Orogenesis

Don't Burn the Flag; Wash It

2012-01-31T23:56:00.000-05:00

Finally, some misguided "revolutionary" adventurers in Oakland have burned an American flag, associating the Occupy Movement with an act which most Americans, as well as people of other nations with their own flags, consider disgusting and provocative. And so it is. It is like taking a crap on someone's bible, a deliberate insult, like spitting into someone's face, thereby inviting, and indeed provoking, a fierce, unthinking, even violent, reaction, and abiding hatred. It could be argued that desecrating the flag is akin to desecration of synagogues and churches, even a violation of the rights of others; those others who, indeed, perhaps unfortunately, rather worship the flag, and what it stands for, or what they think or want it to stand for.
We must accept the fact that some people worship the flag the way others worship their concept of God. Of course, to many, including myself, the flag, a symbol, worshipped, is an idol; a false god. It is an idol representing another idol, "America," and whatever that represents ("freedom, democracy, free speech," etc.) to their worshippers; all idolatry. To worship these ideals or ideas, symbols or images, is idol-worship. To kill over them is idiotic.

It is a crime to desecrate a synagogue or church. But this is done, mostly by kids, all of the time in many parts of the US; but it still is criminal, a disrespect for the rights and properties of others, and not only is unsanctioned by law, but prosecuted and punished. Rightly so.

There is an alternative to this lunacy: wash the flag, instead.

Washing the flag is a whole other statement. Where burning the flag says 'There is no hope,' and, 'destroy America,' washing it says that 'America can be reformed, fixed, improved-upon, and that there is hope.' (We can clean it up.)

Where there is hope, there is possibility of change. Those who are so disgusted with the lack of social progress, that they want to destroy or kill, cannot be taken seriously by we who know that progress is by necessity slow, painful and gradual, and usually a compromise, because powerful interests oppose it. But we have weapons that fire things more powerful than bullets: economic boycotts, for example. Stop the profits, and corporations get scared. They cannot enter your home and arrest you for not buying Corn Flakes. But millions of unified consumers can put any corporation out-of-business, by simply not- buying.

I'm not going to list our other assets. There are too many. They are commonly known and used with effectiveness by nonviolent people in every region. Lawsuits, demonstrations, elections, pressure groups, public information campaigns, teach-ins, grassroots organizations growing food and feeding the poor, non-governmental organizations like Doctors Without Borders and Lawyers Without Borders, which bring medical and legal attention to the vast problems of the poorest, and so on. Two centuries ago, none of this existed, or was possible! They are great examples of progress, created with great struggle, and taken for granted now.

Occassionally, something powerful like Occupy Wall Street buds and blossoms, during a money-drought, for example, as this one was. It grows to a zenith, and then with a change of seasons it fades, changes, and passes on, after seeding the future with more ideas, which become weapons of education, providing better perspectives, better thinking, and more intelligent and creative forms of activism. Like the "human microphone," for example.

Then some monkey comes along and throws a wrench into the gears. Here he is with a match and some gasoline and a burning flag to show us how "revolutionary" he is; he wants to be known, to be seen, to be rewarded with praise and followers. And some will go along. But he, and they, are destroyers, not builders. They have no ideas how to fix anything, other than by destroying what already is there. They are unready for governing, and unfit for leadership.

Perhaps the best that can be said for them--unless they are paid goons--is that their intentions might be good, but their thinking is stinking.

I propose that every time someone burns the flag, Occupy protesters and those calling themselves the 99% descend en masse on that spot and wash an American flag. See who draws a bigger crowd, and which is more progressive and sincere.

I got the idea from Bob Fass in 1991 via Radio Unnameable (WBAI-FM, NY, a Pacifica Network station,)who related that the Socialist Norman Thomas (who won a million votes for President,) had suggested washing the flag instead of burning it about 1918. Bob's revelation inspired me to attend the Jan. 19th and Jan. 26th demonstrations against the war in Iraq, launched on the 19th by President Bush the First and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

To make a long story, which I've probably written about elsewhere, short, I washed the flag in Lafayette Park across from the White House, and had an immediate, approving, and mostly-delighted response from the antiwar crowd. I had a spiel, of course, which I made up on the spot, while scrubbing the flag into warm, soapy water over an antique scrub board. It went something like this:

"Do you know why I am washing this flag? Because it's got BLOOD on it! Look, there is the blood of the American Indians!" (scrub scrub) "It won't come out! Maybe if I keep washing. Uh oh, here is the blood of the Mexicans that we stole Texas and California from. And here is the blood of a million people who died in our Civil War!" (scrub scrub, wringing it out) "Look, the blood of Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Guatamalans, and others, who were murdered so that US companies could get trade advantages! And here are the bloodstains of the slaves...and there's the blood of the Iraqis!" And so it went. You get the idea. "I don't know, is it getting cleaner?" (Crowd response: "YES!") The crowd loved it, and bored network cameramen finally got something of interest to video. But not a scrap of it made it to television.

The second time I washed it, on 26 January, the demonstration was much bigger. The Bread and Puppet Theater was everywhere! Daniel Ellsberg, (Pentagon Papers), one of my main whistle-blowing heroes, saw me doing it and exclaimed, "That's a very creative thing you are doing!" He tried to get me on the stage so that I could wash the flag on CSPAN, and we were at the foot of the stairs, me lugging a galvanized tub of water, when Jesse Jackson upstaged me with an unscheduled appearance. So it went.

If you disbelieve this, ask Danny Ellsberg.

I also had to be guarded by the Capital Police from attack by counter-demonstrators, who shouted, when I was wringing out the soap, "I would like to wring your neck like that!" So the act is not without risk. Someone might shoot you for it in Texas, or Arizona, where gun-toting violence seems to be the rule, rather than an exception, and even suggestions that there is anything wrong with America are taken as personal insults.

Bob called a few weeks ago and suggested that I do it again. I demurred. I don't really want to be known or remembered for that, have no wish to be famous or infamous, and I'm too damned old to face the violence of a crowd, too vulnerable to risk my Social Security with time in jail, and too addicted to freedom of movement to be arrested, perhaps beaten, or to get my name on a no-fly list as "an enemy of America," which I most-definitely am not. I am an enemy of war, and the arrogant ignorance which causes war. I am not looking for or expecting a perfect world; only a better one.

But, when I read about what happened in Oakland yesterday, I decided to wash the flag again, but on the Internet this time. After all, the idea is to spread the idea, to advocate reform, and to turn a counter-productive act into a productive one. We have had many reforms in our nation's history, from the abolition of slavery to the suffrage of women to vote, laws to assure equal pay for equal work, Social Security, G.I. education legislation, anti-child labor laws, Medicare, protections for the young and the old, protections for the environment, and the Civil Rights laws, which enabled African-Americans and other people of color to advance, albeit slowly, into the main stream of American life.

None of these reforms came easily; all demanded sacrifice, persistence, patience and creativity. Of course, nothing is perfect, or ever will be. But progress has been made. You impatient and violent people, who want to wreck things, must stop and honestly consider the progress which has been made, mostly with nonviolent tactics, and admit that, if it has been done before, it can be done again. Your extremist flag-burning is what Lenin would have called, "an infantile disorder." In my own opinion, you also have been victimized by the violence projected into your minds by American media, which make violence "heroic," and youth susceptible to the notion that they can be heroes with the successful application of violence. We don't need those kinds of heroes. We need sincere, patient, and intelligent workers, who are capable of honesty and self-sacrifice, and have the best interests of the human race at heart. If they can be amusing, even better.

The issue is not the flag, unless you make it one. The issues are bigger than the flag and the country that it represents. We must rid our movement of violence altogether, and burning the flag is a provocative act of violence.

Photo by

Nancy Nichols Jagelka

Photos With A Twist

P.O.B. 1114 Wash DC 20013-1114

(301.231.3760)

Finis to Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-26T13:19:00.099-04:00

Occupy Wall Street has made encouraging progress awakening Americans to the true nature of their condition and to the fact that many are willing to take to the streets in non-partisan, bi-partisan solidarity to protest crimes of big business and "cosmodemonic" financial institutions. OWS has raised spirits, invented new methods of communication, networked millions through social media and person-to-person conversations, that inform and familiarize one another with various issues, which somehow are inter-connected and related, from financial crimes and capitalism, to racism, war, and anti-environmentlism.

Great slogans were born: "We are the 99%!" "They got bailed out; we got sold out!" are but two favorites of the marching crowds. The crowds have been mixed in age, races, religions, professions, politics, opinions, tactics, strategies, and mostly have been orderly, enduring provocations and easily-provoked police brutality, and the unprofessional, amateurishness of the under-educated Press; Media who never really get it right--except for those small independent media people at "Media Central" in Zuccotti Park--who interview anybody on radio and internet television stations, for distant regions outside urban New York. But the established press can't seem to get a handle on it. Every story they write is inadequate, patronizing, misleading, derogatory or trivializing.

Oh well, that is what the Press does, and we should not be surprised; in fact we now expect it and would be surprised if it were otherwise. Press and television reports on protest activities are subjects of scorn, disbelief, and hilarity among protesters from the right coast to the left coast. How can they get it right, when we protest against the masters that they serve?

But the fact is that Occupy Wall Street for all intents and purposes is finished, in triumph and failure, because,although many were wakened from apathetic slumber, there has been 'nary a breath of investigation, exposure, indictment, or punishment of very-high-up-criminals of the financial cosmos, inhaled or exhaled where it matters: Congress. Where is our Watergate Committee? Where is our Senator Sam Ervin? Where is the national spotlight on scandalous crimes and ruinous policies, that have taken us to the brink of national bankruptcy? Why aren't the big time criminals sweating in front of congressional investigations? Why aren't they fleeing to non-extradicting nations with their trunks of oil and gold securities?

Because they know there is little to worry about. They know their power. They know the power of capitalism. They know the art of the Bribe. They know who to pay and when to pay and what it will get them. They quit sweating these periodic protests of frustration and anger in the 70s, when they learned one needs only deflect the aim, without the necessity of actually destroying movements or organizations, in order to overcome their demands. (The FBI tried with limited success to destroy the Black Panthers, the Socialist Workers Party, and others, and finally had to decide whether it was worth the embarrassment of inevitable exposure.)

As long as arrows are deflected from their targets, it's no sweat. Let them, hell, help them, organize a huge demonstration in Washington against the El Salvador War, one consuming thousands of volunteer labor-hours organizing transportation, making signs and phone calls, fund-raising, letter-writing, and building coalitions; let them get a half-million people together; we don't care. [Whisper] But make sure the demonstration is on a Saturday, when government workers are home and the Capitol is full of pleasure-seeking middle class tourists. It becomes entertainment for the spectator set.

As an alternative to this government-advantaged strategy, a mere 1,000 athletic demonstrators could disrupt Monday morning traffic all over Washington, at far less cost and to greater effect, if their aim was to impede the war machine and get national attention. Masked demonstrators blocking traffic with blazing trash containers and burning rubber tires, spray-painting video cameras, and disappearing as fast as they came. Small actions are easier to conceal, as well. Of course, I am not advocating such a thing, merely giving an example of how we can be deceived and deflected by the notion of "largeness", of massive numbers, so as never to achieve an actual objective. A hundred thousand people gather, march, shout slogans, sing songs, and go home feeling good about themselves and "the Movement." But no result beyond that, as valuable as raising the spirit can be.

In my opinion, OWS succeeded and failed. The question is, which will have the larger effect? The cops led the demonstrations; they led and channeled protesters where they permitted them to go, which, of course, was anywhere but Wall Street. Despite trapping 700 people on the Brooklyn Bridge in order to show how far they were prepared to go, and despite occasional protester defiance and tussles with the cops--who always win tussles--despite the fact that they busted at least a hundred heads, and despite the fact that no important Senators or Congresspersons are stomping their feet and yelling for an investigation, Occupy Wall Street accomplished and demonstrated the power of spontaeous and leaderless action. It was formless, and therefore difficult for foes to track, trace, predict, or stop.

But, as for control, they have it under control. The cops and Homeland Security have it under control. The formlessness, however, drives the Media pundits and politicians nuts, for they have no fixed target whom they can call child molesters, drug addicts, or communists, or whatever works to personalize, and, by association, to defame the protesters. Formlessness is the key, but it is one which is most difficult to achieve, for it must endlessly adapt and change, like water of a river, and yet have an internal order and discipline, and secret to be sure.

Maybe we can dig our way out of this hellhole.

Now, no one ever asks for my advice, which is why I give it seldom and reluctantly. After all, who am I? (We won't go into that.) But I will share this: I live a delightful, and secret, Walter Mitty-type, existence. I fancy that I am a scholar of history and war, a fairly good tactician, and an emerging strategist. I can hear you accusing me of grandiosity and narcissism; and that's okay, if you want to see it that way. But I really have studied historical movements and profound revolutions, and have the temerity to claim to know a thing or two by now, at 70, after engaging in this kind of thing for nearly 50 years, and participating, in one way or another, with numerous anti-war and human rights demonstrations from coast-to-coast; not to mention four years in the Marine Corps, and probably reading newspapers too much. I know what the Media says, and the more I have learned about the real world, the better I know what the Media doesn't dare say: the whole truth.

There are many under-educated and toady-types in the Media, and it's a crying shame. The pity is that they think they know so much.

OWS is an element of warfare; a tactic; and some strategy. The struggle between the classes, the struggle within the classes, the struggle to define national purpose, the struggle to overcome the malevolence of some who rule, and the struggle to overcome ignorance, and to make ourselves a better people and a better nation in a better world, is no less than a war of many fronts and purposes. But Occupy Wall Street is not the war; it is only another (better-late-than-never) battlefront, in another theater of war, engaged on a non-violent level here, and on more violent levels elsewhere, from Greece to Pakistan and beyond.

Some are marching for "democracy" in the United States, and they are mostly unharrassed by officialdom, if beaten-up now and then, while in other parts of the world, men and women are hung on meathooks and skinned alive, or roasted over pits of smouldering coals. Violent bursts of electricity course through their genitals. Eyes are gouged out. Hot steel is rammed up rectums and vaginas. Fingers are chopped off. Nipples are amputated with scissors, battery acid is dripped on faces, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum. It's all in the records of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and they will let you read the raw reports. The cruel inhumanity of humanity is the scandal of the galaxy.

We cannot hear, nor can we truly imagine, the painful screams of the wretched and tortured people, who have run afoul of established power in the most-lawless and violent regions. While we march peacefully, calling for "love" and "brotherhood and sisterhood," and "unity," it is not pleasant to know or imagine such atrocious things. So we mostly don't, and our demands are generalized, or provacatively exaggerated, and we end up arguing about "what kind of country do we want to be, and when can we have our democracy back?" This forces the pundits and disinvolved politicians to say we have "no focus," and to an extent, they are correct. The lack of "focus" is exactly what confuses them, and saps their power of persuasion.

But these issues, of democracy, of what kind of country we are, although they are fundamental, are not the basic issues of the day. The middle class homeowners of America mostly are workers, though unemployed they hope temporarily, and they already have an idea of what their country is, and what they want it to be, and, mostly, they like and support it. The consider themselves American patriots. They vote and fly the flag on holidays, and many are racists because all immigrant groups had to become so in order to assimilate into a white racist society, that murdered Indians and stole black African slaves. Many protesters also display the flag, claiming American patriotism, while opposing the very "values" (or the lack of them) which the other flag-wavers claim for themselves and deny to us.

To be honest, I think nationalism sucks, I think its time is over, and identify myself as an American internationalist.

For an army to succeed, it must be formless like water and secret as thought. It must be prepared to switch strategies and tactics in order to keep foes unbalanced. It must never repeat a successful strategy after the authorities are onto it, and must stay alert for new opportunities and advantages, where the foe least expects it; at his weakest position. Where our forces are weakest, our foes are strongest. When they relax their guard, thinking they have won, then is the time to advance, as water advances downhill, seeking the natural, easy channels.

We should never engage in a battle that we know we cannot win. Therefore, we must go after smaller, easier targets, and observe how our opponents react, and adjust tactics accordingly. Nothing of any real value is possible without secrecy and speed; and speed above all; which is why it is important to have healthy, spirited, athletic young people throughout the march. But youth and spirit alone are not sufficient for leadership, which must be left to the wiser, older, more-experienced, and hopefully charismatic persons, whose lifelong comittment to the struggle is proven. People like Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, Amy Goodman, Bob Fass, and a hundred other leaders I don't know and never heard of; but I know they are out there.

Where revolutionaries like Ho Chi Minh and General Nguyen Giap communicated with miniature handwriting on cigarette papers, eating or burning them afterward, we have a different problem keeping plans secret, and organizing people to cooperate to advance them. This is impossible without internal discipline, and the willingness to follow leaders, who have proved themselves leaders, not by seeking leadership, but by leading with intelligent thought, persuasive argument, timely action, and by example.

Perhaps our best cover is the internet itself, because of its size, because of the openess of most "social networks," and because it is impossible for man or machine to monitor all of it. And we need codes of course. But nothing will replace human-to-human interaction, and in order for human contact and cooperation to produce something of value, we must be a new kind of human being. In the anarchic structure of capitalism, which promotes individualality above social values, loyal followers are hard to find. Nobody likes taking orders. But without the willingness to do so, and without the power of belief and the glue of loyalty, leadership can achieve little, or nothing.

"War is deception," said Sun Tzu. But, as we seek to deceive, confuse and disperse the power of our foes, we must take care not to deceive ourselves. We must not fool ourselves that Occupy Wall Street is evidence that the American people are ready to undertake real and meaningful struggle; determined and successful struggle, like the early and most-violently opposed labor struggles in the United States, demands self-sacrifice, which, in such a selfish society, is more rare than an unbroken egg in an overturned refrigerator.

Who will immolate himself to draw attention to the desperation of the poor? A fellow named Morrison burned himself up in front of Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara, and it shook him to the core, bringing home to him for the first time that the Vietnam War might be a mistake. Who will be the first to die, when power-wielders finally feel threatened-enough to kill?

What will happen to the present generation of enthusiastic "revolutionaries" when they arrive at their own Kent State? and Jackson State, where protesting students were murdered by national guardsmen? (Without penalty.)Kent State, in my opinion, was the official end of the Sixties. Tuitions went up, activists were weeded from universities, and most admitted to themselves at least that they were not prepared to die in order to defend the Vietnamese, or promote a revolution in the United States.

Non-violence is my preference, and not because I'm a pacifist--I'm not--and not because I believe it can overwhelm Hitlerian violence, but because we can do no less--unarmed and unready to defend ourselves against the ultimate violence of the State. Gandhi's non-violent approach worked in India--to an extent--because the British considered themselves "civilized," and the sight of thousands being clubbed willingly to the ground disgusted public opinion and undermined imperial policy.

Dr. Martin Luther King's non-violence worked for awhile, because it was timely, media coverage was widespread and widely-watched, and at least the Kennedy Administration had some respect for public opinion.

It ultimately won't work here, however, because, not only does America have a horrid history of violence, the American people have been innured to violence by the media; and they actually seem to enjoy violence, as long as it is "the blood of others." Millions of American would like to see the cops beat the living hell out of protesters, and others want simply to shoot or burn them alive; even though they agree that the rich are out of control!

Don't kid yourself. They are out there, in numbers; and many are armed, and wishing...

I cringe when I hear a speaker say "revolution." I talked like that in my ignorant youth. As some Vietnamese revolutionary said, "Revolution is the greatest adventure in the world, especially when you know that you will win." But revolution, despite the adventure, is a civil war. I am for non-violence and reform, reform, reform, wherever, whenever, and with whatever progressive force insists on it. Civil war is destruction plain and simple. Family trauma and painful grudges last for generations, even for centuries, regardless of peace or armistice. As long as reform is possible, revolution is a non-starter.

Most revolutions really are exactly as a revolution is scientifically defined : a 360-degree turn. And most revolutions end where they began, by replacing one set of tyrants with another, slightly different set of tyrants, with a different set of laws, which nobody wants to obey, just as they did not want to obey the laws of the previous regime. So the first thing a successful revolution does, after chopping off heads, is to hire cops. And what cops? People who were already cops, persons who know how to be cops, and what a cop has to do to make people obey the current set of laws. It is a vicious cycle, and all cops carry weapons, and are jealous of the privilege.

I don't want a revolution. Neither do I want to go 180-degrees to the rear where the Luddites lurk. I want a Left Face. "LEFT face!" A ninety-degree turn--to the left. A quarter of a "revolution" will be fine for me.

So my advice to Occupy Wall Street is this: change our "focus" to Investigate Wall Street.

We have had hundreds of thousands of public demonstrations for innumerable causes since the Sixties, and demonstrations all are pretty much the same after awhile, rather boring and predictable, because, in the first place, we know our demands (to not invade Iraq, for example) are never met. They are hardly discussed, not taken seriously at all. So we must conclude that the repetition of street demonstrations is a strategy which worked, when it was new and surprising, but its present effectiveness is greatly diminished. Demonstrations make participants feel that they at least have done something important, that they have set themselves apart from the ordinary run of apolitical, uninvolved and uncaring Americans, and other, altruistic reasons. But Americans are accustomed to demonstrations now, and demonstrations are not working, because the power structure has learned how to control them, and does not give a damn for "public opinion."

But, American minds have already occupied Wall Street. Millions supported it. We didn't blockade or impede the Den of Thieves, where it is business as usual. But, we have been there and done that, where it matters: in the mind. All change begins there. Occupy Wall Street has happened. It is time to move on, and forward.

Now is the time to demand most forcefully, that a full congressional investigation, by standing committees in both chambers of Congress, press forward on investigating, exposing, indicting, trying, and punishing high-up financial criminals, responsible for much suffering, poverty, and undermining of our national security.

At present, only a Baker's Dozen of mid-level securities scam artists have been imprisoned. We must start where it is possible to start and work our way up, then down again, until certain punishent scares the hell out of irresponsible and unethical speculators, and the bosses who give them their marching orders. We must demand that they be punished severely with long prison terms, that they be fined, and that the financial and banking sectors be brought back under control of strict regulation, and for fines and taxes to make them pay back what they have stolen.

Every damned penny.

La Promisa

2011-08-11T02:50:00.008-04:00

Everywhere I walked woodsmoke scented the night air...the night was darker than sin and no electricity anywhere except in the center of the small town from the Sandinista generator that powered the little police station in Bocana de Paiwas...Reagan's "freedom fighters," the Contras, had cut the electric wires a week before, after threatening to kill anybody caught helping the Sandinistas...since nearly everyone was helping the Sandinistas do the necessary things--build and stock schools, man health clinics, food centers, farming help, and some justice--which had been lacking since the Bolivarian Revolution...in other words, since the whole town stood to benefit from the Sandinsta program, helping it to emerge from a state of historic impoverishment, the whole town, excepting the Contra spies within, was on the hit list...nobody was safe.

I felt safe, however, being an American. If the Contra killed me, it wouldn't play well in the US Congress, and if the Sandinistas did it, it would be another "provocation," giving the United States even more reason--if "reason" entered into anything then--to continue the war. I had hitchhiked into the little town in the middle of Nicaragua, catching a distant boom of artillery from somewhere, and had even caught a ride on a six-by with 15 Sandinista soldiers, who were headed for the Front. (A "six-by" is a large military truck for transport of troops and supplies.)

People around the town in the wooded, hilly farm and ranch land had been tortured and thrown bound into the rapid Bocana River to drown. Their friends and relatives told me their stories and I believed them. I went there to hear the stories, but my Spanish was bad, and their English was only slightly better. I did it anyway and understood enough to believe what I heard...nobody lied about the small rancher who wouldn't hand over his 40 cows to the Contras...it had taken him 40 years to accumlate them...so they gang-raped his daughter and cut her head off and put it on a pole on the road...they also killed his son...then they tied the old fellow up and threw him in the rapid-flowing river...an American man from Witness for Peace translated for me now and then...his group was all over war-worn Nicaragua, documenting, and trying to stop the killing and kidnapping, which the majority of Americans seemed to approve, since the victims supposedly were "communists," and communists weren't really people after all, but demonic, ignorant, evil and deluded sub-humans, who hated liberty, freedom, democracy, God, the American way of life, and the United States of America in particular: communists without good reason hated God's only Nation on Earth (besides Israel) and Ronald Reagan, the God of the Lunatic Right, who conducted His public relations.

Reagan had told a fairy tale about his "freedom fighters"--a bunch of filthy torturers, murderers and rapists...as being the equivalent of our Founding Fathers...(it was true! ask the Indians!)...and a gullible American public--raised on the corny, romantic, untruthful Death Valley Days, and the even-cornier Leave it to Beaver--bought the story, but missed the irony. Americans, brainwashed to hate anything that contradicted capitalist doctrine, were ready to buy anything, after losing the disastrous Vietnam War, and feeling the excruciating pain of gas lines and gas prices going up a whole dollar, during the Jimmy Carter period. People who know something of the pain Nicaraguans were enduring scoffed at the whimpering and whining American public, brainwashed for 100 years to view leftist ideas as clownish or demonic. The Sandinistas were leftists, but Violetta Chamorro, the widow of the assassinated Pedro Chamorro, the editor of La Prensa, was herself a member of the Sandinista Directorate, and certainly was no communist; and the Directorate acted only after consensus had been achieved; no consensus, no action. This kind of unity had brought down Somoza, and launched the Sandinistas into power. It really is as simple as this: the US and other exploiters rule their subjects by dividing them against one another. Unity is the biggest threat to this system, and "a bad example" for adjacent nation, suffering also beneath what can only be truthfully called "imperialist domination."

The Contra were torturing, murdering bastards, and they were bossed by the worst of the dictator Somoza's terrorist army, the National Guardmen who escaped revolutionary justice...notably Enrique Bermudez, and by his CIA handlers, of course. Those Contra, who had managed to escape the country and connect with the CIA in Honduras and Costa Rica, intimidated, recruited, and kidnapped men and kids, and trained them to attack other Nicaraguans...terrorists by any reasonable criteria...they sowed terror with rape, theft, torture and murder. Ironically, after the war ended, many of these Nicaraguan Contra returned to their home villages only to find that other bands of Contra had done the same in their own villages to their own families and friends...whoever was a friend of the Sandinistas was fair game, and the Sandinistas had a lot of friends. I was one, and still am.

The Contra had to raid from over the borders of Honduras and Costa Rica, because there was no support or sanctuary for them inside Nicaragua. The Sandinista army swarmed them like hornets when they were detected, and the Contra always fled. The Sandinistas were armed with Soviet and US weapons, a few powerful .175 millimeter howitzers...some Cuban training, and a determined revolutionary spirit, that put their long-suffering country under the control, at least temporarily, for the first time in its history, of a true peoples' party, set on ridding the nation of United States dominance once and for all.

