I Knew This Guy as A Teenager

Shane maybe? He sold me some weed and some of his moms prescription pills when I was sixteen. Huge Marilyn Mansion fan. He told me he had been in an orgy with three girls in the town cemetary.

Such equisite bullshit. Delivered with such confidence. I've always admired that guy. Fuck him all the same.

Camen Sandiego Porn

I was hoping to find something a little sweeter, more satin and candlelight eh? For shame.

Come see me whenever you get tired of getting hurt Carmen.

Yo Greg Harper, Come and Get me Bitch

"In a new interview with Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS), Politico asks the congressman what the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus does. Harper’s response:

We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition."

An obsession with pure manliness and violent assertion of power is most commonly associated with right-wingers and overwieght boys who drop out of third grade at the age of 12, but I repeat myself.

It's not hard to understand. When men of a particular ethnic group dominate a multi-ethnic society for any length of time they become unable to seperate their control of society from their own sense of manhood, and when they start to lose their traditional power....

Well, there have been an awful lot of white men in the past forty years have gotten awful fixated with GUNS and the fear of having their GUNS torn away from them. Like I said, it's not hard to understand.

The portrayal of every liberal female politician as a lesbian ball-buster, the rise of a partiular strain of Protestantism which proclaims a violently jealous skyfather who cares for little more than the endless praise and submission of his children, an endless stream of cinematic revenge fantisies, in which a rightous white man uses his GUN to mow down the killers of his wife or children, killers who are invaribly dark or, if not dark, the sort of white people who have negated their whiteness by getting involved with drugs. (Drugs equal pleasure, the need for pleasure betrays vulnerability, vulnerability equals effeminacy.) It is all pornographicly easy to understand.

And of course to the man whose sense of manhood is based on social dominance their is nothing more threatening to him than democracy itself. (Especially a democracy whose demographics are turning against him.) Democracy requires its citizens to consider those who disagree with them to be, at worst, well-meaning idiots. It requires us to accept that those who disagree with us are acting in good faith and doing what they sincerely believe is best for the country. Moral certainty provides the same sort of testosterone rush that comes with lifting a hundred pound weight or successfully seducing a beautiful woman. So does the belief that you live in a society that is innately just, one that always puts the most well deserving people in positions of privledge and that the most deserving people just happen to be you and yours. To accept democracy is to deny oneself this masculine rush. It is to accept that fair and honest elections will occasionaly put the Other ones in charge to enact their opposing policies. Worst of all it means to accept that those who disagree with your most passionatly-held principles are your moral and social equals. This neccesarily requires one to accept that his most passionatly held principles could be wrong. To live with the internal doubt that freedom demands is to accept ones vulnerability, and as stated before only women bleed.

This is why right-wing rhetoric is so full of strawmen and ad hominems, so full of apocylyptic dreams of crushing internal and external enemies with supreme confidence and will. For them it is not enough to believe that they are right. Belief leaves room for vulnerability. They must KNOW that they are right. The truth of their beliefs must be so obvious that even those who disagree with them secretly know that they are wrong, and are only pretending to disagree beacuse of some hidden evil motive. Right-wing argument violates the rules of logical debate so often because, in a world where abstract truth is as obvious as the color of the sky, there is no need for logic.

And so we have stabbed-in-the-back mythologies to explain the failures in Vietnam and Iraq. Womanly doubt is the only possible reason why indisputibly just White male power would ever fail to impose its infallible will abroad.

And so we have a long history of bullying language and behavior towards liberals, democrats, uppity women and minorities, gays, lesbians, foreigners, eggheads, hippies, city boys, and every other strain of social outsider or vaginal skeptic.

We Come Unarmed, This Time.-Various 'Teabaggers' at recent protests

"We're going to keep on building the party (the Texas GOP) until we're hunting Democrats with dogs." Phill Gramm, 1995
Wouldn't it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country? Anybody that threatens this country, kick 'em out. We'd get rid of Michael Moore, we'd get rid of half the Democratic Party if we would just import that law. That would be fabulous. The Supreme Court ought to look into this. Absolutely brilliant idea out there.-Rush Limbaugh, 2005




I am a United States sailor. I have chosen to defend my country and the freedom some take for granted.
I love my country, my family, my freedom. Only by the blood which was shed by the service members before me did we receive this freedom.
There are some, though, who do not appreciate this freedom. I call these people traitors; they call themselves protesters. They are nothing more than an infectious disease that infests the minds and hearts of the Americans we are defending. It consumes the honor and courage within its host until it kills the very patriotism that made this country.
There is no cure for this disease. Never will everyone be satisfied. But let it be known what this guardian of America's freedom thinks of these protesters: Traitors should be hanged. I hold our enemies in higher standing. At least they are willing to fight for their beliefs and the country they love.
Sonar Technician
Derik L.Jobe
U.S. Navy
Amarillo-Letter to the editor of The Amarillo Globe December 2003

How could we forget the old grandaddy?

I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches-Strom Thurmond, 1948.

The Thurmond quote of course comes from the days when lynchings of both Black men and liberal White "outside agitators" was common practice in the South, especially in Mississippi. Indeed the most famous act of terrorism against the civil rights movement, the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner murders, happened in Greg Harper's district. Happy fucking hunting you worthless piece of illiterate daughter-raping cracker-ass Nazi puddle of diaretic rat shit.

I'm kidding.

The thuggish language is nothing new. Putting it in the form of a "joke" is. Harper learned that one from Angry white Man radio. Tell a "joke" about liberals being a bunch of Commufaggot traitors who are going to get us all killed and than you can paint anyone who calls you out on your joke as a humorless p.c. nancy. But this tactic isn't really fooling anyone. We all know that the violent language is meant to intimidate, and that the drunken tough-guy language is descended from more direct forms of intimidation.

And I'm afraid that the brutish talk isn't going away. Because the right wing is unable to look itself in the mirror unless it has convinced itself that it is in a position of dominance over its enemies. (aka: Everyone else on Earth) If electorial reality denies them this need for dominance, they can always latch on to some minor political setback for President Obama or other Democrats (Such as Chicago losing out on the Olympics. Feel free to keep shitting on my city fellas. It's doing wonders to change our minds about you.) as evidence that the tide is turning and the wayward nation will soon be back in the right's burly arms where she belongs. The twenty four hour news cycle, with its essential tendency to blow up the importance of day-to-day political hubbub, is a great facilitator for this sort of self-delusion.

Of failing that, they can just talk tough, and indeed talking tough is the far rights weapon of choice for any political situation. It is through threatining talk that they convince themselves that they are Titans among men, that they need not even think of compromise or nogotiation, that they need only apply their indisputibly superior force to assert their perfect will.

Mostly they will talk tough because they will always believe that it works no matter how many times it doesn't. Beacuse they sincerely believe that we liberals secretly know that they are right and we are wrong. Beacuse they really do believe that we are the weak, cowardly, and effeminate strawmen they have made out of us. They truly do believe that suburban moderates swung the election to Obama not because they were disgusted with right-wing governments failures (Which cannot possibly exist) but because white guilt and mushy headedness led them to be seduced by mindless calls for 'change.' They truly believe that all they have to do to win these mushy-headed children back is to cow faggy liberal voices into silence.

It is indeed true that a high degree of passion for one's beliefs can better inspire one to fight for them when they are threatened. But again, the far right thinks that they are the only ones who truly believe what they believe. At any rate they think that beliefs are confirmed and validated only through the violent assertion of them, an attitude embodied in the hang-happy Texas sailor's letter to the editor. (The best demonstration I've yet seen of how the American right and Islamist terroists are quite a bit like each other.) There is no such thing as a grudging willingness to fight for one's beliefs. There is no such thing as fighting as a last resort. To be willing to fight for one's beliefs is neccesarily to feel overwhelming lust to fight for one's beliefs. Those who claim to be willing to fight only as a last resort are nothing but dishonest pacifists. The entire right-wing mindset is designed to maintain perpetual self-assurance, and the belief that they are the only ones with the balls to fight is the cornerstone of this self-assurance.

And of course it's not just jokes about murdering fellow citizens. Many of the most unhinged rightists are talking (talking at least)in utterly serious terms about taking back 'their' country through force. Death threats against President Obama are four times what is normal for any given president. Newsmax columnist John Perry has helpfully suggested a military coup. A new video game lets the player start his very own Wolverine Brigade to stike down Obama's Socialistic youth Corps.

And then there's the odd case of abortion doctors being murdured and Unitarians being massacred.

It will get uglier before it goes away. We are in the midst of a right-wing death role. Their claims to ownership of American society will grow steadily louder and angrier as more and more Americans reject their barbarity, to which they will respond by growing louder and angrier, because it is the indisputible cure to all ills. Gays, immigrants, labor activists, and liberal politicians will face harrassment and intimidation. Some will die. It will get uglier, but at least we can take the death role as proof that we have already won.

Where is their pemenent majority? If only they had been just a little less obvious about ruling the world as a Christian White man's world. There was a time when the GOP actually could have had a viable coalition for post-white majority America. Muslime immigrants from conservative cultures tended to vote Republican in 2000. A thing or two has happened since then to change that. The old game of power elites suckering poor-and poorly educated white men into thinking that they were among the elite has finally blown back on them, for it was this army of Real Americans that scared away Latinos who had been evenly divided between Bush and Gore. Even the military, which not long ago was overwhelmingly Republican and offered as proof of conservtism's superior virility, is no longer a solid GOP voting block. They have learned that "Vietnam syndrome" was not such a bad thing after all; that a government who faithfully believes that the military can do everything will command it to do exactly that.

So now the far right's oldest and most dreaded nightmare; sociopolitical impotance, has arrived; and since they have oppressed, terrorized, villified, marginalized, dismmissed, and demonized every rising demographic group in the country, there is a good chance that this impotance is permenent. Oh how sweet it is to hear the dying monster snarl as if it still has the power to scare anyone.

Still let the snarl be a reminder that a bang and a whimper can be the same thing.

Can't Decide If I like the Crucifix Gun or the Belt Gun More

Ah who am I kidding, I'm firing my belt gun right now.

Food Riots, Ghost Malls, Mob Rule, Terror

The spectre of minority/underclass revolution has always been used by American puppetmasters to keep lower class white males, (who imagine themselves to be members of the ruling class by virtue of being white males) terrified and in line.

The poor and brown are wild beastmen who must be kept under heel, otherwise the smallest taste of power will inspire them to take their savage vengence upon our womenfolk. There was a time when this idea was the accepted common wisdom, firmly believed by preachers and presidents. One was simply not a sane and responsible citizen unless he knew that the monkeys were coming for his daughter.

Over time this situation has seemingly reversed itself. While it was once commonsensical to believe that sharing a true democaracy with the underclass would lead to a maelstorm of anarchy and rape, it has now become dispeputible to believe such nonsense; or rather to express such belief directly. No politician would dare run on an overt platform of keeping poor people in the gutter where they belong, he'll just rail about imaginary welfare queens. I have lots of Mexican friends, but I just can't stand Illegal immigrants beacuse I have so much respect for the Law damnit. Out here on the virgin praries crystal meth was unheard of until they came along, everyone knows that. No one believes that Black people are inherently dangerous, oh heavens no, but of course everyone knows that they are more likely to be violent criminals, never mind any liberal media study that tells us otherwise, we know the commensense truth. It's not because we believe that Blacks are genetically inferior, of course not. It's the culture of poverty don't you know? Liberal welfare policies fostering a culture of dependence. They just haven't learned the value of working hard to earn what God says you deserve, like we have.

So of course we have by far the highest prison incarceration rate in the world. We just care about the safety of out children more than other folks don't you know. We understand what good and evil better than they do, and we know how important it is to harshly punish criminals without any weakkneediness about it.

And of course most of the people in jail are poor minorities. It's the culture of dependence, like we said earlier. It's not like we think that they're innately evil. Heavens no. Unless they're selling drugs. If were not man enough to just shoot all the dealers and junkies in the head than at least we can keep building prisons to keep the bastards locked up until they rot. Did you hear about that Mexican over in Peoria who was high on meth and fed threw his baby boy into a wood chipper? Oh it's terrible. Half the hookers you see on the street these days actually grew up in good whi--- Christian families and got hooked up with drugs. It's terrible. Why don't those liberals stop worrying about the so-called rights of these monsters and let the police do their jobs? What sort of place is this country going to be when our kids grow up Thelma?

So to make a long rant short respectible society has replaced overt belief that the mud people are coming to get us with dull self-rightousness toward vices that just so happen to be associated with the poor and brown.

