I have spots. It’s the weirdest thing, they inhabit pretty much the entirety of me – the outside part anyway. They are everywhere save for the bits that don’t usually see the light of day, the bits of me that are pearly white. Arms, legs, face, loaded for bear – ass, hips crotchal region, unloaded and bare. As they don’t appear where the sun doesn’t shine, I would then imagine them as sun spots.
It’s like a random rash of melanin or Jackson Pollock in his splattering stage blasting me with all kinds of splotchy oddness, skin, hair, spots. Spots on spots. They are of multiple shapes and hues, some have little lumps. Mounds. Like little dermal gophers popped through the surface and left a pile of dark meat. But they’re not gophers, they’re moles. Right there on my me.
I’ve been a spotty fellow all of my life, though never entirely pleased about it. As other freckle face freaks can attest, they do accompany their own peculiar brand of derision. And I can see why: it’s an outbreak of tan on whitey McWhite white skin in strange random patches, a birth mark that covers your whole body. Sometimes, I’ll find myself mesmerized by the splotches on others faces, I imagine people get lost in my spots and don’t hear a word I’m saying. Hypnotic.
Though my dad had the odd spot here and there, I like as not got mine from my mom. She had red hair and is covered with spots. A little bleached out Dalmatian of a woman who mixed it up with a black haired spotless guy and popped out a spotty brownish haired boything.
I suppose I expected them to fade with age, but I’m over half way to a hundred and the little fuckers are going strong. I’ve tried to tan them away but it invariably just makes them darker than the surrounding me meat, cooking out there all lubed up under God the sky broiler. Spots. My fleshy antagonists, we all know what they represent: puerility. Freckles are something little kids have – they make them cute. They are associated with Howdy Doody and Carrottop, goofy, childish, nonsensical, not to be taken seriously.
In adults they are to be avoided assiduously. Think of great humans noted for not only their noble deeds but their freckles. I can’t think of one. A genius with freckles is just a person of spots with some harebrained ideas. The same ideas in the mouth of a non-spotter are often highly regarded.
Actors and other public types with spots do all they can to minimize and conceal them, whereas most guys anyway, don’t walk around on the job site with make-up on – it just comes off weird. So we the spotty must accept our plight as blotched and display our shame for all to see. Some will try to mask under tan in a can or other emollients but then they just turn all leather colored and get derided for that. Most just accept it and find jobs that require as little contact with the public as possible.
But just because our spots make us easily dismissed, do not for an instant imagine our influence as negligible. For the spotty among us work behind the scenes, writing and directing and shaking and moving things where we aren’t seen or readily ridiculed for our impish dermatological clutching at childhood.
Spotters are aware of our position in the social hierarchy, we know that just as we deride others with ostentatious spottitude, that our own is the source of the derision of others. A strange reverence can be found in some spotty types for the really spotty, or worse, the tragically spotty, who may have only a couple of spots, but they take up half the face or something equally grotesque. There but for the grace of genetics…
For yes, I forget my spottiness during social interaction. I can’t see me or how preposterous I appear, all blotched and spotted like some hairless neofelis nebulosa, blathering away about this or that. It is only upon reflection, or a glimpse of these spotty, spotty arms, do I remember that credibility does not come from that which is blemished.
It’s as if the skin can’t commit: am I black, am I white, am I brown, am I yellow, am I red? I most assuredly possess all the assorted hues. Yet this doesn’t make me Everyman. Perhaps my flesh’s lack of commitment makes me appear uncertain (which I am) but lends a visual confirmation, regardless of content that credibility may be lacking. How can such a spotty thing have anything to offer? Everyman as no man.
Underneath, that’s all I am, just a man. Better judged by my action than my appearance.
A man.
A spotty, spotty man.
© 2012 simmbiosis 6/27/12
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Thursday, June 28, 2012
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Radioactive Man
I am a product of the nuclear age. I was born just as the USA was going into the war of aggression business in earnest. They had just completed the retrofit of Korea – changing the South of that nation into a model of the USA with smaller workers. Whereas in the North, grinding poverty and unemployment ravaged the nation, in the South, huge numbers of the citizens had become fully employed, in their grinding poverty.
And the USA had set up for business, moving their direct aggression further south still, while only declaring a cease fire with the North Koreans. All told, our corporate rebranding cost billions of dollars and ended millions of lives, reputedly even a couple million civilians. Afterwards, with troops still on the ground, and hostilities in abatement but not concluded, the real invasion occurred as business interests saw a huge untapped manufacturing base ripe for the plucking. We would show the wretched commies how to properly make use of populations: build shit for people who are better off. China learned fast, huh?
My father was a veteran of the Korean conflict, it wasn’t really a war (except to the people it blew to pieces and those who put them back together) because according to the Constitution those have to be declared by congress and it was difficult to get them together on the whole invasion of sovereign nations thing. So the president decided for us and things have only gotten better since, because now, the president always decides.
Let me tell you a little about my dad: He was born in 1930 to a British immigrant who had no use for him. His older brother was named Robert, (we called him Bob) but my dad was named Bill, in all likelihood because that was how his father perceived him. Told him that he was an abortion too late. Let him know who the favored progeny was, and it wasn’t Bill.
Bill took to drinking at an early age, 15. Like his stupid oldest son, he was addicted by the time he graduated high school and had set about a course of personal (and other peoples) debasement that left him afraid and alone at his end, the blank stare of catatonia as he hung on until I could tell him to go to sleep, and the poor bastard let go that night to finally find his peace.
He missed WWII but got caught up in the post war fervor and escalating anti-communism which was so popular in the late 40s early 50s, late 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, until the 90s where we started hating Muslims. Bill hated those commies, just like he was supposed to, and before his brain took him on permanent vacation, he had taken to hating those Muslims too. Just like he was supposed to.
So I have no problem imagining him being quite gung-ho for the whole Korean enterprise – some thinking is so bad that we can’t wait to change it, more direct action is required.
That is until it came to his direct action. Because, while Bill was supportive of US efforts to correct the thinking of people we don’t know around the world, he was less so when it came to his body being used for such educational purposes. Like so many, he was an intellectual anti-communist: he wanted his manufactured hatred to be enforced through the use of other people’s bodies. He liked his, which is why he drank disturbing amounts of liquor and smoked about 4 packs a day. True. True Blue.
How do you argue with a drug that calls itself True Blue? I mean, I took LSD in copious amounts and we called it acid. Imagine where I’d be if we called it Virtue. Or Pussy. Drooling in the corner like as not, I’m certain as many imagine me still. Had a little Mercedes logo shaped filter which did nothing I suspect except make the druggie dream of getting a Mercedes. Which Bill did. Blue, he got a blue one.
Bill told me that he wouldn’t go to Korea; said he went in when he was drafted as a conscientious objector, until they convinced him to accept his enslavement with the guarantee that he wouldn’t have no Koreans shooting at him. He accepted a role as an MP in Nevada. My dad, the drunken letch: a policeman. Makes you wonder, who do they turn down? Nobody apparently.
Bill drank on duty. Bill drank everywhere. I got his thirst, but my mother’s stomach, so I would drink and puke and drink and puke. It was a lovely combo. Since I’ve given up drinking, my puking is at an all-time low. Go team!
As penance for not directly blowing up Koreans, or shooting Koreans, or burning Koreans, soldiers stateside got to enjoy their own little hells. Bill told of his drunken exploits with pride, which likely has abetted my druggy bragging rights, a thoroughly stupid thing to brag about, and one engaged in with ardor by so many. The stuff Bill did when he was drunk was nothing to brag about.