But the Sandinista vision was doomed to failure because Nicaragua, unlike Cuba, is not an island, and the character and temprament of the Cubans and Nicaraguans are very different. It is not unfair to say that Cuba's success had doomed the Sandinista Revolution. The US wouldn't be caught short again. Invasion was not only possible, but probable in Nicaragua's case. It would have been a cakewalk for American forces to establish military control of Nicaragua in a way that never could be accomplished in Cuba, where the Revolution has had nearly 50 years to dig in and establish itself, to educate Cuban youth to their true history vis-a-vis the United States, and to train the people for defense, and to make them more social and less selfish, to keep them lean and hard, and dedicate successive generations to Cuba's independence. Fidel's vision for socialism in Cuba was to make "a new man," unselfish, educated, community-spirited, and militant to defend the revolution.

The unfortunate fact for the United States is that Fidel Castro made public health his private obsession. Medical schools were expanded, clinics were established, technical help was sought from advanced countries, and health care, despite the lies of Wall Street and the other capitalist bastards who want Cuba to be a whorehouse again, is free for all. A few years ago, Cuba had 15,000 doctors and nurses treating the poorest people in Amazonia of South America. People come from all over the world to Cuba for free eye operations. Even the CIA will tell you that. In fact, if you are interested or want to be surprised, you might check out the CIA's website, and see what it says about Cuba, most of which is a direct contradiction to the daily litany of anti-Cuban propaganda that our compliant and cowardly Press blathers about.

Despite constant economic and military assaults against Cuba since President Eisenhower (Vice President Richard Nixon was in charge of this program), revolutionary spirit in Cuba remains high. But one Cuban soldier that I spoke to briefly--I had asked him if the Sandinistas were communists--told me, "They are infants compared to us." He meant as far as communism went. The Sandinistas were nationalists first and pre-communists second, but there were many opinions among the Nicaraguan people.

US assaults, sabotage, espionage, and economic blockade of Cuba had toughened and wizened Cuba's army, and the economic blockade had made lean the people, who, unsurprisingly, never stopped making music and dancing. But Nicaraguans were emerging with bent backs from centuries of colonialism, one of the most brutal dictatorships in the western hemisphere, a devastating revolutionary war period, and a century of Washington's crippling "dollar diplomacy," which had robbed their resources, denied them education, corrupted their politics, impoverished and cowed the majority, vastly enriched a small minority, and empowered an organization of murdering, torturing thugs under the Somoza family, who ruled Nicaragua for 50 years with a Nazi hand, and with US money, arms and training.

It is an understatement to say the US government never met a capitalist dictator it would not cut a deal with. But there were no deals proposed to the Sandinista government, unless Secretary of State Shultz offered one, during a brief stopover from South America in 1985, when he met President Ortega and other officials at the airport. No one I know of has ever heard or read what Shultz said to Ortega, but it is not hard to imagine.

"Do what we say, or we are going to invade and kick the shit out of you," is what I imagine. Or maybe he only offered money for the Sandinistas to back off their principles, quit spreading literacy throughout the illiterate population, and stop building health clinics and schools. That sort of program, when successful, scares the hell out of the United States Government. Somehow, such programs get twisted around to mean, "communism." The magic word that causes millions of American knees to jerk so hard they slam their owners in the brainpan.

We'll probably learn what Schultz said to Ortega when we learn who really killed John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

I was waiting for an American clergyman of Bocana to return from the town of Bluefields so that I could interview him. One sunny afternoon, I was walking around the hilly town with my ex-brother-in-law's Nikon around my neck, climbing a very rocky street, when I noticed an old man standing in the doorway of a shack with a curtain for a door, waving for me to come in. I went in. The room was bare except for a small cot and a thin mattress, a small bedside table with a cloth over it, and a wooden box for a chair. He might have been 40 or 50 or 60. He was shirtless and shoeless and his pants were threadbare and torn. His frame was skeletal from malnourishment. His belly was as flat as a kid's. He motioned for me to sit. I sat. He reached beneath the cloth and brought out a tin plate of cooked red beans with a spoon, and offered it to me. I declined. He offered it again. I declined politely, and he put it back behind the cloth.

He spoke a mixture of halting English and Spanish, beginning with the word, "Por que?" Why? I made out that he wanted to know why the United States was making war on his town. "Por que la guerra?"

I told him that it was because the United States Government was a son-of-a-bitch to poor people everywhere, and that the United States Government did not like the Sandinistas, because they were helping the poor people. That was as well as I could explain what to me was the essence of a simple truth, and he nodded his head in agreement.

"El Presidente Reagan es uno hijo de bitche," I said. President Reagan is one son-of-a-bitch.

"Tell them that we are only poor people. We poor people, we do nothing to them, but they kill us, matar, por nada. When you go home. Solamente los pobres aqui." Only poor people here. "Tu hablas los Americanos, por favor." You tell the American people, please.

That, roughly, was how I translated it with my poor Spanish.

I promised that I would. We shook hands, and I departed. He patted my shoulder as I passed.

"Tell the United States people," he said.

I promised again that I would.

"Promiso," I said.

I have told this story so many times.

The Boys of Nicaragua

2011-08-06T22:55:00.006-04:00

Sometimes it’s too much to bear.

But we bear it anyway, or stop living or live a life of escapism and mediocrity. Many people don’t know how bad it really is because their feelings are buried. Some bury feelings for self-defense; others never had feelings because they were raised hard by unfeeling people or people who felt only anger, hate and pain. Many of these become sociopaths and psychopaths or misanthropes and haven’t a glimmer of conscience. But even they are redeemable sometimes.

“The Boys” of Somoza’s Nicaragua come to mind.

The following story was told to me by Margareta Nordh, a Swedish woman I met in Nicaragua in 1985, and returned there with in 1986-87. I wish I had recorded her words, because she had a way of telling in a musical voice remarkable and memorable things that stuck in my mind. She had seen much of Nicaragua and other parts of Latin America.

Margareta was a credentialed communist of high integrity and deep commitment to the poor, who worked closely with the Swedish government and had something to do with the FMLN in El Salvador and the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Sweden at that time enjoyed the popular and enlightened leadership of Olaf Palme (assassinated,) and the Swedes had no fear of communism, having lived next door to Russia for many centuries with the little-known honor of having been the only nation in history to whip Russia in a war, during the reign of Peter the Great. The government when I knew Nordh was a coalition of conservative capitalists, socialists, communists and independents. Sweden has a competent army and navy and has not had a war for about 400 years. It sat WW II out in Neutrality (like Spain and Portugal) and angered Norway because, under the threat of invasion, it had let the Nazis travel through by trains, supposedly without weapons.

She spoke five languages fluently and was a medical doctor who specialized in broken bones. She also was a social anthropologist who had spent much time living with and studying the pre-Colombian Indians of Venezuela, and she had traveled alone in 84 countries, and lived in Mexico for five years.

During the fifty years or so of the dictatorship of the Somoza family of Nicaragua, the National Guard which the United States had set up in the late 1920s as a “constabulary”-- like the one we had established in the Philippines to maintain our rule in absentia-- was a terrorist organization which kept “order” by torturing and killing any Nicaraguan of any rank who opposed Somoza Garcia and later his sons, Luis and Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

The all-male Guard (El Guardia) lived in barracks, enjoying lives of privilege and comfort separate from and unlike the daily lives of most Nicaraguans. Privilege, possessions, all they could steal and unchallenged power was their domain. To say they were brutes is a great understatement. They were torturers, murderers, rapists and terrorists, and were trained by the United States of America.

Somoza Garcia sent his son Anastasio Debayle to West Point. The Guardia periodically filled its ranks by grabbing young men from their homes and families and immersing them in their brutishness to desensitize them and put them to work keeping the Nicaraguan people in line.

They also kidnapped infants and toddlers of their murdered victims and raised them without women in the barracks and trained them to torture and kill. This group of youthful killers was known as “The Boys,” and was widely feared because, having been raised that way, they had no conscience at all. In many cases their depredations were worse than their mentors’.

The later Sandinistas are the inheritors of the rebellion of General Cesar Augusto Sandino of the Twenties, the only general who refused to sign a pact calling off a rebellion against the presence of US troops in his country. The marines had been there in greater or lesser numbers since President William Howard Taft invaded Nicaragua in 1909 with the flimsy pretext that a liberal president was “denying freedom and liberty to his people.” (Sound familiar?) In reality, Taft was stopping Nicaragua from obtaining a loan of 6.5 million Pounds from England to build a railroad to take Nicaragua’s productive agricultural products from the west to the east coast for trade with Europe, which at that time had 60% of Nicaragua’s foreign trade.

The US under its infamous and misunderstood “Monroe Doctrine” had been trying to get England off the Caribbean coast altogether, and the loan was seen as a lingering foothold of a capitalist competitor that had to be ended if US capitalists were to dominate Nicaragua’s trade. The Miskito, Rama and Suma Indians of Nicaragua’s east coast speak English.

Then as now the wishes and aspirations of the Nicaraguan people were as irrelevant to Washington and Wall Street as were the wishes and aspirations of the American Indians, and people of the Philippines, Vietnam, and now Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were only pawns in the great game of great powers for world dominance of resources, markets and profits.

Taft—and Presidents Wilson, Harding and Coolidge--didn’t any more care about the “freedom and liberty” of the Nicaraguan people than for the man in the moon. After the marines ran the president out of the country (he died in poverty in New York) this became apparent to everybody except the American people who, not caring anyway, then as now got their information from Media owned and operated by the same patriotic capitalists who stood to gain much from Nicaragua’s forced submission to the will of Washington. But that is a whole other story.

Sandino, known to this day as “the general of free men,” fought the marines so well that the helicopter was invented to catch him. A Sikorsky copter attempted its first and failed flight from the airport in Managua. The first aerial bombing of civilians was not in Spain as Picasso’s Guernica memorialized, but in Ocotal, Nicaragua, in 1928, when Navy and Marine pilots dropped bombs on the northern town, killing about 200.

Finally the State Dept. and White House admitted it could not stop the rebellion or catch Sandino and his loyal generals and followers, and took a different tack: establishment of a National Guard, and a false peace treaty. The US Navy, which had been in charge of the war, left Anastasio Somoza Garcia as head of the National Guard. Somoza’s grandfather had been a famous bandit in the 1800s and was hanged. Somoza Garcia’s only talents were greed, dishonesty and murder. He, like his sons afterward, called Nicaragua, “my farm.” He took whatever he wanted, but 12 old families also owned large swaths of territory and the people who dwelled in it and worked mainly for them.

After the marines had sailed for home and the shooting had stopped and a peace of sorts had settled on the country and Sandino’s men were settling in lands promised them, Sandino and his brother paid a dinner call on the President of Nicaragua. When the dinner was finished they departed in good cheer and were arrested at the gate by the Guard. The President had nothing to do with it; power had accumulated in Somaza’s hands because he had the guns the

United States

had provided.

Somoza himself established an alibi by attending a reading by the Chilean poet Gabriella Mistral. Stories about what happened next are different, but it is generally accepted that the two nationalists were taken to the airport and shot, and that their bodies were buried on a runway later covered by tarmac. Somoza’s murderers hunted down and killed Sandino’s generals and men over a period of years as the dictator established his rule by terror with US financing and training.

Prior to WW II Somoza took a fancy to Hitler’s fascist Brown Shirts and established a similar outfit to bully and intimidate the country. When the war started the unit vanished and Nicaragua became a loyal ally. If there were any hard feelings in Washington no one heard about them. When Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1932, he is reported to have said to his Secretary of State, “I hear this man Somoza is a son-of-a-bitch,” and Secretary Cordell Hull is reported to have answered, “Yes sir, he is. But he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”

The Guardia was one of the most-feared of all the dictatorships of Latin America. When I visited Nicaragua for the first time in 1985 with Abbie Hoffman’s second tour, we went to the site of the “21 Jail” in

Leon

. It was about the size of a ranch-type house in the

United States

and had no roof when we were there. US marines had built it in 1921, thus the name. A guide told us that at times it had contained up to 1,000 prisoners.

During one period in the Sixties, he said, a commander of the jail had the nightly habit of getting drunk and showing up late, picking a prisoner he didn’t like, and torturing him to death. Leon is a rather small town. The guide said that the screams of the tortured men could be heard all over town. This was the nightly visitation of the Guardia in

Leon

and a warning not to be disregarded.

Anastasio Somoza Garcia was assassinated at a dinner party in 1954 by a Nicaraguan poet posing as a waiter.

Things became so bad in Nicaragua that in the 1960s Carlos Fonseca and Tomas Borge revived the nationalistic Sandinista movement and began another long struggle to topple the Somozas. (Luis had died of a heart attack and Anastasio was chief.) After a hellish struggle that one must go to

Nicaragua

to hear about, the Sandinistas triumphed in 1979, following the murder by Somoza’s grandson of the country’s most-popular editor-owner of La Prensa, the largest newspaper.

Somoza’s last act before fleeing with his hated father’s bones was to bomb the poor neighborhoods of numerous cities and towns, leaving about 50,000 wounded and many dead. President Jimmy Carter responded to the successful revolution by cutting off medical aid, since some of the Sandinistas had been trained in Cuba.

Fidel Castro sent 500 doctors and nurses and medicine and equipment, endearing himself and Cuba to Nicaraguans who knew the score. I watched Daniel Ortega’s presidential inauguration as Fidel sat behind him, and didn’t see one person in the cheering crowd who looked like he read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, and knew that Fidel was such a terrible dictator. When Fidel spoke he got a bigger hand than Daniel.

The Sandinistas’ first official act was abolition of the death penalty, which had been the chief weapon used against them. When Somoza had captured the top Sandinista leadership including Carlos Fonseca in 1967, they all had been tortured and castrated. Thirty years served without parole became the maximum sentence for any crime. Mary Hartman, an American Maryknoll nun who the Sandinistas appointed as Ombudsman for the prison system, confirmed this for our tour when we visited a prison. She was empowered to take any prisoner aside, without notice and without an observer, to learn about prison conditions and whether there was any torture. The Sandinistas forbade it and came down hard on any soldier caught at it.

The Boys who failed to escape with other Somocistas to Honduras or Costa Rica were rounded up and jailed. They were considered beyond rehabilitation. They had learned their murderous trade too early, had never developed a social conscience, and knew not the corrective scolding or forgiving softness of a loving mother. Women to them were only to rape, torture and kill.

As the Sandinistas established their government, and began fighting a defensive war against the CIA and Reagan’s “freedom fighters,” The Boys were left to endure their fate. But eventually, Tomas Borge, the only actual communist on the 12-person Sandinista Directorate, arranged a meeting between them and some of the mothers whose sons and daughters had suffered and died of their depravity.

Margareta wasn’t there. But she knew others who had attended. She related that they told her that the mothers confronted The Boys directly and told them what they had done. They criticized and scolded them severely about their murdered sons and daughters, how this one had been a bright schoolboy who had studied hard and read the Bible and had wanted only to help people; how this daughter had been pledged to marry; how that one had left orphaned a small child, and how their beloved children had brightened their lives and given them a sense of purpose and a reason to live. They cried and displayed their grief and justifiable anger. Some were inconsolable.

Some of the boys cried for the first time when they understood what they had done. Some of the mothers saw that they were, after all, still only boys, that they too were victims, and pitied the vicious children who had crippled their lives. They hugged and consoled them and reached out. Some were reconciled. Some of the mothers forgave. They cried together. Some of the boys apologized and sobbed. Others remained untouchable. But some mothers could never be reconciled to the unspeakable horror they lived with every minute of the day and night, and could not forgive. Margareta said that some of the mothers had found “closure,” and that some of the boys had been transformed by the meeting, finally discovering their stolen conscience.

When I returned from Abbie's tour in early 1986, I went back to driving a cab in New York. As soon as I had about $500 clear and the rent paid, I drove my old Ford van to Washington and camped behind the Jefferson Library of the Library of Congress and began researching Nicaraguan history from 1821 to the present. I read and took notes until the Library closed at nine. But there was a lot of material, and no way could I read it all. After a couple of weeks, my money low, I would hock something for gas back to the City and return to taxi-driving. As soon as I was solvent again, I would return to DC and study some more.

In late 1986 I returned to Nicaragua with Dr. Margareta Nordh of Sweden, and did more research, intending to integrate everything I had learned for a freelance article about Nicaragua and the Contra War. And then my personal circumstances changed.

During this time my former brother-in-law decided to sell the apartment on

MacDougal Street

which I had sublet and paid low rent on for three years, and my rent went from $330 to $1,300. I returned to living in my van and parked for security and privacy in a cemetery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I kept going back to Washington for the research for six months. I learned a lot of things that I thought might wake the American people from their customary numbed sleep and political idiocy. But I couldn’t write about it for personal reasons.

I found no mention of The Boys.

[I first published this true story on Nov. 22, 2008; and think it's worth re-publishing, because the American people should hear it, if they are to comprehend the true dimensions of power and its consequences on real human beings, as exercised by the United States Government.]

Compelled

2011-08-06T03:25:00.004-04:00

Freedom to work has morphed into compulsion to work; compelled by our stomachs to labor and toil, seldom with pleasure or satisfaction, for mere sustenance and shelter, from the elemental tyranny of Nature, we are abject caricatures of our stronger ancestors. Machines, greed, fear and ignorance are the masters of Mankind. Here we are at WW I again.

International combinations, financial markets, treaties and Alliances, trade agreements and labor pacts, and centuries-old assumptions about wealth and power, democracy vs. Fascism, science vs. Religion, tolerance vs. Racism, environment vs. Exploitation, war vs. Peace, labor vs. Capital, rehabilitation vs. Torture, and the “innate goodness of man,” all are crumbling, like cookies in a clothes dryer.

Selfish, afraid, violent, submissive, greedy, idiotic, aggressive, ignorant, docile, fanatic, overworked, underpaid, entertainment-loving, and leaderless humanity is divided up, like marbles in a child’s game, a game that is the butt of a high-class joke, and made slaves to the job-at-hand, unless they are of the ruling elite. And even they are slaves to their passions; or the lack of them.

Religion is a tired, masturbatory exercise in crowd-control, and a sentimentally absurd belief in impossible magic. Man defines God as an incredible parody of himself, a mean-spirited entity, sentimental and unfeeling, who “needs our help,” and lays down absurd laws, and demands blood for evidence of loyalty. “Worship” is hocus-pocus, and “a loving God” is the fancy of hopeless romantics, who are blinded by the cataracts of wishful-thinking, each holding legal title to “the Word.”

Liberals and conservatives alike stumble upon each other in a jumble of broken mirrors, cutting themselves on the razor shards of their dishonest and outworn “ideals,” and bleeding their toxic nonsense into the minds of all. The vast and silenced throngs of humanity know them for the fraudulent career-politicians that they are, but feel powerless to do a thing about it. Cow-like humans are herded into cities for slavery in various “enterprises,” and are beaten or intimidated into submission for robot-work, which is excused by Science and Economics, sanctioned by Law and Religion, and rewarded by food and betrayal. They slave to fill bank accounts for the high-class rats, who piously posture and pose as “the best and brightest,” that the human race has ever produced, and who are demonically innocent of all criminal activity.

The best of human history, and of human beings, is almost-entirely hidden from view, and the worst is daily drilled into our eyes and ears, by the relentless lasers of technology and media. Politics is the national religion, and religion is no more than politics in robes. Somewhere in the human psyche, the infant in the cradle of conscience is undernourished and cowed. Its crib is a prison where freedom is lost to embarrassment. The concept of Nobility is hidden, lost or misunderstood. The baby has been bayoneted, and the Archbishop, who pleaded for peace and justice, has been slaughtered at Mass.

No one is responsible. No one is guilty. No one has been charged. No one will be charged. No investigation will be made. No remuneration will be possible. No apologies will be forthcoming, or even implied, because the powerful do not apologize, and the survivors think that they are free, and lucky to be alive.

The act of an improbable God has condemned the major portion of humanity to slavery forever. To slavery forever in the stench of a rapidly decomposing swamp, where all the sewage of history has joined to overflow the lawns and roads, and every word of every power stinks, provoking only excrement and vomit.

The artist can do what he likes with reality, because there are no rules in art. Whatever art is, it is not a device which can be crafted into form by a mere persistent desire to make art, and art can never “make revolution.” The artist makes nothing but his own point, and whatever is done, is done against his will, and through him, as something he merely snatched from the air, and threw to a gang of a thousand monkeys pounding on typewriters, because he found it there (and now it’s gone). In his blind man’s peregrination over an obstacle course of lonely choices, none of which can ever satisfy his original vision, the only obligation of the artist is to truth, ever-elusive, in a world where a thing can be both true and false at the same time.

But the citizen must accept the reality of his or her present condition, and decide whether to act, or not to act, to influence events. Action by non-action is a mystery few humans can grasp, like the holding-by-not-holding, or the insubstantiality of solids.

Right action is impossible without courage and nobility. Only courage can overcome dread, and nobility is not a condition of wealth, but a mode of behavior, and it cannot be inherited. Principles are not happened upon instinctively in the immediacy of crisis, but are taught by example from an early age, by principled mentors. Principles are lines-drawn-in-the-sand, long before one reaches the point beyond which he will not go.

The human being is a wild animal beneath a veneer of custom, civilization, and Law. Fear of death robs us of life. But, “death is not an event in life.” In death, there is nothing to fear, and all fear is a fear of death. Competition did not make us the dominant species; mutual aid did that. This knowledge is nearly lost, but it is all that keeps us alive. It is competition which has impeded our progress, and competition that will destroy us. It is ignorance and fear, and selfishness and cowardice, which makes it possible.

“Freedom” cannot be given; it must be taken, seized, and defended to the death.

Until un-free humanity grasps this simple fact, and acts in concert of “all for one and one for all,” it will remain in slavery to the sweathouses and brothels of earth, believing that it is “free,” in this noxious swamp of “liberty,” and “democracy,” where television substitutes for intelligence, and death rules life in unbelievable acts of war. There is no slave more abject or ridiculous, than one who thinks he is free.

The freest spirits are running the rocky, narrow trails of the highlands, past dangerous and hungry predators, risking life, limb and sanity, and shouting with mad joy, to the amazed herds, chewing in the dying fields, “Follow us! We know where food grows out of the ground and falls off of the trees!”

Does anyone hear their shout? Does anyone even care?

Postal Politics

2011-08-02T04:50:00.007-04:00

I walked many sun-scorched blocks in my 70-year-old body, cadaverous and winded, to find a small Post Office, off Fulton Street, in my Brooklyn neighborhood . A truck that was servicing the Elevated was parked on the sidewalk, obscuring the flag, but I eventually found it, and went in to mail my letters and buy stamps. I was grumbling about the price, and that stamps didn't seem to come in books anymore, when the African-American clerk surprised me with something I had never heard in an American Post Office: politics.

"Well, you can't blame President Obama for that," she said.

Since I had not blamed him for anything, and, wondering where it came from, I said, "Well, I don't blame him for that. I blame him for doing a lousy job with his domestic and foreign policy."

She broke into my sentence before it was finished, saying, "I know, you will blame him for something, but it isn't his fault. It's the Republicans and people like you, who won't give him a chance."

"You just like him because he is black," I said.

"That's right!" she exclaimed.

"Well, I like him because he is black, too, but I don't like his wars, and I don't like the fact that he won't stand up and fight for the poor, including the black people, who are poor."

But she heard none of it, because she had been talking over me throughout my sentence. I didn't get all she said, either. I have observed that it is difficult for people to transmit, and receive, at the same time. In fact, I wonder if it is possible.

Anyway, she was pretty worked up, and her tone suggested that she felt mighty superior to me. We both raised our voices then, and, of course, mine won, because I have a mighty voice, despite my decrepitude, and need no microphone.

"Ask Representative John Conyers what he thinks of Obama's presidency," I said, loud enough for her, and everyone else, to hear, as I made for the door, wondering if she knew who Conyers is, and pursued by more accusations. I was "just trying to bring the legally-elected President of the United States down."

I went shopping next door.

Yogurt, milk, cake, ice cream, my usual diet. Then, as I was checking out, I remembered my tan cap, which was on my head. I got it from the National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN. It has a threaded logo of black, white, and red. The white is in the shape of a man, who is pushing to the left against an approaching red mass, with a black background surrounding him. Pretty subtle, yet explicit, if you ask me. That's why I like the hat.

No one ever notices it in East New York, although I have seen people looking at it on the crowded J train.

I walked with my groceries back into the Post Office, and waited in line, until she was free of customers, and then approached her bulletproof window. There were three clerks, and no one behind me.

"I want to apologize for raising my voice," I began. She began transmitting immediately, so I don't know if she heard my apology. And then, I took off my cap, and said, "I just want to show you something." I pointed at the logo. "Do you see what that says?"

She ignored the question and the cap, and went on with her diatribe, about how President Obama was not responsible for anything wrong in Washington, and so on.

"Do you see what that says?" I asked again, having her attention for a second.

"Yes, it says, 'Memphis Tennessee'."

"No! It says National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN'."

She acknowledged nothing. I silently wondered if she knew what Memphis means in the Civil Rights milieu.

"That's Dr. Martin Luther King's museum," I said. "Have you been there?" She didn't answer, because she was transmitting again.

I said, "I want to clear something up with you. I am not against President Obama. I had a lot of hope for him. I am not against you, either. I have been in more Civil Rights demonstrations than you know. I've also been in more antiwar demonstrations than I can recall. I think you are judging me on the color of my skin. You don't know me, or my heart. You don't know where my heart is."

"Oh, yes I do!" she exclaimed.

"How can you know, by the color of my skin?" I held up my fishbelly white forearm.

"That's right!" she said.

"Oh? Then it's okay for me to judge you by the color of your skin?"

"That's right! You can!"

I was flabbergasted, and wanted to say something about "the content of one's character," but decided it was time to leave, because I was beginning to feel superior.

"We call that racism," I said, leaving.

Sigh. I hadn't said "black racism." What's the point? I can't change her. She doesn't care to know or understand me. She probably doesn't believe that such a thing as black racism can exist. It was depressing, because the whole, brief encounter had reminded me of New Orleans, my old hometown, where I had spent three depressing years, living in my van, after Katrina, and, periodically, endured the bullying, and threatening, black racism there. A black government had been in power 14 years by then, and blacks comprised most of the Police Dept., nearly all of the bus and taxi drivers, and streetcar conductors, and every office in City Hall, and managed many stores and businesses all over town.

Of course, New Orleans, with its horrible history of slavery, and 20th Century racism, is a different story, to me, because, in my mind, if "justification" is possible, nobody could feel more justified in hating the whites, than those tough black people there. They have good reason to suspect whites, more reason, to my mind, than most blacks in Brooklyn, who had civil rights, before they had been heard of in New Orleans.

"Please don't sell me down the river, massa. Please don't sell me down the river, down to New Orleans." It was the worst place, with the possible exception of the Florida Everglades, for a slave to be sold. Only the toughest survived.

I know that. Does she know that? Would it be childish to ask if she had ever been in a Civil Rights demonstration, and, if she had, had she ever demonstrated for the rights of white people? Probably. But, I have a feeling, that she, like many blacks today, justified or not, thinks that whites have no rights, which a black person is bound to respect.