The election of President Hussein Obama has predictibly pushed old fears of apocalyptic social levelling into overdrive, indeed further into the political mainstream since the days of Nixon; but not far enough into the mainstream to prod the more stable elements of conservative leadership to spout anything more than coded dismissal of any vaguely Newdealish proposal from the White House as 'radical' and 'a threat to our way of life.' Those who directly express their dread of the peasents overturning all that is holy remain in the margins.

But in the internet age the voices of the marginalized are as easily accessed as all of the old media stalwarts, and the world is a much brighter place for it. In the old days one had to sift through the local paper for weeks before finally coming accross some masterpiece of flouride& black helicopter lunacy on the letters page. Today we have internet zines like World Net Daily (known best as the main voice of the birther movement) to give us that sweet dose of shit-scared cracker nutcase whenever we want it.

And oh shit are they ever scared. 'Trend forcaster' Gerald Celente paints WND's Bob Unruh a future vision of "Food riots, tax protests, farmer rebellions, student revolts, squatter diggins, homeless uprisings, tent cities, ghost malls, general strikes, bossnappings, kidnappings, industrial saboteurs, gang warfare, mob rule, terror,"

"This is the decline of empire America."

"Now comes his forecast for a global depression and for the United States, 'Obamageddon."

PROTESTS!!!

















RIOTS!!!















REBELLIONS!!!














GENERAL STRIKES!!!

















BOSSNAPPINGS!!!

















This is the way the world ends in Right-Wing loonie-land. Unless everyone sits meekly in their proper place and doesn't backtalk the streets shall flow with blood. And now that there's a niggrah in the White House there's no hope for keeping anyone in their place.

According to Celente, the road to Obamageddon shall be paved with economic mismanagement.

"Never before has so much phantom money been printed out of thin air, backed by nothing, producing practically nothing,"

Actually, money has been backed by nothing ever since we moved off of the gold standard. The American dollar is worth what we imagine it is worth, as opposed to the good old days when it was worth what we imagined a pretty yellow rock to be worth.

"drive around Detroit. Look at all the blown out houses and empty neighborhoods. Look at the violence that's increasing. … Look at the types of heinous crimes being committed by people – some blowing their whole families away…"

The violence is not actually increasing. But of course Celente is addresing an audience that belives the crimerate has been skyrocketing every year since 1921. So that today there is no one under the age of fifty who has not committed at least six murders.

There are indeed some towns in the country that are beginning to look something like Detroit and other moribund areas of the Rust Belt. They are the exurbs, the gated communities, the places where development was based on nothing but itself. The communities that were backed by nothing and produced practically nothing. It's most telling that in right-wing loonie land the closing of a shopping mall is considered just as apocalyptic as a food riot. Half of me believes that the "ghost malls" line betrays Celentes whole spiel as a satirical hoax.

When the Ghost Malls come to your bedroom community (and they will) gather your family and ammunition and head for the wilderness immediatly. Be sure to keep a six-month supply of bath oils and lawn care equipment availible at all times and whatever you do DO NOT GO DOWNTOWN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!! We have it on good authority that the Ghost Malls are in fact a clever ruse to draw desperate shoppers into the inner city and straight into the merciless teeth of; The Homeless Uprising.

Spoil Them Or Don't, Brats are Brats

There is a small but significant segment of the population who belives that this...


is the landscape that the typical American lives in, and that this...



is what the typical modern American looks like.

I've mentioned before Bob Altemeyer's observation in his "The Authoritarians" how right-wing-authoritarians are obsessed with believing that there is a universal standard for normality and that they are it. While there is certainly arrogance, self-rightousness, and feelings of entitlement on the left, I think it is the far Right's tendency to believe that it is not just normal but normalcy (along with being far more likely to see cocksureness as morally good) that leaves conservatism decidedly more prone to hubris than liberalism. Remember the crows of 'liberalism is dead' earlier this decade when the GOP was sweeping the country with 51-49 victories. Remember when Karl Rove had 'The Math' just before the 2006 backlash. The rise of the Reagan coalition led to thirty years of rightist bragging about their coming 'permanent majority' but the fact of the matter is that they already had a semi-permenent majority who's time has now passed. The defection of southern Democrats by all rights should have been fatal to the party. Instead it was always at worst a significant minority. While it's true that the GOP, enjoyed a general run of success in getting its candidates into the White House, a predictible pattern of overreach, from Watergate to Social Security 'reform' to Gingrich being Gingrich always kept them from the long unbroken hold on power they always just knew was right around the corner.

But while it was the hubris of Republican leaders who brought the party down, it is the fantastically delusional and sad arrogance of 'The Base' at the pattern that seems to be keeping the party down. American Rednecks; who bolted the Democrats en masse when the donkeys broke their agreement to keep the niggers down, can now claim to have been the ruin of both major American parties. GOP victories in the early part of this decade had the camo ballcap crowd riding pretty high, and after Bush's reelection in 2004 there was real hope of never having to see some uppity dyke in a nosering or hearing some pinhead on the teevee say that they should buy one of those faggy little cars ever again. The clucking editorial tone of the "North Platte Telegraph" tells you everything you needed to know about red America's attitude in those days. Everyone knew that the sane, reasonible, salt-of-the-earth people voted Republican, and the fact that the GOP won was proof that it was the home of the sane, reasonible, and salt-of-the-earth. The urban elitists would stew in their coffee shops and deservedly suffer through structural rot while the real Americans enjoyed their tax cuts and cheered as their invincible masculine force expressed itself through military conquest.

But these military conquests went increasingly sour; and Huuricane Katrina revealed the fact that manly assurance in emergencies is not the same thing as knowing what to do in them, and so suburban moderates inevitebly became fed-up with incompetant right-wing government, and Rural White America was suddenly left without the dispropoertinate social influence it feels divinely entitled to. Understand though that the "Real America" crowd will absolutely never stop feeling entitled to rule everyone else. It's entire self-image and sense of self-worth is premised upon being the eternal universal norm. The hunter who feels that hunting is the only way his sons can learn the indispensible truth of man's mastery over nature can never understand a world in which perfectly conservative businessmen eat arugula because, they just don't like grilled meat that much. The retiree who is sincerely bothered by having to press 1 for English cannot conceieve of an America where walking one's dog past storefronts in four languages is banal. The very free market that right-wingers revere as a divine arbiter of moral justice has produced a nation that is decidedly urban and multithnic. It is a world where the White rural conservative is not the embodiment of sanity and salt-of-the-earthiness but rather an emberassment to everyone else. This cannot possibly be. Multiculturalism is not the natural byproduct of economic and technological development but rather a dark conspiracy among scholarly elites. The urban centers that so many Great Fathers lose their children to are not the proud centers of civilization that most people have considered their cities to be but rather unspeakibly evil hell holes full of violence and vice. A sense of superiority is the universal human addiction, and for the man who believes himself superior, equality is as unthinkible as slavery. If a person's sense of entitlement is threatened than the already-powerful human capacity for delusion will go into overdrive in order to protect it. The American good-old-boy would rather believe the most insane nonsesnse rather than accept that he is the weirdo in modern society, and so he does.

That's why right-wing rhetoric since 2006 and especially 2008 is based so heavily on agrievement, (The liberal media, the supposed enviromental hypocrisy of Al Gore and Hollywood celebrities, the War on Christmas) and usurption (President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim. The way that certain 'ACORN' employees lookes the other way at a 'pimp's' shenanagins is proof that they tampered with the election, well somehow damnit. President Obama is a Communist Nazi. Illegal immigrants plan to establish Aztlan. Black dance troupes are planning their savage vengence against us all.)

What makes the delusion worse is the bullies need to believe that he is operating from a position of strength. At the top you have the Bill Kristol's and Karl Roves of the world, who, despite being exposed as and played for fools countless times in the past three years, still imagine themselves to political genuises with the ability to frame national debate in their favor. At the bottom of course are the rural whites who imagine themselves to be the country's eternal essense. And in between the two are the Limbaughs and the Hannities and the Becks linking the mud flap and country club classes together in one big naked esctatic whirl of fantasy.

Right-wing media knuckleheads may have the power to turn their fans out for tea-party rage orgies but, as the Times' David Brooks has pointed out, their actual political power is and has been grossly overrated. Limbaugh and company failed to prevent the nomination of the "moderate" John McCain, failed to turn the close primary fight between Clinton and Obama into a crippling blow for the winner, failed to make Peoria moderates see Sarah Palin as anything but the lunatic she is and finally of course failed to preven the election of The Other.

But of course the epilepsy cases of AM radio are more popular with their fans than ever before. The ditto-chamber provides a cacoon from a social reality that cannot possibly be. Here in the reality of hippy-socialise freaks, reaching out to moderates would seem to be the obvious way for the GOP to recover from recent losses, just as reaching out to moderates is the obvious strategy for any minority party anywhere. In Limbaughland it is exactly the appeal the moderates that has purged the real majority from power. Here there are millions of phantom patriots who stayed home on election day out of disgust towards McCains insufficient hatred of brown people. In Limbaughland the tea-party tantrums are a better measure of ideological strength than elections. In Limbaughland the thirteen million citizens of Limbaughland are an invincible arm ready to overwhelm a nation of 300 million. In Limbaughland it matters not that the thirteen million number has remained static for twenty years as the country has grown significantly larger in all areas except the hinterlands where Limbaughlanders hail from.

And the Rove's and the Kristol's who can't and the GOP members of Congress, who can't imagine themselves as anything but shapers of opinion, as anything but manipulative masters of imperial fate, hear this mouse in the megaphone and feel assured that they are still Lords.

And so the Republican party will continue to overplay its hand as it did when in power. Any public disontent towards the president will be interpreted as a massive popular rejection of him. Any temporary advantage gained by Democratic timidity will be pissed away by grandiose bluster that reminds the general public of what assholes these people still are. Hubris cannot possibly be unlearned by the mind that considers hubris a virtue, and conservative confidence that we will always be living in 1994 will likely asure that 1994 will not happen again.

Blackmailing David Leterman.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/01/david-letterman-extortion_n_307221.html

Remember kids, moral reputations are not very important to comedians, certainly not worth two million dollars. If you're thinking about blackmailing a comedian, writer, or musician, you'd be better off just robbing a bank.

And I shouldn't have to tell you that if you're doing any sort of illegal business by check you might as well just lock yourself up now.

Surely I'm the Only English Major to Bitch About Banned Books

It's Banned Books Week, and this year's winner for most banned book in America is "And Tango Makes Three", the story of homo penguins Roy and Silo and their adoption of a chick whose natural parents were unable to care for more than one child at a time.

As with anything involving gayness, the gay penguin book has inspired all of the tired claptrap about "promoting the homosexual agenda" and "undermining Christian values," and I must say that when I read the book to my baby cousin, the part where Roy and Silo pop Amyl, grind to Kylie Mynogue at a Village club, and felate total strangers in the bathroom was a little off-putting. Mostly though the asshole segment of the American population is bothered by the book because of how it puts the lie to the old "homosexuality is unnatural" canard. The truth of course is that gayness is utterly rampant in the animal kingdom, and it takes a great deal of willful blindness to not notice. Sure you can chalk up your two hunting dogs having at each other to some sort of prison sex thing; but then come along these gay penguins right there in New York, and then along comes some fucker who writes a book about them, and the perfect naturalness of anumal gayness becomes almost impossible to ignore.

Well that's what you get motherfuckers. I loath homophobia, and more than that I trully dispise citing the naturalness or unaturalness of a thing as proof that is just and good or not. Nature is the incarnation of nihilism and anarchism. Our precious instincts are nothing but electric needles prodding us to become decaying vehicles for self-perpepetuating chemical mechinations that are wholly indifferent to us; wholly devoid of meaning or value. There is no circle of life. There is no Gaia system uniting all biological existense into some damned cosmic Kumbaya. But I digress.

Any man who raised in the Midwest has no chance of getting through boyhood without some shithead giving him the plug-and-socket metaphor. The correlation between homophobia and strong religious belief is based largely on the notion that the "perfect fit" between penis and vagina is the ultimate proof of an interventionalist God. A God who personally dictates the laws of society, determines what our social and gender roles shall be, what our desires shall be, makes sure our socks match in the morning, etc.

They have it precisely backwards. The reproductive process for placental mammals is indeed quite impressive, almost like clockwork though not quite. Mistakes still happen, and it wasn't until humans invented the abortion clinic that mothers had a more of disposing their dead and unwanted that was more appealing than eating them. At any rate placentals are the exception. Sex among the lower animals is a smorgasboard of methods that are by turns wasteful, needlessly dangerous, and frequently hilarious.