But his promotion for Gordon’s Gin always struck me as amusing, so it seemed worthy of sharing, especially so in a world where people write at length about their cats. Here, kitty, kitty. Ah, shaddap!
The USA nuked Japan twice. Nuked a bunch of natives when the wind shifted after they bombed the Bikini atoll during Castle Bravo. But of all the places we’ve nuked and all the people we’ve irradiated, the place we’ve attacked the most? The USA. We’ve nuked this nation close to a thousand times. I’m not making this up. Here is a YouTube link of a disturbing representation of just how fucking crazy we are:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXxPRHkyAvY
Humans and especially American humans. We’re suicidal.
I look at this and think of cutters. Cutters are humans who have suffered such trauma, such psychological debasement that they cut themselves as a way to punish themselves for being inadequate, perverse, or just wrong. Cutters are hurt people who hurt themselves because they feel they deserve it. Nuked the USA 1000 times. Telling.
Bill took part in what were known as the Desert Rock tests in Nevada. It was a military operation called Buster-Jangle conducted from the early 1950s till 1957, where the military would drop an atomic or hydrogen bomb from a plane, or detonate it on the ground and then they would watch what happened to the troops exposed to the detonation from various perspectives. Study the effects is what they called it. Kind of like a kid squirting flammable fluid on an anthill and studying the ants when he lights it.
Bill told of his exposure: said he and his group were in a trench near the test. He said he had a half pint of Gordon’s Gin with him, for emergencies – that Bill, always prepared. He said just before the detonation, he set that bottle above him on the rim of the trench. When the explosion occurred, he said that bottle flew from atop the trench above him, slammed into the back of the trench yet didn’t break. He was very impressed with that: Gordon’s Gin, nuke tested, drunkard approved.
Afterwards, he gathered up his special beverage and he and his fellow grunts charged the area of detonation: they charged the nuke. Just in case it wasn’t dead or something. Then, in celebration for their successful thwarting of the commie desert and its denizens in Nevada, he and his buddies no doubt drank that nuked liquor and regaled each other with their exploits, as soldiers are wont to do. Decades later, regaling his son with the same, expanded and embellished story as story tellers are wont to do.
I’ve often wondered, though, did the nuking of my dad have any influence on me, other than culturally, does it offer me any super-human capacities or is it really only good for cooking? Or burning? I can’t fly, (TSA insists), can’t stick to walls or shoot webs out my ass. I’ve broken, so I don’t think I’m bullet proof, though I’ve had many opportunities to find out, gladly all missed.
The things I can do are because I’ve trained myself, taught myself to do them. The way I think is because I can see things which seem obvious to me, while others think I am imagining them. That clarity I suspect came in part by the government sponsored ingestion of LSD because once I crossed that threshold many of my illusions were swept away, I became receptive.
A receiver.
As a receiver, I accepted things from a neutral position, neither for nor against, observing, considering. In time, when that reception made the obvious irrefutable, the receiver became the broadcaster, sharing an understanding of reality from a different perspective indeed. The active man, as radio.
The radioactive man.
© 2012 simmbiosis 4/8/12
And the USA had set up for business, moving their direct aggression further south still, while only declaring a cease fire with the North Koreans. All told, our corporate rebranding cost billions of dollars and ended millions of lives, reputedly even a couple million civilians. Afterwards, with troops still on the ground, and hostilities in abatement but not concluded, the real invasion occurred as business interests saw a huge untapped manufacturing base ripe for the plucking. We would show the wretched commies how to properly make use of populations: build shit for people who are better off. China learned fast, huh?
My father was a veteran of the Korean conflict, it wasn’t really a war (except to the people it blew to pieces and those who put them back together) because according to the Constitution those have to be declared by congress and it was difficult to get them together on the whole invasion of sovereign nations thing. So the president decided for us and things have only gotten better since, because now, the president always decides.
Let me tell you a little about my dad: He was born in 1930 to a British immigrant who had no use for him. His older brother was named Robert, (we called him Bob) but my dad was named Bill, in all likelihood because that was how his father perceived him. Told him that he was an abortion too late. Let him know who the favored progeny was, and it wasn’t Bill.
Bill took to drinking at an early age, 15. Like his stupid oldest son, he was addicted by the time he graduated high school and had set about a course of personal (and other peoples) debasement that left him afraid and alone at his end, the blank stare of catatonia as he hung on until I could tell him to go to sleep, and the poor bastard let go that night to finally find his peace.
He missed WWII but got caught up in the post war fervor and escalating anti-communism which was so popular in the late 40s early 50s, late 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, until the 90s where we started hating Muslims. Bill hated those commies, just like he was supposed to, and before his brain took him on permanent vacation, he had taken to hating those Muslims too. Just like he was supposed to.
So I have no problem imagining him being quite gung-ho for the whole Korean enterprise – some thinking is so bad that we can’t wait to change it, more direct action is required.
That is until it came to his direct action. Because, while Bill was supportive of US efforts to correct the thinking of people we don’t know around the world, he was less so when it came to his body being used for such educational purposes. Like so many, he was an intellectual anti-communist: he wanted his manufactured hatred to be enforced through the use of other people’s bodies. He liked his, which is why he drank disturbing amounts of liquor and smoked about 4 packs a day. True. True Blue.
How do you argue with a drug that calls itself True Blue? I mean, I took LSD in copious amounts and we called it acid. Imagine where I’d be if we called it Virtue. Or Pussy. Drooling in the corner like as not, I’m certain as many imagine me still. Had a little Mercedes logo shaped filter which did nothing I suspect except make the druggie dream of getting a Mercedes. Which Bill did. Blue, he got a blue one.
Bill told me that he wouldn’t go to Korea; said he went in when he was drafted as a conscientious objector, until they convinced him to accept his enslavement with the guarantee that he wouldn’t have no Koreans shooting at him. He accepted a role as an MP in Nevada. My dad, the drunken letch: a policeman. Makes you wonder, who do they turn down? Nobody apparently.
Bill drank on duty. Bill drank everywhere. I got his thirst, but my mother’s stomach, so I would drink and puke and drink and puke. It was a lovely combo. Since I’ve given up drinking, my puking is at an all-time low. Go team!
As penance for not directly blowing up Koreans, or shooting Koreans, or burning Koreans, soldiers stateside got to enjoy their own little hells. Bill told of his drunken exploits with pride, which likely has abetted my druggy bragging rights, a thoroughly stupid thing to brag about, and one engaged in with ardor by so many. The stuff Bill did when he was drunk was nothing to brag about.
But his promotion for Gordon’s Gin always struck me as amusing, so it seemed worthy of sharing, especially so in a world where people write at length about their cats. Here, kitty, kitty. Ah, shaddap!
The USA nuked Japan twice. Nuked a bunch of natives when the wind shifted after they bombed the Bikini atoll during Castle Bravo. But of all the places we’ve nuked and all the people we’ve irradiated, the place we’ve attacked the most? The USA. We’ve nuked this nation close to a thousand times. I’m not making this up. Here is a YouTube link of a disturbing representation of just how fucking crazy we are:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXxPRHkyAvY
Humans and especially American humans. We’re suicidal.
I look at this and think of cutters. Cutters are humans who have suffered such trauma, such psychological debasement that they cut themselves as a way to punish themselves for being inadequate, perverse, or just wrong. Cutters are hurt people who hurt themselves because they feel they deserve it. Nuked the USA 1000 times. Telling.