Of course, one can say, "How does it feel?" It feels lousy, just the way they want us to feel. It feels even lousier, when you know, as I know, that I lost my whole, original family, and their trust, when they thought I had gone crazy, because I took the side of the oppressed, black poor. I don't think I deserve to be treated like a white racist. Naturally, neither did blacks deserve their oppression. It's like Clint Eastwood said, in "Unforgiven": "Deserves got nothing to do with it."

That's the way it is. "We all have our cross to bear." Racism is alive, and thriving, in this world, and all over this world, in every race that I know of. It is co-equal with war as the most-malignant force moving on our pernicious, human planet.

I'm not asking Congress to deal with this. It already tried, and failed.

It's my party, and I'll whine if I want to.

"The Piping Days of Peace"

2011-07-31T01:05:00.008-04:00

I forgot who wrote, “War shall endless war still breed.” (Coleridge?)

Watching President Obama since his election, alternately thrilled by it, and disgusted by his warmaking, and by his concessions to conservative Republicans, and by his patronizing, uninspiring speeches, I find myself still liking him, but detesting his lukewarm domestic, and incendiary foreign policies. How many times, during the last two months, have we heard, “the middle class?” One would think that the middle class is of more importance to politicians than their own families. Many of them came from the middle class, but are of that class no more, and are the owners of property, businesses, “perks,” status, and power. Of course, they are aware that it was this class, which elected them, and which they need to elect them again, if they will continue their lucrative careers in politics.

Another thing that comes too often from his mouth--for they are the magic words politicians must utter at least once daily, to convince us that everything they do is for "the American people." For a better understanding of what I mean by this, please Google Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. He said it better than I ever can.

I remember the 60s very well, because I was in my prime, and a small part of it. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was my hero, though I am a white southerner, and, even today, his simplest words make me teary. What a loss. What a terrible loss. Imagine, if this committed and passionate man, this moral and courageous man, assassinated at 39, had been elected to Congress.

Additionally, I remember Bobby Kennedy, a very rich man, who tramped through the shantytowns of the South, the poor white towns of Appalachia, the squalid migrant labor camps of the West, and the ghettos of the North, and sat in smelly rooms with the poor, the aging and hopeless poor, on sagging chairs, with cockroaches all about, and no electricity, and little or no food in the cupboard. Kennedy was not bashful about pointing to the plight of the poor, black or white, and insisting aggressively, but with grace, that it was the nation’s duty to pay them attention, and provide care. I cannot help but compare President Obama to Robert Kennedy. But there is no comparison.

If King and Kennedy were here yet, and still in their lovely prime, they would not be saying, “the middle class.” They would be saying, “the poor.” It is the poorest who must be attended to before all others; before the wealthy, before the military, before the students, and before the middle class. As President Franklin Roosevelt said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Republicans and members of FDR’s own wealthy class, called him, and still refer to him in private, as “a traitor to his class.”

FDR, in effect, created the middle class, when he put money in the hands of the poor, who spent it, helping business to prosper and grow, and for new business and enterprise to become. How quickly we forgot this, in our too-comfortable, complacent, and materialistic lives.

Now I’m reminded of another quote, by John Wilmot, in reference to King Charles II:

“We have a pretty witty King,

Whose word no one relies on.

He never said a foolish thing,

And never did a wise one.”

But the clever King Charles, hearing of it, replied, “That’s true, for my words are my own. But my actions are those of my ministers.”

If President Obama has such wit, we have not seen it, and wit is a sign of high intelligence, as the wit of Presidents Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy and his brothers, and lately, of Senator Al Franken, proves.

President Obama may be intelligent; but he is not witty. He has never made me laugh, and is about to make me cry. Who will follow his likely one-term presidency, which promised so much, and delivered so little? What a loss. What a tragedy. But, if he doesn't light a fire in his belly, and start speaking out for the poor, I won't be sorry to see him gone, no matter who follows him. The "lesser of two evils" is only "the evil of two lessers."

It is like Representative John Conyers (D-SC), a toughened veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, said recently: "President Obama went to Harvard."

And, considering the middle class, I’m reminded of yet-another quote, which, again, I think came from Coleridge:

“Mid thy herds and thy cornfields secure

Thou hast stood,

And joined the wild yelling of famine and blood.”

This is a copy of a blog I've begun at firedoglake.com ("The Piping Days of Peace")

Claro

2011-07-19T06:00:00.003-04:00

I've been going through a serious criticism of my blog by someone whose opinion I valued for awhile. I'm going to post some of it here and then try to analyze and deal with it.

"you mike have a one track mind.
your problem - and it has been all your life - in every one of your damn blog entries THAT I HAVE READ
is you DONT LISTEN
you only hear your own woes and your own self.
everyone who has met you in this process has pointed that out.
funny, how fifteen people all come to the same conclusion.
and while yours might say "she's still young" mine all say "well he is an angry old man that never grew up"

This person praised my blog to the sky: "There is some good stuff in there." She said it was "strong" and "unique" and other accolades. I admit that those sorts of compliments encouraged me to keep writing. The blog enabled me to finish things and led me to think it was one of the most-productive periods of my miserable 50 years of writing life. I'm not used to people reading my writing, much less praising it. It encouraged me to keep on with it. It was heady praise, and it went to my head of course. When I lost her friendship, my self-confidence went down like the moon, and I lost interest in blogging.

The problem is that I don't know much about anything other than myself. I have opinions of course, strong ones, and think I could organize some things better than they are; but I don't know much about anything, and doubt everything I think I might know. It's my skeptical nature and low-self esteem, which was birthed by betrayals and failure.

But looking back through some of the 190 pieces I've posted here, I can't fully accept the criticism that I "don't listen," and write only about myself. It's simply not true, though it has elements of the truth.

I'm forever re-writing things I read:

"The moments after engaging with a sunset or engaging with a partner in the act of sex are the ones that offer true clarity"

My rewrite:

moments after engaging a sunset or with a partner in sex are moments of true clarity

I wouldn't know.

I've seen thousands of sunsets and remember only one. It certainly was a moment of clarity. The sex I remember ended with temporary unconsciousness but not clarity.

I was walking beside an estuary in Corpus Christi in the early 80's, probably hitching to the university, where I was reading about the Holocaust, when I saw thousands of birds; gulls, pelicans and cranes, standing on rocks rimming the small cove to prevent coast-erosion. They were standing there apparently watching the sunset. I stopped to watch it too.

I was probably stoned. I usually was. I was broke most of the time too, jobless I'm sure, and for awhile I donated blood in one of those plasma-sucking stations that paid 15 bucks for a quart of my vital body fluids every two weeks; but somehow I always had some weed. So I stood there for about 10 minutes completely immobile as our fiery star sank past the curvature of the planet. Then, to relieve my feet, I kneeled.

Every single bird in the estuary lifted off in a flutter of silent wings, hovered a moment, then settled back to the shoreline. They had all been watching me, and, when I dropped into a shooting position, they had instinctively lifted off for evasive maneuvers. I was shocked. They had been watching me. Imagine that a simple act of yours frightens thousands of other creatures into taking flight.

It did not make me feel powerful or important, but small, mean and feared. Other creatures feared me and my species, even as I meant them no harm, and I could not claim species-discrimination. After all, do sea birds shoot at us? Wherever there are birds, it seems, there are two-legged humans killing them for food or sport.

All the other animals must feel the same instinctive wariness, because there isn't a one we haven't killed in great numbers. They know our firesticks. It is in their genes.

At one time it was probably a more-even contest.

There are many many creatures who are our betters in physical ability and ferocity. A bear of any kind can tear us to pieces and eat us alive; a whale can swat a whole boatload of men with a single stroke; tigers, lions, cheetahs, and all other cats,can kill and devour us. A baboon can rip us to shreds with its teeth, a chimpanze can tear us apart with its hands, and our faithful dogs can turn on us and kill everybody in the house. There's hardly an animal out there which a single human can defeat in hand-to-hand combat. Imagine what a wild boar with tusks and teeth can do to a frail or flabby human being. A pig can kick our ass.

We learned to gang up on them, to distract them with drums and poke them with hot sticks, and to beat them to death all at once in a circle of death by rampaging human fury impelled by fear. We learned how to hunt, trap and kill every one of them over time. We are the best predators on the planet; if not the best-looking.

Our intelligence out-matched their strength and ferocity, as Nature would have it, and the smarter ones learned to give us a lot of room, with the noble dog being the only clear exception. This poor animal is probably the only one capable of loving us despite our abuse. Well, we feed them too. Actually, most domestic house-dogs are drugged by their dog food. (As for cats, they are an alien species and parasites of the first order; but they provide us with soothing vibes in exchange for food and shelter.)

We obviously are more afraid of wild animals than they are of us. We've proved we can kill anything on the planet except the cockroach, and the other animals know it. The real danger is if the cockroaches learn it.

The trouble is that there are so many of us, and way too much killing of all sorts. If we keep killing at this rate--species, fish, oceans, forests, air, each other--soon the only thing left to eat will be the cockroaches and each other.

We need to slowly over many generations reduce the population of humans to a manageable billion. There's no reason why each of us can't have hundreds of acres of land and all the resources thereon. Nor is there a sensible reason why we should steal and destroy the natural habitats of the other species. It is clear that all life and systems are inter-dependent. If our quality of life is to improve, the quality of all other lives also must improve. Our arrogant, warlike species has defiled the planet and this must stop. We must rid ourselves of thinking that we can and should control the earth. The planet will destroy us before we destroy it. And it is absurd: we don't control the earth.

It would be so much the easier to do with fewer people and less waste, and, served by robots and machines operated by robots, we could have a happy and serene life. A life perhaps of contemplation or sensation, or whatever we choose. A free life, presumably. Or could we? Life is so complicated and hard sometimes that we can only attribute the cause to human malevolence and stupidity.

But we still would have to put up with cockroaches. They will always be here, feeding on our stenchy waste, searching for and finding food and territory. Rather like ourselves. Of course, they can't make atom bombs. But atom bombs can't wipe them out either. Nothing can withstand radiation like a cockroach.

The First Famous Man I Met

2011-04-07T22:25:00.012-04:00

The first famous man I ever met was John Nance Garner. He was Speaker of the House of Representatives, and then was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Vice President during FDR's first two terms, 1933-41. Garner was part-Indian; I don't know which part or what tribe, but he was the second most-powerful part-Indian in the whole world for eight years, and rose higher in American politics than any other of Native ancestry. He tried again for the top job against FDR in 1941 (the year I was born,) and lost. He must have served nearly three decades in the House, and was Speaker from 1931 to 1933, when he joined Roosevelt's ticket, after losing to him in the Democratic Primary. A famous quote of his went, “What this country needs is a good 5-cent cigar.”

Another, less-quoted, was "The vice presidency isn't worth a bucket of spit."

For some reason, I knew some but not all of this, although, in 1960, I was only a 19-year old marine, overfull of testerone, totally oblivious to what lay ahead, and hitchhiking to California with transfer orders from Camp Lejeune, N.C., to Long Beach, CA, for re-assignment to Okinawa as an amtrack crewman (amphibian tractors.) I was hitching to save money. The Marine Corps didn’t care how you got there, but expected you to be on time. I'd been hitchhiking since about 14, and was averse to wasting money for buses.

Some guy let me out in the middle of Uvalde, TX, about three in the morning. It looked like a car-an-hour would be the deal, and the town was deader than a door nail, except for one place open; a large restaurant across old Highway 90. It had a cater-corner entrance. So I went there.

At first the restraunt looked empty. Tables with white tablecloths and ketchup and a bowl of sugar and salt and pepper and maybe 10 wooden booths with padded leather seats laid out the same, and a counter with about five stools. Then I saw a waitress, an older woman, and could hear a cook moving around in the kitchen. And, way in the back in the last booth, I saw an old man with a table full of papers lit by a green glass-shaded bronze lamp, the kind you see in courts, libraries, and Congress, reading.

I sat facing the counter and the kitchen at a table about 20 feet from where he sat to my far right. We looked at each other and I waved. He waved back. Strangers often did that in Louisiana and Texas then. He returned to his reading, and the waitress approached.

“Oh, do you know Mr. Garner?” she asked, setting down a menu.

“No ma'am,” I said. “Just being friendly.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “Well that is John Nance Garner. He was the vice president of the United States under President Roosevelt. He's our most famous citizen in Texas.”

“Oh yeah, I've heard of him,” I replied. I guess I'd seen something on television or read about him in a magazine.

“Do you know what you want?”

“I’ll have a hamburger with mustard and mayonnaise only; a cup of black coffee and a piece of apple pie heated up with vanilla ice cream on top, after I eat the hamburger.”

“My, that sounds wonderful. “

“I have to wash up. Where’s the bathroom, please?.” I’d been hitching for about 18 hours from Louisiana, my 30-day leave almost expired, and felt grimy.

“Over there,” she pointed to a door behind Mr. Garner.

She went to the kitchen and I walked toward the bathroom. Garner looked in my eyes, so I stopped and stuck out my hand. There was a dead cigar in a big brass ashtray.

“Good morning, Vice President Garner,” I said boldly. “I’m Private Mike Havenar.”

I was in uniform of course. It was easier catching rides that way, and I wouldn’t have imagined wearing anything else at the time. I'd earned that uniform on Parris Island two winters before.

“Well good morning," he said, shaking my hand with a hard firm grip. “What outfit are you with, marine?”

“Sir, I'm an amtrack crewman. Until a month ago, I was stationed at Courthouse Bay, Camp Lejeune. I’m being transferred to First Amtrack Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, on Okinawa. I’m on my way to California. I’m due there in three days.”

“You’ll make it all right. Where are you from?”

“Lake Charles, Louisiana, sir. I was just there visiting my grandmother.”

“And where is she from?”

“She’s originally from Jasper, but she’s lived most of her life in Westlake now, across the river from Lake Charles.”

He said he saw.

“Mr. Garner, can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead and ask,” he said.

“Sir, what was it like, being vice president?”

He smiled and said, “Like sitting on a cactus for eight years and wishing you were some place else.”

We laughed together.

“Thank you sir. Nice meeting you.” We shook again.

“Nice meeting you too. Good luck, marine.”

I went to the bathroom, came back and ate my hamburger slowly, and then the coffee and pie, and glanced at him a few times. He was absorbed in his reading and writing. I guess that he liked to get away from the house to do it, and this would be the perfect place too; deserted but for we three at three in the morning. Good place to smoke a cigar. Quiet, but with ordinary people about.

The waitress brought yesterday’s paper. I read part of it slowly. The hamburger was perfect, none of this lean cuisine dry fatless and tasteless stuff you get now; the crust of the meat was soaked with tasty grease, and the bun was toasted. The apple pie and ice cream and second cup of coffee were delicious. I smoked a Lucky Strike. I was starved from going all day. I was making pretty good time. I stayed about an hour. Then I left about a 50-cent tip on the table, got up and paid, exchanged a pleasantry with the waitress, waved goodbye to the former vice president, and walked on up the road with my sea bag for about a quarter-mile, turned and faced east, and waited. Nothing was coming. Dawn was near.

I was hoping he’d come along and give me a ride. I don’t remember any of the rides to California, and I didn’t remember that I had met John Nance Garner for years. It just slipped my mind. When I started remembering, I remembered it all. I told my uncle about it when I was in my late fifties. I don’t think he believed me. But why would I make something like that up?

Mike's Dream

2011-04-03T22:40:00.005-04:00

President Obama strode to the lectern and acknowledged several journalists from the major media as they seated themselves, then launched immediately into the subject at hand: the budget deadline.

"As of midnight tonight, in exactly two hours, the United States Government will be forced to suspend all but vital military and emergency aid services to the American people. Social Security employees will not be on the job; federal funding for colleges and universities will not be forthcoming, and government-subsidized transportation and communications facilities and so on will not be operational. All national parks and recreation areas will be closed. We have prepared a list of which employees in every department are to be laid off, and it is going out as I speak. I order all non-essential federal employees to go home at midnight and to not report until further notice.

"Additionally, because military expenditures and legal contracts cannot be paid on time without a working government, I am ordering all of our military units in every part of the world to suspend operations where safety allows it, since none of this either can be done without funds. We are temporarily closing most of our embassies, including those in Europe, the Far East, and Africa. State and other federal departments will run with a skeleton staff of only the top management officials, without secretarial or other help.

Someone laughed.

"In other words," the President continued, "I am ordering all federal employees other than those previously indicated to stay home tomorrow. Do not come to work, and do not work from your homes. We cannot pay you. I am cutting my own staff by approximately 50 percent."

"Constitutionally, I have no choice in the matter. Congress alone holds the strings to the purse, or in this case the keys to the Treasury. Our Founders wisely decided on this method, with the representatives of the people deciding how taxes will be spent, instead of a lone executive who might become a dictator if he had such power.

"There are emergency funds available to me as the Executive, and I will dispense them as fairly as I can. It is constitutionally up to Congress to find concord on how taxes will be spent. It is my job and constitutional duty to sign or not sign that legislation. In this case, there is no legislation for me to accept or veto. I reiterate that I will veto exactly what too many in Congress are now proposing, and that is why they have not decided whether to pass the bill in dispute. At midnight, by law, or rather for the lack of a law authorizing expenditures, it will be illegal and unconstitutional for the federal government to operate without a budget.

"I bow to the will of the Congress and presumably to the will of the American people, since they elected the members who did not come forth with a budget, and am shutting down the federal government. My hands are tied. It is up to the Congress and the Congress alone to resolve this delimma, and up to the American people as well, to let their will be known, and to make their will be done. That is how it is supposed to work in America. Thank you. Don't worry. God bless the United States of America."

"Mr. President!" shouted the 30 journalists.

"I'm sorry. No time for questions. Well, just one." He chose the guy from the New York Times.

"Mr. President, is there anything you would like to say to the Republicans and some Democrats in Congress whose refusal to pass a budget brought this on?"

Obama considered the question for about 10 seconds.

"It's your play."

And he walked away from a chorus of shouts.

Michele was waiting with a big smile when he returned to the private residence.

Japan: "Where Are the Robots?"

2011-03-18T03:35:00.004-04:00

My friendly landlord caught me coming in from work tonight at 2 a.m. and enlisted me to help him slide a 300-lb. slab of bluestone down an innovative ramp into the cellar, and after we'd both risked our lives doing it and had stood it against a wall, Gary asked:

"Mike, with Japan's supposed advanced lead in robotic development, where are the damned robots?"

Of course! A light went off in my head. Robots! Robot fire trucks, robot helicopters, robot wheeled vehicles with cameras to go in and take a look at this melting pile of radioactive human garbage which is now threatening to poison and cook us all.

"They've probably been so busy working on building Terminators for the military that they never imagined robots that could go in and prevent a meltdown," I replied.

They probably could make a robot which would be powered by the escaping radiation. Nuclear-Meltdown Terminators (NMTs). The higher the radiation, the stronger they become. Anti-Godzillas.

Godzilla always was a puzzle to me. I guess I missed some of them. As I remember it, Godzilla was created by radiation mutation after WW II. He was the ugliest monster imaginable, all lumpy and misshapen, with a head that didn't look like it belonged to the body; a fierce mouth breathing fire like the dragons of yore...and now look. Look at the visible radioactive monster created by greedy humans with a lust for power and gold. They created this monster, this Frankenstein, and set it loose despite every reasonable protest and argument. They've birthed these little Godzillas all over the planet, to fuel "development" through "Atoms for Peace," which has expanded us into a species of consumers, and which has spawned a million millionaires, and all it took was a 30-foot tsunami to open the cage to let a few of the monsters out. People are, just like in the movies, fleeing for their lives.

The twin reactors at Indian Point on the Hudson River ("O majestic river!") are only 35 miles from New York City, where population is most-concentrated in the United States. An earthquake, any geologist will tell you, can happen anywhere on earth. No place on the planet is immune from earthquakes. Indian Point sits directly on a "fault," and it's application for a license renewal is under legal challenge because the plant has for years been in violation of the Clean Water Act...Will they re-issue it after a few vague promises of reform? Or won't they? Stay tuned. (You don't think they are going to shut down a moneymaker like that, do you?)

Do we have any such robots? If not, isn't it time we started designing and building some?

And here is the other thing that puzzles both Gary and myself. When Chernobyl melted down, it was reported that hundreds of Russians and other volunteers went in to put out the fire, and then to entomb the whole joint in concrete, knowing full well that all were doomed to die. The "News" recently reported that Japan's emergency teams "could not get near" the reactors, because it was "too dangerous." It is reported also that they are willing to let the whole shebang melt down to the groundwater, rather than go in there.

What happened to that so-called Code of the Samurai in Japan? The hero who would sacrifice his life for the people? You mean to tell me that Japan can't find a thousand or so of its citizens who will volunteer to die in order to save the rest?

Jesus Christ, they commit hari-kiri over exposure of shameful business practices! To save their "honor."

What happened to "Banzai!" the shout of the brave Japanese soldier running into battle and almost certain doom? Was this another lie, another movie myth?

After all, there would be compensation for the families, and a promise to be shot through the heart when the sickness becomes too painful to bear.

What about us? Do we have any of that sort of people in America, heroes who are willing to give their lives in order to save the rest of us? Is anybody except me and Gary thinking about these things? We know one of these sons-of-bitches is going to melt down sooner or later. The questions are only where? when? and what are we prepared to do about it when it does?

I confess that I'm not one of them. If Indian Point starts melting down, I'm getting the hell out of here.

Godzilla Arrives

2011-03-16T02:15:00.003-04:00

Finally the Japanese are handed their birthright…a radioactive island…this is what we are leaving for our children and their grandchildren if there are any …nuke plants exploding in Japan…where will the Japanese go?...NOT KOREA…the nuke plant’s secret name is GODZILLA…Japanese have been expecting something like this for years…they knew in their hearts that someday a horribly deformed and unlikely monster would descend on Tokyo and tear the place up…what can they do? They have no say…queue up stay calm and kiss your ass goodbye…RUN FOR IT!... (“They’re coming to America.”)…we have no say in things either…the NRC like the “oil regulators” is more interested in building nuke plants than policing them…advocates and regulators combined in same agency same as in the BP debacle…what to do what to do…GET RID OF THEM!...but the planet’s too stupid…Maybe the Japanese will figure it out that the United States guided their energy policy for years and SOLD THEM THE NUKE PLANTS…G.E., WESTINGHOUSE, etc…53 nuclear power plants in Japan can you imagine.

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD…oh well there are other worlds…somewhere…OM…die and hold onto God or you have to live another existence and it’s all a pain in the ass…AN ILLUSION!!…SAMSARA!! 200,000 demonstrators in Wisconsin…THAT really worked…what a feel good thing for the defiant chorus…but guess what?...IT’S A LAW ANYWAY…no more collective bargaining for you…oh well while you were protecting your comfy jobs and pensions enjoying your house and car and cabin having all the fun in the world while gouging your customers for every dime you didn‘t say much about the poor people…you prayed O GOD don’t let me be poor…I wanna stay middle class…WHINE…I voted for every war and now this! I never supported organizing the poor and I ALWAYS WANTED MORE AND WORSE PRISONS (and now this) BOO HOO…now you’ll be one of US!... Welcome brothers and sisters…it’s not so bad in here once you get used to the stench of hypocrisy and the braggadocio of activists…WE STOPPED THE VIETNAM WAR! Sure you did. I seem to remember the Vietnamese stopping it when they finally kicked our ass…75% of “the American people” are against the present two wars AND THEY HAVE NO INTENTION OF STOPPING THEM…you can find another job in the Prison Industrial complex. Or you can be sacked and thrown in the slammer and become a CLIENT (prisoner) of the Prison Industrial Complex…it’s being “privatized” you know…soon they will outsource the prison system to Arabia.

We want to have a revolution but it has to be fun or we’re not coming…OKAY…GOOD LUCK…TWITTER IT!...Government might outsource the Air Force and Corporate Big Boys can watch them bombing our asses on real time big screen televisions from their rooftop verandahs…laughing their asses off…LOOK THERE GOES SAN FRANCISCO!...surgical strikes on the queers in Greenwich Village…a little collateral damage but oh well…you’ll see…we’ll have our RIGHT WING FASCIST REVOLUTION and it will be fun fun fun…and simple too…cracks me up to hear the dreamers thinking it will be a left wing revolution… NOT IN AMERICA…Hitler waiting somewhere to come out full blast when America finally loses a war…LYNCH THE USUAL SCAPEGOATS!...okay Mein Leader and thank you for removing the burden of voting…CHOICE MATTERS…the vote is meaningless…nuke plants meaningless…profit the only thing that counts…the more you have the more your vote counts…THAT’S DEMOCRACY…O no Mike think positive…kiss my ass…it all sucks…nothing has changed in Egypt…the military has always been in power…same here…civilian leadership my butt…they blew so much smoke up Obama’s ass it came out his mouth…you think I’m a cynic?...you should hear my marine friends talk…Punchy’s a Mexican who hates black people…Ralph’s a 10th generation West Virginian and he wants to vote for Sarah Palin…THAT’S AMERICA TO ME…oh well they are still my buddies and I’d die for them… POLITICS SUCK…friendship’s the only thing that matters…and family if you have one…I don’t.

Hey, I just remembered…I saw Dylan on MacDougal St. last week at midnight…standing in a circle in a dark corner near Houston Street…him another guy and two women…looking each other in the eyes and singing…Dylan keeping the rhythm with his hands…I told a friend...I was beginning to doubt my vision, but he said yes he was probably here for Suze…I thought he meant her birthday and didn’t know she had died until the next day…I read a lot of obits but missed hers…too bad she’s gone…her picture reminds me of a woman I loved in the Sixties (still love) and she was Italian too…she had that same look, a happy, outgoing look, and my gal was her own woman too…especially after she dumped me; it’s been over since 1968 and I still haven’t gotten over it so I can imagine how Bob Dylan must have felt and probably still feels about Suze Rotolo…I hear it in some of his songs; not just the ones they write about… when you fall in love for the first time I don’t know how you can ever get over losing it…you keep seeing her as she was…I do anyway…if I saw her today and she was a fat old lady she would be just as beautiful to me as the first time I saw her in that green cape in Basin Street East…I couldn’t get my eyes off her…she was just my style… that’s what Dylan wrote about Suze in Chronicles…”She was just my style.”…so anyway it was him all right…there are a lot of Dylan lookalikes but they aren’t all wearing thousand-dollar cowboy hats…I don’t know what it has to do with anything except it was the high point of my week.

Next week I’m quitting the crappy cab business and THAT will be another high…back to building geodesic models for a living…gonna make connectors that look like dollar bills and sell ‘em on Wall Street and in front of the Chinese Embassy…paint ‘em gay colors for the Trivial and Irrelevant in the Meat Packing District…Mike the Peddler with a thing about Buckminster Fuller…equally tired of the sad and the arrogant…Sadassed Hillary flying around selling integrated weapons systems…STATE DEPT.THE BIGGEST ARMS SELLER IN THE WORLD!...President Obama doesn’t have the guts to summarily stop the two wars…DECLARE A GODDAMNED CEASE FIRE!...Commander-in-Chief my ass…where will he find the guts to stay out of Libya?