There's a lot of cloaca rubbing. The cloaca is the all-purpose rear oriface possessed by most birds and reptiles, male and female. Reproduction among birds involves a method known as the "cloacal kiss." Male and female back up to each other, line up holes, and then it's basically a game of ball-and-cup. Gay birds? They do it exactly the same way. What else are they going to do? It's hard to imagine why even bible-thumpers would be bothered by same-sex relationships among creatures who all carry the same junk. All bird sex is essentially lesbian sex. If you're worried about strange sexuality shattering your delusions of an orderly universe, than never mind gay penguins, worry about the coalca. Turn your extended family into a cult and picket Thanksgiving dinners.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8284509.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_animals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_and_Silo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca

Learning From Mistakes is For Pussies

"In Colorado, a state where Palin campaigned hard last year on behalf of the Republican ticket but which Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) eventually lost to Barack Obama, Arapahoe County Republican Party Chairman David Kerber said that Palin was a good fit with Western sensibilities.


“She comes across as someone who’s going to say what she says and if you don’t like it, that’s just too bad,” Kerber said. “She’s not going to lie, she’s not going to sugarcoat it — she’s just going to let it rip. I think that’s what Westerners want.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/26236.html#ixzz0SY0dLlQ4

While that's certainly unPC and ubermacho of Ms. Palin, Mr. Kerber, the career success of a politician is specifically determined by how much people like what he/she has to say. If they don't like it then it's too bad for the politician, not for the people, especially when it comes to keeping power out of the hands of Tracy Flick. So if you were wondering why the McCain/Palin ticket lost Colorado, and Nevada, and Virginia, and North Carolina...

By the way, however much you may imagine the thoroughly suburbanized deniziens of Arapahoe County to be self-reliant frontiersmen, the fact remains that the American West has a higher percentage of its people living in cities than any other part of the country. So if you want to know where "Western sensibilities" lie try looking at the bus-riding collectivists of Denver and Alburqurque. Feel free to hold your nose if you must.

Life Is Good.

Dallas Cowboys, Nazis of the American sporting world, playing in front of an all-time NFL record crowd, pregame celebration of all things football and Texas and alpha male, George W. Bush in attendance, 33-31 losers. This coming after the Italian Fascist of American sport, the New England Patriots, get torn to pieces by a Jets team they had come to consider a slave race. To be alive in this age is to see humanity in the full glory of all that is free and good.

I think the Bears won this weekend as well, and I might have had sex at some point in the past two days, but I don't remember unimportant things.

The Breeze Here is Starting to Get A Little Cooler at Night

I think I'll wonder south for awhile. Maybe hit up the Northeast in the spring, and maybe I'll stick around in a place where I can get paid to be a psuedobohemian bore. I'm not 30 yet and I can still taste the new for what it is. So yeah. I do believe I will.

So...

That Joe Wilson post I did a few days ago, about right-wingers penchant for inventing truth in order to maintain their delusion of being normal folk. Well, a much better example of that has just come up.





"In the competitive world of Washington protests, crowd size is often a matter of dispute. Organizers usually boast of huge crowds, while police and the news media offer much smaller estimates.

So supporters of Saturday’s “tea party” protests against President Barack Obama were quick to highlight their big turnout. To bolster countless claims on blogs and Facebook, many posted a photograph that showed a gargantuan crowd sprawling from Capitol Hill down the National Mall to the Washington Monument.

But it turns out the photo is more than 10 years old, apparently taken during a 1997 Promise Keepers rally." politifact.com

This is easily the most pathetic thing I have come across in my life. The lengths that rednecks will go to in order to avoid accepting that they are the unamerican radicals. Disgusting.

You Dumb Motherfuckers

So, God told you that this was worth killing and dying for huh? Hell of a joker that guy. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/world/middleeast/14settlers.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

Forgive the Internet Speak: But This!!!

This!!, with a dash of no shit Sherlock.

"A common meme on the left is that racism is driving the hatred of Obama. I think the root is deeper and scarier: it is shadow projection.

Our ego wants to believe we are wonderful, and so cannot tolerate evidence to the Obama-joker contrary. Consider America. As good as we are, we have a dark side and our actions often have dark consequences. We are large and cast a large shadow. If we were a more mature people we would simply own our dark side, integrate it into part of our self knowledge, and act accordingly. However American mythology says that we are the good country, and to maintain that the pure version of that belief, we are willfully ignorant of our faults. In the minds of many “patriotic” Americans, we have no dark side. Unwilling to own our dark side, we project our shadow onto others.

The Cold War gave us a long period as “the good country” as the Soviet Union gave us a steady (and objectively evil) force onto which we could project our shadow. After the fall of communism we finally found Saddam Hussein to play that role, which clouded our perceptions of the real Saddam (and again, he was objectively evil). Since the Iraq war we’ve looked for a new target onto which to project our shadow. Perennial candidates China, North Korea, and Iran don’t quite suit our needs, and “the terrorists” finally wore thin. I have wondered who our next victim would be. Now we know."

Poster on "The Daily Dish, 09/14/09:

When I was very small my very conservative father told me that he though my grandmother's Thanksgiving dinner was the best in the world because it was my grandmother's and that my mother's breakfast was the best in the world because it was my mother's, and furthermore this is what it meant to love something. He is on record then in his belief that to love a person or thing is necessarily to consider her or it to be the best in all things. The thought of love and pride being independent of each other is inconceivable. (Remember the flap over Mdm. Obama's 'proud of my country for the first time' comment.) Rather it is love and scrutiny that can not possibly exist in the same mind. (Just try to forget the mountain of 'why do you hate America' crap after 9/11)

In the absence of a quasi-divine monarch on which to project everything we like about ourselves we have instead deified the lifestyle of the White small-towners and suburbanites who have historically been our ruling class. Consider now what social conditions pose the biggest threat to the regal myth of "Real America"...
1. Inequities in education,income, and health care caused largely by historical racial oppression.
2. Wasted resources and environmental degradation caused by suburban sprawl,

... and you go a long way towards explaining why American hostility towards liberals is so intense. The Right's hatred of 'big government', its often paranoid suspicion of state-directed reform, is based largely on the fact that to acknowledge that the state has a legitimate role to play in society is to acknowledge that society is human, requires conscious direction, does not maintain equilibrium by itself as does an atomic clock.

* Of course, there is one famous exception to the right's belief that government has no legitimate role to play in society. It is perfectly eager to use the State as a totem of patriarchal authority. This is why many right-wingers who proclaim the fiercest hatred of 'big government' will tolerate no criticism of military of police power, which are indisputably the twin engines of tyranny for any state that chooses to be tyrannical.

If you wonder how reasonably intelligent people can believe patent nonsense; such as Al Gore leading the entire scientific world in a Marxo/environmental scam, it is for the same reason that reasonably intelligent people pray to a sadomasochistic zombie. They do not consider their obligation to American society to be based on voluntary agreement to a social contract. America, and the White middle-class rural/suburban lifestyle that is supposedly the essence of America, is a thing beyond scrutiny, it is a thing they must believe in. Their worthiness as persons, as well as yours and mine, is utterly dependent on adhering to this belief through all storms.

You Lie Because I Say So Is Why

"He voted for that bill without even reading it!!" is a line that's been used by both parties when in the Congressional minority, and it is a canard. Congresspeople are busy, and the bills they vote on are fucking long. If you were in their position, I can assure you that you wouldn't read any more than was neccesary to get the jist.

Or maybe not. Congressman Joe Wilson, Republican from South Carolina, has become instantly famous by apparantly ubermenshing controversial tenants of health care reform into being by sheer will. Wilson publically called President Obama a liar during the joint-session speech last night when Obama said that illegal immigrants would not be receiving government health care under any proposal. The always quick-witted president managed to avoid an awkward situation by using his backwards Communazimuslim Lizardman language to sieze control of Wilson's mind and illicit an apology within an hour.

I'm not terribly concerned about proper decorum in the halls of government, in fact I lust for the day when Congress busts out into a Japanese-Diet style brawl. And like I said before, Congresspeople do not have the time to read entire bills cover-to-cover and should not be expected to do so. Still there is nothing stopping Joe Wilson from perusing the health care bills himself if he's afraid that there's anything in them that is insufficient in regards to keeping out the spi..../ upholding immigration law.

I've mentioned before that Orwell's fear that a authoritarian regime with "memory hole" power would have the ability to maintain its tyranny forever turned out to be blessedly backwards. What happens is that dictorial systems gradually fall under the delusion that they can invent truth, and in so doing they become unable to respond to threats they imagine themselves able to wish away. The Rupublican Party was never quite tyrannical during the Bush years, which makes the fact that very obvious fact that they fell very hard to this delusion all the more pathetic.

In 2005 it was deeply irritating to hear a hair's breadth majority party chastise us liberals for being "out of the mainstream". To hear a party now firmly in the minority lecture us in precisely the same way in 2009 is baffling and sad. Staid suburbanites and post-modern hipsters are now united in viewing the American right wing as the batshit uncle emberassing us before the world, yet the right-winger still considers the other ninety nne percent of Planet Earth to be the weirdos.

What we are seeing within the American Right today is not the sort of imperial God complex that brought down Moscow and the Third Reich, but rather the populist God complex chronicled in Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians." Altemeyer observed that one of the biggest motivators of the 'right-wing authoritarian' mindset is a fierce desire to beleive that there is a universal standard for normality and that they are it. (In philisophical jargon, the right-wing authoritarian considers himself 'subject.')

When the right-winger combines this adolescent need to be normal with good old- fashioned chauvanism,(the worship of power and force, purely masculine of course, as the solution to all ills) he becomes endowed with the ability to bend reality as much as is neccesary to maintain his sense of being subject, center of and rightful master of the universe. The old buggaboo of 'liberal media bias' is the tool by which he bends reality. If the authoritarian's sense of being normal is upset by hearing the liberal media say that black is black, than black is white, the president is a secret Muslim terrorist, Naziism is a form of Socialism, and the State will force you to feed your grandparents to illegal immigrants.

So finally, if President Other dares to deny something that provides the right-wing authoritarian with moral license to hate him, such as making the objectively falsifiable claim that there is nothing benifitting illegal immigrqants in his health care proposals, than the shout of "you lie" delivered with certainty, passion, and perfect thoughtlessness, is enough to make this inconveinent fact disapear, and the world again rotates on the axis of the self where it belongs.

Riley is Doing Well

I saw the hobbled ex-ultimate fighter at 2:00 AM on Monday night, driving the new Saturn that his new sugar mama lets him borrow. Or at least he says she lets him borrow it, he gets very defensive when pressed for details. The woman in question is apperantly a 49-year old lawyer from Schaumburg who he met at an Einstien Bros. Bagel shop downtown, a middle-aged woman who found herself single and alone before she knew it. Riley mocks her apperence and attempts to give "bootleg cab rides" to twentysomething women in her car. Truely a rat fuck excuse for a man, so naturally I got in the car when he asked me to.

He asked me if I had any money and I said know. He had completely blown the two hundred dollars the woman gave him burning gasoline accross the city and snorting cocaine off of the counsol. Now he didn't have enough gas to get back to the lovenest in the suburbs. He was completely broke until he sold the Lakeview neighborhood crackhead a baggie full of spat sunflower seeds for five dollars. He called her a stupid bitch when he found that she had given him only three dollars and change.

"That bitch is a crackhead. I mean, I do it every now and then, but there's getting high recreationally and there's being a fucking crackhead. That bitch is a fucking crackhead you know what I'm saying?"

A gay admirer of his on the Halstead strip gave him three dollars and a joint for both of us in return for the info that the police were planning to raid his favorite club. (Hydrate, if you must know, and you shouldn't bring your pharmacy with you if you're going out anyway. Watch yourselves out there fellas.) The look on Riley's face as he held up his six dollar bills before me was the most sincerely prideful countenance I had seen since my preschool graduation.

"I come up quick don't I?" It was impressive in its own way, the way he badgered the gay man into handing over that second joint, the way he held up traffic to hit on a girl walking down Halstead in the hope she would be impressed by somebody else's car, the way he used my phone to call a stolen-goods fencer at three in the morning after picking up a friend named Baeu with a Boliva watch. (The fencer tried to call me back at eight that morning as I was sleeping.) In pop culture the mythical man without a soul is usually some sort of ultra-theatric serial killer. The reality of living without a sould is much more banal than that. Terribly pathetic and yet, somehow grander than any Hannibal Lector nonsense. Godspeed you shameless asshole.