Bill took part in what were known as the Desert Rock tests in Nevada. It was a military operation called Buster-Jangle conducted from the early 1950s till 1957, where the military would drop an atomic or hydrogen bomb from a plane, or detonate it on the ground and then they would watch what happened to the troops exposed to the detonation from various perspectives. Study the effects is what they called it. Kind of like a kid squirting flammable fluid on an anthill and studying the ants when he lights it.
Bill told of his exposure: said he and his group were in a trench near the test. He said he had a half pint of Gordon’s Gin with him, for emergencies – that Bill, always prepared. He said just before the detonation, he set that bottle above him on the rim of the trench. When the explosion occurred, he said that bottle flew from atop the trench above him, slammed into the back of the trench yet didn’t break. He was very impressed with that: Gordon’s Gin, nuke tested, drunkard approved.
Afterwards, he gathered up his special beverage and he and his fellow grunts charged the area of detonation: they charged the nuke. Just in case it wasn’t dead or something. Then, in celebration for their successful thwarting of the commie desert and its denizens in Nevada, he and his buddies no doubt drank that nuked liquor and regaled each other with their exploits, as soldiers are wont to do. Decades later, regaling his son with the same, expanded and embellished story as story tellers are wont to do.
I’ve often wondered, though, did the nuking of my dad have any influence on me, other than culturally, does it offer me any super-human capacities or is it really only good for cooking? Or burning? I can’t fly, (TSA insists), can’t stick to walls or shoot webs out my ass. I’ve broken, so I don’t think I’m bullet proof, though I’ve had many opportunities to find out, gladly all missed.
The things I can do are because I’ve trained myself, taught myself to do them. The way I think is because I can see things which seem obvious to me, while others think I am imagining them. That clarity I suspect came in part by the government sponsored ingestion of LSD because once I crossed that threshold many of my illusions were swept away, I became receptive.
A receiver.
As a receiver, I accepted things from a neutral position, neither for nor against, observing, considering. In time, when that reception made the obvious irrefutable, the receiver became the broadcaster, sharing an understanding of reality from a different perspective indeed. The active man, as radio.
The radioactive man.
© 2012 simmbiosis 4/8/12
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Fatal Abstractions
Every day, for as long as I can recall, I’ve considered the notion of my mortality at my own hand. Every day, I consider killing myself. I am not suffering physical agony, haven’t committed atrocity which leads me to seeing offing myself as something deserved, I do not live in horrific conditions. To the contrary, I live about as rich as a man-beast can live.
I have a home reflecting my own sensibility, eat delightfully, enjoy creature comforts and mod-cons and a lot of really hot and gratifying sex. I have talent and capacity and interest and people I love deeply and dearly. I have, perhaps a better life than I feel I have earned.
Don’t get me wrong, I work hard and dedicate my effort to what I set before me – I sometimes achieve a high level of proficiency. While not lazy in a creative sense, always engaged in something to keep brain and body active, alive, I don’t have a good record when it comes to some of our other invented contrivances: I suck at money, god and politics.
I can be political, polite, when the situation calls for it, but I invariably say something offensive, often deeply, if you talk with me long enough. If you listen to me. My suckage at politics is my honesty – I say what I feel at any given moment, not just what I feel the person I’m speaking to would like to hear. This is impolite, impolitic.
As to our god money, I work in creative abstracts and god money is the least creative while most manipulative of abstracts. Designed to control, contain and condition the vast herd of humanity, driven from one uninspiring pen to the next prior to our slaughter, god money is the abstract which makes all others pale by comparison. I don’t work well within its constraints.
The fact of this, is the fact of my inability, unwillingness to dispatch myself. I, in my grand and opulent life, wake often to such despair that I must stay my hand from the pistol on the headboard. I have held it more than I likely should admit, faced its finality with the understanding of the freedom it offers too often for a life lived large, but largely empty. Each day I face a moment or several where I feel so awful that I could wither into nothing if such things weren’t prohibitively difficult.
I suspect the reason for this is that I am a failure. Another abstract notion, yet one so firmly imbued that it daunts me every day of my life. Don’t care about god, don’t think that money is the answer, don’t really give a shit about which asshole is the leader du jour (cause frankly none of them inspire me to follow). And while stating this, I must acknowledge the role money plays in the abstract success – the respect and adoration of ones contemporaries while a consummation devoutly to be wished, still doesn’t keep the power on and food on the plate. You need the big paycheck for that. Reality trumped by abstract.
This is my perplexity. I work in the abstract: writing, music, art are all abstracts which, while moving, cannot physically move things. A song can’t reposition your sofa, a painting can’t fix your plumbing, the finest written expression cannot water your lawn. I know this. As an artistic type, I know this because I have spent my life trying to get my art to do anything and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t just sit there, all smug and self-assured.
Which means I’ve got to water and plumb and reposition and all that other stuff that art would be so much better at than me. Abstracts don’t do anything.
Yet our mess, my mess, is all pretty much related to them. Our different gods polarize us, leading us unto racism through the notion that god favors us, which leads us to disfavoring others. Our leaders further stratify us along racial, regional and economic lines. And money, instead of the means to achieve our objectives has become the objective – all we want is enough.
There is never enough. So we scramble over each other to get as much as we can and its inventors sit back and watch us rip ourselves and each other to shreds to possess its purity of essence, secure in the knowledge that while we fight each other over the table scraps, we won’t be lambasting them over their promulgation of division through economic slavery, so they can enjoy the prime cuts unmolested.
I remember when I was a boy, 20ish, I felt this way. I felt empty and alone and foolish in the face of the world around me, thoroughly incapable of rising to what was expected of me, what I expected of myself. I was a farmer then, facing the day from sun-up: digging, plowing, pruning, planting, irrigating, harvesting. I was a young artistic type then too, teaching myself to write, compose, play music. But art wasn’t economically viable. For me.
So I labored. I have my whole life, on and off. Crafted art for free and cleaned out pipes or built houses or sold crap or made movies (other people’s movies) for money. And not much at that. Hard work pays off for some, good fortune for most who enjoy it, but the vast majority will work hard and enjoy no good fortune – ever. Hard work is no guarantee of success. Ask a field laborer if you doubt this.
This then leads me to suspect the reason for this sense of despair is the notion that I am better than what I do and my inability to overcome my failings is the constant reminder that I am not. I am no better than what I do. None of us are. All of our noble thoughts pale by comparison to our ignoble deeds. When I farm, I’m no better than a farmer (likely the most noble, and least rewarding, profession), when I plumb, I’m no better than a plumber, when I paint, I’m just a fucking painter.
That’s all.
I want to be better than this. I want to be the best at something yet understand with no equivocation that such a thing is beyond impossible but for one instance: I can only be the best at being me. I can only be the best at what I do, not by comparison with what someone else does. I have the experience of no other and no other has the experience of me. I can only be better than I am, not anyone else, just as anyone else can only be better than they are.
Yet that is our social measure – not self-improvement so much as the diminution of others. Best the opponent, crush the opposition, revel in the spoils of conquest. Fight, fight, fight – win, win, win. Those who look different, dress different, think different are to be marginalized and disregarded – superior types succeed, inferior types fail. This is but the caprice of birth, predetermination, God’s will.
Steal the crown, earn it, it doesn’t matter – because it is a crown, man positioning himself alongside god and nothing more than the clamoring of monkeys to be the top banana. For a while. Anyone can be king – anyone born into royalty or wretched enough to destroy any number of lives to wrest such a position from another. Superiority comes from exiting the right vagina alive or killing the right people dead.