Sorry...it's the first thing I've written since November.

The Fixing

2010-11-19T05:43:00.001-05:00

The early stages of the Great House Fixing, a production of Gary & Mike, a weird partnership of landlord & tenant, in half-desperation racing winter to caulk a house like a ship on a street in Brooklyn.

Tired dog; 169 years old and counting...

The moon waxes above the waning tree and I can't think of a poetic thing to say about it.

My view most nights. This night the mirror looked like it was painted by a Spanish painter whose name I forget.

First meal I've cooked in about 15 years. Red beans and rice Louisiana style. Everybody liked it. I made enough for eight.

Getting ready for the messiest job on the planet, roofing tar; ugh. Then to make matters worse, we kept stepping in it while doing other work. Ladies, notice the nice flat belly, the trim legs, and the handsome head of pure white hair, none of it missing.

Work beckons on one of the few nice days, this morning first seen through plastic mystic haze.

This was once a true 2x4-inch stud, which now resembles the tree it was milled from. To remove a nearby post this decayed could collapse a brick wall that it supports. Hard as a rock where it was unrotted, we decided to fill the spiral cavities with cement, through a complicated but ingenious proceedure by squeezing very wet cement through a pastry-cone-squeezer rig. A two-man job, we're having a hard time coordinating our time to get to it.

The squirrels apparently have given up on moving back into the renovated quarters, and occassionally give us resentful looks. They will have to chew through cement to return.

For the carpenters out there, the apparent mis-alignment of the pump jack posts caused great problems pumping the jacks. The posts had to be evened with a belt sander, a back-breaking job from a ladder; all this the result of not having enough flat space to build the posts on level ground, and working in a cramped space.

This was where the original leak began about 80 years ago. Over the years it rotted out the tops of the 4 x 6-inch supporting beams and crucial true 2 x 4 studs and cripples. Fortunately, it is not a bearing wall, but a "balloon house," with a roof supported entirely by brick "party walls" shared by two adjoining houses built at the same time, about 1905.

Squirrels got into the place years ago and made it their home. Gary is too-good-hearted to use the rat trap trick, so he has lived with them because his cats could not get to them in the high attic crawl-space. We had to tear the roof back one shingle-course, and, after the major repair is done, need to go back one or two more courses to inspect and repair decrept roof underlayment.

Gary. His grandparents were the first occupants. The leak must have started in the 1920s.

I found these sturdy saw horses in the trash of a store on Madison Avenue, stowed them in my taxi, and took two hours off to haul them home. Useful! Gary wants to burn them when we're finished, which is a hoot, because we will never be finished.

Gary made a great firepit! It is deep and ventilated from beneath through a pipe, and woodsmoke goes straight up and not in your eyes.

There's this photo I have of a man photographing himself. He wears dark winter clothes and the camera obscures half of his face, while the other half is seen in ghostly outline. The man is myself, the moment long-ago, a never-to-be-forgotten moment, with a shifting meaning once clear but now grown more obscure with time and perceptual changes. A wintershed moment, I was setting out from New York due North in the dead of winter, not knowing or caring where I was going. It was the end of something and the start of something else, as every event must be. Our endings are in our beginnings as everyone should know.

Words Won't Work

2010-11-15T00:53:00.006-05:00

There is too much to write about and I've been thinking about swearing off the habit anyway, so I'll just show some pictures of what has been going on and on: house-fixing, motorcycle gangs, weird skies, I don't know what-all:

Hardworking days with rotten wood and a tranquil night by Gary's fantastic firepit. And a taxi night that suddenly turned violent when a masked motorcycle gang attacked my taxi on the upper level of the Queensborough Bridge at 1:30 a.m. before Halloween. (I won.) More of that later.

Pump Jacks

2010-10-04T23:58:00.009-04:00

I drove out to a small upstate town to buy pump jacks so that Gary and I can fix his house, which is structurally-impaired in the back because of a long-neglected roof leak. (80 years old.) I took the wrong exit off Route 32 and had to call to locate the place. I had timed it perfectly from East New York, and would have arrived exactly at the appointed time of 3, if I hadn’t turned late.

He gave new directions and I found the house about 15 minutes later. It was on a quiet tree-lined road with acreage between homes in the same town of Highland Mills, where I had lived for a couple of years in what seems like another life.

I saw a nice-looking couple of kids walking a big friendly dog with golden retriever and yellow lab mix, and stopped to ask where that numbered house was.

“It’s my house,” said the kid. I had expected an older guy; he was 17.

I pulled into the driveway, and they walked up with the dog, which was very anxious to meet me. We met. I ruffled his wintry fur, told them that he reminded me of my great old dog Finch, who’d had a similar mix. Finch might have been his great-grandfather, since he had been an experienced rope-breaker and unregenerate dog-womanizer all over the same town.

He put the dog back into the house, which was large and freshly-sided with a nice light gray vinyl. We walked to a back shed overflowing with tools that revealed a lifetime of working, and he showed me three pump jacks with extra braces. I had expected only the two he’d advertised.

He had told me on the phone that he was selling his dad’s tools.

“Your dad’s not working anymore?” I inquired.

“No.”

“How about I give you $75 for all three,” I offered.

“Sure,” he responded. The girl was standing nearby and didn’t say anything.

So I gave him the money and we carried the stuff to my van and loaded it. I was happy to get three jacks. It meant Gary and I could work the whole back of the house at once, and not have to relocate a jack in order to do it by halves.

“That’s a nice house,” I remarked as we finished loading. It occupied a small hill and had a big front porch and a long graveled driveway under a side entrance portico.

“It burned down,” he said simply. “It’s just been rebuilt.”

“It burned? You mean the whole house burned?”

“Yes, the whole thing.”

“Well, what for? I mean, what caused it?”

“They don’t know. Nobody knows. Inspectors were at it for months, and they still don’t know what caused it.”

“Could it have been arson? An electrical fire?”

“Nobody knows. My dad was in it.”

I was stunned.

“God! That’s terrible. I’m so sorry that happened,” I said lamely.

He nodded. He’d heard it before. He would be hearing it for the rest of his life.

He was a great-looking kid, clear skin and nice build, alert eyes, polite. He was going to be a strong working adult. But now I saw the resignation in his eyes. He had seemed older on the phone, and when I first met him I had thought he was mature for his age. His manner was mild, quiet, and accepting.

“That’s a life-changer, man,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said.

“I lost my dad when I was 15. He got run over by a car. It changed my life, my mother's, my sisters’ lives; everybody’s life would have been different if he had lived.”

He nodded.

“But it will hurt less as time passes,” I continued. “You’ll never get over it. But you can deal with it. I see you already are dealing with it. That’s pretty much what life is, a trial, a pretty hard trial sometimes, and all we can do is our best and deal with it as it comes. Whoever said life was easy was full of it. Life is hard, and maybe it’s supposed to be hard.”

He said he understood.

“You didn’t just lose your father; you lost your best advisor. Every time you make a mistake, you’re going to wonder what he would have advised you to do. When I got older, I wondered what my dad would think of me now. It’s a tough question. You see, you’ll never get to prove to him that you’re a man now. You’ll never see his approval when you do something right.”

He lowered his eyes and agreed.

“Is your education provided for? Do you have money for school and everything?”

“That’s taken care of,” he said. “I’m starting school next year.”

“What are you going to take?”

“He was an architect and engineer. I’m going to study engineering.”

“Yes! What kind of engineering?”

“I don’t know. I’m interested in architecture too. I want to be a builder.”

I was relieved somehow to hear it. The thought of his father burning to death had to be burning him up too every time he thought about it. When Sid had died, I kept imagining his living body being dragged down the Airline Highway by a car braking from 75 mph. I could almost feel it sometimes; tumbling and flipping and scraping and limbs being torn off, muscles being ripped, bones breaking, flesh tearing like wet paper, skull-crushed. Bloody tires. Did they roll over his eyes?

We shook hands goodbye and he went back in the house. She had gone in after the sale.

I sat in the van without starting it and thought about it. I felt like I had taken advantage of him with the extra pump jack. I walked to the side door and knocked.

When he answered I handed him two more fives.

“I didn’t come out here to make an unfair bargain,” I said. “That’s all I can afford for the other pump jack. People usually need at least two, and seldom just one."

He smiled.

“That’s right,” he said. “Thank you.”

I kept thinking about him on the way home through the coagulating stream of vehicles into New York. His whole future beclouded by an ugly memory, but himself fresh, fit, alert, and fragile but unbroken by a horrible family tragedy; and continuing anyhow with the realization that his life could never be the same, and there was nothing he could do about his dad dying in a fire but accept it.

The thoughts brought raw emotion out of me. I cried, feeling his loss.

I remembered that exact feeling when the bus had left New Orleans for Houston as Hurricane Audrey approached Cameron, La., in 1957. I had looked out the window of the Greyhound at New Orleans receeding under gray clouds and thought, “My life will never be the same.”

But I don't remember crying until 40 years later, when I finally let myself feel the enormity of what had happened when and after Sidney Havenar died on the Airline Highway.

Gary was as happy as a cat with a raw egg to see the jacks. Now we can get started fixing this house before hard winter arrives.

How Can They Go Wrong?

2010-08-29T03:15:00.007-04:00

He was a young man sturdily built, dressed nicely, and carrying a coat. I saw him come out of the bar and wasn't surprised when he got in and said, "Grand Central Station, please."

"Perfect," I said, putting the cab in gear. I wanted to head home over the 59th Street Bridge.

"Had enough partying?" I asked.

Surprised, he said, "Yes, frankly. It's too noisy and frantic. I have some work to do tomorrow and can't stay out later. My friends are all undergraduates, but I graduated last year, and can't do this anymore."

"I know what you mean. What kind of work?" I always ask that if I can.

It was the financial industry, of course. He lived in Connecticut, way upstate, where it was quieter and more peaceful.

"I know how it is," I said. "Well, like what are you, an analyst?"

He said yes and explained that he was in his first job and just learning the ropes.

"All you can do is work hard, pay your dues, and hope for the best results for your efforts," he concluded.

I thought about it while I maneuvered up First Avenue in the thickening late-evening traffic back to Queens and uptown. He looked like a nice guy. He probably had a nice girl friend, close family relations, and good prospects. He was well-mannered and alert, though he had had a couple of drinks.

"I know what you mean about quiet," I started. "I grew up in rural Louisiana, and I've lived in some pretty quiet places, from Nicaragua to the Far North of Canada. I lived in the Rockies, and on the beaches of Texas and California. New York is an acquired taste."

He agreed. I added that I was about to spit out the taste.

"It's such a different time, mine and yours. I grew up in the 40s and 50s, and although I was older than most of the Sixties people, that really was my generation too. All kinds of things were going on. First the Vietnam War, which was the seminal event of my generation, and the Civil Rights Movement, which was happening before and during the war. There were riots, protests, shootings, beatings, prisoner issues, womens' issues, prison riots, political assassinations, and the toppling of Nixon from the White House. Things were busting out all over, and it seems like everybody was involved somehow. I had been a marine for four years, and then I started following the antiwar movement and became a protester."

I turned left on 42nd Street and the traffic was sparse so that I had a clear shot to Grand Central. Waiting at a light, I said, "I keep thinking of what Che Guevera said: "One, two, many Vietnams." I waited for him to think about it all the way to the terminal. He didn't reply.

I pulled to the curb and turned to face him.

"You said all you have to do is work hard and pay your dues. I say it doesn't matter how much dues you pay as who you pay them to. Vietnam nearly ruined this country. Now we got two more Vietnams going, and more in the works in Iran, Sudan, Korea, and South America. It's going to topple this country like a house of cards, because war is corruption. If your work promotes it in any way, like war production or working for corporations or banks that are invested in these wars and profitting by them, you're digging your own grave."

"I thank you for that," he said.

He paid the fare and we smiled good night.

I forgot to tell him to read Mr. Baruch, by Margaret Coit. Everybody in Finance should read it.

All the bright young people,
so handsome and fine,
educated by wealthy parents,
so focused, so social,
and entitled--
walking hand-in-hand on The Bowery;
which ain't what it was.

Armed with knowledge,
support networks,
decent gigs and digs and looks,
and fortified with skills,
determination,
and credit cards--
plus wanting to do the right thing;
how can they go wrong?

Joe Finnen

2010-08-11T09:22:00.012-04:00

I'm sorry Joe Finnen is dead.
We drank together and talked.
Joe was sharp. He read books and he listened.
Joe appreciated ideas and would trade you even.

We felt the same way about the stupid government.
He wanted to shoot it down,
and I wanted to negotiate then.
But he knew more outlaws than I did.

Ironic and humorous,
He was the best pot dealer in town.
Sold it out of his boot
in a bar in Durango.

Everybody knew everybody,
But he was cool and natural about it.
Few ever saw.
None ever told.

Or I would walk home with him, not far,
where, outside his small rented place with Fran,
a big wild Irish rose tree thrived.
I'd never seen one before.

It was plush in summer with big yellow roses,
a carpet of them shading his porch
like an old green and yellow umbrella.
We joked and smoked there afternoons a-plenty.

Fran didn't like me of course.
"Don't take it personal," said Joe.
"She doesn't like anybody."
She feared I was a cop but soon got over that.

Fran had the nicest butt in town and Joe was proud of it.
She was Rocky Graziano's neice.
At their wedding, Fran's father had taken Joe aside.
"I love you Joe, but if you ever hit her, I'll kill you," he stated.

Irish Joe never hit petite Italian Fran, of course.
He wasn't that way anyway.
Joe was confident and tough and didn't have to prove it.
My best friends are all like that.

He was a tall rangy guy from Long Island,
Who'd moved to Colorado and loved it and stayed.
He had a thousand stories and so did I.
We hung together when I was around.

He'd first made love to Fran on a dark football field at night.
She was amazed he'd remembered that.
"Pretty good, Joe," she said.
Finally she became friendlier.

We had a standing joke:
He would buy me a shot of B & B,
And I would break out in handcuffs.
Because he'd bought me one and I'd flown down the road to a DUI.

Finally he managed to build a house but I was gone then.
I sent him some hash once from New Orleans,
concealing it so well he threw it away with the packaging.
Luckily I called and he got it back.

I left him like I left all my friends,
Touchstones over half the globe.
I called or wrote when the loneliness got too bad.
He always answered and helped me keep breathing.

He was the only guy I ever knew
who ate popcorn one kernal at a time;
an amazing act of self-discipline.
He cracked up once when he overheard me using a $20 word.

"Antithesis!" his laugh tickled my ear from across the bar.
He made me feel good.
You would have liked Joe.
He listened.

We both knew a guy, a survivalist militia guy,
Who is still on the FBIs Most-Wanted List.
The Feebies grilled him for days.
Joe never told them a thing.

Last time I called, Fran said Joe had died of cancer,
sudden and painful.
All I could say was
I'm sorry Joe Finnen is dead.

The System Works

2010-08-07T04:24:00.009-04:00

World trade is a pure mess and getting messier. Fires in Russia cause higher bread prices in America and wheat shortages all over the poorer Third World; an oil spill in America eventually affects the ecology business and health of the entire planet; politics business and religion are corrupt from top to bottom; the American people and most of the people on the globe are largely-ignorant, badly-educated, and in some way depraved; materialism has run amok and hedonism is the order of the day; we live in a “friendly fascist” military state, and military “needs” are sucking us dry while our physical plant falls apart and capitalism produces more and more useless shit. Millions labor in worthless industries from flipping hamburgers to making hydrogen bombs, and the system can't be altered because they would lose their jobs and the profits which the wealthy suck from consumerism would fall. But “socialism,” which rules only in Cuba, is somehow demonic, and ultimately it always is the laboring classes who are blamed when the economy goes down in flames. The capitalist system is anti-social in character, false in philosophy, defective in spirit, and has a mean stingy and violent temperament. "Democracy" is a sad joke, the Illusion of the Age, and the excuse for every sort of heinous atrocity our rich nation does to poor ones. Most of what people are sure of is absolute doubletalk, total bullshit, and impervious to proof. Religion is politics and politics is religion. Triviality and irrelevance pervade every aspect of American life from business to art. Americans are the most-insecure and fearful people in the world. They also are the hardest-working and least-rewarded of all working classes in the industrial western world. Their "culture" is the Culture of Television: pure Thought Control, where they get their stupid ideas and idle away their lives lazing before imprisoning televisions. They live in an aura of self-congratulation and fantastic self-regard, and they are completely blind to the hard-won advantages that peoples of other industrial nations enjoy as the result of labor struggles for rights that now are taken for granted. The beliefs of "the American people" are almost mystical, and in fact the whole myth of America and most of their stupid religions is nothing less than believing in magic. They "pray" for things and favors as if their doing-so will persuade or alter the plans of an all-knowing all-controlling god which they themselves do not believe in. They have no faith but believe in "luck." Their "praying" is an act of magic. Americans are in about the same place where the “good Germans” were during the rise of corporate (fascist) government in pre-war Germany. All it will take is for us to involve ourselves in yet-another expensive and unwinnable war, and a Hitler will emerge from the resulting chaos to accuse and lynch the usual scapegoats for the failures of the Old Regime and the stupid, wasteful, mind-killing capitalist warmongering system.

And the President is too inexperienced and ultimately ignorant to know that retreat from a battlefield where his army is dominant is no disgrace, but tactically and strategically wise. He is wading deeper and deeper into "the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on." Just as it was in Vietnam and a dozen other places, President Obama and his cohorts are afraid to leave because they will look "weak." In fact they are weak. They will be weak until they decide that peace is the better and only option.

The fact that the American people are dumber and poorer than ever proves that the system works.

Renewal

2010-07-20T21:14:00.004-04:00

“I love your eyes,” said a lovely brown skin cashier.

“I love your eyes,” I said back.

A black man standing near emitted a soft, appreciative laugh and walked away.

She was about 20.

I’m about 69.

Our eyes loved each other.

I wanted to say more than I could,

But she was too lovely for words.

For hours I felt like a new man.

Chance Meeting

2010-07-05T03:24:00.008-04:00

I ran into her on a streetcorner near a lake in Stockholm. We simultaneously said, "What a surprise!" She said hello, I said hello. She asked what was I doing in Sweden.

On impulse, having some sudden cash, I had flown there for a mere two days, because it was all I could afford, and still make Amsterdam.

"I'm passing through on my way to Amsterdam."

"Why are you going to Amsterdam?" she asked in that perfectly melodic voice I remembered so well.

"I'm going there to smoke some marijuana and hashish and get high and maybe get laid," I replied.

She frowned. She didn't like that at all. I remembered her walking into another room when I had smoked with some friends.

"But you must know that ultimately those drugs are damaging to your body and mind," she said with the perfect assurance that she couldn't be wrong, not about that, because she is a doctor.

I laughed.

"Is that what they are saying? Still saying? Well tell them I said to go duck their heads in a vat of acid and call it hairspray. I'm going to get so stoned I wake up on another planet."

"But this is a very nice planet. We have many nice things. Beautiful women, for example, and strong, handsome men. You won't"...she laughed..."find them on another planet, but on this one. And you don't need to be stoned."

"Ummm. I haven't seen any beautiful women lately, and hunky men don't do much for me."

Of course it was a lie, a deliberate lie, because a beautiful woman was standing in front of me. I meant to wound just a little, because, like me, she is getting older. Of course she is a marvel to look at still, but I would be damned if I would give her any advantage.

"Why did you come to Stockholm?"

"I heard it was very clean."

"Oh yes, it is very clean."

"It is almost perfect."

"Ah hah," she breathed that small laugh that I remembered. "Well, certainly not perfect."

"Hmmm. I thought it was. Everything is so clean and orderly, and the people look happy and energetic. It looks almost perfect to me. No homeless people, no cops with guns. Perfect. But not cheap."

"No." She seemed distracted for a moment.

"But how did you happen to be here?"

"Do you think I was following you? Do you suspect me of stalking you? Do you think I arranged this? Is that why you keep asking that? No, neither of those. I just happened to be walking around, and there you were."

"How remarkable."

"Yes, nearly as remarkable as our meeting in Managua."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Nothing."

"But you must have meant something."

"No, I didn't mean anything. What could I mean?"

"You said our meeting in Managua. You implied it was not, ah, accidental."

"Coincidental. Well, I think the Sandinistas wanted to identify their friends and enemies. And you and they were rather close. And a lovely woman knows who she is showing her ass to."

"Showing my ass?"

"You came out the door across the street right after I came out of mine. You crossed the street to walk in front of me. I caught up. You knew I would. Maybe you needed to investigate me. Maybe with an eye to using me for something in the future."

"For what?"

"I have no idea. We never had a future."

"I didn't intentionally meet you. You approached me. Of course, a woman is always prepared to be approached by a man. I liked you."

"Hmmm. I wonder if that's true."

"Of course it's true. Why would I say something that wasn't true? You know I did."

"You might be a pathological liar for all I know."

"You know I am not."

"Yes, I know you are not pathological."

"Only a liar?"

"Ha, ha. I didn't say that."

"But, you implied it."

"You speak English so well."

"Most Swedish people do speak English," she lilted.

"Yes, I know. You told me. You told me a lot of things."

"But why wouldn't you think it was a coincidence?"

"I'm just naturally suspicious of communists."

"Well, thank you very much!" She said with a little indignation. "Why?"

"They're very secretive, you know. You never know what they are up to, what they are really thinking."

"I was open and honest with you."

"And I with you."

"You became very angry over nothing, really."

"And my anger frightened you?"

"Well yes, it alarmed me."

"You walk around with no protection in free-fire zones, and a little anger alarmed you?"

"You had no reason to be angry."

"Oh well."

"So. You are in Sweden. And you are going to Amsterdam. When are you going there?"

"The sooner the better, heh? Well, tonight I am going. No more chance meetings."

"I hope it was chance."

"I hope so too. But I'm afraid it's another trick of Fate."

"Fate?"

"You know, the gods."

"The gods?"

"Is there an echo here?"

She was imperturbable.

"You don't believe in the gods, do you? But that is so, so..."

"Banal?"

"Well, yes, it is banal. But it is so bourgeois, so childish."

"Yes, I know. Well, I'm just a child at heart."

"You are."

"Yes."

"You really are."

"Yes, I really am. I'm a case of arrested emotional development, in fact."

"You told me that you were paranoid-schizophrenic."

"I just said that to punish myself."

"You mean that you are not one? Why would you punish yourself by saying that?"

"I don't know. Because I fouled everything up again. It was the worst thing I could think to say about myself. But I'm neither paranoid or schizophrenic."

"How do you know?"

"My psychiartrist told me."

"You have a psychiartrist?"

"I've had many psychiartrists. Haven't you ever had one?"

"No, I haven't."

"Yes, well. Some people are near-perfect."

"I didn't think you were paranoid. But perhaps schizophrenic."

"Believe me, I'm obsessive-compulsive, narcissistic, anti-social, histrionic, and majorally-depressed, but not paranoid-schizophrenic. I made that up just to make myself look worse than I am. I don't know why. It was perverse. Well yes, to punish myself, I suppose. They say that for want of a god who will throw us into hellfire, we put ourselves there."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"So am I. But, oh well."

"So, you suspect me of being duplicitous?"

"That's a good word."

"There were things I could never tell you."

"Well, I guess."

"Things that don't concern you at all. Things that have nothing to do with you."

"I'm sure of that."

"I had more reason to be suspicious of you."

"I know. You wondered if I was CIA." I laughed. "I wondered the same about you. But the CIA would not give me a job. I know, I applied."

"You applied to the CIA?"

"Yes, I did." I laughed out loud.

"But why did you?"

"Just for a laugh. I have to laugh sometimes."

"They gave you an interview?"

"I applied online. I didn't get very far. As soon as I listed my education level...ninth grade dropout and an auto-didact, the screen went black."

She laughed at that. God she had a beautiful laugh.

"What would you have done for them?"

"If I had gotten further in the application I would have asked to be an assassin."

"An assassin?"

"A hit man. You know, to kill people."

She must have seen the joke and thought it unfunny. She fell quiet, and deliberated for a few moments and looked out at the water with me. Then she stepped back a foot. A wind lifted her blonde locks then let them down.

"It was sad, what happened to us, Mike."

"Yes, it was sad. I cried the whole year long."

"But you shouldn't suspect me of things, of doing things to manipulate you, you know. I didn't."

"Am I suspecting you of anything you didn't do? By the way, when you flew to Moscow, did you stop at any offices? File any reports? Ask for anything? Did you make a report to the Interior Ministry in Nicaragua? And wasn't that a coincidence, getting a ride from Commandante Cabezas, when we were hitchhiking to San Juan del Sur?"

She let that pass. It had been such a put-up job that I hadn't even mentioned it. We were hitchhiking to San Juan del Sur on her insistence. She waved the first ride off, and then we just happened to catch a ride with the official who was in charge of keeping track of all the Americans in Nicaragua. And she just happened to be a communist official from Sweden.

I looked away at the water again. It was gray and choppy. It reminded me of Lake Managua, which had always looked dreary to me.

"I admired you in Nicaragua for awhile."

Her beautiful voice was getting to me. I had known it would.

"Amazing. Well I'm just an old angry white cab driver in New York again."

"What are you angry about?"

"The same things you're angry about. We just have different roles to play."

She looked at me tolerantly. Her blue eyes looked bluer, and there were wrinkles around them that had not been there before. She had gained very little weight, and still was sexy as hell, and, I swear, wearing that same diaphanous, violet dress.

"You were so disorganized. You didn't even have a driver's license, and I had expected you to drive us around in a rented car."

"Yes, I am disorganized," I admitted. "I probably have some brain damage from being hit on the head so much."

She didn't pursue that.

"I see you still have that dress."

"Yes. It is my favorite one."

"Mine too."

"Mike."

"Ah," I said. It made me tired. I almost invited her for coffee. I didn't know if she would accept and didn't want to risk it. Suddenly I didn't think I could talk to her anymore. I wanted to repair the relationship so badly I couldn't stand it, but knew I never could. What difference would it make?

"I've got to go. My ferry leaves early tomorrow, and I have a long trip. Good luck to you." I shook her hand. "Goodbye."

I heard her say goodbye as I turned to leave. Politeness wears me out sometimes. I walked off and didn't look back. I imagine she did too. It didn't matter to me. I had gotten what I had come for, amazed at how easily I had found her. I hadn't really expected to. Now let her wonder.

I could say more, but it's a very long, complicated story.

I got so stoned in Amsterdam. But I didn't get laid. I didn't even want to.

The Rule of Law

2010-07-02T01:43:00.006-04:00

Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia was holding forth on immigration to the press: "Part of the reason we have been so successful as a country is because we live by the rule of law. We do live by its enforcement and transparency in our judiciary. And I think some of the ire right now is having to do with the illegal immigration, and, frankly, the flouting of the law."