There's This Neighbor Girl

She still lives with her parents at the opposite end of my mom and dad's block. 25 now, has a boyfriend with a husker ballcap and a trimmed goatee. She's already carrying a paunch, already keeps her hair in a ponytail and wearing t-shirts with the name of car companies on them with grey sweatpants. She seems confident in keeping the boy.

I've been eating a lot here, naturally enough. I said something to my mom about being nearly thirty and not having a gut yet. Dad said yeah but there was such a thing as starving to death to.

That's lovely. My father thinks that having a gut hang out over ther rest of the body is not only perfectly healthy but the standard norm for male health.

Every man to a man with the Husker cap (sometimes red, sometimes camo)oakley sunglasses, and the closely shaved beard/goat combo.

I Really Was Expecting Ted Kennedy to Make 150

As a white Catholic three generations removed from the days when the subdivisions among white people meant something, I had some trouble shaking the urge to refer to the Kennedy brothers collectively as "our Obama." But in spite of the genetic penchant we "White ethnics" have for negative romance; melodrama, martyrdom, and general caterwauling, I have to accept that it just doesn't fit, at all. It goes without saying that anti-Catholic bigotry in the U.S., while real, is small fish compared to what Blacks and Native Americans have suffered through. Mainly though the "our Obama" phrase is just 'USA Today'-headline level stupid. I've been sleeping in irregular two-hour snatches lately and that's the only excuse I have for even thinking it up.

Still I pour my 40 for Ted Kennedy. I pour it with pride and without qualification. The little brothers contributions to civil rights, workers rights, health care, and education have indisputably left the country better off than it would have been without him. There have been times when Kennedy was almost single-handidly keeping the federal government functioning as something more than a Monopoly money factory for the Pentagon. In those days when the State was in the hands of those who viewed government as a necessary evil, existing chiefly so that the people would have some form of central authority to worship, Ted Kennedy did what he could to make government actually do its damned job.

Yes I know about Chappaquiddick, and so does everyone else. Yes I know that baby brother Kennedy was able to get away with an epic amount of shit for being a Kennedy, so does everyone else. Still Ted Kennedy is slightly more admired than reviled, and rightly so.

This is not now and never has been a liberal media conspiracy to downplay Chappaquiddick, Chappaquiddick is loud and clear, and it was unforgivable. There are those who demand that Ted Kennedy be known for Chappaquiddick and only Chappaquiddick, who would accuse me and anyone else who admires the man for being amoral partisan hacks or mindless Kennedy-oglers in considering anything but Chappaquiddick in judging the man. Sorry but no, In spite of self-help slogans to the contary life is not defined by any individual moment; neither the bright shining kind nor the dark and despicable kind. Life is the summation of moments, choices, and actions. Ted Kennedy caused a great deal of pain and suffering in his personal life, the good he has done for the country outweighs that.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the idea that government should help people gradually came to be seen as a radical one. The sorry fact is that a family of spoiled vagiholic monarchists gave the concept of activist government the celebrity appeal it needed to stay viable during the long post-civil rights-era Thermidor. The fact that we needed these rakes is our fault, not theirs. What would you do if you had society at your feet like they did? And hell, I know I'm not alone in finding it very hard not to like these guys. Have you ever worked in a bar as a teenager, and have some pie-eyed banker or lawyer start telling you about the time he did acid with a bunch of Mexicans and ask you what it's like to be fuck the sixteen-year-old waitress with a rose tattoo on her ankle? The Kennedy's are like that. While the Bushes drink their near-beer, produce barely enough children to replace themselves, and refuse themselves any attempt at emotional release outside of their Abercrombiefied excuse for churches, the Kennedy's do aristocracy as its meant to be done; baroque, decadent, obscene insatiable, Catholic. Tonight the sons of Joseph are abusing barmaids together in eternity.

Who The Fuck is Bob Collier?

Collier, the man featured in a front page article in tuesday's New York Times, is someone who has "built himself a quiet life of family and church (and hunting and fishing) in his rural hometown in southwest Georgia." Collier and his wife Susan are both ardent conservatives, "They receive much of their information from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh's radio program, and Matt Drudge*'s web site." but Bob has apparently never been especially politically active. He skipped the antiwar protests of his college years. It was not until the looming specter of health care reform raised its menacing head that Mr. Collier summoned the courage to drive a whole hour to Albany, Ga,(The market town for his region and so presumably a trip he makes quite frequently)to speak out against the plan to his congressman, Sanford D. Bishop**

* Drudge? Seriously? That's old school as fuck. I wonder if they still have Hotmail like I do.
** Sanford D. Bishop dares you to deliver a shipment of Coors in twenty eight hours.

So, that's who Bob Collier is. But we still left with the question of who the fuck Bob Collier is and why he's on the front page of the New York Times. I freely admit to being a little jealous of the man. I hope that my jealousy doesn't cloud my assessment of the man, but I am jealous, and there's no reason why I shouldn't be. I'm some guy. I have opinions on things. Some things make me happy and some things make me sad. Some things make me angry and some things make me glad. In making front page news out of what Bob Collier thinks of health care reform the Times has officially declared that anyone with a brain that responds to external stimuli has every right to expect the same treatment.

They were looking for an everyman's opinion, that was the hook, and of course in looking for an everyman they theoretically could have ended up featuring any man. But of course not just anyone can be anyone. In the age of a Black urban president, with the river of human settlement flowing from country to city just as it always has, no less of a publication than the secular/Marxist/liberal/traitor/ New York Times still considers the standard of American normality to be the conservative rural White guy.

Collier, for his part, is perfectly convinced that his position on reform is suitably Olympian for the Times. "This is about the future of our country as we know it, and may mean the end or our country as we know it." His lack of lifelong political activism is presented by the Times as somehow legitimizing. "The cameras may linger on those at the extremes, but it is the parade of respectful questioners, those expressing discomforting fears and legitimate concerns, that may ultimately have more impact."

It is of course a good and fine thing to speak respectfully. But just as the level of passion one has for ones' opinion does not determine its truth, so the tone of ones' voice in expressing a concern does not make it legitimate. A vagrant once spoke to me with perfect serenity about his plan to join the army and become a suicide bomber for the US government. Which isn't to say that Collier is a raving loon. He seems like a decent man, and compared to the town-haller who accused a Jew of being a Nazi he seems downright admirable.

The fact is that the health care reform now on the table does not call for any more government in the market than any other social policy proposal put forth by a Democratic government since the New Deal. (In fact a good deal less than what would have been boilerplate thirty years ago.) If you think that's still too much, fine. But if you honestly believe that the health care industry, with its tow-truck style captive customer base, is the virgin pillar of Capitalism, and that to sully it in the slightest way would bring the whole structure down, well that's just nutty, in whatever tone of voice. It betrays a strong-father complex that can allow itself to relate to the larger society only as protective ubermensch, never allowing itself to accept its dependence upon the larger society, the innate vulnerability of being a mortal creature.

It is, to put it another way, an aristocratic complex. To the very end the nobility of Europe clung to the belief that they were the essence of their nations, never mind that the serfs had long moved away and that the general public was becoming as well or better educated than they. They were the standard of normality for reasons that lay beyond physical reality. The history of American stupidity is largely one of rural White men who have been suckered into believing that they are aristocracy. A strong-father complex is understandable in a man who has gone through life on a diet of Fox, Limbaugh, and Drudge, telling him that he and all other great defenders like him are under siege from those who seek to take away their unchanging national essence that exists beyond the realm of physical reality.

And now this poisonous old myth is repeated again by, the New York Times?

Oh Nature

I napped in a small bit of park space accross the street from the Washington Libary. The sun burned me and the bugs had any part of my ankles that they wanted. So decadent; the Earth is our enemy and we should rightfully hate the dirt on our knees and the breeze on our skin. If I could get the woman with the dog to lie down next to me she would be at ease. She would have no objections to whatever.

I abhore nature, as much as I ever did. The thought of a universal human nature disgusts me as much as it ever did. I still belive that if there is such a thing, then it is a tyranny imposed upon us; driving us against all reason to create more damned and pathetic slaves of genocidal biology.

Still she's cute though.

I've Been Going on About Myself Way too God Damned Much Lately

Oh well. Hopefully the readership is confined to those who either already know me or read about my latest doings without having any interest or impression of me.

I've been thinking of Bill Withers lately; "Lean on Me", "Use Me Up", "Ain't no Sunshine" just about everyone knows and loves his songs but they often don't know the man. I've been forming a revisionist interpretation on "Use me Up" lately. I think he's actually trying to pawn off a difficult woman to some gullible friend, Tom Sawyer style. If that is indeed the correct interpretation of the song it would be just about the most brillent piece of music of the past hundred years.

Christie

This is Josh from Thursday. The one your friend called the philosopher. You remember, you answered your phone in bed like women always seem to for whatever mad reason. A friend needed help and I had to go before we could go round again. My phone had died at some point in the night but you have my number.

When I kissed you, my god, that mix of perfume and cocktails. Whn I told you you were beautiful you moaned like we were already in your room. I hear the sound of it whenever there's a quiet moment.

I saw you accross the street and came to meet you. I said something cutish when you dropped your purse and you and your friend called me a philosopher. When you smiled at me it was warm, not a polite grin toward a stranger. Your friend told you to stop talking to the philosopher. You said you were going to wait for the bus instead of taking a cab with her and I knew I had you. You leaned into me for support for awhile before I turned you round and kissed you. I think you appreciated it.

When I said you were beautiful you knew it was sincere didn't you? You could hear it come from the gut, the hint of crying and laughing at the thought of it. My God how can one as beautiful and sweet tasting as this want me as badly as she does.

Yours the finest body I've ever made love to. Blue-eyed, unbroken copper on every inch of your skin; half-white, to judge by the name, the eyes, the good neighborhood your bed is in; half-Latin to judge by that perfect skin and the Spanish notes around your room. Whereabouts in particular? Your glasses, you remember how I took them off so ritualistically? How all I did was smile in bed and hardly said a word? With glasses or without, they compliment your face equally somehow.

If you could have seen me the next day, how sweet it was to have the scent of you on me as I wondered up Clark, how sad I was to shower and brush my teeth and change my clothes so that now I have is the memory of your scent.

Call me. Call me.

My Uncle Tom

I spent last Friday with him and his Philipine wife and in-laws. He is the most succesful member of my moms generation; ex-marine, world traveller, mid-level executive for Sprint, inveterate fratboy but a good guy all the same. Fully convinced of the superiority of the suburban life; semi-conciously derisive of the small town and the inner city, but warm enough. He is perfectly convinced that I tyoo shall scorn the city once I settle down, since it's self-evident that the city is only for young partiers and the sorry bastards in the ghettos too poor to leave. To be agreeible I told him that if/when I have a family I could very well live in a place like Evanston, an inner ring-suburb with enough space for free parking and medium-sized yards, and of course the presence of Northwestern gives it a very Lincoln feel. I doubt that I will ever see the ways in which a large city is inadequate for raising a family that strike him as so obvious. My children will read Wittgenstien and cower under the monkeybars at recess. Still I wasn't exactly lying. I like Evanston truly enough, that place is cute as a puppy in a schoolgirl's raincoat. Fuck yeah Evanston.

Tom picked me up on Friday afternoon in Lakeview and we meandered are way to the spot on near north Milwaukee where I had seen a couple Polish cafes once but I've forgotten exactly where they were and there was no place to park. We ended up eating at some gulag hot dog place on Milwaukee and Lake where he had a Chicago dog and I had a weak Philly steak. After lunch we made our way to the Eisenhower and rode the freeways to his in-laws place in Glendale Heights; somewhere between O'Hare and Elgin. The thirty mile drive took three hours. I was resisting the urge to weep while Tom was nonplussed. He's from D.C. which according to him has the worst traffic in the world. I told him that our Circle Interchange was the worst in America. He was still nonplussed.

We kept the conversation light and impersonal. Seventies rock and Husker football mostly. He asked where Nicole was and I said at work. He said she was free to come out if she wanted to. She texted me that evening and said she was gambling in Hammond and I texted that that and please stay there.

That evening his relatives had a barbeque of grilled chicken and lamb with hot sauces and egg roles and a shitload of rice with flan and cheesecake for desert. Aunt Elsa, Tom's wife, criticized my dress and dirtiness. She is the twin sister of Kahn from 'King of The Hill' and I had been out drinking vodka with Nicole the night before and had'nt showered. The relatives didn't mind. They spoke a tongue called Visayan to each other and I noticed it had quite a lot of Spanish in it. I asked Tom about it and he basically repeated what I had already noticed. He went on to say that the Phillipines has hundreds of different languages and dialects and that there was a good deal of dispute over what made a proper language or just a dialect.