Instead of working to be worthy of our fellows, it seems we struggle to be superior to them. This would appear to be the cause of our racism, the notion that for whatever reason, regardless of what we do, we are still better than others around us. Maybe because of our location, perhaps owing to our pigment, likely owing to our beliefs, but for some reason, we are certain we are better than someone else. Usually a lot of someone elses.
My despair is that I can’t live up to what I imagine of myself – I’m not as good as I think I am. If I made oodles of money and had adoring fans heaping me with praise, I wouldn’t be as good as they thought I was. But as it stands, I see impressive work which appeals to me ignored while observing work that appeals to children rewarded magnificently. Gaga. We worship baby talk.
As a joke of an artist, one laughed at – not with, I have sucked this up for my entire adult life. It has led me unto moroseness and self-loathing. When I create, I can contain it, direct it, take power over it. When I am compelled into non-creative endeavor, my spirit withers, my lust for life becomes disinterest and my drive to create languishes. I become positively unbearable. To me. I lose my desire to abide, to proceed.
It is through my relation with my abstracts, my art, that I crawl from my slough of despair and press forth. Disgusting that surfeit leads the glutted to thoughts of termination while starvation leaves the hungry with little drive beyond sustenance. One supposes that there is more than one emptiness and more than one response to it.
Battling abstracts with reality is an untenable struggle – like trying to slay Santa Claus or mate with the Virgin Mary. While food abounds, people without fictional money must starve; with shelter in abundance, people without pieces of paper with numbers and pictures on it must sleep in the elements; while medication exists in astronomical proportion, humans without the right imaginary permissions must suffer its lack. How does one overcome such perniciousness?
Despair, while existing only within the mind, can lead to the permanent alteration of a body.
Abstracts, driven by human action, can kill.
But you still have to move the sofa on your own.
© 2012 simmbiosis 3/13/12
I have a home reflecting my own sensibility, eat delightfully, enjoy creature comforts and mod-cons and a lot of really hot and gratifying sex. I have talent and capacity and interest and people I love deeply and dearly. I have, perhaps a better life than I feel I have earned.
Don’t get me wrong, I work hard and dedicate my effort to what I set before me – I sometimes achieve a high level of proficiency. While not lazy in a creative sense, always engaged in something to keep brain and body active, alive, I don’t have a good record when it comes to some of our other invented contrivances: I suck at money, god and politics.
I can be political, polite, when the situation calls for it, but I invariably say something offensive, often deeply, if you talk with me long enough. If you listen to me. My suckage at politics is my honesty – I say what I feel at any given moment, not just what I feel the person I’m speaking to would like to hear. This is impolite, impolitic.
As to our god money, I work in creative abstracts and god money is the least creative while most manipulative of abstracts. Designed to control, contain and condition the vast herd of humanity, driven from one uninspiring pen to the next prior to our slaughter, god money is the abstract which makes all others pale by comparison. I don’t work well within its constraints.
The fact of this, is the fact of my inability, unwillingness to dispatch myself. I, in my grand and opulent life, wake often to such despair that I must stay my hand from the pistol on the headboard. I have held it more than I likely should admit, faced its finality with the understanding of the freedom it offers too often for a life lived large, but largely empty. Each day I face a moment or several where I feel so awful that I could wither into nothing if such things weren’t prohibitively difficult.
I suspect the reason for this is that I am a failure. Another abstract notion, yet one so firmly imbued that it daunts me every day of my life. Don’t care about god, don’t think that money is the answer, don’t really give a shit about which asshole is the leader du jour (cause frankly none of them inspire me to follow). And while stating this, I must acknowledge the role money plays in the abstract success – the respect and adoration of ones contemporaries while a consummation devoutly to be wished, still doesn’t keep the power on and food on the plate. You need the big paycheck for that. Reality trumped by abstract.
This is my perplexity. I work in the abstract: writing, music, art are all abstracts which, while moving, cannot physically move things. A song can’t reposition your sofa, a painting can’t fix your plumbing, the finest written expression cannot water your lawn. I know this. As an artistic type, I know this because I have spent my life trying to get my art to do anything and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t just sit there, all smug and self-assured.
Which means I’ve got to water and plumb and reposition and all that other stuff that art would be so much better at than me. Abstracts don’t do anything.
Yet our mess, my mess, is all pretty much related to them. Our different gods polarize us, leading us unto racism through the notion that god favors us, which leads us to disfavoring others. Our leaders further stratify us along racial, regional and economic lines. And money, instead of the means to achieve our objectives has become the objective – all we want is enough.
There is never enough. So we scramble over each other to get as much as we can and its inventors sit back and watch us rip ourselves and each other to shreds to possess its purity of essence, secure in the knowledge that while we fight each other over the table scraps, we won’t be lambasting them over their promulgation of division through economic slavery, so they can enjoy the prime cuts unmolested.
I remember when I was a boy, 20ish, I felt this way. I felt empty and alone and foolish in the face of the world around me, thoroughly incapable of rising to what was expected of me, what I expected of myself. I was a farmer then, facing the day from sun-up: digging, plowing, pruning, planting, irrigating, harvesting. I was a young artistic type then too, teaching myself to write, compose, play music. But art wasn’t economically viable. For me.
So I labored. I have my whole life, on and off. Crafted art for free and cleaned out pipes or built houses or sold crap or made movies (other people’s movies) for money. And not much at that. Hard work pays off for some, good fortune for most who enjoy it, but the vast majority will work hard and enjoy no good fortune – ever. Hard work is no guarantee of success. Ask a field laborer if you doubt this.
This then leads me to suspect the reason for this sense of despair is the notion that I am better than what I do and my inability to overcome my failings is the constant reminder that I am not. I am no better than what I do. None of us are. All of our noble thoughts pale by comparison to our ignoble deeds. When I farm, I’m no better than a farmer (likely the most noble, and least rewarding, profession), when I plumb, I’m no better than a plumber, when I paint, I’m just a fucking painter.
That’s all.
I want to be better than this. I want to be the best at something yet understand with no equivocation that such a thing is beyond impossible but for one instance: I can only be the best at being me. I can only be the best at what I do, not by comparison with what someone else does. I have the experience of no other and no other has the experience of me. I can only be better than I am, not anyone else, just as anyone else can only be better than they are.
Yet that is our social measure – not self-improvement so much as the diminution of others. Best the opponent, crush the opposition, revel in the spoils of conquest. Fight, fight, fight – win, win, win. Those who look different, dress different, think different are to be marginalized and disregarded – superior types succeed, inferior types fail. This is but the caprice of birth, predetermination, God’s will.
Steal the crown, earn it, it doesn’t matter – because it is a crown, man positioning himself alongside god and nothing more than the clamoring of monkeys to be the top banana. For a while. Anyone can be king – anyone born into royalty or wretched enough to destroy any number of lives to wrest such a position from another. Superiority comes from exiting the right vagina alive or killing the right people dead.
Instead of working to be worthy of our fellows, it seems we struggle to be superior to them. This would appear to be the cause of our racism, the notion that for whatever reason, regardless of what we do, we are still better than others around us. Maybe because of our location, perhaps owing to our pigment, likely owing to our beliefs, but for some reason, we are certain we are better than someone else. Usually a lot of someone elses.
My despair is that I can’t live up to what I imagine of myself – I’m not as good as I think I am. If I made oodles of money and had adoring fans heaping me with praise, I wouldn’t be as good as they thought I was. But as it stands, I see impressive work which appeals to me ignored while observing work that appeals to children rewarded magnificently. Gaga. We worship baby talk.