I told my friend Gary about the statement and we scoffed together.

"Tell it to the Indians."

"Isn't the reason we've "been so successful as a country" because we stole everything on the continent?"

"Transparency in our judiciary, like secret warrants for secret courts and secret crimes about "National Security, and deletion of records of CIA torture sessions?"

"'Rule of law,' like when we ignored international laws to invade Iraq after being fed a feast of lies?"

"Like when we flouted the UN Charter?"

"'Rule of law,' like when we invaded Vietnam and ended up killing six and a half million people, destroying 60% of the forests, and sowing the land with poisonous pesticides so birth defects will recur for generations?"

"The place where we dropped three times the number of bombs in all of World War Two?"

"Like the law that gave us the right to leave 45 million bomb craters in Vietnam?"

"That 'rule of law?' Which rule of law are you talking about?"

"The law of the land, the law of the marketplace, or the law of the jungle?"

We went on like that for a few more moments. Gary and I are usually on the same page when it comes to official doubletalk and unofficial hypocrisy.

"The rule of law" is another of those shibboleths like "the American people,"
and "the American way of life." It is nearly meaningless, because it can mean anything.

Laws of treaties forbade American "settlers" from building on Indian land. Settlers moved in and built anyway. Indians attacked. Settlers asked Government to protect them from "Indian depredations;" Congress passed a new law; the army came to the rescue, pushing the Indians out, and killing them as the need arose; or for sport.

The rule of law.

Harold Pinter said, "Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay."

All the old crimes are new again. The crime of the Indians, the crime of Vietnam, the crime of Nicaragua and El Salvador, the crime of Chile, the crime of Haiti, the crime of American neo-colonial capitalist-imperialism, the crime of Iraq and Afghanistan, is ongoing and severe. People are bombed into becoming our sworn enemies forever. A tenacious war is escalating. Lies are being told about the other side.

Rapacious international gangsters posing as corporations are descending on Afghanistan to reap supposedly "newly-found" trillions in mining interests. Opium is in the deal. Oil pipelines are in the deal. Billions in arms contracts and supply contracts and "security" contracts are going down; the middle class is being gutted for a nice meal, and the poor as usual are always with us, and thousands are getting rich.

And no one is guilty. No one is to blame. We all are innocent.

The Rule of Law marches on.

Beautiful Again

2010-06-25T13:41:00.011-04:00

I was working on something and suddenly she was sitting there with her chin resting on her hand. I could not have more surprised.

"Would you like some company?" she asked.

I had sworn to myself that if I ever saw her again I would not even speak to her.

"Sure," I replied. "I'd love some company."

God she was beautiful. But she looked different somehow; tired; more mature; still absolutely beautiful; and those eyes.

Then I woke up.

It was summer, 2010. I was 68. I was walking down Logan Street, returning from a colonoscopy that had hurt like hell. I had a feeling that this would be my last summer. I looked intently at the green trees and blue sky.

How beautiful, I thought.

Love I Guess

2010-06-20T04:27:00.008-04:00

Okay, I painted that grimy black piano in an effort to lift my mood...didn't work...took forever to dry properly...now I'll clean the keys and get it tuned...someday I might learn to play it...someday after my novel is written and published and I've won the Nobel Prize for Literature...I love the piano because it's percussive and as you might know I meant to play the drums...the story of why that didn't happen is the story of my life...but who cares?..I told it already.

I tacked a map of Louisiana over the un-usable fireplace...I might as well admit it, it's my home...but I'm an alien there too...not to mention persona non gratis...New Orleans I'm sorry bores me to death...one bloody party after another...public drunkenness...the worst streets in America...the most-corrupt city government...some of the dumbest bastards you ever met...I know it seems cynical...okay I'm cynical...screw your frigging parties and your Mardis Gras too...Jesus what a boring spectacle.

But Louisiana is beautiful...I'm talking about the natural world, that is...the piney woods and cypress swamps...marshes and bayous...birds and...butterflies...what's left of 'em...they've been disappearing long before the current obscenity of an oil spill...I counted...there are only four cardinals in New Orleans and not a red-winged blackbird for 50 miles around it...I saw one tiger swallowtail in 14 months and perhaps one black swallowtail...they have the butterflies caged in the new "Insectarium" I hear...it reminds me of a vision I had once...the Metropolitan Museum has gobbled up Central Park and there is only one tree left...in the middle of the museum with a plaque: "An oak tree of the original Central Park, which once occupied this space."

Some of the rudest people in the world live in Louisiana...but they think they are polite..."southern hospitality" don't you know...there was said to be a white liberal living somewhere between the Sabine and Pearl Rivers, the boundaries of Texas and Mississippi...but it was only a rumor...and "liberal" there means liking Jimmy Carter...there are some liberals in New Orleans but they mostly are young people from other parts...New York, San Francisco, Paris...who came there to help out after the hurricane and liked the authentic dirty-ness and the palmetto bugs so much they stayed...they find something charming and appealing about those soft southern accents and the underlying hard-bitten meanness...oh and the parties the parties the parties...and the parades...good god the endless parades...and what they have to parade about I haven't understood yet...city parish and state government is so rotten and corrupt they think it's the natural state of things...between Baton Rouge and New Orleans oil and chemical refineries along the river have turned the corridor into "Cancer Alley"...they know as much about their own true history as I know about nuclear physics...I know a guy so mean he cut a dude's leg off then burned him to death...true it was revenge for the guy raping and killing a woman and her baby...and he's a well-known musician.

And there are the bone-crushing Saints of course...oh everybody loves the violence and boastfulness of it...but it bores the shit out of me...football my ass...they should take up ping-pong and chess...if anybody can invent a good game named "Corruption" it will sell like po-boys there...everybody knows how to play it already...it's known as hooray for me and fuck you...it's more popular than Jesus, but you won't find anybody to admit it...out in the country people have chronic sore knees from praying...and the only thing that hasn't happened in New Orleans yet to my knowledge is a mass killing in a church...bullets fly around like bees at any time of the day or night in any part of the city...white people whisper that "at least it's them killing each other"...meaning you-know-who all right...some whites see the horrendous murder rate among young blacks as a blessing...you think I'm shitting you?

I grew up a mile from one of the biggest oil refinery complexes in America...it's 10 times bigger than it was when I was a kid...I came over the Earl K. Long Bridge in Lake Charles at night and it looked like a Las Vegas of lights in my old hometown of Westlake...the old First Baptist Church has been replaced by a casino...the swamps are now parking lots...but I wrote about this in Tending Graves and Smashing Idols...in my mind's eye I see the hundreds of thousands of flamingoes and cranes that used to nest there...but people need jobs don't you know...and the Gulf is full of oil wells...more than three thousand of them I think...and numerous deepwater wells already pumping I hear...so the birds can find some other place to nest...millions nest in the Chandeleur Islands of course...where the oil is landing...oh well they are only birds...Louisianans would prefer nuclear war to losing their oil incomes...there is no comparable profit in flamingoes and cranes...and the future? oh Jesus will take care of that.

I wish I could think of something good to say about Louisiana but with the mood I'm in I couldn't find something good to say about Heaven...if there were such a place...I had an uncle once...he's dead I think...at least I hope he is...he was in the oil business his whole adult life...he told me once that large parts of the acquifier of West Texas was ruined long ago by oil companies pumping salt water into the ground to force the oil up...I think he told the truth though he was dishonest about other things.

But Louisiana is my heartaching home despite the fact that I find most of the people ludicrous shallow and boring...try having a sane conversation with those fundamentalist know-nothings who recently discovered politics...they discovered it on FOX...enough said?..I had one give me a lecture on Ayn Rand believe it or not...can you imagine?...I read that mean bitch and rejected her philosophy 45 years ago, but 30 years after she was absolutely discredited and her golden boy Ronald Reagan had tripled the national debt, sacrificed 45 unarmed marines in Lebanon, killed 250,000 Salvadorans and 30,000 Nicaraguans, illegally traded arms with terrorists, fired 25,000 air traffic controllers and upped the air accident rate 25%, and beat bloody hell out of defenseless Grenadians who were building an airstrip for tourists...to show what a macho guy he was after the marine debacle in Lebanon...where he cut and ran like the bloody craven empty-headed coward he was...this guy had just discovered her...and John Galt...trying to have a reasonable conversation with him was like explaining English literature to Eric the cat...and not nearly as pleasurable...Eric at least listens...and I never know how much he understands.

I was listening to this song with its incredible guitar riffs and almost felt love again.

Once I thought I saw you in a crowded hazy bar,
dancing on the light from star to star.
Far across a moonbeam,
I know that's who you are.
I saw your brown eyes burning once before.
You are like a hurricane.
There's calm in your eye.
And I'm getting blown away,
somewhere safer where the feelings stay.
I want to love you but I'm getting blown away.

I am just a dreamer,
but you are just a dream.
You could have been anyone to me.
Before that moment you touched my lips,
That perfect feeling when time just slips
away between us and our foggy trip.
You are like a hurricane.
There's calm in your eye,
and I'm getting blown away
somewhere safer where the feelings stay.
I want to love you but I'm getting blown away.
Blown away.

You are just a dreamer,
and I am just a dream.
You could have been anyone to me.
Before that moment you touched my lips,
that perfect feeling when time just slips
away between us on our foggy trip.
You are like a hurricane.
There's calm in your eye.
And I'm getting blown away,
somewhere safer where the feelings stay.
I want to love you but I'm getting blown away.

Hurricane by Neil Young

My friend hasn't dusted in the 35 years I've known him; doesn't bother him, doesn't bother me, and doesn't seem to bother Buddha.

Mineral Wealth Estimate Excites Afghan Officials - NYTimes.com

2010-06-15T03:22:00.000-04:00

Mineral Wealth Estimate Excites Afghan Officials - NYTimes.com

Corner the Opium Market

2010-05-24T02:02:00.008-04:00

ABC reports that marines are paying off poppy farmers for fields they burned by mistake. They even are encouraging the farmers to grow poppy, commiserating when the harvest is poor, and wishing them a better crop next year. As for the opium that finances our dreaded enemy the Taliban, the marines say they will interdict and catch the traffickers, and fight drugs that way. They've confiscated hundreds if not thousands of pounds of the stuff already, say the marines.

This all is patently ridiculous.

The US probably could win the war overnight by the simple expedient of buying this and all future poppy harvests at double the price the Taliban is able to pay. President Obama could corner the opium market. Opium is after all a commodity, and perhaps the most-important medical commodity around, because it is the base of a battalion of pain-killers, of which morphine is only one. Why not buy and stockpile this valuable and necessary commodity?

Aha! It would bring down the price of dope and therefore medicine; it would force the heroin-makers to spend more for product, and thereby constrict the outlaw market. Heroin-users would have to pay more for the illegal drugs, and presumably some would rather quit for economic reasons, as many cigarette-smokers have done.

Who could outbid the United States Government? Certainly not the Taliban.

A President who did this truly would be "Jeffersonian." It is exactly the sort of thing Tom Jefferson would do if he were in the White House now. President Jefferson transacted the greatest real estate deal in history with the Louisiana Purchase. How did it come about?

President Jefferson asked his War Secretary how much it would cost to fight France for the territory stretching from Louisiana to North Dakota, and was told three-point-five million dollars. Instead of spending it on killing, he decided to offer Napoleon the $3.5 million instead, and Bonaparte, strapped for cash by his wars with every king in Europe, accepted the offer. What was a distant colony to him, if France fell?

France fell anyway, because of Napoleon's mego-maniacal stupidity and royal European vengeance for the murder of the King and Queen of France by "The Revolution." But not all was lost. Napoleon had after all enriched France with what are now known as its "national treasures," meaning the booty he looted from every country he temporarily conquered. The treasures he stole from Russia to Egypt built modern France, and most of them are still in the museums he constructed, like the Louvre, and are more-valuable today than when he robbed them.

Oh well, some good came of it anyway, from the eventual births of Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, and some very good books.

Of course, the United States Government will never try such a simple strategy to alter the course of its losing war in Vietnamistan.

Be mindful that the king of Saudi Arabia is reported to have told President George W. Bush that there was no need to invade Iraq in order to topple Saddam. He advised his friend George to buy the loyalty of the whole Iraqi Army for a mere billion dollars, and the suddenly-rich generals would overthrow Saddam for him.

It isn't known how much President Bush knows about Thomas Jefferson, or whether he would want to be historically associated with such a rebel .

But the Arabian king's solution was too simple, and there was no glory in it for George and the gang, and much less profit.

The same reasoning probably applies in Afghanisnam.

New York Spring

2010-05-11T08:15:00.001-04:00

The Spring plantings in the median of Park Avenue are in full bloom. There are white tulips and black ones, red and yellow ones, and other nice plants everywhere, and the warming weather is upon us. It was a long, cold winter, and hardship for many. A recent report said that Bronx County is the hungriest county in America, and Brooklyn is close behind. There are lovely plantings there, too; but most of them are in the wealthier areas of course.

The ladies are out in full bloom too. As Nature would have it, they look on an old man with a camera with a certain amount of suspicion, with good reason; we appreciate them more as we age and wither. They know it, and it disgusts them to know they are attractive to us too.

A commercial mural about something I don't understand being installed professionally at the corner of Houston and Bowery. Nearly everyone in the crowd was taking pictures, so I stopped my cab and snapped a few too.

Lately I realized I hardly ever look up at the tall buildings. Most of us see the street scene and skyscrapers are so taken for granted we hardly notice them except as background. There's a lot going on up there. I find myself fascinated by the exceptionally complicated polygons of angled grids glass and reflections composing these scenes. John Lennon's Steel & Glass comes to mind...

The buildings of Park Avenue South (the poor end) seen from the Park Avenue Bridge at Grand Central Station. The speed tunnel has been changed to one-way North. The narrow tunnel suffered too many collisions. It is impossible to make the light at 40th St. without excessive speed though. Ask a professional taxi driver.

The Park Avenue Building is one of the jewels in the crown of New York's swankiest street. Behind it looms the Met Life Building (one of them) cloaked in the mist of a rainy day. Every time I drive around these buildings and Grand Central Station, I remember that we would have lost Grand Central when powerful real estate groups sought to tear it down and build another modern atrocity. It would have happened, had not Jackie Kennedy Onassis assumed the chair of The Committee to Save Grand Central Station. After all, her great-grandfather Cornelius Vanderbilt built Grand Central Station. Tearing it down would have been a mistake worse than the demolition of the original Pennsylvania Station, an architectural masterpiece, replaced by the banality of the present Penn Station. Older New Yorkers who remember Penn Station still shake their heads in wonderment at the stupidity of the men who tore it down. Right on, Jackie-O.

Interior shots of the original Pennsylvania Station. Sunlight poured in, eliminating the need for much electricity in the days when electricity was an adolescent.

It was a kinder and gentler skyline if you ask me (nobody does.) Manhattan may have been poorer, but it had a human scale altogether lacking in today's imperial building boom. You could see practically the whole island from a five-story building.

The still-magnificent Flatiron Building at the junction of Fifth Avenue and Broadway at 23rd St. The first modern building constructed with structural steel, it's triangular shape convinced New Yorkers it was unstable, and for a long time people walked with tredpidation in its vicinity, thinking a wind might push it over.

Disgust

2010-04-19T02:08:00.007-04:00

the impossibility of helping anybody do anything anymore...the cold indifference of men who refuse to act brotherly in order to protect their own rights and guard their own interests...the fear behind it all...many are cowardly and base...they cheat everybody, and say it is because "everybody does it."

Yeah, this is all about me, the raw wood of the unvarnished truth.

I wish I had stayed with carpentry. I gave it a few years of the seventies in New York, Virginia, North Carolina, and Texas. I worked for some pretty good carpenters. One guy I worked with could drive nails with his eyes shut. That was before the cussed nail-gun appeared. Ugh. I hate that damned machine. Speed the work up to make more money and drive down the cost of labor. Hire fewer carpenters. The ease of the gun puts excess nails where no nails belong, badly set because of an angle. Because no hammer can swing in that space, the painter can't set the nail either, and has to cut the head off or pry the nail out with sidecutters. There goes your perfect stairwell.

I worked for a fellow who would take a few measurements, go below and without referring to a chart, cut a hip roof on the ground and throw it up to us a board at a time to be nailed in place; compound angles and a perfect fit. I probably could have attained that degree of skill, so at least I could say there is one thing I can do well. As it is, there is no such thing.

No I don't really wish I'd stayed with carpentry. Too many splinters. I wish I had stayed in the Marine Corps. Maybe I'd have been killed in Vietnam with the rest of my outfit, and I'd be a bloody hero now.

At any rate, I'd be out of here.

I wish I'd never left Westlake, La. Maybe I'd a-had a job in the chemical plants there, walking around with a clipboard and a gas mask, seeing how much poison I could safely release into the lungs of Calcasieu Parish that day. I'd be retired with a good pension a house of my own and umpire of the local softball team. I could walk over and see my mother's and my grandparents' graves every day. Believe it or not, I feel pretty good when I'm standing there that near to them. I wish there was room for me.

I wish I'd never met my wife that's for damned sure. Then we wouldn't have had that damned kid and I wouldn't be sitting here worrying about his fucked-up head and kicking myself in the ass for being a bad father and missing her for nearly 40 years.

I also wish I had never wanted to be a writer or an artist. I wish I had given up the thought when I penned those first words in that first notebook in the bowling alley in Harahan, La., in 1963. When those cops showed up wanting to see what I had written because the owner thought I was casing the place for a robbery, I should have just quit it right then. It was probably a warning from God. I probably should have been an over-the-counter salesman and retailer.

I wish I had stayed a newspaper reporter by shrugging off the preposterous hypocrisy of the news media and writing about the antiwar movement the way they wanted it written. I could think of myself as a muckraker while defending the Establishment. I wish I had become an editor "where I really might make a difference." Har har de har har.

I wish I had never smoked a joint, never taken lsd, never heard of the freaking antiwar movement, and didn't give a damn about the civil or human rights of anybody except me. I wish I had kept those suits and ties and worked my way up into the higher echelons of the Cosmodemonic Industrial Complex and kicked some ass in the market place. Maybe I'd be sitting on a nice shady verandah in Brazil right now with a beauty waiting for me on the couch. I wish I had never believed in "the American dream."

I wish I had never met Cindy S., Joey B., Jill W., Madeline H., Ursula W., Margareta N., and Meryl M. I wish I had never loved any of 'em. I loved each of them as well as I could, and each left me with lingering pain and lower self-esteem. None accepted any blame or responsibility whatever for the failed relationship. It was always something I had done or not done. Like a damned fool I accepted the blame and spent years punishing myself for it. At the end of each, deception and dishonesty about their true thoughts and feelings finished us off. They couldn't have hurt me more if they had planned it. The spaces between relationships became longer and wider. I came to feel like a male-reject in a woman's world, where they choose the winners and discard the losers at their whim and fancy, naturally with an eye to prosperity security comfort and above all fun. They decide, making up and changing the rules now and then (today, gentle, womanly men are the rage)
while we pass before them exposing our strengths and vulnerabilities, wearing what they like, smelling how they like, walking talking and acting in a way they like, passing their secret tests, or it is take a hike buddy, there's a hundred more waiting to make a pass. They have so much sex that by 30 many are rather fucked-out and tired of it, but say that men are "obsessed with sex," without regard for the obvious fact that most men are starved for it. The prisons are full of them. So many women take sex for granted, it's so easy to get. They lie their asses off to men especially about sex, because it is their power, their exclusive and guarded power, to give it or not. Of course it's bloody Nature at work, and Nature, if you didn't know it, is a bitch.

.

The things they said or wrote to me finally in the end hurt my feelings terribly. They couldn't have planned worse words to wound me. I remember every insult. Each of them went on to more successful and satisfying relationships until they either found Mr. Right or gave up on him altogether. One married a super-rich Japanese businessman, another became a successful art dealer, another is living a happy old age in Paris, one is a retired and well-off editor, another is a successful doctor in a foreign country, one is probably dead and the other I have no idea at all but I'm sure she's happier than I am about it.

It angers me sometimes, seeing the wreckage of my life, understanding how much time I've wasted looking for her, doing self-destructive things to numb my pain after I lost her, knowing my unsatisfied hunger for a compatible partner, and making me want just to stay away from them.

But I wish I had stayed in Lake Charles and married that nice blonde tomboy girl whose name I can't remember, who liked me.

Above all I wish I had never stayed with this writing shit. Maybe I would be normal.

Forty-seven years ought to be enough to discover whether you have any talent, don't you agree?

It is possible to go your whole life and fail in every undertaking you ever undertook. It is possible to reason logically from a false premise. It is possible to make one mistake after another until you believe you can't get anything right. It is possible to live in solitude and loneliness your whole life for no other reason than your refusal to give up hope and die. It is possible to study your ass off trying to do something well and never get it right. It is possible to try and try and never succeed. It is possible that persistence will produce nothing. It is possible that everyone you ever tried to know love or help ended in a failed relationship. It is possible to have known so little contentment and happiness that life itself is a misery. It is possible to have never been successful or satisfied. It is possible to be forever misunderstood. It is possible to write for 47 years without knowing you haven't the talent for it. It is possible to conclude that life without success is impossible. It is possible for a situation to become hopeless against your will. It is possible to live a whole life and never meet your mate. It is possible to find her and lose her and never get over it.

It is possible to go 30 years without a massage and never realize how much you needed one, because your body is so tightly-wound in a stance that keeps you standing in a stiff mental wind.

I wish I had joined the Merchant Marine and shipped out all over the world, just another sailor in another port, making money lying on the deck reading and steaming from place to place, the whole freaking human world...the whole nightmare of civilization...out-of-sight most of the time. But not even that would not have satisfied my wanderlust, which became more intense as time went on.

I wish I had gone to Europe in the sixties when everybody else was going. Maybe I'd be civilized now. Maybe I wouldn't feel like a hungry animal chewing his foot off in a trap. Maybe a couple of months around a fire on the beach of a Greek island with a group of educated and sexy Europeans would have matured and mellowed me out and I wouldn't feel like a hunted animal. Maybe I would have married a Swede and would be living in a cabin we built on a fjord or whatever, eating fresh fish and making love everyday.

I'm going to delete this blog pretty soon. I wish I had never started it. It looks like it's moving but it's not going anywhere. I'm going to re-read the whole thing and flush out the crap and see how I feel before I do it.

Not for Sale

2010-04-12T04:35:00.008-04:00

A dreamy paralysis from hacking Sunday night and pressing on...seeking a moment of clarity...I've done everything I could to avoid looking at the white background on a laptop screen...I cleaned this place...folded my clothes...paced the floor...glared malevolently at the screen...do I dare go into Word and start it again?...it's too late to try...I'll never get to sleep...I don't know if I'm too empty or too full...fleeting impressions of stone & concrete & glass & lights & other cars flying past my vision all night...finding a driving rhythm...the right speed and the right path and getting there as fast and efficiently as possible...looking far ahead...seeing traffic jams develop and avoiding them...concentration...looking everywhere...outpacing the other cabs...feeling pride in it...and subtle interactions with passengers...reading their postures and what they say and don't say...keeping my mouth shut and listening...and feeling my life slip away before I can describe an arc...my mind in a dreamy paralysis looking for a mood...I'm still lost in Tracy Chapman's voice..."it's only smoke and ashes, baby"...God I can't stand it sometimes...the intensity of my life the relentless humm in my head...intensity thriving in my spine and vibrating in my being despite sore muscles and dying lungs...the tension of my lifeline stretched like a chord on a geodesic sphere...the hub my tetrahedonal mindset...aloft here miles above the fray for decades watching involved but detached ...understanding suddenly and seeing a veiny path through dense forests of depraved society to a separate peace...sometimes I feel indestructible like two pyramids base-to-base...even knowing that almost anything can crush me, still feeling like nothing can smoke me ...nothing can make me fall apart or explode me...nothing can defeat me and death will be my victory...the essence of me is untouchable...I can't see and can't understand it but I can feel it...I seem to soar even as I plummet crippled hopeless broken alone and unknown to the hard ground that will absorb me or my ashes...sharing our common fate to be forgotten.

"It looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still." (Dylan)

First-person-writing is personal...it's not as easy as you might think...you have to take risks and be honest...or be at least a convincing liar so you can write truthful fiction...but as someone I've forgotten said, I have a one-track mind...you might think you know the track but baby you don't...I wandered alone and blind in the dark through a deadly railhead while silent boxcars whizzed by missing me by inches before I found it...I'd be a fool to tell...you wouldn't understand anyway I think...it would sound ridiculous to you...besides you don't have a need to know...it's my own private obsession and it means the world to me...it would betray my only principle to tell anyway...it's one thing I can't talk about yet..if I do I might lose it...it's the thing I think most about...it's the reason I been keeping on for so long...it's really the only thing on my one track mind...it's my reason to be as far as I can see...it's not love...it's not sex...it's not for sale.

Saving the World for Whom?

2010-04-02T05:00:00.013-04:00

In a moist halo of light high over Brooklyn the full moon wanes...all over the nightside of the globe millions of eyes are watching...the four-leggeds too...at first it was a flat spot on the top right...now the curved shadow of earth eats up a sliver of light...soon the moon will be dark invisible and new...it will be doing this long after our bones are dust...if it doesn't collide with another planet or a comet...that happens you know...space is a big place...they can't see everything at once...big stony objects speeding around out there...whoops there's one we didn't see...and look how close it came...a million miles is only an inch in outer space...imagine...a giant asteroid can slam the moon and send it hurtling toward earth...anything can happen anytime.

I've said it before but I'll say it again: maybe we need more bombs in case the asteroids come...all ICBM's should be pointed outward to blow up incoming rocks...what if aliens invade?...who says other cosmic creatures are peaceful advanced and civilized?...perhaps they evolved from insects or lizards...how could we get along with an intelligent cockroach or a friendly alligator?...we can't even trust each other...maybe they'll want to eat us...giant radioactive cockroaches who don't even need spaceships or air...or intelligent flying rats with footlong teeth...I'm telling you anything can happen...the dinosaurs could return in giant spaceships with superior technology...maybe they already have.

Sigh...I know it's silliness...I'm exhausted here...I can't write anything good because I don't feel anything...I don't know what I am anymore...I feel nothing at all...all I know is that I'm human and I don't know why...I don't know what I am doing here or what I am supposed to be doing if anything...I'm not an intellectual...I tried to be when I was young...I thought it would make me attractive to females...but it was too much for me...in the first place gals of my day liked muscular self-confident macho guys with money and thought intellectuals were wimps...gals of today like the same thing but now you have to have an education and be an artist as well...wimps are okay if they have money...old guys can butt out...it sucks but that's Nature.