I could smell how tirethe grass was in the daylight. I could feel my ears straining to catch the hum of cars and grinding metal they've become used to and you hear locusts and see stars at night.

The Visiyans (I didn't ask them if they were the cats who had themselves crucified on Good Friday.) are very open about homosexuality. The gay cousins ate at table in full drag. They looked like broads living out of a cheap motel room. Nicky is a broad in a cheap hotel room but she has thrift store style.

My Uncle was very eager to take me to the backyard after I was finished eating. He said it was customery at family gatherings in the Phillipines for men and women to segregate and hang with their own kind. Well alright. This is in fact what ends up happening at most gatherings everywhere. Some cultures make an official more out of it and think they're special, and that's alright. There was an impromptu singing group with an acoustic guitar playing love songs by Marvin Gaye and the Beatles and The Eagles and Journey. My uncle explained that this was traditional as well. Why thanks Tom. The only foreign culture here is suburbs, and your ways are strange indeed. There was an brother of the family who kept feeding me Bud Lights. The in-laws were terribly kind to me the whole time. I took some barbecue home and ate it with a 40 of Mickey's and it was delicious.

Oh The Cheap Irony of the Red Line

"Redlining" is a socioeconomic term that refers to the practice of financial and real estate institutions working in formal or informal collusion with local governments to more or less create racial ghettos. The 'wrong kind of people' (Blacks being the most famous and typical example in this country, though there are other groups who who have suffered the same nonsense both here and just about everywhere else.) are herded into the same substandard housing in neighborhoods that are astutely ignored by civil services. Banks will not loan them the money to move out. Real estate companies will not give you a house even if you do somehow get the money. Businesses which offer jobs that pay enough to move out won't offer them to the wrong people, which hardly matters since they would never be able to get to these jobs anyway by attempting to navigate the abysmal local infrastructure.

Chicago, like other cities, bestows the honorary title of "Red Line" on the aorta of its train system. Symbolically linking Wrigley Field to the Cell, the Red connects the well-heeled northern lakefront with the Loop and the South. In the South, it runs along the median of the Dan Ryan expressway, an expressway which was routed where it was specifically to seal off the "Black Belt" from the old "White Ethnic" enclaves, particularly Daley Sr.'s own Bridgeport. The northern terminus of the Red Line is Howard Avenue, also the northern end of the city, with other El lines connecting to the nearest-in suburbs of Skokie and Evanston. (In fairness, the Caribbean enclave surrounding the Howard station is noticeably black and noticeably rough.) The south end of the Red Line is 95th Street, barely more than halfway between 0 block and the south city limits.

95th is the main east/west street on the South Side, dividing the far south from the merely south. The Chicago South Side is of course considered to be one of the great ghettos of the Western World. This is unfair for several reasons. To label a place as a ghetto is to attach to it the morbid fascination of a ghetto, a fascination that typically involves mocking the people that live there. This is unjust when one recognizes that the south half of Chicago is exactly what one hundred years of very deliberate planning by the forces ruling this city have made it into. Those who are poor and stuck in the bad neighborhoods of the South were designed to be. Add to this the fact that it's simply ignorant to dismiss the whole of the South Side as a uniform ghetto, ignoring the complexity of both the South and the city as a whole. There is Englewood and "Murdertown" along the Dan Ryan in the fifties, but just a block toward the lake from there is Hyde Park. The South has good neighborhoods, the North has bad neighborhoods. The Cubs have Black fans, The Sox have gay fans.

But in the Far South, past where the train ends, one does see the large realms of uniform bleakness that outsiders envision south Chicago to be. This is where the factories are. (Or used to be, for the most part.) While the city as a whole is too big and economically diverse to suffer the total meltdown felt by Detroit and Cleveland, the Far South is reeling from the same collapse of American heavy industry that's fucking up the rest of the Great Lakes.

But anyway, after years, years, years, and years of talking bout doing so, the transit authority has voted to extend the Red Line south to 130th street. Also to be extended are the Orange Line from Midway to a shopping mall nearby, and the Yellow Line (aka the 'Skokie Swift' or, if I'm hungover and feeling very evil 'the Jewish boxcar'.)to a shopping mall in that town. The total cost of these projects is around two billion dollars and is expected to take several (more) years to complete. The money is a big concern of course. If only there were someone from the South Side who had any sort of influence in Washington.

According to the Tribune residents who sit in the path of the extended Red Line are screaming for it, which is natural. Skokie residents who live in the path of the extension are complaining about it, which is also quite natural. Even in progressive metropolis such as this; where forced proximity to ethnic groups you didn't even know existed leaves people little choice but to get along, public transportation is still associated with the "wrong element" by the well-heeled. And of course Skokie does have a history of unwanted outsiders just marching through the place.

In the end I think that all of these projects are worthwhile and I'm optimistic that they will go through. The expressways are jammed and there's no room to make them any wider. While we're at it the entire El system could use an overhaul as well as an extension. Trains and tracks are both getting a little bit creaky, and if OUR president is as much as a corrupt Chicago pol as the nutcases say he is, than surely he has some idea of how we truly need a big bundle of billions in kickbacks, for both transportation and other infrastructure. It will go how it goes. I'm sure it will get ugly and stupid sometime soon, but I'm ok with that mostly. The Olympic bid got ugly and stupid very quickly but I still think that's a cool idea.

You Got a Problem Buddy?

Ben Joravsky's incessant vitriol that maligns, vilifies and demonizes Mayor Daley is bombastic and only resonates with nihilists, atheists and anarchists. Conversely, articles in National Geographic, Time magazine and Vanity Fair that have lauded Daley for being a green mayor have resonated with ecologists, environmentalists, conservationists, nature stewards, horticulturists and botanists. Being green is more constructive than venting spleen. —Brien Comerford- Letter to the Chicago Reader 6/12

Speaking as a proud nihilist, atheist, and anarchist, fuck you Brien Comerford. Fuck you, fuck the venal vindictive feudalistic racist Mick fuck running this town and fuck his bicycle.

The Black Juggalo of The Red Line

ICP tattooed in bubble font across his right fingers, that "guy with meat cleaver" symbol on his left arm. Yup, there he is, a Black Juggalo. I thought the black guys listening to "Freebird" in the computer lab was strange, the black guy in the Hank Williams Jr. T-shirt with three Confederate flags on it? Thrift shop maybe, take what you can get. But an honest-to-God black Juggalo. Wow. Wow.

Odds And Ends.

I make love every time I enter the State. Street subway on the inbound redline. Every time I come back out I am born again. My most fervent wish right now is to be insane so that I can see demons screaming at me on the subway walls. I should have joined the Marines, gone to Iraq, and acidentially killed a pregnant teenager when I had the chance.

In North Platte there was this share-a-bike program. People would donate their old bikes to the program and they would be left in various racks around time. I used them a couple of times, terrible bikes mostly. The idea was based on similar programs in Boulder, Portaland, some Bay Area suburbs, etc. There were of course cases of permenent borrowing in these places and it was expected that the same would happen in North Platte. Well, you can say whatever you want to say about Boulder and Portland; they don't have the meth problem that North Platte does. There were never more than two bikes availible at any of the ten or so program racks set up around town. Share-a-bike lasted three weeks. Mind that these were the most bent-spoked, rusted-powder blue, brakeless recumbent tandem pieces of shit imaginible that people were stealing. The smooth talking ones got two eight balls.

"The Man who Stole from Tom Osborne."


I met Lynn Finney. He tried his "car broken down on the way to Columbus" hustle on me, told me he had been a Husker and all that. Added some flavors to it, like how he had walked to campus from Shoemaker's. He asked me for seventy five dollars as cooly as one asks a stranger for the time. Twice, once in December of 06 and again around October of 07. A couple months after that he tried to hit me up while I was in a moving car, my own, accelerating for the green light at 16th and R. Whether he even vaguely recognized my face I don't know. Dying of cancer and still can't quit the rock? Horribly pathetic. I really did like that guy.

Odds & Ends

Papa Manic is currently in jail for possession of two bags of weed within a thousand feet of a park, which is to say in a park, not that it makes any difference. In a city of this density one won't find many spots that aren't a thousand feet from a school or a park. The law seems designed specifically to allow for gang bangers on south Harlem to leisure their afternoons in vacant lots. They figure two weeks for Papa. Keep the children clean. How hard would the cops have come down on my blue eyed pretty white ass? The Latina cop who popped me for taking a leak under the el. She said she was surprised to hear that I was twenty eight, that I still look young. Bless her.

Mama Rainy, the wife, the black mama, is lonely. Last night she again asked why I was so quiet and I again told her that it was just the way I am. She asked me if I was sexually frustrated. I answered that I've been worse as far as that goes, and in fact was growing a bit weary from company, but if she needed any help. Why not? She's done me favors, looked out for me, and she looks good for fifty one, whatever that means. She's not untouchibly ugly by any means, and the difference in race would prevent the surrogate mother factor from getting too nasty. She said she would take a rain check.

Mama Dee, the white gay-spawn one, was robbed of twenty dollars and her prescription to adderal by a sixteen-year-old transgendered hooker named Tiffany. Dee took to smoking again until her son wired her the money to shop Walgreen's so maybe she'll stop now. Tiffany was the victor in one of several scrapes between the working drag queens who gather at Belmont and Clark across from the twenty four hour Starbucks. She wondered in there fillthy and covered with a few spots of blood hear and there, railing to Mama Rainy about the same incoherent nonsense about "respect" that usually comes with these things. Rainy futilely tried to speak sense to her while Dee glowered. Dee and Tiffany don't get along of course. But Mama Rainy is Mama and refuses to let the girl fall to the fate she has chosen for herself, refuses to allow Dee to knock her teeth out and give her a hospital bed to get clean in for a few days. So now this situation keeps festering among people who sleep in three hour snatches once every two or three days. Barbecue Friday night.

I Want You So Bad

The woman being refereed to in "She's so Heavy"?



Yes, that's right, Ayn Rand, subject of no fewer than seven out of ten love songs in all of popular music. If there was ever a true doubt in your mind, than you are a moral slave worthy only to wax my Lamborghini.

By the way, "Happiness is a Warm Gun" is about the joys of using lethal force to defend one's inanimate property. What did you think he was talking about anyway?

A Man Asked Me for A cigarette Here Last Week

I told him I was smoking my last one. He asked me if he could have half of it and got violently mad when I said no. It is impossible to smoke in public without getting hit up anywhere in this city. I myself have gone without food for twelve hours instead of aking strangers for help. I'm not putting myself on a cross that's just how it is. There are neighborhoods where I try to explain that my parents don't have a swimming pool and brand new Escalade waiting for me back home and I know that I'm wasting my time.

Elton John and Billy Joel from Waveland Avenue.

I have some metal friends who may still be unable to admit to themselves that Elton John kicks ass, and that's a shame. The way the man puts his warm, empathetic voice to use really is magical, to the point that even Bernie Taupin's most absurd lyrics come out sounding like a healing lullaby to the tragedies of human life. Yes Elton, space is a terrible place to raise a kid. Won't the parents ever stop climbing the corporate ladder and think about what they're doing to Junior?

But then again it is no secret that John is an absolute whore, so for the past few years he's been touring with 'the human gin & tonic hangover', Billy Joel. With the exception of 'Piano Man' and 'Pressure', Joel is known for the sort of hack work that Elton avoided until he hit middle age. He is also yet another father figure in my life that I scorn to the point of hating my own masculinity, but more on that later. John and Joel came to Chicago last night, and of course they played at Wriggly field, home of the entire white population of Cook County.

The concert was scheduled to start at seven. I met Liz at the Addison El station about twenty after six and we had dinner at Taco Bell. (Yeah that's right. What?) It was a great atmosphere, the streets were full of pseudo-tanned suburbanites drinking champagne in the parking lots and hustlers trading bibles for cigarettes. When we made eventually made our way around to Waveland (Where the rooftop stands our) it really was postcard romantic. All the beautiful young people grilling, drinking beer, enjoying the hard work their parents did for their pristine real estate. The night was as soft and mild as a woman who believed your story about working for Vanity Fair. "This, darling, I will remember." "Oh yeah. Fucking Billy Joel man!" There was a flourish at about 7:20 and the show began with, what? Elton John is the opener?

John and Joel "dualed pianos" for awhile. Elton opened with "You're Song" as per tradition and Joel followed with "Just the Way You Are" the classic love song for his long-divorced wife. John countered with "Levon" one of his weaker old-school jams before Joel came back with the dishwater "My Life."