As a joke of an artist, one laughed at – not with, I have sucked this up for my entire adult life. It has led me unto moroseness and self-loathing. When I create, I can contain it, direct it, take power over it. When I am compelled into non-creative endeavor, my spirit withers, my lust for life becomes disinterest and my drive to create languishes. I become positively unbearable. To me. I lose my desire to abide, to proceed.
It is through my relation with my abstracts, my art, that I crawl from my slough of despair and press forth. Disgusting that surfeit leads the glutted to thoughts of termination while starvation leaves the hungry with little drive beyond sustenance. One supposes that there is more than one emptiness and more than one response to it.
Battling abstracts with reality is an untenable struggle – like trying to slay Santa Claus or mate with the Virgin Mary. While food abounds, people without fictional money must starve; with shelter in abundance, people without pieces of paper with numbers and pictures on it must sleep in the elements; while medication exists in astronomical proportion, humans without the right imaginary permissions must suffer its lack. How does one overcome such perniciousness?
Despair, while existing only within the mind, can lead to the permanent alteration of a body.
Abstracts, driven by human action, can kill.
But you still have to move the sofa on your own.
© 2012 simmbiosis 3/13/12
Friday, February 17, 2012
Reality Check
Like mobsters the system
Demands its cut from we
Who go to work and try to earn
A little dignity
Gamblers get their income
For the most part duty free
Workers pay through the nose
Subject to buggery
The increasing tax burden
Falls on those who have the least
While rich guys’ rich accountants
Watch profits untouched increased
A predatory system
As corruption self-policed
Serves to always guarantee
That the customer is fleeced
Now lemme get this straight:
The government invents the money
And pays the Fed to print it
Even though Constitutionally
It’s the system’s job to mint it
Every dollar they invent
Comes with a little fee
To pay it off then becomes
An impossibility
This charge for making money
A gambler’s winning bet
Tax payers are the losers
Drowning in invented debt
Yet we bail out the banksters
Thieves who sunk our ship of state
Loaning us back our own money
Of course at the going rate
So some prefer to bank
With people that they know
Not officious strangers
Who we beg to bestow
The money we give them
To hold in their escrow
So we can give it back
To pay them what we owe
Instead of just keeping the paper
Which seems like the smart thing to do
Give it to a banking ass raper
While watching his profits accrue
He swaps it for interested paper
Or plastic, bid paper adieu
Just save it for the bottom scraper
Wiping the savings onto you
Time for a reality check
Accepting only cash for bail
Broken, trapped within the wreck
Afraid that check is in the mail
The post brings me a refund
Department of treasury
While revenuers are shunned
Money cures what ails me
So’s I takes it to Wells Fargos
Government backed: a hundred grand
Payment extracted through the nose
Refund check within my hand
The oh so happy bankster
A sneer upon her damning gob
Just an economic gangster
A bitch: the right man for the job
“So sorry cannot cash it here”
I asked, “Is this not a bank?”
“It sure is and let’s be clear
If it stinks we made it stank”
“But you gotta give it to us
Give to us your little slip
No account nothing to discuss
Submit to our stewardship”
“Barring that go to Wal Mart
They are known to cash them there
They forgo the none or all part
Why they have so much to share”
Cannot cash this reality check
Guarantor in the tank
Stare at this economic train-wreck
So many victims to thank
From the fish tank at Wells
To the freak show at Wal’s
Fresh released from their cells
Because bad nature calls
Owed, our reason rebels
Owned and held by the balls
Come resounding death knells
As the economy falls
Of course drones at Wal Mart wouldn’t cash it
Claimed it had an expiration date
Honor checks which arrive within hours
Seems I was at least a year too late
If you won’t compete within their system
Treat you as though you’re a reprobate
Toy with you while playing with their paper
Start the match already in checkmate
Plastic/paper delightful for groceries
Anticipating pleasures which await
While wonderful wallowing with weirdies
That paper won’t put food upon my plate
Seen as trash this reality check
Balance books balancing blank
Prop up nonsense with plenty of dreck
As good as money in the bank
© 2012 simmbiosis
Demands its cut from we
Who go to work and try to earn
A little dignity
Gamblers get their income
For the most part duty free
Workers pay through the nose
Subject to buggery
The increasing tax burden
Falls on those who have the least
While rich guys’ rich accountants
Watch profits untouched increased
A predatory system
As corruption self-policed
Serves to always guarantee
That the customer is fleeced
Now lemme get this straight:
The government invents the money
And pays the Fed to print it
Even though Constitutionally
It’s the system’s job to mint it
Every dollar they invent
Comes with a little fee
To pay it off then becomes
An impossibility
This charge for making money
A gambler’s winning bet
Tax payers are the losers
Drowning in invented debt
Yet we bail out the banksters
Thieves who sunk our ship of state
Loaning us back our own money
Of course at the going rate
So some prefer to bank
With people that they know
Not officious strangers
Who we beg to bestow
The money we give them
To hold in their escrow
So we can give it back
To pay them what we owe
Instead of just keeping the paper
Which seems like the smart thing to do
Give it to a banking ass raper
While watching his profits accrue
He swaps it for interested paper
Or plastic, bid paper adieu
Just save it for the bottom scraper
Wiping the savings onto you
Time for a reality check
Accepting only cash for bail
Broken, trapped within the wreck
Afraid that check is in the mail
The post brings me a refund
Department of treasury
While revenuers are shunned
Money cures what ails me
So’s I takes it to Wells Fargos
Government backed: a hundred grand
Payment extracted through the nose
Refund check within my hand
The oh so happy bankster
A sneer upon her damning gob
Just an economic gangster
A bitch: the right man for the job
“So sorry cannot cash it here”
I asked, “Is this not a bank?”