In the second place I never understood a word of Hegel or Sartre...Kierkgaard depressed me...Nietzsche made me anxious...Kant was incomprehensible...Plato exhausted me...only his depiction of Socrates taught me anything at all...and Socrates wrote nothing down...aside from that, the only philosopher I ever really liked was Bertrand Russell, an activist human being with a moderate point of view, and I can hardly remember a thing he said...see I am not an intellectual...the only philosopher who ever made me laugh was Aristotle, when he said, "I don't know which is stranger; me, or my cat"...for a philospher, I'll take Woody Allen.

I'm not religious either...I never was, despite my grandmother hauling me off to a Baptist church every week for seven years...

I wanted to do right and still do...but I screwed up of course...I haven't done anything Jesus wouldn't forgive if that's how it works...but I haven't done as well as I could have...mostly I've wasted my life with selfishness and self-indulgence...I lied to myself for years...I said I would put it all in a book someday...so maybe I have character flaws and personality disorders...but how much of that is my fault?...and who cares?

I'll die soon and everybody who knows my faults will die too...that's what death is...mass memory-erasure ...O God no not my memories...what else have I got that's real?..we even posit that our memories go with us in death to another life...in our version we never die.

O well we'll all be digitized somehow...no religion ever answered anything for me...I learned more reading Gorky Faulkner & Hemingway...we all have our own paths to walk...I tried spirituality and didn't really get that either...yes yoga is good and the I Ching is intriguing and Lao Tzu is amazing and Gandhi is a marvel for the ages...but I'm just an old guy trying to get along on Social Security and driving a cab six nights a week...I can see how chanting OM 20 hours a day might help you see God but I just don't have the time...I live and breathe here on planet Earth and know squat about God religion philosophy & spirituality...I know about human beings busting their asses and bleeding their blood into the dirt all over the planet to keep a vicious favored clique in clover though...I know how the rich make war on the poor and blame their victims...Ho makes more sense to me than Jesus...I'd rather read Lenin than Obama...Marx is still a delight to poor working people who get it...Fidel ain't so bad either...yes I know Marx was a philosopher but I don't blame him for it.

But I can't save the world that's for sure...to save the world you have to be against people...and if you save it then what?...more people?......we might reach a point where only mass-suicide will save the earth...on the other hand, "saving the earth" is ludicrous...the planet will poison or boil us alive before we can kill it...it only looks like a race against time...it's not a race...you can't beat the planet...it has all the time in the world and better armament...I recommend making peace with it by reducing the human population to about a billion over a number of future generations...then everybody can own some land and have some peace quiet and freedom...robots for the hard labor...but nobody listens to me...they didn't even hear my suggestion for moving sidewalks under glass canopies in Manhattan.

Brazil

2010-03-28T04:57:00.010-04:00

It wasn't the lady crazy like a fox who finagled a free ride in Long Island City, or the fat woman who started bitching at me after a night of traffic jams whom I kindly let out in Columbus Circle to find another cab when there weren't many...but the black guys who threw a bottle at me then spat in my face because I wouldn't let them squeeze past me at a crowded light...that's the kind of week...has anyone ever spat a big gob directly in your eye?...imagine my delight...I actually wanted to kill the son of a bitch, but my passengers were nervous: "We don't want to get shot!"...so I went on...they had looked coked-up and the road-rage was out of proportion to the imagined offense: I had the right-of-way...the farther I went the worse torture I imagined for them...is there anything more insulting or filthy?...what if the asshole was H.I.V. positive?...wouldn't that be attempted murder or manslaughter at least?...I regretted that I hadn't taken out my handy little camera and gotten their picture and license plate...I regretted that I had not gotten out and beat the living shit out of him...he was a younger and bigger than me but my anger would have split his lips...I would have torn his ear off and squashed his balls...at least I threw the full water bottle back, missing the spitter-passenger but getting the thrower-driver square in the side of his crackhead...you think I'm a violent guy?...Admittedly I'm not like Jesus but turning the other cheek only works now and then...I'm for putting them on a post and whipping the shit out of their butts with a cane...yeah yeah I know...the beatings will continue until morale improves...violence doesn't work love conquers all and blah blah blah...the hell it doesn't work...it depends on who you apply it to and how and why.

Sorry to bring you down, but there's no point in writing this blog if I can't be emotionally and intellectually honest...the world is already a shitpile of lies...there are so many lies hardly anybody remembers a truth anymore...and what is the truth?...I have no bloody idea...that's the only truth I know.

They say love cures hate...maybe it could cure mine...but I don't even know if what I have is hate or plain old outrage and anger...the only love I ever knew was my grandmother's...I go around offering violence to no one, yet violence has been threatened and perpetrated against me so much in my 68 years that I know there are some evil sons-of-bitches out there and no amount of love will ever faze them...all it takes for them to go off on you is to look them in the eye or be in the same room when they don't like your looks or your voice...I saw a guy get all his front teeth knocked out without warning from a guy who just didn't like his looks...a sucker punch...it makes me wish we could all wear guns...I would shoot some of these sons-of-bitches right where they stand...I wouldn't even say draw motherfucker.

I'm remembering this asshole named Roland Manuel...he was doing 10 years in Angola prison in Louisiana for being a goon hired to break up a strike with a baseball bat...besides that he was an armed robber...I was doing two years in the Calcasieu Parish Jail for two joints and 82 tabs of Leary's orange sunshine...Roland was back in Lake Charles for a new trial or an appeal or something...he was a loudmouth braggart who had boxed some...in the pecking order of the bullpen he was the biggest shit there...so the syncophants yessed his every stupidity...I of course stayed out of it and mostly-did yoga exercises on a blanket on the terrazo floor in the corner all day until we were allowed back in our four-man cells...it was a hard-enough life but I was younger and it was just another day of having to stay as sharp as I could in order to wake up another day shorter on my sentence...I had just read Gandhi's Autobiography and was taken with his vision of non-violence...I mean I was enthused...there wasn't anybody but a couple of potheads around to discuss it with though...so I was writing a lot and doing my yoga and minding my own business...mostly they left me alone while I stretched and stood on my head and twisted myself into the postures.

Each morning they woke us and put us all in the common room of the bullpen...we all proceeded to lie down on the floor to continue our sleep until breakfast arrived through the slot in the green steel wall...I was half under a steel table when Roland aroused himself walked to the bars and started shouting uselessly for a jailer...there wasn't even one on the floor...his shouting went on and on...finally I said Jesus Christ Roland give us a break..."Why you son-of-a-bitch you!" he said, leaping across the room and attacking me with fists.

Now my training in the Marine Corps told me to rise up thru the hail of fists and butt my head on his stupid face and proceed to kick the shit out of him by getting two fingers in his mouth and tearing his cheek off...but I had been reading Gandhi...I was part of the "peace movement"...not to mention that I was raised by a pious grandma who taught me to do unto others etc...so I rolled myself into a ball protecting only my face and neck and let him beat the shit out of me...when he saw that he was not hurting me enough, he reared back and kicked me square in the tailbone.

It hurt...it showed me it would only get worse...this thug would permanently cripple me if he could.

I threw Gandhi to the dogs and got up painfully and went at him with both fists...I landed a couple and he backed off but I went after him again...I was enraged...then one of his syncophants got between us...Roland suddenly was content to let it be...he wasn't in as good shape as me and he saw I wasn't a coward...if he was a boxer all he knew was the left hook...he never gave me any trouble after that...but the tailbone is still sore at times more than 30 years later...I still think about that asshole every now and then...I still want to beat his ass...when I was in New Orleans I ran into a guy who had been in Angola with him.

"That asshole? I kicked the shit out of him in the chow line," he said to my great satisfaction.

I hope he was telling the truth but like I said about the shitpile...everywhere I turn there is somebody lying somebody threatening or somebody posing...yet with me I think everything is written on my face...every now and then I catch a look at myself in the rearview mirror and I don't look nice...don't like what I see...if I were a woman I wouldn't give me a second look...

my ragged old face a mass of seams and scars from having been dragged across poisonous living coral 45 years ago...my eyes dimmed and out of focus...no hint of a smile...all the muscle tone gone from cancer weight loss...shrunken cheeks...white hair...yet I keep on keeping on...doing it every day...dragging myself from bed at the last minute...driving a taxi all night...paying traffic fines...paying personal loans...trying to be useful to someone...trying to write and knowing I'm not making it...alone as usual...confused outraged and on the verge of tears sometimes...looking at this hopeless mess called America and just wanting to move to Hanoi to finish my book...God please just get me to August...I promise I'll never come back...just get me out of here...to some place where no one spits in your face...where is my Brazil?

Something to Believe In

2010-03-06T07:18:00.005-05:00

“Start all over/whole world’s broke, ain’t worth fixing…”Chapman’s ditty rocking my head again after a busy night driving with hardly a wrong move back and forth over three boroughs…made enough dough to dent this pile of traffic and parking tickets…no money beyond expenses for me yet though…my tolerant debtors not pushing me thank God for that…what luck I’ve had…hard to admit sometimes because I'm obviously a pessimist...a cynic really...a skeptical pessimistic cynic that's me... and I don’t even believe in luck…I believe in Fate.

There I’ve said it, what I really believe in, if you wondered...but I doubt anybody did...still, I'm committed to it.

I’d debate it with you optimists who think you can rule the world...but nobody reads this blog much anymore…and once I was a person of interest…one day I had 40 readers…oh well fame is fleeting…and I could’ve had an acting career too…someone actually thought I had talent…ha, ha! …fooled you…fooled me too… fool me three times babe…fool me twice today…I don’t care…I been fooled before…I fooled myself most of all...it don’t hurt no more…and I don’t even care…I wouldn’t care even if I did care…if anybody noticed what good writing some of this stuff is it wouldn’t make any difference anyway…like I said it’s all fate…I’ll never be rich I’ll never be famous and I’ll probably never make love again …oh…well.

What’s my fate? I don’t know and don’t care…wait yes I do know but I still don't care…this is my fate…my fingers flying over the plastic keys…now at this exact moment…that’s my fate…this is my fate…me being here writing this long past bedtime...you being there reading this that’s my fate too…how we got here only you and I can know...Tracy Chapman’s singing about my fate right now:

”I’ve done so many things wrong/I don’t know if I can do right/put your trust in me/I won’t let you down/give me a chance/I’ll try/see it’s been a hard road/the road I’m traveling on/if I take your hand/I might lead you down the path to ruin/just say it will you?/I’ll understand/right now, I’m doing the best I can/at this point in my life…”

The best thing of the night happened in a suffocating traffic jam that started at Bleeker Street on Sixth Avenue and clogged the avenue all the way to 10th Street…suddenly a small cop car appeared on my left with siren bleeping yipping and wailing…I leaped into the spot behind and followed him like a remora fish as he sharked his way up the avenue…everybody peeling off lickedy-split to get out of his way…ha, ha!...I fended off every attempt to get between me and the cop…I twisted through like a fish all the way to Greenwich Avenue where a light stopped me…then another one wailed behind me and made me run that light!...I went through the whole jam in less than a minute and had the street to myself all the way to 23rd, when they started to catch up…I was laughing my butt off…about time the cops did something for me…the nice lady in the back enjoyed it too and left a big tip…she’d was in a hurry to get home.

Two hours before I had confronted a cop in front of Penn Station…I saw an opportunity to get in a lick for free speech and took it…you don't have freedom of speech if you don't use it...there was a needless taxi jam on Seventh Avenue so the passenger decided to get out before I made the curb…a cop came over and chewed me out…it burned my ass but I meekly submitted to his ferocity...after she closes the door I move into the line one car from the front…soon I see the problem: a cop car is parked directly in the spot where we have discharged and picked up passengers since the dinosaurs died…two people get in but I put the cab in park and say "Wait I have to ask this cop something"…I walk over and the cop…in his late 20’s…is leaning against the passenger door with his arms folded in denial and looking importantly at the station…I say “Would you mind telling me why you are parked in this spot?”...he looks at me and says “What?”...I see he is stunned that a citizen would question the authority of someone as important as him…I repeat it…he says “What do you mean?”… I say “This is my spot”…”This is your spot?”...”Yes this is the spot where taxis disembark passengers and passengers embark on their journeys…what are you doing here? Why aren’t you parked up there”…I point ahead…”where you would be out of the way? Why do you have to park in this…exact…spot? “He is dumbfounded…He doesn’t know what to say…finally he finds something:

”I’m preventing terrorism.”

Yep…that’s what he said all right…now it’s my turn to be dumbfounded…”You are preventing terrorism?”...I nearly guffaw at him but know better than that…””How are you preventing terrorism, standing there with your arms folded? You think that an intimidating look will prevent someone with a suicide vest or a taxi full of explosives from blowing you and this place all to hell?”...his eyes widen…”What do you think, that a terrorist will see you here and say oh boy I better forget it?”…I say “If you want to be useful why don’t you go stand in that intersection there”…I point at 33rd street where people are crossing against the light…he follows my finger and sees it…”and stop people from walking against the Don’t Walk and stopping traffic?...go do something useful and direct pedestrian traffic…what you are doing is impeding traffic…it wouldn’t endanger New York if you moved that car up a couple of lengths and let us get on with our business here…I almost just got a ticket because of this jam that YOU created”I see I have struck him dumb so I walk back to my cab and drive off...it was probably only my age…he was young enough to be my son…that kept him from throwing me down and cuffing me…I don’t know if I’m on a Watch List now…I don’t care so much either…like I said it’s all fate…go ahead ship me to Gitmo…I haven’t actually been tortured yet…it might be just what I need to snap out of this depression.

Of course he was only following orders from Higher-Ups at a loftier level of stupidity…Homeland Security my ass…It's the Homeland of Higher Insensibility...New Yorkers scoff at their lame militaristic tactics...I guess they have Penn Station surrounded so that if a bomb does go off inside they all are outside…and then they can rush in to secure and investigate the horror scene…rush in barricade the doors and run the reporters and photographers off so we can’t actually see it.

It was something though, that miraculous path through the traffic jam…I wish you could have been with me…you’d know what a good driver I am…it would make me feel good to know you knew it…but that’s my luck…you never will see or know it…it's a jewel that only I can see...that’s Fate…mine and yours…you’ll never know me and I’ll never know you…you can never be with me to make me feel good again...or me, you...that's fate...you will never properly appreciate me...or I, thou.

Mapless in Blue Eyes

2010-02-25T02:15:00.004-05:00

notebook madness...too many of 'em...if I had every notebook I ever kept...you too eh?...this small one has the melding of banalities and bizarre-ness of a night's work hacking the streets of New York...the man who ran off on a $7.90 fare... my momentary outrage and oh well...then the nasty English chap from a bar in Williamsburg...who gave me the finger because I didn't know the way to where he was going..."But you're a cab driver," he'd insisted, incredulously, when I told him I couldn't figure a way there from here, and if he didn't know the way, we were out of luck...of course this isn't true...I have a map...but I didn't feel like resorting to it with this arrogant prick...I didn't like his looks that's all...the whole stiff upper lip bit and he didn't do it well...I could see him directing a firing squad in South Africa...he insists that I must know the way..."It's off Metropolitan Avenue" he says apparently not-knowing we are on Metropolitan Avenue...I tell him I don't know where Metropolitan Avenue is...he is outraged...but he doesn't know where it is either obviously...the sign is right in front of him...I tell him "Yeah well I didn't ride around New York on a bike with a map for a year like they do in London. I been here 50 years off and on and I don't know every street."..."But you're a cab driver!"...I am thinking oh...kay...mother...fucker...I have fleeting vision of doing something vile perverse and unforgivable to him...to confirm his worst suspicions...give him a taxi story for the boys back in the pub ...he can't believe he has captured a taxi driver on the taxi-starved corner and he won't do what he demands...finally he gets out stands on the sidewalk and gives me the finger...I tell him across a lane of traffic that I would have found it on the map if he hadn't had such an attitude...thus the finger...I laugh at him and hit the BQE for the Williamsburg Bridge...my thoughts like old cars on a wet freeway...switching lanes moving thru invisible synapses and blinded by oilslicked wipers of logic...sliding confused from the absurd to the inane at the corner of profound and divine...through the underpass past the squalid dark garbage bins steel and green...overstuffed iron boxes on wheels waiting under impassive gaze of vacant human-less windows seemingly etched into the concrete monoliths of steel and glass...every window an eye...garbage-trucked on 37th St...bus-bullied on Sixth Avenue...suffering superior evil glances of lazy mean cops in Times Square...all I can do not to give that smart-aleck there the finger...

I will tell you a story about him...after I told him the truth about the ticket he'd said open yr trunk we'll see if you have a fire extinguisher...I nearly laughed in his face...I opened the trunk...see he said, no fire extinguisher...imagine that I said, folding my arms...an equipment violation I explained, goes to the fleet owner...I have nothing to do with it...he let it drop and told me to get on...entrapment plus harrassment of a citizen...I record it in my memory for the Tribunals someday...I hope to testify at the trials...I have a list of crimes and misdemeanors longer than Route 80...the city installs a no left turn sign at 46th and Seventh Avenue where I've been turning for 50 years...it's the last eastbound street to bypass Grand Central...is there a cop directing my attention to the new sign?...no...it's beneath the exalted dignity of a heroic New York cop to stand in an intersection with a whistle in his mouth...it's too sensible!...it worked for hundreds of years but we're progressive now...four rookies under his command lurk around the corner with flashlights waiting for the unlucky sucker who never thought to look for a sign where he has been turning for 50 years...130 bucks...I made the same mistake again a week later and got another one...yes I know maybe I'm too old to be driving a cab...don't think the thought hasn't surfaced...on the other hand these cops are nothing but tax collectors for Mayor Mike Bloomberg...they don't direct traffic...they obstruct traffic so they can give tickets...oh yes they do...check out the traffic jams and you will find a cop car up at the head of it...five will get you ten...the bastards!...I know...it doesn't bug you at all...well I don't really give a damn either...it really makes no difference to me...I just mention it is all...nothing I can do about it...I'm not superman...I just get up like a zombie everyday and put one foot in front of another until I fall back into bed some indeterminate time later...after having sent in another hundred bucks or so to the City Entrapment Bureau...or to a lawyer...somebody has to keep them in potato chips...even if they are a bunch of hired goons...everybody's got to eat...that's how I see it...the Universe is eating itself...every single thing in it is eating some other thing somehow...we chew swallow and shit our way through life and then the planet eats us...no matter how many preservatives or bullet-proofed tombs...the earth will devour us...it's a done deal...Manhattan won't out-last the pyramids...they built things better back then.

A guy in the back with nothing else to do asks me: "If you could be anybody other than who you are, who would you be?"

"God."

It cracks him up...he cackles..."Why?"...I look at him in the mirror...if I were God I could make him vanish...I want to disappear him...I want to disappear the whole scene sometimes...but I can't do that of course...I'm not a magician or a serious revolutionary...I tell him so that I could have instant gratification...he doesn't understand...I let it go and get him out at 14th and Ninth Avenue, where he is headed to a trendy new bar...where do they get all this money? how can I get some of it?...I am thinking about it when this Chinese bitch and I mean bitch gets in...she orders me about like I am her house servant in the Forbidden City...she is imperial...about 40 I guess and pretty but hard...in less than a minute she has me chained to the floor of the cab and is threatening to whip my back with a tapir tail...she orders me here and there...go left!...go right! stop at the light! watch out for the car!...I endure this...I ask where we are going and she says never mind..."I'll show you!"...I go along with it...I meekly submit...I nearly cringe...I am wondering how to properly kowtow in case it comes to that...she takes me away from the congestion on Essex Street into a dank street in Chinatown I never saw before...it is like an alley...not many alleys left in New York...it is full of garbage cans...I see a rat out in the cold scaring up a late snack...she abuses me some more...I wait patiently...finally I say listen lady I am not your slave...she has a fit...she misunderstands..."what?!...I not a slave! I been in this country four years! Never speak to me like that! You hear me? Never! Never speak to me like that!"...She goes on with the never-never routine for a few more sentences...I say please pay the $9.50 fare...she takes money from her purse but holds onto it..."Never speak to me like that! You understand?"...she holds out the bills...I reach for it...she pulls it away..."First you must understand"...she repeats it...I wait in silence..."Never speak to me like that!"...I say please pay the fare...she hands me the money...I grab it as she tries to take it back again...now I have it!..."Now get out of my cab you crazy bitch!" I say...I don't like to say that word it is like saying nigger but my control is slipping..."Aha! Now you have money! You are very brave!"...for a servant...I say get out of my cab...she doesn't move...she asks "You want to call the police?"...gladly I say, taking out my cellphone and stepping from the taxi...I will call the police...I am breathing hard and tense now...I hate to involve the cops...she gets out and yells something at me as I get back in and drive away...I suddenly realize she is drunk and maybe high on coke and maybe an addicted prostitute getting older and just hanging on...I feel sudden shame...ah Mike you and yer big f-ing mouth...give yer ego a rest will you?...you are a slave and you know it...and so is she...that's why she went on like that...maybe she knows it too...nobody likes to be reminded.

That's how it goes some nights.

Then you're headed back to Queens empty and you pick up this quiet classy young dame on Fifth Avenue in the rain...she is quiet and you didn't even see her face...it's a long ride downtown...take the FDR? yes...no traffic now...down Fifth and left on 42nd for the highway...WBAI playing Tracy Chapman..."We are the witness to the rape of the world"...I feel relaxed with her and no need to talk...the rain stops the clouds move and a low white moon shines on the roiling river as the tide comes in..."Pretty," I say. "Yes"...we are in perfect synch..."How long have you been driving a cab," she asks my wasted old face...I laugh..."Since 1873, ma'am, soon after the civil war"...she laughs...are you in the market? I ask...she says yes...I ask is it getting better? she says yes, for some...I am liking her more and more..."How about you?" she asks me...I tell her it has never been worse and I am moving to Thailand...I tell her why and she says that's a good plan...so you don't think it's going to get any better, she asks politely...I tell her no...the ship is going to the bottom...it's full of holes and the bilge pumps are breaking...the Captain's a madman and the crew is homicidal...the steering gear is broken and the gyroscope is frozen...it's blowing a perfect storm and they're panicking on the Bridge...she laughs at my description as I pull up to her big lighted building where I suppose she is working a well-paid night shift...she pays and tips well and flashes a genuine smile... with dazzling blue eyes between damp blonde locks beneath a black wool hat...another one I'll never know...separated by class sex age and money...wearily I go through the hour-plus stuff I have to do to get home to Eric the Cat.

A Night in the Life

2010-02-22T06:27:00.001-05:00

The following photos are scenes I see from one or another angle nearly every night while driving a taxi in NYC. Tuesdays end in a laundromat because Wednesday is my day off, the only day to do laundry. These are in no particular order. Click once for close-ups.

I have nothing to say.

Time Doesn't Care

2010-02-14T06:20:00.005-05:00

There aren't enough hours in the day or enough days in the year to satisfy me. Time is a commodity I can't afford. I have never felt such a sense of urgency about the things I need to do before I go to a boneyard. Money needs above all. I desperately need to write and not lose the momentum I gained in the last two years. But the most-fallow periods of my creative writing life have been when I was driving a taxi in New York City. It requires my full attention behind the wheel, and the process of getting to the garage, waiting for a cab, then cleaning it and getting it into traffic is time-consuming to say the least. Then there are the pressures of the job. Tonight I had a calm, busy night, taxi almost always with riders, traffic conquered, and the very last ride blew the whole thing.

Not even the guy who almost puked in the back on Nostrand Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant while I was making a u-turn got to me (I held up traffic in three directions for five minutes while he unloaded out the door)...but this one got under my skin. She was drunk of course. A nice-looking 30-ish well-dressed woman who said take her to 39th and Second, which I did.

I waited a long time while she was supposedly swiping her credit card. Nothing happened. Then she fumbled in her purse another few minutes. I inquired. She said pull around the corner. I did. She sat still in the back. I asked again. She handed me a dollar. It was a six-dollar ride. I told her I needed five more. She said she would get it for me. I pulled into the fancy building with a driveway, wrongly assuming it was her destination. She said no she wanted to go in the MacDonald's on the corner and get it for me. I was exasperated. She went to get out. I got out and demanded my money. She yelled at me. I yelled at her. Some guys came out of the building and yelled at me for yelling at her. I yelled at them. They yelled some more at me. I yelled at her again and drove away cursing everybody.

Yes, yes, I know. I was wrong. It was only five bucks. I tip the guys wiping down wet cars in the cold car wash that much.

I just blew it that's all. I'm tired and disgusted. This job is kicking my butt. I have aches and pains where I never had before. Every day I talk to these guys in the garage and we are all pretty much in the same boat. They ask me about the business. I'm an older gentleman now. They give me respect. I play it for what it's worth. Bring it on. This is new. I tell them the whole damned story starting with the Irish Italians and Jews hiring horses to start the taxi business. I take them through the organizing of the 30s 40s and 50s to the point where the union sold us out for a dime in the 70s. I tell them the whole thing every day if they ask; and they do. I tell them exactly where we are at why we are screwed and how we arrived in this shit hole, where the City of New York has us over a barrel and is whipping our asses with barbed wire, and how we are nearly powerless to do a thing about it--without a union.

Then I tell them about the Taxi Workers Alliance and their ears perk up. I tell them what I read that's all. This outfit looks pretty good to me. Health and dental benefits? One hundred dollars to join the union and actual benefits. I tell them what I read. They look organized and serious. They managed to get us the $45 JFK flat rate. More cab drivers need to check it out. They want the website. Ha ha I just happen to have it here...

But I have to find a better way to make a living. I can't get involved in this stuff again.

On second thought, I just need to save enough dough to pay my debts and go to a better, cheaper country. Some place quiet exotic beautiful and cheap, where I can wander around and write. That's all the hell I want to do. Is that so much to ask?

I have a lot on my mind. I guess everybody does. But Time doesn't care.

it's enough to make you cry

2010-02-06T06:17:00.005-05:00

It's Etta James singing "I'd rather go blind, boy/than to see you walk away from me"...the chill of this room is finally gone after an hour ...it's snowing out...wind is picking up...sun is coming up..."something deep down in my soul said cry, girl"...I was hanging in a bar on 125th Street in 1987, and playing this song to death after finally accepting the end of something...no recovering that one...or any of them for that matter...icebergs melting in my wake...I'm steaming on...fuck 'em all...the ones I had and the ones I didn't...the disaster that's coming down on me now dwarfs anything I ever anticipated before...it's a losing race with the State and no race at all with Death...which will get here first is anybody's guess and I care less and less.

Shazia Massih, 12, a skinny little house-slave in Pakistan, was probably beaten to death by her employer or someone connected with the big shot lawyer...under arrest...who is a pillar of something legal over there...where 40 percent of the people live in extreme poverty...amid the luxury of those profiting somehow from the military dictatorship that's ruled since "Independence" in 1947.

In Haiti where misery is traditional...the American military has spent its time pointing guns at people to prevent "looting," and has been rescuing and re-patriating American citizens to their own comfortable country...just to the north...and has done precious little if anything for a million or more suffering Haitians...somebody forgot to tell them to bring ambulances and other means of transport for the crushed black poor people...oh...and medicine.