Elton had the stage to himself for the next hour and change and kept it seventies. "Yellow Brick road" (Should have stayed on the Farm, should of listened to my mom.) "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" and, oddly, the eleven minute, Kubrick invoking "Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding." It's an epic tune and all, but popular mainly with Elton fans and not really known to the general public anymore. I don't know whether to be thrilled or disappointed that EJ whored out to the baby boomers this hard. It's not if he doesn't he hasn't had any hits in the past twenty years. "Songs From the West Coast" has several good songs on it. Why not play "This Train Don't Stop..."? Or something from the Lion King, Fuck it.

Then again, I was off to the porta-potties as soon as he played something that I didn't recognize. The bastard started playing "Tiny Dancer" just as I was stepping out and I had to run back the length of a block to rejoin the crowd and find Liz. I eventually saw her with only three or four other people between us, and she waved at me to go to her, but Elton was already halfway through the second verse and I didn't have the time to jostle anymore, so I waved back and finished singing the song with perfect strangers. You're a big girl darling.

After that it was "Philadelphia Freedom" (meh.) a couple other tunes and than "Crocodile Rock" for the pseudo-finish. (Sing along! Yay!)

Billy Joel opened his stand-alone set with "Angry Young Man" and "Moving Out" (manmanmanamn. Oh Bill, you're so saucy.) After pathetically trying to keep it real with the supposedly impoverished Great Lakes audience, (It's not true that New Yorkers view everything to the west as monotonous desert. They can tell the difference between Chicago and LA just fine. They just don't know the difference between Chicago and Akron.) his band busted out into "Allentown", the absolute worst excuse of an ode to white blue-collar poverty ever written.

After this it was a few more pieces of trilling trite nonsense until the moment I had been dreading finally came. When I was ten years old I was riding in the car with my mother when "It's Still Rock & Roll to Me" came on the radio. I said that it sucked and this made my Mom start giggling and saying I should have more respect for it. I asked her what she meant. She grinned and sneered and snorted and, eventually, she told me that I had been, I had been conceived, to this song, to Billy Joel. I exist because my mother, she was seduced, by Billy Joel. I stood in the crowd last night, doing all I could to hold back the Taco Bell vomit and the tears, I turned to see my girlfriend dancing ecstatically to this song,this fleshly prayer of my blasphemous physical being, and the girlfriend, she likes it too. She probably has it on the her ipod somewhere, blissfully unaware of how many times I've wished myself dead to deny Billy Joel the satisfaction. I hope you were really drunk mom.


After this came "We Didn't Start The Fire" a song that is both Joel's most shameless piece of work and the ultimate demonstration of Baby Boomers' historically ignorant sense of self-importance. The crowd loved it of course. Liz loved it of course. Bouncing up and down and exhorting me to join her. I should have broken up with her right then. Or maybe it would be better if I killed her tonight. Joel closed with the mercifully tolerable "Only the good Die Young" and it was on to the encores.

Elton started things with "I guess that's why They Call it the Blues" and Joel followed with "You May Be Right." "After this came "The Bitch is Back" and, at last "Bennie and the Jets" from EJ. Liz once again wanted to cuddle while we sang along together, and didn't have the slightest clue why I was being cold and unsubtly angry towards her. She took to grinding against the "Billy Cub" mascot who had joined the crowd for the climax of the show shilling for tips and rocking a glow stick. I think it was a humorous attempt to make me jealous. Give yourself to the rats for all I care you filthy evil Joel-whore.

Still, "Bennie and the Jets" is a beautiful experience when played in front of a hundred thousand receptive ears, and would have made the perfect closer to Slton John's night. But he decided to show his famous sanctimonious side and close with "Candle in the Wind" instead. Which is fine I guess. One could easily make the case that it's his best song. It shows how the sisterly love that gay men feel for dead female celebrities is perfectly sincere and often quite moving. Still it's a rather grim song to end the night on. I mean it is summer and all and we would like to have some fun.

Finally of course there was Joel's "Piano Man", which is far more transcendent then it has any right to be but never mind. I was at piece again after half an hour of agony. Liz came up behind me to wrap her arms around my waist and I accepted her and we sang along. "They're sharing a drink we call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone!!" She asked me if I was going home with her and I said no. She asked why and I said I'd explain to her some other time. "Piano Man" is great but not great enough to forgive Billy or Liz or mom or any woman.

And They All Believe in Jesus

The women at the welfare office, the twenty-six year-old, Sonya if I remember right, the one from one of the rougher ends of uptown who managed to get an associate's degree and a job as a dental assistant, never needed a dime of government aid until the recession hit. She was assured that the suffering was all a test, and that the suffering was the point, to see if she's worthy to go home, and that the test never ends. The white and the rich go to church to learn why Jesus loves them better than other people. The brown and poor go to church to learn the the test never ends, and that this is how it should be, so stay calm. The neighbors who have been on food stamps their whole lives ask Sonya why she doesn't have children yet.

Papa Manic believes in Jesus. He says that he fought the war "fifteen years ago I was in that war you know." This would have been Iraq I, in which Bush the elder freed Christian Kuwait from the Moorish hordes. Manic was just past thirty then, so maybe or maybe not. He's not conciously lying at any rate. The passion of a believer tells him he was in the Gulf War. "You gotta fucking kill evil, if you ain't willing to kill evil when God tells you it's time than get the fuck out!! I'm for real on that shit. I assured him that I was for real on that shit, and that I wasn't just camping out with the black homeless for amusement.

Purvis too; gay, alcoholic, crack-addled, estranged from his elderly mother, firmly believes. His sisters have assured him that they'll let him know when his mother goes home to the Lord, assuming that she gets there first, before his eyes get any yellower.

Sarah, the one who stood in the middle of the bike path at Lincoln Park while begging me for a cigarette, telling the bikers who nearly bit the dust avoiding her to eat her ass. Sarah rode the bus from a South side shelter to Lakeview looking for work. She was being paid for 'giving some company' to an Iraq II veteran who came back with a missing arm and a mental twitch, likes to torment her with a knife apparently. When she asked me if I believed in Jesus I said I was a skeptic. She spent ten minutes asking me how I couldn't be afraid of hell and I told her I was afraid of death gin general sure. "How do you know there ain't no hell? How do you know, how do you know?" "I don't know. That's what a skeptic is. One who doesn't know what he doesn't know." Finally she asked me if I came from a Christian family and I said I was Catholic. She took this as a no and went into the old Calvinist spiel of how "the Bible is a guidebook that comes straight from God and the Catholic church and the Baptist church and all of these churches are fucking up the roadmap right, think of it as a roadmap. now imagine you're lost right, and you need a map; now are you going to trust the person who wrote the map or are you going to call some motherfucker who's just guessing? You know most people think you go to heaven for being good but not one of us is good we are all sinners and we have all fucked up........" She left me with a God bless and a Chick tract, the one where Satan dresses up like the Great Pumpkin and goes Freddy Kruger on some town.

Walter wanted to know if I had a problem with black people. I said no, I just didn't talk very much. This assumption by those who enjoy conversation for its own sake is universal and that those who don't partake with them simply must be stuck up is my greatest pet pieve. I remember my parents chiding me for growing noticibly anxious during extended family talks over dogs and priests that had been dead for twenty years. My natural introversion became militant and I came to distrust the smiling and effervescent, so here I am. But I listen as well as a wiretap. What could I possibly add to your passion to kill for Jesus anyway?

But there was no convincing Walter that silence wasn't tantamount to derision. He exhorted me to go to the Washington library and look at all the records of how many white people had secret white blood and vice-versa. "Adam and Eve were black." "Jesus looked like us." "I believe in the Bible. Some people are athiest and I believe in God, that's just my preference." "Races have always been mixing. The history of Italy, Italy is real close to Africa, the Moors." "Who is the purest race anyway?" "Caucasion, or Caucoid." "white people believe in this fallacy about race. You know what a fallacy is right? I said fallacy." "Thomas Jefferson." Barack Obama." "I have the same intellect as you. I just want to make sure that you fucking know that."

Liz was raised Muslic and has no religious preferences. "But I believe in god with all my heart and I know he's wqatching after you and I know he gives me the strength to stay clean." She gives me a God bless every night, either in person or via text. I do sleep better for it, so who cares if it does any real good or not? She sleeps better when I tell her I'm keeping safe. Mom sleeps better when I tell her I'm safe.

Grant Park Fireworks Show Quotes

"Quite a show fucking ay?"- Sgt. Gonzales, CPD.

"Hey!! Get your fuckin asses on the sidewaullk!!"- Some other CPD officer, blonde, female, maybe about 5'2.

"The whole world is watching!"-Me

"Josh, it's cute that you know your history and all, but this is the CPD honey and they don't play. Just be quite and keep walking baby."-Liz.

"That butch cop was hot wasn't she?"-Me

"Shut up baby."-Liz

Mama & Papa

This is where the spoiled north side homeless sleep. 'Mama' Patty with her portable grill and her husband 'Papa' who calls himself Manic and insists that this is the legal name his mother gave him. Other pillars of this community are Purvis, a gay blond black man in his fifties, struggling with cocaine and attention whoring, and Mama Dee, divorcee and formally abused wife in Muscatine Iowa; half of her eight children our gay and she has been elevated to a saint in the Halstead bars. The recession dried up her maid business and forced her onto the street. She owns an ipod that one of her children bought her two Christmesses ago, and also a $2500 laptop that she keeps hidden at the bottom of her basket. She's fifty one, same age as my mother, told me that she has a son named Josh in New York, tall blue eyed and long blond; she trusted me with the secret of the Dell almost as soon as I met her. She told me Purvis likes blond white boys, don't give an inch and he won't take a mile.

Mama and Papa regularly get their hands on grillible meat, charrities and such, so it's usually barbeque chicken for the ones who can't afford gas station pizza or can't stay sober long enough to get portable food from a pantry. The couple has been uptown for a long time and will often attract the housed to their barbeques as well. Last night a group of about ten of us, homeless and otherwise, Liz and I among them, martched with Mama and Papa to a spot along the lake in Lincoln Park.

I'm spending my days with Liz at her recovery home in Cicero, ran out of rent money for my hotel room. Hers is a reletively liberal place that lets significant others stay nights over the holidays. Tonight is not a holiday. I must find my own way tonight. Last night I could have stayed but I told her it was the fourth and we must go out. She said she would have to be back by ten, no weekend passes on the holidays, temptations to great. Come with me until than darling, I'll see you in the morning. Mama and Papa had a stereo with Patti LaBelle and Aretha, and we danced until she had to ride back to the suburbs with a friend.

Mama kept giving me chicken three or four times after I refused the next piece, until I stopped looking at the chicken on the grill. The fireworks from downtown were powerful enough to be seen from around the meandering shoreline. There was a party a few feet away from us who was getting reckless with their explosives. One shell went off barely six feet in the air covering us in a black cloud. The girl named Briona would grab me whenever a boom went off. I gave her my jacket when she complained of being cold. (Freakishely cold for the fourth, rained nearly until dark)She has a boyfriend and I have a girlfriend. We winked at each other is all, strictly "Lost in Translation" and innocent. I said it was cute how she was afrsid of fireworks and she said she loved to fuck white men. I told her she smelled nice and she asked me what makes pussy good to me anyway?

And that is a damned fine question. It disturbs and amazes me how much I lack self-reflection in these matters. What does make pussy good to me, besides willingness? Can't honestly say, it's a question I should be able to answer without this sort of trouble. Why do fish need to swim? No. No. Why am I so much more attractive here than I was in Nebraska with stable housing and a reletively stable income? They keep mentioning the eyes and the curl of my hair; maybe you could add my slow hinterland accent and relative bashfulness regarding sex to that. There seems to be something of a Tom Petty fetish among some women here and it will do by me. I can work on my 'evenin mams' and drawl out my diction even more and have a fine old time for as long as the eyes stay blue. Briona came from the Carabian when she was seven. She has a Jamaican accent that she'll stratigicaly drop in with her standard Midwestern black. As I walked her home she was talking to her kid sister in Creole over the phone and could see me smiling and leering.

I couple hours later Mama Dee bought me a Starbucks and showed me where I could charge my phone anytime as long as I had the money for coffee.

Could Stand for A Drink

I told her about New Orleans and and she asked where WE were going to live there. She seems perfectly confident. If she talked even half as much it would be better. If she stopped sending me the sort of chain texts that you could just as easily find on a bumper sticker or a shot glass it would be a lot better. If I gave her a copy of "Gravity's Rainbow" and made it an eighth of the way through I would be much heartened. Dad after all still hasn't touched "The Stranger" since I bought it for him for Christmas.