“It sure is and let’s be clear
If it stinks we made it stank”
“But you gotta give it to us
Give to us your little slip
No account nothing to discuss
Submit to our stewardship”
“Barring that go to Wal Mart
They are known to cash them there
They forgo the none or all part
Why they have so much to share”
Cannot cash this reality check
Guarantor in the tank
Stare at this economic train-wreck
So many victims to thank
From the fish tank at Wells
To the freak show at Wal’s
Fresh released from their cells
Because bad nature calls
Owed, our reason rebels
Owned and held by the balls
Come resounding death knells
As the economy falls
Of course drones at Wal Mart wouldn’t cash it
Claimed it had an expiration date
Honor checks which arrive within hours
Seems I was at least a year too late
If you won’t compete within their system
Treat you as though you’re a reprobate
Toy with you while playing with their paper
Start the match already in checkmate
Plastic/paper delightful for groceries
Anticipating pleasures which await
While wonderful wallowing with weirdies
That paper won’t put food upon my plate
Seen as trash this reality check
Balance books balancing blank
Prop up nonsense with plenty of dreck
As good as money in the bank
© 2012 simmbiosis
Friday, January 13, 2012
Tired of the Tease
Diseased I’ve eased
Through life’s anxieties
Appeased I’ve seized
On the daze niceties
Greased and squeezed
Into all my cavities
The beast is pleased
With such activities
Sadly all relations aren’t so gentle
Some are seen as commodities
Such thinking always detrimental
Suffering life’s shrinking sanctities
When we treat our bodies as a rental
To be milked for their capacities
Could it just be coincidental
That we’re subjected to indignities
Lose a little today
Lose a little more tomorrow
In control there are seldom scarcities
How much will you pay
How much more will you borrow
Have you considered extended warrantease
It’s the best but will break in a year
One of life’s few guarantees
When that occurs the flirts disappear
Dodge responsibilities
The wink in the eye, the bug in the ear
Alluded fertilities
Concealed under flirtatious veneer
Spiteful ambiguities
Offers entice what words endear
Perverting utilities
Like all the rest, then be of good cheer
Embrace these futilities
Some things aren’t always as they appear
Some have similarities
Sometimes sweetness can become severe
Disruptive disparities
The dangling carrot can cause you to veer
Forsaking securities
Thinking is muddy but choices are clear
In taking impurities
Unheard as cattle conditions austere
Free within captivities
Ahead as chattel continue to steer
Through increasing casualties
The failed promise of a career
Economic cruelties
Expect no quarter from the cashier
Forsaken civilities
Empty handed the smart asses sneer
Proffering dishonesties
Promise as always is insincere
When facing it’s real: a tease
I’ve tired of the tease
The bland banalities
These animosities
People’s duplicities
All slutted up yet no one she’ll blow
Can’t stomach perversities
Don’t ask why she’s dressed like a ho
Not good with absurdities
A champion of life in all of its forms
Within certain sovereignties
Not one likely to challenge the norms
Live clean and then dynasties
Feign to the virtues they’ll never know
Exhort through false moralities
Offer nothing so much as a show
Export escalating mortalities
Blinded by light that seldom warms
No longer subsisting on subtleties
The biggest lie – everybody conforms
One of many human curiosities
I’ve tired of the tease
These grim realities
The animosities
People’s duplicities
More mediocrities
Bland banalities
Scary sanctities
Fleeting falsities
Rank deformities
Mortal deities
Phony charities
Bullshit celebrities
Business entities
Truck adversities
Sell iniquities
So many casualties
Engender enmities
Compel conformities
Lambaste liberties
Affect affinities
Unreal affinities
Reveal in the tease
Repeal affinities
We deal with the tease
With real affinities
We deal with the tease
© 2011 simmbiosis 12/31/11
Through life’s anxieties
Appeased I’ve seized
On the daze niceties
Greased and squeezed
Into all my cavities
The beast is pleased
With such activities
Sadly all relations aren’t so gentle
Some are seen as commodities
Such thinking always detrimental
Suffering life’s shrinking sanctities
When we treat our bodies as a rental
To be milked for their capacities
Could it just be coincidental
That we’re subjected to indignities
Lose a little today
Lose a little more tomorrow
In control there are seldom scarcities
How much will you pay
How much more will you borrow
Have you considered extended warrantease
It’s the best but will break in a year
One of life’s few guarantees
When that occurs the flirts disappear
Dodge responsibilities
The wink in the eye, the bug in the ear
Alluded fertilities
Concealed under flirtatious veneer
Spiteful ambiguities
Offers entice what words endear
Perverting utilities
Like all the rest, then be of good cheer
Embrace these futilities
Some things aren’t always as they appear
Some have similarities
Sometimes sweetness can become severe
Disruptive disparities
The dangling carrot can cause you to veer
Forsaking securities
Thinking is muddy but choices are clear
In taking impurities
Unheard as cattle conditions austere
Free within captivities
Ahead as chattel continue to steer
Through increasing casualties
The failed promise of a career
Economic cruelties
Expect no quarter from the cashier
Forsaken civilities
Empty handed the smart asses sneer
Proffering dishonesties
Promise as always is insincere
When facing it’s real: a tease
I’ve tired of the tease
The bland banalities
These animosities
People’s duplicities
All slutted up yet no one she’ll blow
Can’t stomach perversities
Don’t ask why she’s dressed like a ho
Not good with absurdities
A champion of life in all of its forms
Within certain sovereignties
Not one likely to challenge the norms
Live clean and then dynasties
Feign to the virtues they’ll never know
Exhort through false moralities
Offer nothing so much as a show
Export escalating mortalities
Blinded by light that seldom warms
No longer subsisting on subtleties
The biggest lie – everybody conforms
One of many human curiosities
I’ve tired of the tease
These grim realities
The animosities
People’s duplicities
More mediocrities
Bland banalities
Scary sanctities
Fleeting falsities
Rank deformities
Mortal deities
Phony charities
Bullshit celebrities
Business entities
Truck adversities
Sell iniquities
So many casualties
Engender enmities
Compel conformities
Lambaste liberties
Affect affinities
Unreal affinities
Reveal in the tease
Repeal affinities
We deal with the tease
With real affinities
We deal with the tease
© 2011 simmbiosis 12/31/11
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Rude Awakenings
I awoke slowly, consumed with inexplicable apprehension. My head seemed detached, distant and I swam through the mind’s darkness seeking the glow of consciousness. I became aware that it was dark; I couldn’t see. Anything. As the sleep cloud faded I realized something of even greater concern – I couldn’t hear. I was deaf.
This scared me more than anything. Darkness was a state I was accustomed to, it’s dark all the time, I close my eyes, it’s dark. But silence – total, absolute, unyielding – terrified me – I felt isolated, cut off from the world just beyond the darkness, more alone than I’d ever felt. Someone could be standing but a few feet from me, talking to me, telling me what had happened, warning me, but in the silent darkness, I would not know. I was alone.
Remember. Try to remember: What was I doing before the darkness, before the silence? Where was I? Where am I? I moved my right arm, slow, heavy handed. Then it hit – Wake up! Pain! Horrible, Searing, Throbbing – first my arm, then my shoulder, back, chest; my head. My head felt like I had been kicked in the face, by a horse wearing cleats. I instinctively reached up, then realized I was pinned – I couldn’t raise my arm to my head.
The pain, pulsing now, like a grinding toothache but the tooth is my head. Then the drill. That’s what it sounded like: a dental drill, right through the top of my head. I shout out, but nothing. I can make no sound, I am racked with escalating and all but unbearable agony, I cannot see, I cannot hear, I do not know where I am.
I don’t know who I am. A new level of terror – pain, horrible, pounding, searing, grinding pain and I don’t even know who is feeling it. I am so afraid. Then I smell it: smoke. Whoever I am, where ever I am, I smell smoke. Think. Think. What kind of smoke? There are different kinds. What do I smell?
Wood. Wood is burning. Then with the already excruciating pain everywhere, I feel it. Heat. Wood is burning near me. Whoever I am. I thought I was afraid before. Is the next awakening coming with the smell of me cooking? I try to move, now my whole body. I sense stuff on top of me, heavy, difficult to move. The heat increases, the smell now includes artificial scents: plastic, polyester, rubber. Flesh. I smell burning flesh.
I focus all my concentration and try to move – I’m on my back. I force myself up, feel wood and debris fall off of me, smell gypsum dust through the smoke, I sneeze. This shakes me awake and I begin coughing. At first I hear nothing but as I cough, nearly choking on the dust and smoke, I can hear my body hacking, each cough agonizing, my chest feeling as though it will cave in, arms like they were beaten with baseball bats, head pounding, swimming.
My eyes open. The room is dark, but I can make it out through my clouded vision. I see the sky through a hole in the ceiling, the walls around the hole cratered and burning. Lots of smoke. I focus hard, my head splitting, body straining as I lean forward, rubble from the ruined structure around me falling off. I can barely make it out, but once I realize what it is I find myself: a framed photograph of my family on holiday. On the night table.
I am in my bedroom – I am on my bed. The wrecked ruin around me, upon me, is my house. I look to the right. Beside me on the bed lies my wife, very still. As I sit upright, more rubble falling from my brutalized body; my ears split with a horrible buzzing, grinding sound. My head swims and I begin to topple back to the bed, catching myself. I know who I am, I know where I am; I observe with silent horror the ruin of my home around me.