Another thing our efficient military has done has been to divert private and NGO aid shipments, and particularly those containing medicine and medical equipment, to places like the Dominican Republic and Panama...much-needed equipment of Physicians Without Borders ended up in Panama...the airport at Port-au-Prince was "secured" by our troops and the runway was reserved for the American military first...our heroes.

Meanwhile Cuba with 450 doctors and six fully-equipped hospital tents is treating 600-plus serious injuries a day...another 1,500 doctors from the dreadful communist threat has been tending the poorest in Amazonia for years now...where do they get all these doctors?...from their medical schools, stupid.

The American Media having masturbated itself to exhaustion...while managing to avoid covering the Cubans and others who are working themselves to death...is preparing to leave for the next sensation wherever it is...maybe more extensive coverage of Sarah Palin...or a three-day special on the Lives of the Stars...or an in-depth examination of Avatar.

The American people put up with this shit.

It's Super Bowl Sunday...ninety million people are gonna be watching it's said...that's a lot of beer and chips and billions of buffalo wings...I can't imagine anything more fattening or boring...the din from the hoorah bars across the land will drown out any wails from the Caribbean.

New Orleans is going bugfuck over the Saints in their first-ever...New Orleans (party till you drop) is where Hurricane Katrina played The Prelude to Haiti a few years ago...some might recall that opera...remember the people dying of thirst on rooftops and all that? What a show, eh? What a cast of characters.

The elections are coming around again...but it's another Hobson's choice.

It's enough to make you cry.

Or angry.

Angel in a Blue Dress

2010-02-04T05:25:00.008-05:00

In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1960, I was walking around alone in a marine tropical uniform, and a taxista hailed me. He said he would take me to a nice girl and I hopped in. He careened toward the edge of the city and about 15 minutes later deposited me on a dusty tree-lined street at a small store, that inside out of the torrid heat was dark and cool. I paid him a couple of bucks.

A friendly man sat me down in a room where a small group was playing dominoes and served a warm beer. I like warm beer. I was drinking it when a lovely young dark chocolate black woman came in and sat at my table and spoke vivaciously to me in French, of which I knew only como tale voux, bonjour, and merci. Don't ask me how to spell it; they didn't teach French in Louisiana though I grew up in Cajun country.

She made it plain that she was available and I accepted the offer, and she escorted me through a curtain into a small room with a single bunk-type bed. She smiled and put her arms around my neck and kissed me full on the mouth, and then she drew back and held my shoulders with her hands and laughed very sweetly. Her mouth was full of pretty white teeth, and she wore a bright blue dress and had white powder between her breasts. In a moment that pretty blue dress was on the floor beside my uniform.

We did what we were supposed to do with the dominoes clacking and voices raised in laughter less than 10 feet past a flimsy wall, and she laughed the whole time. I hoped she wasn't laughing at me. She seemed to enjoy it well-enough. It was one of the greatest short times I ever had in bed with any woman, and she was my first black one.

I never knew her name and she never knew mine.

Afterward we went out and sat at a table, and the man served us each a plate of rice and beans and small pieces of roasted chicken. I paid for everything with a $20 bill. That was a lot of money to them, and to me, since I made about $150 a month being a marine. When I left everybody was smiling and laughing and waving. I don't remember the taxi ride back to the ship, which was anchored near the yacht of President Papa Doc Duvalier, whose name meant nothing to me then. I was 18.

If she's still alive she's a grandmother by now and probably has no memory of me at all.

But I've never forgotten her that's for sure.

In 1962 I was back in Haiti with a marine battalion from California during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We were sent to invade Cuba but nothing came of that. This time we went on a fast forced-march of about 15 miles carrying M-14 rifles, canteens, and a full backpack.

Haitians watched us solemnly. A few waved and smiled but nobody cheered. I was 21 then and still didn't know what it was about. It was the poorest country I have ever seen. I just went where they sent me and did what they told me.

We didn't have any liberty either.

Symbolic Logic

2010-01-31T23:25:00.012-05:00

Sunday night; what a fright.

What fury and despair I felt on losing my cell phone. I was enraged when I assured myself that it, a small leather belt bag, and $130 in bills and coins had vanished. It seemed impossible. How could I have been so careless negligent and stupid as to have lost it? How could it have simply fallen from my hips from beneath layers of sweaters and coats without my noticing? It was brand new! I had it secured with the plastic snap-buckle so it rode on my left hip, until I sat in the cab and moved it to my lap. From there I gave change and stashed money all night. The cell phone fit in a pocket beside the pouch. It made a small unnoticeable bulge beneath a hooded sweater that hangs below my belt, and below a smart black wool jacket I wear while driving, and the green arctic coat that covers all to my knees when I'm walking; well-hidden. A stick-up artist would have to undress me to find it.

“Okay motherfucker. Take off your clothes. I know you got some money somewhere.”

I learned it was gone when Mohammed called my name at shape-up and I went to the window to pay. I figured I must have left it at home, though I had given my rooms a last look before leaving, to make sure nothing was forgotten. Nothing of the things I need every night: a small canvas bag containing a map book, magnifying glass, notebook and pen, extra receipt roll, toothbrush, subway map, diode flashlight, medicine and an Atrovent puffer, and a book to read when waiting at JFK.

Oh I must have left it home, I thought, hardly-worried. It only meant losing about 45 minutes to drive down Bushwick Avenue to East New York, retrieve the pouch, and start working my way north through Brooklyn to Manhattan. But when I arrived in my rooms after parking illegally on the sidewalk out front, there wasn’t a sign of it. I refused to believe my senses and practically tore the room apart searching. I checked the cellar and walked to the corner gas station where I had gassed-up. I asked the guy if he’d seen it and he said no.

It could have fallen off there or it could have dropped off before I’d reached my van. Or it could have fallen in the parking lot of the taxi garage where I’d parked. Anything was possible. It might have been in the small plastic bag I keep in a stainless steel wastebasket for trash in the van, which I had dumped in a barrel at the garage. But it was gone all right.

I went back to my rooms and succumbed to despair for five minutes. The money was one thing but losing the phone was like losing loved ones. It was too much on top of the other things. A great wave of self-pity crashed on me. I gave into it and let it push me to the murky bottom. Man what else can go wrong after all this shit? Why the hell did this happen, when I am busting my tired old ass to make money and pay off all these loans? Is there some nasty little demon following me around and fucking me up? What did I ever do so bad as to deserve this shit? For the 13,000th time I thought about leaping from a bridge. Three seconds of terror and splat, it's all over.

Cindy’s unlisted number from so long ago, still working. And other valuable ones. And my oldest friends from the Marine Corps. A couple of them I could get back, but one is lost forever, since I was the only guy who had it. I wept without shame. I could never find Rex's number again. He lives in the middle of a desert with an unlisted cellphone. I would have to drive to Death Valley to get it. And another number too that I should not have been sorry to lose but was.

I drove back to the garage knowing I couldn’t work. The unexpected loss punched me in the guts and consumed my mind; losing the money I’d wore myself out earning the night before. How dumb of me not to have committed the numbers to old-fashioned paper! I’d been meaning to do it for a month and kept forgetting. No, driving tonight was impossible. I could end up in the morning papers.

I told Mohammed the story and said I was too angry to be driving tonight, and how much did he want for the hour-and-a-half with the car? Forty bucks. Okay. That's $170 gone and not-working tonight is another $80 to $100 maybe, and $5 for gas for the taxi, and $10 for my own expended gas; I can accept a $290 loss without screaming, but please give me back the cell phone. I implored the universe and the universe I thought had ignored me.

I catch Alex the Mexican at the pump and borrow his phone and call my own number. I tell my own message service why whoever is hearing this should keep the money and to please return the phone by mailing it to me or by calling another number, which I leave with my address. I feel absurd telling him/her to keep the money. Now I feel stupid and absurd. I’m not showing that I’m so pissed I could put my foot through a wall. Not to Mohammed or the other guys anyway. That’s for when I’m alone with the proper wall. And one day there may come such a wall and I may be in such a mood and my foot might make a hole in it.

I go outside and a tall dark and handsome man approaches, looks with plain friendliness into my eyes, and touches my shoulder and says, "Brother, you can talk them into not-charging you at all. You can get your money back, go get something to eat, and sit back and relax, and then go out there and make some money to make it up."

I am astonished by this timely wisdom from the universe through this very black man that I never saw before. I ask his origin and he says Ivory Coast. I say that the deal is done and my plan is to go home and chill. He agrees that this is a very good thing too, and gives me this calm terrific smile of encouragement, and squeezes my left shoulder, and suddenly it is almost all right. It’s better. Another human sent to give me a message of solace comfort and wisdom. And my own tribe oppresses his.

He saw into me. He saw me the way I really am beneath this welded iron mask. He saw the tension despair anger age desperation weariness and flagging determination, and he cared. I wonder if he knows how grateful I am to have been seen and cared for, and how sorry I am about some of my own sadassed cowardly race?

I go out with Alex and move a taxi while he moves another so I can back the van out. It is tricky but I manage it and take the key back to Mohammed and wave goodbye to Alex and drive back to East New York, chafing at the robot lights, delayed behind the careless and half-doped motorists, who bribed someone for their licenses. One of the bastards has my money and cell phone.

By the time I got home and found a miraculous parking space, I was thinking maybe someone needed some money and a cell phone, and the universe had me provide it.

I borrowed Gary’s phone and called my number again to make sure it wasn’t here. I called Sprint and after 30 minutes of waiting a guy told me I would get $75 off on a new phone, and they could restore my contact list.

Now I’m writing this and listening to the radiator rattle, glad to be warm, glad to be off, glad to still have some dough to buy another phone tomorrow, glad for the guy, glad for the cigarette, glad to have the numbers of the ones I still love.

Not that I'll ever call them again.

The Other Thing

2010-01-26T04:54:00.009-05:00

They both were stunningly beautiful and fresh. One was black-haired like a raven and the other was a strawberry blonde with a genuine smile just for me. They slid into their seats and she asked me to take them to the Upper West Side. There was a whiff of Tabu.

I exhaled. My eyes were lit up. I felt slightly crazy and lightheaded from it.

“Where are you from?” I asked the blonde.

“Switzerland!” she beamed at me in the mirror.

“Ai yi yii!” I exclaimed, rubbing my hands together and laughing. “Switzerland! O my God…”

I told her I would drive her to Switzerland by way of Alaska if she would pay for gas.

She laughed at my raw admiration and honest desire. She was delighted. She said something in Swiss to the other and they laughed and she settled back in the seat and smiled at my reflection in the mirror, as I steadily made my way up Eighth Avenue, slipping in and out of the iron streams of cars and weaving gently past the others until I held the lead with the lights. I felt her watching my face and kept my eyes on the problems of driving.

I must have sighed. There is something about European women that American women just don’t have for me.

We had pleasant conversation about her lovely country. Did she like New York? Oh yes she loved New York. They both loved New York. They had a place here. New York was a wonderful place. And Switzerland was also a wonderful place, and they were happy to live there but they loved New York very much.

I told her I knew a Swedish woman once who was the most-remarkable woman I had ever met. She was appreciative and I saw that she understood more than I had said. It might have been my tone as I described a woman who spoke five languages with fluency and the other things about her. I was brief but thorough.

I couldn’t see the other who was directly behind me and she didn’t say anything to me or in English to the other. I tried not to look at her too often but each time I did she was looking back at me frankly in the mirror, her eyes wide interested friendly and smiling. She was about 30 I think. The other was younger.

They give you their full attention, that’s what it is. They are really there, these European women. They aren’t somewhere else when talking with me. They treat me with respect and no condescension without giving up an inch of their freedom status or femininity. There isn’t a hint of competition, patronizing, challenge, domination, subjugation, inequality, fear, or age-ism. They seem to have nothing to prove, nothing to fear, nothing to hide, and no one to confront; but they will take you on intellectually, with equality, confidence, and generosity in argument. I never met one who wanted to cut off my balls but I knew one who meant to teach me a lesson and did.

Every one I have met has been something else again. They share and they are interested in what I have to share. There seems to be no class-ism or class-consciousness among them, and that is the most-remarkable thing besides their great looks, which they know they have but handle casually; and they must have other things too that keep them alert, smiling, confident, and healthy. Like money education security and the other thing.

I talk to them about books of authors from their countries which I have read. I tell them what I have read and sometimes they have read the same thing and sometimes they are surprised that I had read that. I tell them I know nothing of modern authors from their countries and sometimes they tell me names of present ones, but usually I am driving and forget to write them down.

The rides never last long-enough.

I let them off on West 60th and she tipped me well and smiled. I could have kissed her face it was so close in the window when she paid, and I would have if I could have. Then she and the other laughed gaily and ran across the street to their building.

They looked in love and held hands as they ran lightly like otherworldly creatures from some rare and exquisite place. Their laughter was melodic like their speech, almost a song. It was all very fine. Everything had been fine. The ride was perfect except that it was over and she was gone but it had been fine.

I drove all night in the rain that came later and couldn’t get her out of my mind. Then after I turned in the cab and drove my own car home in the rain the others started coming back from the closed-up place, where I keep them so I can’t think about them too much or about the other things.

The Monster Won't Be Televised

2010-01-24T05:06:00.009-05:00

I never could stand that John Kerry. As soon as the senator was nominated I said Good God. What a pompous horse's ass. I'll never forget that rich son of a bitch sitting before the Fulbright Foreign Affairs Committee, telling about soldiers and marines "cutting off ears" and "pulling out teeth" for souvenirs. What an asshole. Not a word about some of the senators sitting on that committee, who voted and kept voting for the war and every supportive measure. Not a word about Walter Rostow or Robert McNamara or McGeorge Bundy, or the other smartass muckedy-mucks who made the war in the first place, including his great friend John F. Kennedy. Even Fulbright himself had been a big supporter, though he turned against it eventually--sort of. Only Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska had the foresight and guts to vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, one of the biggest lies in history, giving the President authority for 24-hour bombing of North Vietnam; a tactic they knew would fail. Bombed populations only become infuriated and go underground. World War Two proved that.

The North Vietnamese were better-organized than an ant colony, because they had been through the shit with the French and knew Americans would attack them next. Americans who still think we lost the war because of our own mistakes won't admit or even think about the intelligence and skill of the Vietnamese communists, in anticipating and preparing for their every move, and exploiting their every mistake. They were ready to fight a hundred-year war and lose 29 million people and said so. Nobody took them seriously until they had shot down 49 B-52s, 300 Phantom jets, and 3,000 helicopters, and killed (supposedly) 58,000 Americans. Even then we blamed it all on the Soviets and Chinese. It was like the British blaming the French and the Dutch for the American Revolution; as if the Vietnamese had nothing to do with it.

When the NVA moved SAM missile batteries and tanks into South Vietnam, it was all over for American "air superiority" in the South. After all the war was against the South. Even the retarded American government knew it couldn't invade the North, because then it really would have gotten an ass-kicking.

Three-point-five million Vietnamese human beings bombed shot burned garroted stabbed beaten thrown from helicopters and starved to death, just in Vietnam; another million "wasted" in Laos in a "secret war" that lasted ten years and halved the country's population. Then two-point-five million more in Pol Pot's atrocity in Cambodia, which we unleashed with a "secret bombing campaign" of at least two years, which destroyed traditional village infrastructure, and let uncultured teenaged murderers run amok over a hitherto peaceful and orderly society.

And not one official investigation by the Congress or any other legal body into the causes and conduct of the war, or charges against the guilty bastards who had sounded the battle charge. Much less a trial and a hanging. The American people? They didn't want to hear it and still don't; to which I say, tough shit.

What an arrogant lot of ignorant intellectual cowards most of the American people are. They don't know shit and don't want to know. Most of them are near-slaves of one sort or another, afraid to open their mouths when they do disagree, because they will surely lose their jobs, families, friends and whatever else one loses when one is out of favor work money and luck in a "democracy."

Yes, yes, I know, there are millions opposed and hundreds of thousands actively working to change it all...still outnumbered by the complacent selfish overworked frightened aforementioned Ignorami, and by half-committed distracted disordered reckless and sadface clowns like me.

And now the same thing is happening in Afghanistan, not to mention what is still going down in Iraq, where we invaded how many years ago? And how many Iraqis dead wounded homeless jobless and infuriated? Nobody knows it appears. It could be 500,000 or a million or more; ho hum who's counting and what's for dinner dear? The poor are poorer, the homeless are colder, and war-makers are buying extra houses and stocking them with toys. Yet everyone is beyond reproach. We are all fine people. Future psychological and physical impairment of a whole generation of Iraqi youth doesn't compute because it isn't considered. Or maybe it was by the monsters of war.

Despite the boastful energy-wasting embarrassing glitter of a thousand Times Squares, Americans are dressed for mourning. Why else do they wear so much black? I nearly run over a dozen of them a night, as they flit before my taxi like blurry shadows, without contrast to black streets beneath a black sky. The bright colors of the Sixties are barely remembered in New York. I get a feeling sometimes everybody is in hiding. I try to look in their eyes and most of them look away. The only ones who look back steadily are those who know they are in prison, no where to go, nothing to lose, and having to deal with whatever comes before their eyes.

In case you didn't know this now you do. In case you did it's a reminder: Beneath the benign masks of the oh-so-concerned government officials, devoted to the point of rabidity to "protecting American lives," "defending freedom" and "the American way of life" (luxury pride and ignorance,) a stinking monster of uncanny proportions squats over a perfumed sewer, hydra-headed, uglier than Pat Robertson, dripping with choking raw blood and pustulent rottenness from blasted human guts. I've seen it; a lot of us have seen it.

The monster shits landmines with a satanic smile, seems immortal, is accepted as normal, and is completely insane. A domestic house cat has more conscience. A tiger has more compassion. Maybe you saw it once and couldn't believe your eyes. Maybe you saw it and forgot. Maybe you never saw it at all. Just wait. You will. You'll see.

But it won't be on television this time.

Bees Don't Tire

2010-01-20T11:16:00.011-05:00

He was sitting on his bed with a .38 in his hand.

“I don’t know how to do this,” John said.

He was going to commit suicide with a gun because his multiple sclerosis had become unmanageable and he could not wipe himself anymore. I had been his caregiver for five months and been wiping him for a week.

I was sitting beside him on his bed where he contemplated the act. I touched my finger to a spot below and behind his left ear. “Right there,” I said.

He asked, “Where should I do it?”

“If it were me, I would lie down on the bathroom floor and wrap my head in a towel so it wouldn’t make a mess.”

“That sounds right. I don’t know if I can do this, Mike.”

“I don’t know if I could either.”

“I don’t want to die.”

“Who does?”

“But I can’t live like this anymore.”

He knew he wouldn’t be able to pull a trigger soon and that no one would or could do it legally for him. I sure wouldn’t.

He had done everything right. When the draft notice arrived in 1964, he was leading a do-wop band and was signed with Phil Spector. His group played Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey and other places on the way up the musical ladder. A recording date had been set. He’d shown me an 8 millimeter film of them and they’d looked good. He had broken up the band and reported to the Army within a month and less than a year later he was getting shin splints from walking the stinking jungles of Vietnam near Pleiku. He had seen the planes poisoning the forests with Agent Orange from Operation Ranchhand.

“When we saw those planes we dropped our gear and ran like hell,” he told me. “But we always got some of it anyway.”

Now he was as ready as a human could be to die. He didn’t want to do it of course. He wanted to live. But he didn’t want to live like this. Every day it worsened. He had the worst form of MS, the regressive kind that gets nothing but worse without a day of remission or relief. Each day it was harder to walk with his walker from the bedroom to the living room, where he spent most of the day lying on his stomach watching television. It was his most-comfortable position. He had pains all over all of the time.

I had knocked on his door five months previously after a former in-law had asked me to look in on him. I’d met him in New Jersey a year or so before, when he was in better shape.

“I was going to commit suicide today,” he told me a few hours after I knocked.

No one had ever told me that when it was the truth. I saw it was true because he looked down, ashamed of his weakness for having told.

“Well I might do that too, if I were in this condition. You have every right. But have you tried every therapy?”

I knew a little about multiple sclerosis because it ran in my former wife’s family.

“I haven’t tried bee sting therapy,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“They sting you with bees and it’s supposed to make you stronger.”

Nothing sounds weird to me anymore.

“Have you researched it?”

“A little. There’s stuff about it on the internet.”

“Well, let me read up on it, and maybe I can help you with it,” I said. I didn’t want to think about him pulling the trigger after I left. I’d just been released from the VA hospital in L.A. after five months of having my head reduced to a manageable size.

“Where are you headed for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you stay here for awhile? I can use some help. Shopping and things. Taking me to the doctor.”

“Okay.”

“I can pay you some.”

“You don’t have to. Just buy my gas and I’ll eat what you eat.”

“Okay.”

I read about it on his ancient Gateway computer until I got the idea. I printed things out for him and we read them together. He was ready to believe it and so was I. It was a simple matter of access to honey bees, and having the right equipment: a hive, protective gear; a jar; reverse forceps, and, we learned the hard way, ice.

I called around Redlands, CA, until I found a beekeeper. I told him what I wanted and why and he said he’d heard of that, and he would be glad to sell me a hive and the clothing and a smoker.

As soon as I met the beekeeper I knew that he was a pervert of some kind. He lived in a big old neglected house in a rural area and every window was boarded up or somehow blocked. No way to see inside anywhere, not even into the kitchen in the back where I knocked, because he had a stack of cardboard boxes blocking the view; he could have had anything inside from an arsenal to a dozen children chained to walls. His backyard was strewn with junk, mostly broken down equipment and car parts. There was a small orchard of apples and about 10 hives stark white in the sun.

“These hives are too big for me,” I said. “I don’t need that many bees.”

“I can’t make you a half of a hive.”

“Okay. Just sell me the smoker and some clothes.”

“I’ve got just what you need.”

He produced a smoker, the gloves, heavy pants and shirt, and the face mask and a Vietnamese peasant’s conical hat.

“Pretty good,” I said, paying him more than I expected.

“I got that from a gook I shot.”

“Sure. Maybe if you’d asked he would have just given it to you.”

He looked at me a minute and then he turned away.

“Maybe I can make you a smaller hive.” He started looking around for lumber but it was mostly mildewed and rotting.

“That’ll work.” I gave him a number and left. He was a creep and I felt the creepiness of the place as I walked past the boarded-up windows.

I talked to another beekeeper on the phone who told me he’d read up on it. Bee sting therapy came from China, he said. He told me that the Chinese had discovered acupuncture by observing the effects of beestings on different parts of the body. He said that some beekeepers bottled bee venom in hypodermic vials. He said beekeepers never get arthritis in their hands from being stung so much.

I took his word for it and asked if he would sell me a small hive.

“I don’t want the honey,” I said. “You can collect that.”

He made a deal. I didn’t like the other guy and though he called I never went back.

“Ants will kill a hive if they discover it,” he told me when he showed me the half-sized hive. “Bees have no defense against ants because they’re too small to sting. You have to find a place they won’t find easily.”

“Where is that?”

“Hang it in a tree and coat the wire with ant poison. I scatter it around my hives to keep them away."

“How do I collect the bees?”

“You’ll have to figure that out. You can use a net.”

“I don’t want to use a net.”

“You’ll figure something.”

We wrapped the half-hive in an old blanket and put it in the back of the crummy little compact Dodge I was driving then. A few got out and buzzed my head as I drove the 25 miles back to Redlands. It was dark when I got home. I put the hive on the back patio on a chair and removed the blanket.

I thought about it overnight and figured it out.

I found a medical supply house and bought reverse forceps, which open when you pinch, and close when you release. Then I bought a hole saw for my drill.

I donned the gear and smoked the hive with newspaper and dried leaves. When you smoke them, bees think the hive is afire, and start eating the honey in preparation for emergency evacuation. They don’t have time to sting anybody, unless you mess with them. It does not make them drowsy. Bees don’t get drowsy.

I screwed a mayonnaise jar lid to the back of the hive with two small screws, and then I drilled a hole through it into the hive. As the bees swarmed out, I screwed the jar onto the lid and watched it fill with alarmed bees.

When a hive is compromised, the bees start repairing the intrusion with wax. It doesn’t take them long. While they were repairing the hole I screwed a large eyehook squarely in the middle of the top. I carried the hive to a large pine on the edge of his eighth-acre that was shielded from neighbors by flowering bushes and trees. The nearest limb was 10 feet high. I threw a rope over it and taped it to the number 18-guage wire I had bought. I hauled it up until the hive was head-high, and then climbed a stepladder to wrap the wire around itself like a coat hanger. On the way down I coated it with liquid ant poison. I secured it to the tree with another wire so it wouldn’t spin. It hung perfectly and the bees didn’t seem to mind.

We began the next day after studying charts and figuring where to sting him. He wanted it on his hands and fingers to see if he could get strength in them. Some days it was hard for him to hold a fork.

I approached the hive with an extra jar and lid. Removing the one, I poked a hole through the wax and then screwed it back. It quickly filled with investigating bees. I removed it, put on the lid, and replaced it with the other jar. Nothing could be easier.

He asked me to sting the back of his hand. I retrieved a bee with the forceps, grasping it by the thorax, and then I applied it to his hand.

The pain was nearly unbearable. His eyes teared-up. The closer to the bone, the worse a bee sting hurts.

“I don’t think I can do this Mike.”

“What if we numb the area with ice first?”

“Let’s try that.”

We did, and it worked. He hardly felt it at all.

I stung both hands at the base of the fingers and thumb and once on the back of each wrist. John said it hardly hurt at all. I watched the stingers through a magnifying glass while they pumped venom for five minutes after. It looks like two testicles on a sword. When they stopped pumping I plucked them out with tweezers. The stinger-less bees flew off with their guts hanging out and died, usually near a window. I gathered them up later and threw them away.

The next day he said his hands felt stronger.

So we did it every day in the afternoon after he had done with watching The Price is Right and another famous show which name I cannot remember. John was always close with the price of the giveaway items. Some days I watched them with him, but mostly I explored the internet on his old computer.

The bees scoured the neighborhood for flowers and after a month or so the whole street was awash in hybrids. Neighbors never suspected the hive. There was a large orange grove nearby and I suppose they went there too. Some days I watched the bees trying to figure them out but I never did. After awhile I dropped the face net and worked without it. Only once did a just-born bee fly out and get me between the eyes, but his venom was so weak that it hardly hurt at all.

I shopped for him, cleaned his house every day, mowed the lawn, and prepared our meals. At night we often watched a movie I would rent. I told him some stories and kept him laughing. He appreciated my cynical outlook, which I admitted was an insincere pose to keep people away from me. He liked my honesty. He said he had never met anyone like me.

"You've got a lot of guts to live like you do," he said. I re-assured him that I was as cowardly as the next guy.

He wasn’t a physical person. He was a gentle man who loved music and tried to do the right thing all the time. He screwed up of course. We all do. He had married and had two kids and had started an electrician’s business back east in New Jersey and paid his taxes religiously. Then his wife started fucking around and he divorced her. She took him to the cleaners but didn’t get the boys. His business was ruined
financially by the alimony and lawyer-fees.