Or maybe she could just keep telling me how pretty my eyes are and that will do. When leaving the airport I asked a nice Scottish girl for a cigarette, wondered my way to the el station, called her, and told her to tell me how handsome I was. Just a man after all.

I walked Addison from the Kennedy all the way to Halstead yesterday. A solid three miles, never once felt tired. Maybe I could hoof it from my place to the loop or back at least one way.

This Weekend

Went to see the vigil at the former Jackson house in Gary on Friday, the saddest sack of shit this side of Pine Ridge. The town with a literal facade. Two blocks of nice looking convention center facing the South Shore line and the Indiana Tollway. Step into the downtown and you'll quickly notice the lack of a shop that isn't boarded up for six blocks. Liz told me to be careful via text and I promised her I would be back to the city by dark. This was a half truth. Crumbling apartment buildings, vacant lots that haven't been mowed in years, some with footpaths tempting the suicidal into the brush.

A man named Big Sweat drove me the last mile or so to the place in exchange for seven dollars and than twelve. I think it was the mild hustle that innoculated me from getting more seriously jacked. I had three hundred dollars in my pocket. Don't ask me why. It's okay to let the world know now.

All the marquees and electronic sings proclaimed Gary's love for Mike Jack. The Jackson family got the hell out of course as soon as the Motown checks allowed them to, and they are of course the only people from the place to ever strike it rich in any way. Sad doesn't begin to describe. They still have the signs up celebrating the town's 2006 centenial. Mayor Rudy Clay sprays his name and acheivements about the place more shamelessly than a Kim, and of course the city still boasts loudly about being of the fuck-ugly U.S. steel plant along the lakefront. The same U.S. steel that went moribund and took the town with it. Gary takes daddy's beatings as obediently as Micheal and LaToya did.

And it's abundently clear that the Jackson's are a tribe of Black crypto-Catholics. It may even be that Micheal's famous color change reveals betrays them as Sicilians trying to pass as African. The abuse they suffered is apperent in the entire clan's social and sexual stundedness. I'm confident that it was no mere occasional slap from drunken daddy's belt that they suffered. They have the sort of hangups that can only come from ritual sadomasichism of the Papist school. The house where they lived in is obscenely too small for seven kids and their folks. It could of been built for migrent grape pickers. I could go on and on with this.

Every network news van in the metro was there. On the corner facing the house was a man selling ice cream and on the other was a man selling vienna beef dogs. The mourners were busy cramming themselves in front of hand held cameras and singing "I'll Be There" for Youtube. There was a stack of filthy used teddy bears and roses by the front door and some wag left a cardboard tribute to the actual Billie Jean 'Jackson'. I'm afraid that none of it gets to me anymore. How absurd I guess. Yawn.

I took a side street back towards the South Shore that started in what was a clean-enough looking neighborhood before quickly changing back to Bogata once I crossed a set of frieght tracks. I stopped by a liqour store and bought a 40 of "Wildcat" which wasn't at all distinctive. I reached the station to find I had just missed a train by ten minutes and would have to wait an hour and a half to catch the last one inbound for the day. I texted Liz to tell her I was safe and asked her to send me a pic of her legs. I napped mostly until I got back to Millenium Station and met her there.

Saturday we slept until three and watched the FOD's below my window celebrate Pridefest 09. I live just off of Broadway and Halstead and was unsure of just who's ethnic enclave this was until I got here. We lounged until five until the unmistakable strains of "Shake Your Love" reached my room.

My sister was thriteen when Debbie Gibson was hot. I'm familar, and it was pitiful to see her face stretched and dried out by cocaine or surgery or both. Still she put on a hell of a show. Drag queens were rushing the stage like rapists at an ICP concert. After her came Crystal Waters, (La da de,la de da.) The gay night scene is every bit as much of a time warp as any Motley Crew bumping dive in the Nebraska sticks. Thursday night at this place called Bobby Love's they played a newish video from old Gibson rival Tiffany, catering to the glass dick and Eurotrash set now. It was several minites of delirium before I could finally believe that it was THAT Tiffany. My sister dug her too.

I missed the actual pride parade on Sunday as I was in a vein search for a TV showing the USA/Brazil soccer match, which we naturally lost in the most calculatingly painful way imaginable. I called Liz to ask her is she could skip work on Tuesday. She said no and asked why. I said it was nothing and I'll let you know on the when.

The Object of Attacking is Attacking

President Obama is being criticized for having ice cream with his daughters on Father's Day. No, really.
"How in the tank is the mainstream media when we have people dying for the right to be free in a country like Iran that has been such a thorn in the side of America and the spread of democracy in the Middle East and the media thinks that covering Obama and his daughters having ice cream is news?! WTF!
This was, by the way, the day of the famous "Nedia" incident, in which an Iranian election protester with that name was shot dead by revolutionary guards. It is indeed enraging to see the woman lying on the ground, her eyes clouding and tearing as she sees the void and knows; a comrade forlornly trying to staunch the bleeding from a hole half the size of her chest. It is brutally effective propaganda for the democracy movement in Iran. Or you could use it to shit on the president for having ice cream. Whatever.

To the credit of the GOP, this trope has not caught on among that party's leaders. The top brass, at least, is not that stupid, knowing that attacking a man for having ice cream with his elementery-aged girls will win no votes. Still it does reveal a section of the far right that is consciously and deliberatly trying to be outraged by anything the president does. They are seriously going to go there. 'How dare the president have ice cream with his little girls.' If they really are that bothered by it, then I suggest they have some friendly congressman introduce the following resolution.

The president is hereby forbidden from engaging in recreational activities while there is somebody suffering/and or dying somewhwere.

Then again, considering the very noticible emphasis on "having been such a thorn in the side of America." Perhaps the resolution could be reworded like this.

Being that their are millions of human beings suffering and/or dying at every moment of every day. It is certainly too much to expect the president to personally address the pain of all of them. Nonetheless, the president is still forbidin from engaging in any recreational activities when their are people suffering at the hands of forces with unkind things to say about the United States, thus making their suffering trully important.

If middle aged-white men want to play the childish game of showing that they are not afraid of President Other, that they are perfectly willing to criticize him for quite literally everything he does and invent drama out of thin air when need be, fine. So long as they aren't downing a case of Keystone Ice and rolling to the Unitarian Church with their AK's, than we on the left are most profoundly unafraid of them. It would be easy to say that their behavior is that of a bully, but that wouldn't be right. Bullies tend to straighten out after getting smacked in the mouth once or twice, as conservatism certainly has been. Bullies are not religiously commited to believing themselves martyrs. Sara Robision at Orcinus does a fine job of explaing what's going on here on her 'blame the parents' blog post..

"... you learn that you're not entitled to have any physical or emotional boundries. The authorities have an unlimited right to intrude on you're thoughts, feelings, personal space, and even your body perimeter at any time, for any reason. You are not your own; you're entire being is at the mercy of those set by God to rule over you. You must trust that whatever they do, they do for you're own good, even if the reasons arn't clear to you right now, and in fact may never be explained to you. They know best. Just go with that.
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On yet other fronts, they learn that they do have boundries, but only to the extent that they're personally able to fight and defend them. The far-right affection for pugnacious rhetoric and a strong defense comes straight out of this---


It is the soldier, not the minister, who has given us freedom of religion
It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to protest.
It is the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial
It is the soldier, no the politician, who has given us the right to vote
It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.
- Charles Provience.

That was a little ditty I saw taped to the old Nebraska U. credit union next to ads for used cars and bastard puppies. It always did piss me off something fierce. Apparently there is no such thing as civil society. Saul Bellow would have never written a word on his own don't you see? His Russian-Jewish heratage, study of Hebrew, comprehensive education, time in the Merchant Marine, and stint of living in Paris would have never inspired him to create a thing. No, it was not until some specific set number of Nazis were killed, say 298,123, that his talent magically came to him.

There is a place for self-defense, both personal and national, and I can agree that part of national self-defense is defending the free thought and culture of a nation. But in order to defend a nation's culture the military must neccessarily be the servant of that culture, and they had damned-well never forget it.

There is nothing neccesarily wrong with a solid, tangible brain that shuns abstractions. I could not float away on this blog if some sharp and caffinated brain had not invented the microchip. Still it is understandible that the tangible mind would have trouble with grasping the etherial human liberties; freedom of speech, expression, belief, etc; freedoms that, at some level, exist independently of the person exercising them. It has of course long been noticed that one can record some controversial belief that one later dies for, and that after death somebody else can hear or read the idea and maybe agree. Many are inspired by this fact, others may be disturbed by such negation, unable to accept freedom beyond my freedom, will beyond my will. So among the far right, which loudly and proudly loathes the abstract and intangible, there are two methods for attempting to make the ideal of liberty into a physical thing.

1. The emphisis on property rights. Property is the primary, and perhaps even the only means, of determining a persons freedom and dignity.

2. The exercise of liberty is the violent defense of it, and nothing more. Freedom cannot exist unless it is imperiled. any violent crime commited anywhere absolutely must be a personal threat. Whatever the tax rate happens to be, it must be outragously high, any dispute with or threatining gesture from a foreign country absolutely must be the equivelant of the World Wars.

This mindset is mostly just irritating and amusing until taken to its absolute extreme, where the desire for tangibility reaches the point to where one convinces himself that the truth of his political opinions are as obvious to everyone as the color of the sky. There isn't really any such thing as disagreement. There are only those who pretend to disagree for reasons either foolish or evil, preferibly evil. It is this mindset that brings truckbombs.

She Seems to be Religious.

Like, seriously so. In the ghetto way you understand, the sort of religion that does what it wants but can't stand to hear impieties. I like impieties. She doesn't have Facebook I don't think. Doesn't have regular internet access, doesn't know I have this blog. Shhhhhsh.

I can do with it. She's a white girl from the South Side so she's probably Catholic, ummmm ummm.

I Met a Part Irish-Englishman

Kyle is his name Touring the US over the summer. Down the west coast from Vancouver to San Diego, up to Chicago on route 66, then east to New York. Got in an argument with his travelling buddy and hit him. Travelling buddy hit him and Kyle refused to hit him back. "Talk about love but don't live love. I hate that." He says he's from Manchester. That's not what I've heard about Manchester.

She's Been Waiting for me All Along

There was no cholora epidemic that killed a tenth of Chicago in the 1870's. Even a lot of people who live here think there was. It is an essential American trait that we need to be reminded that a hundred and thirty years ago was only a hundred and thirty years ago, that if there had been a plague that killed seventy five thousand people, there would still be quite a hell of a lot of evidence of it.

It's never been proven that Daley Sr. stole the election for JFK. He just probably did is all. Writers are sexually attracted to knowing what other people don't, and there's a reason why so many come from here. The layers of what you know and others don' what you don't yet know, and what you don't even know there is to be known, are inumerable. If any serious thinker grows tired and old here they were never a thinker at all. I know secrets you don't. I know the crack fiend who loves NPR and has a knowledge of city politics as encyclopedic as a librarians. The gays are more preternaturally kind than ascetic saints. The lesbians not so much.

When and where the buses run is a secret I still need to learn. The el station nearest Hyde Park is a mile and a half away. Vacant lots, condemned townhouses, a twelve-year old boy ruling his block with a 40-oz for a scepter. Not Hyde Park. Today the 'Sun Times' told me that the place where the Green Line stops over Garfield is the second most dangerous neighborhood in America. A man there asked me for change five times over a course of ten minutes. He followed me into the chicken shack where they put this thick hot sauce on the chicken and fries and it's delicious. I finally told him that not every white man who comes to his block is a Kennedy. But upon learning this new information that might actually be so.

Hyde Park is a jewel of a spot. You can see the South Side's downtown and the idol smokestacks of Gary from the beach. Lake Michigan is cleaner than people back home would think, cleaner than I thought, certainly better than the mudholes on the high plains. The water was so cold that I felt my blood pressure drop but it was humid and it was good. I was safe in the president's neighborhood. Thirty dollare in cash stuffed in my shoe guarded by nothing but a dirty sock. His house looks nice and unlived in.

I hope I never find out all of the secrets that women have. I hope there's always something about them that I don't know. The one right here. That one over there. That working girl last night. Yes I did.

The new one. The one who wants a straightforward thing, something solid and exclusive, without the mental S&M games. The one who came to me. The one who, I'll be damned, this one wants me right back. 'Im Liz. I like you. You got a girlfriend?" Harsh and quick. The Chicago bark. Just a hint of East Coast blending into the cadence. Just a hint, because we're not there. This is still the Midwest. Ask a stranger a question and they'll answer you with contrived annoyance condensation, but they'll still give you directions. The I-love-you's are flat and to the point, like how my Mom says it to Dad.