My wife is dead. As I move closer to her I see that her face has been ripped from her head by a ceiling rafter, her neck broken, body torn by burning shards of something, the bed soaked in blood. I begin to cry and see in the broken mirror near me that I am bleeding and appear to have half of my face torn off, mangled right ear and skin hanging from my shredded head.
The pain overwhelms me as I look into the room next to ours, the children’s room. It is a flaming ruin, walls and ceilings collapsed, rafters and roofing crushing our two daughters, pinning them until the flames can finish them off. By now this has occurred and I stare into the burning hell that engulfs my family and I try to make sense of it.
Then I remember: Certain governments fly unmanned aircraft over residential areas and bomb houses where people they suspect of opposing them might be. Apparently, they were in the neighborhood and decided to drop by. While I didn’t really care one way or the other about them before, I think you can say I number myself among their growing opposition now.
And with no family to care for, or any chance of ever knowing a woman again with my face destroyed, I’ll have plenty of time to express it.
(c) simmbiosis 12/1/11
http://simmbiosis-spoken.bandcamp.com/track/rude-awakenings
This scared me more than anything. Darkness was a state I was accustomed to, it’s dark all the time, I close my eyes, it’s dark. But silence – total, absolute, unyielding – terrified me – I felt isolated, cut off from the world just beyond the darkness, more alone than I’d ever felt. Someone could be standing but a few feet from me, talking to me, telling me what had happened, warning me, but in the silent darkness, I would not know. I was alone.
Remember. Try to remember: What was I doing before the darkness, before the silence? Where was I? Where am I? I moved my right arm, slow, heavy handed. Then it hit – Wake up! Pain! Horrible, Searing, Throbbing – first my arm, then my shoulder, back, chest; my head. My head felt like I had been kicked in the face, by a horse wearing cleats. I instinctively reached up, then realized I was pinned – I couldn’t raise my arm to my head.
The pain, pulsing now, like a grinding toothache but the tooth is my head. Then the drill. That’s what it sounded like: a dental drill, right through the top of my head. I shout out, but nothing. I can make no sound, I am racked with escalating and all but unbearable agony, I cannot see, I cannot hear, I do not know where I am.
I don’t know who I am. A new level of terror – pain, horrible, pounding, searing, grinding pain and I don’t even know who is feeling it. I am so afraid. Then I smell it: smoke. Whoever I am, where ever I am, I smell smoke. Think. Think. What kind of smoke? There are different kinds. What do I smell?
Wood. Wood is burning. Then with the already excruciating pain everywhere, I feel it. Heat. Wood is burning near me. Whoever I am. I thought I was afraid before. Is the next awakening coming with the smell of me cooking? I try to move, now my whole body. I sense stuff on top of me, heavy, difficult to move. The heat increases, the smell now includes artificial scents: plastic, polyester, rubber. Flesh. I smell burning flesh.
I focus all my concentration and try to move – I’m on my back. I force myself up, feel wood and debris fall off of me, smell gypsum dust through the smoke, I sneeze. This shakes me awake and I begin coughing. At first I hear nothing but as I cough, nearly choking on the dust and smoke, I can hear my body hacking, each cough agonizing, my chest feeling as though it will cave in, arms like they were beaten with baseball bats, head pounding, swimming.
My eyes open. The room is dark, but I can make it out through my clouded vision. I see the sky through a hole in the ceiling, the walls around the hole cratered and burning. Lots of smoke. I focus hard, my head splitting, body straining as I lean forward, rubble from the ruined structure around me falling off. I can barely make it out, but once I realize what it is I find myself: a framed photograph of my family on holiday. On the night table.
I am in my bedroom – I am on my bed. The wrecked ruin around me, upon me, is my house. I look to the right. Beside me on the bed lies my wife, very still. As I sit upright, more rubble falling from my brutalized body; my ears split with a horrible buzzing, grinding sound. My head swims and I begin to topple back to the bed, catching myself. I know who I am, I know where I am; I observe with silent horror the ruin of my home around me.
My wife is dead. As I move closer to her I see that her face has been ripped from her head by a ceiling rafter, her neck broken, body torn by burning shards of something, the bed soaked in blood. I begin to cry and see in the broken mirror near me that I am bleeding and appear to have half of my face torn off, mangled right ear and skin hanging from my shredded head.
The pain overwhelms me as I look into the room next to ours, the children’s room. It is a flaming ruin, walls and ceilings collapsed, rafters and roofing crushing our two daughters, pinning them until the flames can finish them off. By now this has occurred and I stare into the burning hell that engulfs my family and I try to make sense of it.
Then I remember: Certain governments fly unmanned aircraft over residential areas and bomb houses where people they suspect of opposing them might be. Apparently, they were in the neighborhood and decided to drop by. While I didn’t really care one way or the other about them before, I think you can say I number myself among their growing opposition now.
And with no family to care for, or any chance of ever knowing a woman again with my face destroyed, I’ll have plenty of time to express it.
(c) simmbiosis 12/1/11
http://simmbiosis-spoken.bandcamp.com/track/rude-awakenings
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Neighbor Hoods (Think Globally/Act Locally)
“Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.” Bertrand Russell
As many Americans, I pride myself on being a good neighbor. I live on a nice street in a nice house in a nice place. What can I say, it’s nice. I even get along with some of my other neighbors; we like to keep things around the ‘hood' very livable. You might say we have mutual interests.
There was this fellow down the street, Moe, who’d become a bit of a problem. We’d always had a tentative relation; he wasn’t really like the rest of us, at least the guys I got along with in our local neighborhood watch coalition: Nick, Allen, Tom and Oscar. We call it NATO as a kind of in-joke. I didn’t say it was funny. Most jokes really aren’t when you think about it. Suppose that’s why we don’t think about it. Easier just to chuckle.
Moe was doing pretty good for himself: he had a young wife, a bunch of kids, great house, new cars and even a boat. Gotta tell you, none of us in NATO had a boat and we live on the good section of the street, not on the other side of the tracks like Moe. We had developed our suspicions as to how Moe had come about his good fortune which were bolstered by his association with a guy named Boris, who none of us really liked and who had been an antagonist of mine for some time.
Allen told me that his kid had heard one of Moe’s kids talk about conditions in Moe’s house. I was appalled. Sounded to me like he was a strict disciplinarian, perhaps even beating the children, as well as restricting their internet access, which is tantamount to a first amendment violation these days. Don’t get me wrong, I feel discipline is vital and that we suffer the lack of it, but as concerned citizens, we can’t allow people with authority the right to abuse that authority by abusing others who can’t defend themselves.
And we had this on good authority. Allen’s kid, I think his name is Billy, heard it direct from one of Moe’s kids. Said it looked like he had been beat up. Or had a black eye or something. So even though we were friendly with Moe when we’d see each other at market or whatever, we had begun feeling he was not merely an annoyance but indeed a threat to the harmony of the neighborhood. There way down the street, across the tracks.
So Moe, in all his wisdom, started his own neighborhood watch without consulting us or getting our approval. Not that he needed it, really, but it would seem that in the interest of good neighbor relations he would want to make nice with us, especially in light of our concerns about his parenting, and stuff. Coupled with his improved relations with Boris, things were getting tense around the neighborhood.
Then Billy, or Bobby – one of Allen’s kids – tells Allen, or Cindy – Allen’s wife – that he heard that one of Moe’s kids was in the hospital; that it looked like Moe had beaten him up pretty badly. It seemed that all hell was breaking loose in Moe’s house and something needed to be done. So we, NATO, drove over there and parked across the street. We had several beers and stood out in front of his house talking shit about him.