It's been claimed by many, Bouvier comes to mind, that men tend to equate cities with women. This is very much true, painfully obvious even. There's quite a hell of a lot of Joan Beran in you Chicago. You're a good fun broad who knows everyone and can handle grunt work just fine. Still you're stratigically soft to the ones you can trust, the ones you know you can rely upon. A city to mother me so the women don't have to. It comes so much easier now. Men and women alike are so direct that it can't help but bleed unto me. So I'm straight and real right back. The people I talk to seem to like me. I've been worse.

Here in the downtown library is a man who spends his whole afternoon looking at foot fetish porn. He's free to do so. This is a city library, and he's a citizen with a library card. He just needs to keep it softcore, and that's easy enough to do. The pussyfoot is just a myth.

Lost My Fedora in The Move

Nobody here knows how I walk the fed.

Shaved my mustache too. Grows in too unevenly.

I thought the summers were supposed to be milder here.

Quick notes as Guest Internet User From Logan Park Library

1. Shared the train with a bonafide Amish couple yesterday. There were at least a dozen people more boring than they were.

2. Train showed up to Lincoln just twenty minutes late. Pulled into Union Station three hours late.

3. Rained hard last night. Humid. Not much wind.

4. I've passed by no fewer than eight Chicago cops without being savagely beaten. Daley Jr. is a pussy. No redlining the blacks by freeway, no verbal smackdowns of Jew motherfuckers. So weak.

5. I'm riding the train to Hyde Park today. Going to see the First Family's private home. Drink Old Style with Bill Ayers.

6. There's a bar uptown called "The Closet." Gay bar names really are as obvious as "Police Acadamy" makes them out to be. Who knew?

7. I have a most sincere hope of walking into a Polish Church and hearing an eighty-year old woman prophesy my future in backwords tongues.

8. Hell yes the food is good! You should see the condiment selection for a gas-station hot dog.

9. Italian fucking beef motherfucker.

10. I'm thinking White Sox over Cubs. Cubs fans have too much Plains-style mildness to them. Gotta go with the edge.

top 10 FC's as of right Now

1. Barcelona.
2. Man U.
3. Chelsea
4. Inter Milan
5. Porto
6. Liverpool
7. Real Madrid
8. Wolfsburg
9. Sao Paulo
10.Marseilles

I put A Joke Ad on Craigslist

It was supposedly for naked mole rats. But in truth it was a ploy to draw attention to my car for sale. I've received one phone call and three e-mails for the mole rats in the four hours since the ad went up. Nothing on the car.

So...

I seem to have had a bit of an episode last night. I won't go into details, because in truth I really don't know what they are. Let's just say that I've become accustomed over the years to avoiding pressure, ambition, and burying my emotions in liquor or whatever else was available, and I've recently decided that I'm not going to do that anymore.

I really am better this way, overall. It just takes some adjusting, and being stranded in Lincoln for an indefinite period is quite literally maddening. But no need for any mates reading this to worry. Through it all I've always maintained a perfectly sincere love of myself. Rest assured that I won't do anything more foolish than I already have.

Crackpot syntax: Army of God Vs. DPRK News Service

Note how in both cases clarity and smoothness are sacrificed for the sake of cramming in slogans that denounce the enemy or praise the cause into every possible nook.

"JUSTICE AND RETRIBUTION

In the particular capital crime of murder, God has required the death of the murderer. The very principle, the “image of God” in man, both prohibits murder and commands that the murderer be executed. Just as men are required to refrain from murder, they are required to execute those who commit murder.
As with all forms of injustice in the world, God, who loves justice, will bring judgment in due time and right all wrongs. Those wrongs of which we have knowledge but are unable to prove in court will not go unnoticed or un-addressed by God. Vengeance is His and He will repay and He delegates to human authorities the task of executing vengeance (Romans 13:4). That which escapes His earthly courts will not escape His Final Judgment Day. In this we can find some comfort and hope whenever we see wicked deeds go unpunished before our eyes. But this sad delay in justice does not leave us indifferent to it. We are to love and to seek justice.
Temperance of justice may be afforded the offender by the injured party in the case of civil wrongs; e.g., one may forgive a personal debt and thus extend godly grace. But the case of first degree murder is another matter. There is to be no mercy shown. No judge has the right to reduce the sentence to prison time or flogging or fine. Because human beings are created in the image of God, those who murder them must forfeit their lives (Gen. 9:6). There is no alternative for execution; no substitute for the blood of the murderer (Ex. 21:12,14; Deut. 19:4-13; Josh. 20; Num. 35:27-30). “You shall not take ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty of death, but he shall surely be put to death” (Num. 35:31).
The question of duty arises. Who is responsible to see that the guilty one is executed? In civilizations with developed legal systems, the answer may seem to require no thought: police, prosecutors, jails, courts, prisons, and electric chairs all compose modern justice systems so that responsibility never is in question. But in ruder or simpler societies, the question of duty might be less obvious. Tribal Israel was informed by the Law of Moses that the “avenger of blood” (goel ha-dam) was responsible for administering the justice. In a murder case this “avenger” is traditionally understood to be the nearest male kinsman of the victim though some scholars have argued that he may be a representative of the elders of the city, an official of government.
On the assumption that the duty of executing murderers resides with civil authorities whenever they are functioning legitimately as just authorities, what happens when such authorities flagrantly fail to carry out justice? When is “vigilante justice” tolerable?
This theme is popular in literature and the cinema. Gresham’s A Time to Kill featured the drama of a father sitting by as a court was poised to slap the wrists of two men who had raped and murdered his daughter. No reader or movie watcher reacted against the execution of the two men by the father when he grabbed the rifle from the sheriff on duty and blew away the two murderer rapists in the court room. Justice was served; it was only for the court to bless it after the fact when the jury acquitted the avenger of blood. One could find countless examples in popular literature from Homer to Shakespeare to Dirty Harry. And even in those instances of popularly accepted vigilante justice, it is not even so grievous a crime as murder for which retribution is countenanced. Ulysses executed the suitors of Portia for insolence: hardly a capital offense. And Hamlet took vengeance on his uncle on the basis of quite crude evidence: the testimony of a nocturnal visit from a shade.
So what if, in such a matter of murder, surviving kinsmen took it as their responsibility to see that just vengeance was executed upon the murderer of their relative regardless of the hand by whom the death blow should be rendered? And upon the failure of the authorities to execute the murderer, what if the obliged kinsmen believed it their duty to do what the civil authorities were derelict in performance? "

http://www.armyofgod.com/MikeBrayFathersRights.html



"The U.S. imperialists and the south Korean puppets perpetrated at least 200 cases of aerial espionage against the DPRK in May or 30 cases more than those in the same month of last year by mobilizing strategic and tactical reconnaissance planes with various missions, according to a military source.

The U.S. imperialist aggressor forces committed more than 110 cases while the south Korean puppet army at least 90 cases.

On May 28 and 29, the U.S. imperialist aggressor forces' overseas-based five RC-135s flew into the air over south Korea and were busy with aerial surveillance and photographing and electronic espionage against all areas of the DPRK.

South Korea-based U-2 made shuttle flights from the east to the west all day long on May 30 to spy on the DPRK. The number of cases of aerial espionage perpetrated by this plane reached 25 this month.

The U.S. imperialists and the south Korean puppets let more than 40 strategic and tactical reconnaissance planes fly in the air over the front areas to intensify the espionage against the DPRK side in the period from May 7 to 13 when they were busy with combined air battle exercises in the air over areas of south Korea.

In the meantime, the south Korean bellicose forces let two or three tactical reconnaissance planes make shuttle flights in the air over front areas in the East and West seas and the areas along the Military Demarcation Line day and night every day on spy missions."
http://www.kcna.co.jp/index-e.htm

There is believing in good and evil, and than there is thinking about absolutely nothing but how we are good and they are evil.

Pour Your 40 Shorty

Tales From North Platte

There have been sporadic studies and news articles about the difficulties of being a first-generation university grad. Let me boil it down for you. My two best friends are currently living abroad. My mother has never ridden the subway. Neither has my sister or most of my cousins.

"Living in this town is like being in high school forever."

So saith Brian Keith, first cousin via our common maternal grandparents, Ivan and Shirley Beran, still alive and dying. It was far and away the wisest thing I've ever heard the boy say, and possibly the smartest thing he's ever done, unless one counts the times he resisted the urge to quit some especially unpleasant construction job for a day or two for the sake of feeding his children. It was the sort of line that puts a writer to shame. How many hours have I spent typing how many characters to describe how and why the rural life is bad for you? And all it is is a spontaneous line spoken by a high school dropout.

But who am I to question Brian's judgement? I'm emotionally closer to him than any other releative save the folks; and biology gives him an advantage over Dan for the title of surrogate brother. More to the point I am coming down from cocaine and am fresh home from a two-man three-way with a forty-year old single mother who has miraculously kept her beauty dispite her habits. What can I say? There is a brief moment in late spring when the Great Plains is the most gorgeous place in the world, and the poison of North Platte and every place like it becomes strangely alluring. And I have always known how to play this place. The game is very simple. Joshua D. Beran is North Platte and Madonna/Whore. Take that away and all you have is some mindless imp fellating Ernie Chambers.

My mother is about three inches shorter than me; lacks mustache and goatee, breasts noticibly more protrusive through her shirt than mine. Hair color exactly the same, parted through the middle. We went to work on my ailing grandparents yard both dressed in olive green Nebraska-logo shirts and black sweatpants. Some fellow at a gas station we stopped at on the way said I looked just like her. This was both unnessesary and unwanted. I had already noticed and was already writhing in primal disgust. I was wearing proper work shoes while she was wearing those God damned Crocs of hers. That makes all the difference in the world.

An older friend of Mom's from the VFW auxillery told us that her husbands lung cancer had spread to his brain. My mom asked if there was anything our family could do and the matron said that she couldn't thin of anything. Mom is fifty two and smokes a pack-and-a-half a day. Grandpa takes too much radiation therapy to handle sunlight anymore. I will ride the subway in their name. They will be blurbs in my biography forever, or else I will be a blurb in my childrens, or else they will be a blurb.

It's True What They Say About Eating After Midnight

I slept from 10:30 until 2:30 and then 5:00 till eight. In between I had leftover ribs that my mother made, I hadn't eaten much in the past two days. True nightmares, looming and inevitibility. Material and romantic disasters, unstoppible acts of a vengeful and jealous hearth God. I'm leaving. I returned back to North Platte to leave forever. I'm seeing my grandparents for probably the last time. Testosterone rush. Trolling for random women on Craigslist. Danger. I have a friction burn on my middle finger that comes from I know not where. Danger. A sense of power bent and distorted like a midday drunk. I don't give a damn. This time the flames will lead somewhere. Perfect confidence for nothing in particular.

Goodbye

"I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town
He'd tousle my hair and say son take a good look around this is your hometown
This is your hometown
This is your hometown
This is your hometown

In '65 tension was running high at my high school
There was a lot of fights between the black and white
There was nothing you could do
Two cars at a light on a Saturday night in the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed in a shotgun blast
Troubled times had come to my hometown
My hometown
My hometown
My hometown

Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back to your
hometown
Your hometown
Your hometown
Your hometown

Last night me and Kate we laid in bed
talking about getting out
Packing up our bags maybe heading south
I'm thirty-five we got a boy of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said son take a good look around, this is your hometown"

Last Night

I was walking through the intersection of 11th and F. A married couple driving by in an SUV were nonchalantly smoking a joint, waiting for a man wearing a suit that costs more than his 1987 Buick Sable to pass through. Lincoln you magnificent bastard. I would of missed you like this, on your own terms, a few short months ago. Now I see what a cheap narcotic you are without her.

The protective masks of fifteen years are all gone, what is left now is the naturally intense man I've always been. Intoxicating clarity. Passion of all sorts but especially the moral, as after Whiteclay. I mind full of I must and we must and I want not spoken but screamed.

I have always been able to have my grandest dreams whenever I would have them, whenever I would accept the intensity and learn to act on it, live with it. I realize that now. I simply realize. There is no epiphany. No release or rush of revelation. The grandest dreams bring no solace. For it is spring and the time has come for the shy and timid to burn for what we don't have. The only solace is knowing that she will always have her own company. She can never possibly know what an acid burn it is to miss herself. My interior protection was always poison and a lie. Hers is real. I know that she will be safe and then I am calm again. She taught me that it's good to want. Now I see, as never before, that anything I could want is available to me in a tangible way . She is not. It's been so God Damned long since she's even been here. But she is safe.