After about an hour he came out and asked us what the problem was. We told him. He responded that we didn’t know what we were talking about and asked us to drink elsewhere. Allen told him it was a free country and we could drink anywhere we wanted. As his neighbor didn’t feel like chasing us off (cowering inside his house), we had decided we would drink there. Moe told us to fuck off.
So I punched him. This surprised all of us as I’m disinclined to punch anyone, but Moe had pushed me to the limit. I drew a line in the sand. In the gutter across the street from Moe’s house, there across the tracks, about five or six miles from my house.
Shocked, Moe considered his options with the five of us standing there and went back inside. So we started throwing rocks at his house. Busted out the windows on his cars, smashed his mailbox, shattered his hummingbird feeder and threw bricks through the front windows. His kids were crying inside, he was probably beating them, wife screaming. God knows what he was doing to her.
So what does the asshole do? Moe, I’m talking about that asshole. He releases his dog, a corgi or something and it runs out barking at us, like to bite us. So Tom pulls out his shotgun from the trunk and blasts that yapping little bastard right there on the porch. I was with him all the way; if that dog had left the porch, ran across the lawn and the sidewalk, leapt the curb and crossed the street, it could have bitten one of us.
Moe went nuts. All his kids were screaming; the beatings were more than we could bear out there in the street; his wife was hysterical, wailing and babbling; we couldn’t understand a word any of them said. It was intolerable. The crazy bastard came at us with a weapon, not sure exactly what it was because he was still in the house, but once we had established he was coming to attack us, we knew what we had to do.
We opened fire. We all had our guns out by now knowing that defending ourselves from the crazed dog would only escalate to violence. Moe’s movements in his house left us no option. We shot the house for a couple of hours: my trigger finger was numb; Tom’s shoulder was so sore he ended up getting a massage afterward. We went through about 1000 rounds before we ran out of ammo. The smoke-filled air reeked of cordite and we could hear the weeping of joy from the other houses, the full knowledge that another tyrant had met his grisly end comforting them there in their homes.
We were pleased that of five children, his wife and mother, we were able to protect two of the kids and his wife may even walk again – if their insurance covers it. Because of our time and expense (bullets ain’t cheap), we felt obliged to take a few things by way of compensation. It seemed fair in light of the circumstances.
In retrospect, it seems kinda odd that no one stepped up to intervene: no one even complained. Guess they were all happy it wasn’t their family we were protecting. Which is great, until NATO decides to go water skiing in your neighborhood. Then, well…
© 2011 simmbiosis 10/25/11
As many Americans, I pride myself on being a good neighbor. I live on a nice street in a nice house in a nice place. What can I say, it’s nice. I even get along with some of my other neighbors; we like to keep things around the ‘hood' very livable. You might say we have mutual interests.
There was this fellow down the street, Moe, who’d become a bit of a problem. We’d always had a tentative relation; he wasn’t really like the rest of us, at least the guys I got along with in our local neighborhood watch coalition: Nick, Allen, Tom and Oscar. We call it NATO as a kind of in-joke. I didn’t say it was funny. Most jokes really aren’t when you think about it. Suppose that’s why we don’t think about it. Easier just to chuckle.
Moe was doing pretty good for himself: he had a young wife, a bunch of kids, great house, new cars and even a boat. Gotta tell you, none of us in NATO had a boat and we live on the good section of the street, not on the other side of the tracks like Moe. We had developed our suspicions as to how Moe had come about his good fortune which were bolstered by his association with a guy named Boris, who none of us really liked and who had been an antagonist of mine for some time.
Allen told me that his kid had heard one of Moe’s kids talk about conditions in Moe’s house. I was appalled. Sounded to me like he was a strict disciplinarian, perhaps even beating the children, as well as restricting their internet access, which is tantamount to a first amendment violation these days. Don’t get me wrong, I feel discipline is vital and that we suffer the lack of it, but as concerned citizens, we can’t allow people with authority the right to abuse that authority by abusing others who can’t defend themselves.
And we had this on good authority. Allen’s kid, I think his name is Billy, heard it direct from one of Moe’s kids. Said it looked like he had been beat up. Or had a black eye or something. So even though we were friendly with Moe when we’d see each other at market or whatever, we had begun feeling he was not merely an annoyance but indeed a threat to the harmony of the neighborhood. There way down the street, across the tracks.
So Moe, in all his wisdom, started his own neighborhood watch without consulting us or getting our approval. Not that he needed it, really, but it would seem that in the interest of good neighbor relations he would want to make nice with us, especially in light of our concerns about his parenting, and stuff. Coupled with his improved relations with Boris, things were getting tense around the neighborhood.
Then Billy, or Bobby – one of Allen’s kids – tells Allen, or Cindy – Allen’s wife – that he heard that one of Moe’s kids was in the hospital; that it looked like Moe had beaten him up pretty badly. It seemed that all hell was breaking loose in Moe’s house and something needed to be done. So we, NATO, drove over there and parked across the street. We had several beers and stood out in front of his house talking shit about him.
After about an hour he came out and asked us what the problem was. We told him. He responded that we didn’t know what we were talking about and asked us to drink elsewhere. Allen told him it was a free country and we could drink anywhere we wanted. As his neighbor didn’t feel like chasing us off (cowering inside his house), we had decided we would drink there. Moe told us to fuck off.
So I punched him. This surprised all of us as I’m disinclined to punch anyone, but Moe had pushed me to the limit. I drew a line in the sand. In the gutter across the street from Moe’s house, there across the tracks, about five or six miles from my house.
Shocked, Moe considered his options with the five of us standing there and went back inside. So we started throwing rocks at his house. Busted out the windows on his cars, smashed his mailbox, shattered his hummingbird feeder and threw bricks through the front windows. His kids were crying inside, he was probably beating them, wife screaming. God knows what he was doing to her.
So what does the asshole do? Moe, I’m talking about that asshole. He releases his dog, a corgi or something and it runs out barking at us, like to bite us. So Tom pulls out his shotgun from the trunk and blasts that yapping little bastard right there on the porch. I was with him all the way; if that dog had left the porch, ran across the lawn and the sidewalk, leapt the curb and crossed the street, it could have bitten one of us.
Moe went nuts. All his kids were screaming; the beatings were more than we could bear out there in the street; his wife was hysterical, wailing and babbling; we couldn’t understand a word any of them said. It was intolerable. The crazy bastard came at us with a weapon, not sure exactly what it was because he was still in the house, but once we had established he was coming to attack us, we knew what we had to do.
We opened fire. We all had our guns out by now knowing that defending ourselves from the crazed dog would only escalate to violence. Moe’s movements in his house left us no option. We shot the house for a couple of hours: my trigger finger was numb; Tom’s shoulder was so sore he ended up getting a massage afterward. We went through about 1000 rounds before we ran out of ammo. The smoke-filled air reeked of cordite and we could hear the weeping of joy from the other houses, the full knowledge that another tyrant had met his grisly end comforting them there in their homes.
We were pleased that of five children, his wife and mother, we were able to protect two of the kids and his wife may even walk again – if their insurance covers it. Because of our time and expense (bullets ain’t cheap), we felt obliged to take a few things by way of compensation. It seemed fair in light of the circumstances.
In retrospect, it seems kinda odd that no one stepped up to intervene: no one even complained. Guess they were all happy it wasn’t their family we were protecting. Which is great, until NATO decides to go water skiing in your neighborhood. Then, well…
© 2011 simmbiosis 10/25/11
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