He started another one and built it better than the last. His boys were teenagers when the second wife did the same thing. She had put her money in cocaine and he had put his in a big sailboat that she didn’t know about. But he wasn’t a sailor. One day in a stiff wind on Long Island Sound had convinced him of that. But he kept the boat and kept it secret. When he developed the disease she tried to shoot him first, then started divorce proceedings and almost got it all, but failed. He managed to pay her and the lawyers off and send both kids to college. He sold the boat and used the money to open a comfortable little bar in Bergen County, and hung out there; but he wasn’t a drinker.

Finally, he told me about Vietnam. He had never told anyone.

“The first time I mentioned I’d been in Vietnam, people put me through hell about it. One guy called me every name in the book. That cured me. I never mentioned it again until I met you,” he explained.

He told me a lot of things about it. I told him what I knew, and we left it at that. He saw I hated the war and it enabled him to finally hate it too.

There wasn’t any explaining the multiple sclerosis. He had no family history of it or of any central nervous system disease. One day at age 49 he had slipped on the ice and hit the back of his head hard and flat on the sidewalk. The next day it had begun.

When he saw he was going to die of it he had sold the bar and moved to Redlands to be near an old buddy who helped and comforted him. He had fallen in love with my former sister-in-law, who had it too. She had hers pretty much under control with proper diet and exercise and little stress other than an obnoxious, selfish daughter.
But it only got worse for John.

I suspected Agent Orange and convinced him to let me take him to the VA hospital. They examined him and enrolled him in the Agent Orange program and sent him to neurosurgeons and they performed their tests. I took him to a Korean acupuncturist, and after each session his pain subsided for days at a time.

But it was a losing game and he knew it. We figured he'd taken about a thousand stings in five months, and though it helped some it wasn't doing the trick.

One day he said he was going to kill himself with the .38 he kept in a bedside table.

“There’s probably a better way,” I said. There was no use trying to talk him out of it.

“Like what?”

“How about a heroin overdose? It just stops your heart.”

“I don’t know how to shoot drugs.”

“I do.”

“Can you get heroin?”

“Probably.” I had met addicts in the hospital who had been kicked out but returned every day for methadone treatment.

I made three trips to L.A. looking for the stuff. Each one was a 90-mile traffic jam. I found the addicts in line one day and inquired.

“You’re not a junkie,” one said.

“No I’m not. It’s for a friend who wants to kill himself.”

They wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I kept looking and on the third trip a junkie burned me for $100 and I gave it up.

“I’m a pothead,” I told John. “I don’t know how to score this shit. They look at me and see a cop.”

“I’ll use the gun Mike.”

“Ah shit John.”

“It’s all right. I’ve seen guys shot in the head. It’s quick.”

“It sucks.”

“Nothing is fair.”

“What about your sons? What will I tell them?”

“They’ll get along all right. Tell them I couldn’t take it anymore. It’s the truth.”

That morning he had fallen walking slowly from his bedroom. He hated me wiping his ass.

“You’re a good guy Mike. I’m going to give you two thousand dollars for helping me out.”

“Okay.” He sent me to his bank with his card and PIN number. I withdrew the money and started packing to leave. My writing was laid all over the dining room table he never used anymore. I cleaned his house real good. He gave me a lot of stuff to throw out that he didn’t want anyone to see. He laboriously wrote a suicide note and showed it to me.

“It doesn’t exonerate me. You have to do that or they will say I helped.”

He re-wrote it and thanked me profusely for helping him get along.

“That’ll work,” I said.

That night I sat waiting in the living room with the television on. Once I went in the bedroom and sat with him on the bed while he held the gun. That’s when I told him how I would do it if it were I. He thanked me again and I gave him his last hug.

He was too weak to respond.

I went back to the television. Later I called my son in New Jersey and told him what was happening.

“I don’t want to hear this,” he said indignantly, and hung up.

About 11 o’clock the pistol shot sounded like the crack of a whip. I was there in a second. He had lain on the tiled bathroom floor and wrapped his head in a heavy towel. Blood seeped through the towel. The gun lay on the floor. His left leg was jerking. I held the portable phone in one hand and called the cops while I rubbed the leg; I don't know why. After five minutes his body stiffened and died. I kept saying “Oh John, oh John.”

It was the saddest thing I ever saw. He had left the note on the walker at the bathroom door.

The operator told me to stay on the line and I still had the phone to my ear when two cop cars arrived. My face was twisted in pain. I led them to him while the coroner was telling me to slow down.

“Who wrapped his head up like this?” he demanded.

“He did,” I said, leaving the room.

I sat in the adjoining bedroom and cried. They could hear me. I cried a long time until I heard the coroner say, “Forget the ambulance.”

I went into the kitchen and sat at the counter and cried. I couldn’t stop. They posted a cop in the hall to watch me in case I was a murderer.

I called his son in San Francisco and told him. He had been drinking and refused to believe it. I gave the phone to the cop and he confirmed it. He handed me back the phone and the son said he was on his way.

After three hours I was all cried out, and they came out carrying John on a stretcher in a black plastic bag that was taped all around.

The coroner stood a few feet away and made inquiries. I explained about the regressive MS.

“What were you doing when he shot himself?”

I couldn’t remember.

“Watching television?” The TV had been on when they had entered.

“Yes.”

“Did you know he was going to do it?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know he was going to do it tonight?”

I looked him steadily in the eyes.

“No.”

“He left a note that had some good things to say about you. Did you read it?”

“No.”

“Do you have another place to go?”

“No.”

“You can’t stay here.”

“His son is on the way. He expects to find me here.”

“Okay.”

He left after telling me they had gotten up all the blood except for a small amount on the carpet.

“Bleach and soapy water will remove it,” he explained. After they had gone I cleaned it up. There wasn’t a shred of evidence that a man had died there.

I loaded my car with the boxes I had stacked in the garage and went to bed. About 7 a.m. his good friend called but I was so groggy I couldn’t talk to him. I awoke about nine and called his girlfriend in New Jersey. She broke down. She said she would come to the funeral.

Her meddling mother called a half-hour later.

“Don’t you leave, Mike. Stay for the funeral.”

“Okay,” I said to get rid of her. I had no intention to stay for a funeral. I never listen to that bitch anymore.

I called the beekeeper and told him what happened and to come for his hive.
John’s son arrived a short time later. I told him the truth about it.

“I would have pulled the trigger myself if he had asked me to,” he said. But I knew it was bullshit. That’s murder according to the state.

I showed him what I knew about the place and where the spare key was hidden in a magnetic box by the air conditioner. I gave him the large envelope John had sealed with tape before asking me to give it to him and to keep it away from the cops. I lit some sage and walked around the house through every room with it because the Utes had taught me to do that in case of a death.

“It calms the departed spirit who stays around awhile,” one had said.

His son gave me a strong hug and a thank you for helping his father for so long.
I drove to Las Vegas to see my old friend Dave. I told him John was the 45th guy I knew who had died because of Vietnam, and the third suicide. Our whole amtrack unit had been destroyed in the Mekong four years after we got out in 1962.

Dave died a few months later of pancreatic cancer and I eulogized him. I left Vegas and went to Tahoe. A few months later I left there and went to San Francisco. Then I went to Seattle to see my old friend Pat Clary. I gave him the Vietnamese hat which fit him better than me. He laughed and said he would never wear it but kept it anyway. Things went sour when Pat died, and I went to Colorado to stay with Wild Bill Norman, who had become a terrible drunk. So I went to Albuquerque. When nine-eleven happened I sold everything and took a bus to New Orleans. Then my son became ill and I closed my place and went back to Jersey. After that was over 11 months later I tried to go to Canada but they wouldn’t let me in. I rented a place in Presque Isle, Maine, for 14 months until the VA told me I had esophageal cancer. I went through that bullshit for six months and moved to Mexico. I developed a post-surgical blood clot in my left femoral region and went to the VA in El Paso to have it fixed. Then I went to my sister’s place in Louisiana to recuperate. When that was over I went to Florida and ran a military museum for 14 months. Then I went back to New Orleans and lived in my van for three years. Recently I returned to New York City.

Now I’m driving a taxi again after 22 years. I can hardly wait to get out of this hell hole too.

Scenes from a Yellow Cab

2010-01-18T22:28:00.013-05:00

These shoes shined nicely but pinched my foot so badly I woke up in extreme pain after driving all night. So I switched to my most comfortable pair, in which I painted houses for several years.

(Click once on photos for close-ups.)

Taxi drivers are not famous for stylish footwear.

The bright lights on the left are JFK International Airport ...looking south over Brooklyn from Highland Park, which is a high place at the end of the Terminal Morraine; what the glaciar left as hills thousands of years ago. Old mansions on this stretch had the best view of Brooklyn, until apartment houses blocked their view.

Modern mountains of steel and glass humming with electricity and fiber optic magic quivering with information, viral with all the imperfections of the species. Impressive, if you've forgotten what the night sky looks like.

Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn on the coldest night of the year, when my van broke down with a busted universal joint, hours after my heater had gone haywire. I spent an hour on my cell phone looking for a tow truck, freezing my ass off.

Cops engaged in their favorite activity: jawboning with each other while the world passes them by.

The Cynic. It's a dirty job but someone has to do it. All this upbeat positive-thinking shit gives me the blues. Give me a break; the planet's going to hell faster than we can make ice cream.

Statue of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who built Grand Central Station, which was saved from demolition when his great-granddaughter, Jackie Kennedy, became chairwoman of the Committee to Save Grand Central Station. One of America's first millionaires, Vanderbilt made his dough in shipping and railroads; his desire for a canal through Nicaragua helped fuel William Walker's war there in the 1850s, which nearly ruined Nicaragua and poisoned our relations with Nicaraguans unto this day. Viva capitalism...

The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. Right after I snapped this photo a cop siren beeped, telling me to move on. The Met is slowly devouring Central Park, acre by acre. Jackie-O lived across the street.

A nicely-restored old building on the Lower East Side, looking better than all of the buildings around it.

The new skyline of Long Island City in Queens, going the way of Manhattan: up.

Port Authority bus terminal, which most New Yorkers know by heart. Walking through PA at night in the Sixties was like walking through an insane asylum; hundreds of street hustlers, pimps and and other predators leaned over the balcony watching for prey. Mayor Koch cleared them out.

This was a Brooklyn bank at the turn of the 20th Century. It stands at the corner of Essex Street (Avenue B) and Houston. I wanted it for The Free Speech & Democracy Cafe, a pet idea of mine. On investigation, I found it belonged then to the artist Jasper Johns, who wouldn't have considered renting it, because his paintings were stored in the vault. Now it is a restaurant/night club appropriately named, The Vault. I wanted it to be a cheap cafeteria with a free mike for people to come and voice their opinions on anything; anything at all...

Another sexy dame brimming with talent and swimming in money, her face blotting out the sky. The night sky is full of sexy women.

Looking north on Eighth Avenue past Port Authority.

The most-common sight in the City: a taxi speeding past. There are about 14,000 yellow cabs.

During the Sixties, when the Lower East Side was crawling with hippies, Gem Spa at the corner of St. Marks Place and Second Avenue was the place to find every revolutionary newspaper from The Black Panther to the Berkeley Barb,and every counter-culture magazine from Ramparts to Grok. Now it is full of slick mags and blah newspapers, like a hundred other newstands around the City.

Crossing the 59th Street (Queensboro) Bridge to Manhattan at twilight.

A popular club in the West Forties.

Grand Central Station at 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue.

Grand Central and the Chrysler Building. I was looking directly at the unlighted Chrysler Building in the late eighties when the lights went on for the first time in the 50 years since it had been built. The architect had died with the schematics for connecting the lights in his desk, and his will had been in probate all that time, so no one could open the desk or figure out how to connect the lights.

"Shape up" is when fleet drivers wait for a taxi. Some have been working 10 years in the same garage and still wait 3 hours for a car.

This driver is so impaired he can hardly walk; but drive he must, to pay an extravagant rent and for overpriced food. He probably has no health insurance. Since fleets went back to "horse-hiring," drivers are no longer employees, but "sub-contractors." How convenient for the capitalist fleets. Sub-contractors can't unionize.

Conversations in a dozen languages going on at once. In 2003, 90% of drivers were from other countries; 44% from the Middle East; 22% from South Asia; only 6% are Americans, black, white and latino.

My dashboard.

Looking East on 42nd Street at 3 a.m.

Same cops an hour later. I haven't seen a cop with a whistle in his mouth directing traffic in years. Now they lurk around the corner waiting for someone to miss a newly-installed "No Turn" sign on streets where drivers have been turning for 50 years. New York street cops have become tax collectors for the bean-counting administration of our billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who spent $100 million of his own money to be re-elected, and barely was.

From the Ice House

2010-01-09T05:10:00.005-05:00

snowdusted Brooklyn cold under a quarter-waning moon...a million ice crystals like twinkly stars on sidewalk...fumbly-stumbly with keys thru dark cellar for furnace switch...two cats waiting at my door to meet the first heat after Friday taxi feeding frenzy...taxis like yellow sharks closing on shivering Manhattanites hailing cabs... half-drunk arrogant aggressive and proud of what?

the hottest places in town are in the meat-packing district...coked-out businessmen with dolled-up fancy women most of them whores of one sort or another...thousand-dollar tips to get in...to be seen there...to have been there...then back to some high-paying slave job of one kind or another feeling powerful and important...they actually think they have it all under control...their bank accounts prove it.

I have this failed life problem obsessing me...if you don't know what I mean there's no use telling you.

it's like hunting a contact lens on the beach...it's gone face it...be grateful you still have an eye to die with.

drooping exhausted over the keyboard...writing words for the unknown Swede who's reading me...or is she unknown?...I got readers from all over the world...don't know how they found their way here...they read me from England & Pulau Pinang...Canada & Antarctica...Berlin & Paris...Dubai & Pakistan...Mexico & China...Israel & Lebanon...Houston & Rochester...Afghanistan & Turkey...India & Brazil...Butuan & Geldenland...Italy & Brezovica...Mountain View & New Orleans...I wonder who they are? Is there a sister in the bunch? A friend? A lover? A soulmate? I wish she would come forth and spend time on me...I got the consequences of this obsession to face alone as usual...is there anybody out there?

no? what a surprise.

they're only reading.

i'm only writing.

Broken Crystal

2010-01-07T02:00:00.007-05:00

a broken crystal glass...on my knees weeping over shards...beautiful old and gone...someone's treasure...slipped from my fingers while I cleaned it...remembered now months later...trashed and forgotten...another cigarette...another coffee...another blog going nowhere.

Dylan singing "I feel a change coming on/and the first part of the day is already gone/now what's the use of dreaming?/you got better things to do/dreams never did work for me anyway/even when they did come true..."

feet...lots of feet...broken vinyl floor green like jail...thousands of feet...old dirty sneakers and boots...men above them waiting...shouts...bitter laughter...scorn...inscrutable men from other countries...a dozen languages...90% of taxi drivers are from other lands...cold in here...cold out there...a biting wind spinning off small tornadoes on Broadway...stupid bright lights of Times Square...stupid giant television screens...stupid televisions showing stupid ads to the stupid tourists in back of the stupid taxis...stupid plays and everybody loves them...stupid cops and stupid TLC inspectors...stupid tickets stupid fines stupid traffic system...stupid economic system...stupid politicians...stupid professionals...stupid decisions...stupid choices...I was going to drive a taxi again just like that...make money...sock it away...get the fuck out of this stupid country once and for all...just like that...stupid me.

it's all wrong...you can start off on the wrong foot and never get in step...you can live a whole life and never meet your mate...you can try and try and try and try and still not get it right...you can listen to all this bullshit about living a happy life and still not find a way...you can read a million books or drive a million miles or write a million words and never learn anything or get anywhere or say anything...it's enough to make you think you were born to lose...good intentions have nothing to do with it.

headaches now...unbearable foot pain waking me...walking the cold floor to make it go away...the movement all night from accelerator to brake to accelerator to brake making my old ligaments scream...backaches...buttaches...shoulder muscle aches...hanging on by a broken fingernail...cold.

glad I didn't return to New Orleans though...that would have been a worse disaster...I wonder how many more humiliating experiences I have to experience before I'm humbled enough...part of the plan I guess...hard to figure though...the bad guys wear white hats.

Chimera

2009-12-12T01:07:00.011-05:00

"He said when you yelled at him it was 'blood-curdling'."

She looked non-commital. I saw the image of this calm woman suddenly pulling a Little Lulu on that gentle boy and curdling his blood. It had been years before. "Did you really do that?" It amused me. I laughed softly. "Did you really do that, gentle lady? You're the gentlest and sweetest person I ever knew. Ha, ha. I can just see you doing that." She had never done that to anyone's knowledge. Of course they had kept everything from me.

"You're a fire-breathing monster all right."

She almost smiled.

"You must have had a lot of stress."

"Sometimes."

She never yelled.

"Want to have an argument?"

"No."

"Why not? Afraid you'll lose?"

"No."

"I just thought it would be nice if we could have an argument for a change."

"What do you want, Mike?"

"An argument. We never had a real argument."

"Why do you want one now? I don't want to argue. I don't even think about stuff."

"Lucky you."

"It's just a waste of time that's all. Why go into it?"

"Oh I don't know," I relented. Our business was over, and I could see she was becoming impatient. It didn't take much to make her impatient with me. She knew all my tricks. The Year of the Snake and all that.

"I just thought it would make the time pass faster. Everything's going so slow. I feel like I'm on the Lincoln train. Maybe we could spice things up with an argument or something. How about if we arm wrestle instead?" I offered her my elbow on the table.

She got up and moved into the kitchen and stood with her back to the counter.

"Okay," I said. "Wanna make love?"

"No."

"You never want to make love anymore."

"Look, I have things I have to do."

"Okay." I laughed. "Look."

Two beats.

"What?"

"Look at us."

"I see us."

"Do you?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

I looked at her until she couldn't look at me anymore and turned away for something in a cabinet.

"Well, Merry Christmas," I said. I touched her shoulder and headed for the door.

"Merry Christmas."

"Don't let the bedbugs bite."

"I won't."

I stopped at the door and turned.

"Your vocabulary is improving."

She didn't say anything. I left.

A Story Under Every Stone

2009-12-11T03:02:00.010-05:00

Gary Davidson and myself after finishing a two-day job assembling and hanging those IKEA cabinets I am dancing in front of. Gary is a Brooklyn native who knows more about Brooklyn and its history than anyone needs to know.

There's nothing to beat 129 blog posts for showing me how full of crap I am. I can't even read some of this stuff now. Yet it was heartfelt, most of it, proving I suppose that feeling doesn't mean all that much in writing, as far as literature goes. This ain't literature, that's for sure. I don't know what it is in fact, unless it is merely a compulsive vomiting of thoughts and feelings into the blogvoid--for relief from the empty dull nightly nothingness of my suspended-animation existence-in-waiting, and the submerged daily anxiety of surviving. My habit of writing is hard to kick, even if most of what I write can safely be flushed and never missed. You think this is bad? You should see the 150 drafts I abandoned but keep for inexplicable reasons. Don't think I never wanted to chuck every pen pencil paper notebook and word processing program on the premises into the garbage and be done with it. In fact I did it once.

Beside the great Brooklyn Dodger's grave, a short distance from where I live in East New York. Jackie Robinson is a hallowed name in Brooklyn. (Click photos for close ups.)

Gary is a fine photographer and artist with an eye for balance and beauty. After 55 years in the neighborhood, he knows this vast complex of cemeteries as well as anyone except the gravediggers. I have the same fascination with graveyards, the older the better.

A normal day at the Post Office on Sutter Ave., where I waited an hour-and-a-half to pick up a package that wasn't there.

Sunday I start driving a taxi in New York City again for the first time in about 22 years. It took 3.5 months to get this goddamned hack license due to the bureaucratic snarl of the licensing proceedure now. In 1974 I paid $30 for a hack license and went out the next day and found a job on West 47th Street and started making money right away. I applied for this license in early August, and since then I have seen thousands of dollars go by in yellow cabs that I wasn't driving. I nearly had to marry somebody at the TLC to get the license, at a total cost of about $600. I racked up $2,450 in personal debt for this son-of-a-bitch. (I had no idea that many people would actually lend me money.)

Gary holding a ticket I received for no inspection sticker beside the inspection sticker. I got two of them in two days. Sixty-five bucks a pop. (Contested)

Looking east and south over Brooklyn from Cypress Hills Cemetery.

Yeah, that black van is still with me, but soon it's going to be sitting in a field in the Catskills, far from any voracious insurance company.

Those bastards had me making phone calls for two weeks to the Virgin Islands, trying to get to the bottom of a mysterious entry on my NY state driving record that I had turned in a "document" there in 1995, when I was in Colorado. I've never been to the Virgin Islands.

Finally I tracked down the head of the motor vehicle department in that faraway place. She told me, "We don't even keep records back to the 1990s." I repeated this to the one friendly voice I had found at the TLC, and he said, "Oh, okay. You don't have to get that one then. But it might come up later."

It might come up later?

This vast criminal enterprise had me rounding up driving records from every state they had a record of me driving in. It's a good thing they aren't as thorough as they think they are, because I have had, count them, 15 driving licenses from 15 states: NY; NJ; LA; TX; MA; RI; WA; CA; CO; NM; NC; ME; FL; VA; NV; plus Canada, and a Marine Corps driver's license too. I think I'm qualified to drive a taxi in NYC; especially since I drove them for six years at night over a 15 year period.

Incidentally, I took the written and driving tests for most of those licenses. On top of that I had a National Safety Driving course that lasted a week, and several other safe-driving courses over the decades.

Sigh. Things have outwardly changed but inside I hardly have. I almost never look at my face in a mirror, except when I'm brushing my old white hair back, but on the rare occasions when I do, like the other night when I was wondering if I had suffered a mild stroke, I look long and steady and wonder who is this guy looking back at me, and what is it that keeps him keeping on. I don't know what keeps me going with the intensity of my life. Something set me running back in 1958, and I have never stopped.

Sometimes it seems like my life has been an emergency; one emergency after another, which I learned to negotiate every day looking more or less calm. I don't think people who know me realize how intense my feelings are, how intently I look at things, how intense is my wonderment amazement and disgust, how wild and intense my thoughts are, that I can't adequately express, and how passionate I really am. I have to clamp my mouth shut all the time or they will think I am a complete nut. Sometimes I feel such a sense of desperation it's indescribable. I am burning up in this fucking refrigerator.

My feelings exactly.

Stealing Fire

2009-11-27T06:23:00.007-05:00

A world of trouble...entropy of the heart...masked anxiety...calm panic...insufficiency of human solutions for human problems...genetic criminality...a masquerade of civilization raining bombs of steel and fire on the "uncivilized"...terrorism of an uttered curse...techno-governments...robot populations...holy war...Predator diplomacy… millions of refugees…the crime of silence…acceptance...stealing fire.

I’m fascinated by President Barack Obama…never seen anything like him…he does his job with grace and certainty…an uncultured southern redneck shouts “You lie!” at The President of the United States of America …reporting Constitutionally before Congress assembled…President Obama snaps “I do not!” and never breaks stride…gracefully he accepts an insincere apology and dismisses the distraction… he won’t let it divert him from serious business…who can fault him?

So-called Republicans sulk and get nasty. It didn’t work. They are bad losers.

Their disrespect is serious. Not since Lincoln has an obdurate, self-righteous opposition minority hated a President so much. Everybody knows it’s his race and not his supposed “socialism” which is their real grievance. Congressman Joe Wilson might as well have shouted, “You lie, nigger!” Everybody knew what he meant. He never would have yelled that at a white President. Racist sickos from Lake Charles to Sandpoint applauded or approved.

But what an outrage it was for those who love America, and know the better angels of our history; to see an ignorant drunk defile such an established tradition and custom, personal courtesy to the President of the United States of America, when he Constitutionally addresses Congress. As much as I disliked any President in my lifetime—and Reagan owns that honor—I never would have shouted such a thing to him in Congress…though I gave him the finger in public demonstrations. We all hungered to call him a liar privately, to back him up to an intellectual wall show the proof and say "You're a goddamned liar, Mr. President."

The worst kind of liar is one who believes his own lies, and Ronald Reagan was the most-convincing liar I never met...we stood with our jaws hanging open as we watched the American people fawn over him.

Grandiosity rising…Lou Dobbs, Glen Beck, and Sarah Palin…sudden self-invented stars… command the attention of some of our perverted Media…but Palin isn’t even slightly amusing…Dobbs is dull and Beck is a mental cripple…everyday another report…Dobbs and Beck and Palin…promoted by flatterers…are running for President...they should duel with guns…Palin everybody knows applied for the position the moment she and McCain crashed in flames…every culturally-deprived redneck and romance-reading housewife from Maine to California shouted “Yahoo!” when she declared herself an everyday sort of know-nothing just like them. She field-dresses moose and shops at Wal-Mart too…she doesn't even know the names of the magazines she doesn't read...her daughter is just as fucked-up as their daughter…her real claim to fame?...she doesn’t mind getting bloody…the image of a female Teddy Roosevelt…and the Viagra crowd wants to bang her of course. They’d sell their Harleys for the chance.

Elect her President then. It would be a fine joke. I’ve maintained since Nixon that the American people usually get what they deserve, and that they bring hard times on themselves. I also maintain that the harder it is for the American people, the better it is, because they won’t get off their selfish asses until their backs are to the wall and flames are scorching their butts. Sarah Palin will have their backs glued to the wall within a day of settling into the Oval Office. But the American people are quite unpredictable when things get tough.

And then look out. It will be either a lynching party, or Eisenhower storming Normandy. It can go either way. Question: are these hard times the expression of the Collective Unconscious for self-correction? Let’s fuck it up so bad we’ll have to change it. The Unconscious might have its own weird logic. I'll give myself cancer and maybe it will encourage me to quit smoking.

The war continues of course and it is the most-serious business…is it working?...can we really win all optimists are asking...Admiral Mike Mullen Pentagon Chief of the Generals babysits Pakistan…he’s probably bought a condo there…is obviously running the war for them…please step aside…this man is a real Admiral...he's been to the best war colleges in the world...he rather knows how to run a war…Pakistan militarists deny it but they’ve bowed to his superior knowledge…or his deep pockets…now they’ve taken on the Pakistani Taliban in their strongholds. The Talibani are ecstatic...come on in, said the spider to the fly.

”We’re neck-deep in the Big Muddy/And the big fool says to push on”...”it's an unprecedented war inside a nuclear-armed State.

Talibani feel like the Indians at Little Big Horn…Black Elk said that Indians could hardly believe Custer was so foolish as to attack 10,000 of them in their strongest encampment…his supreme arrogance enraged them…they swarmed his puny troop like killer bees and joyously killed them all…recent archaeological digs reveal the soldiers ran like rabbits…a revenge for the buffalo in the Land of the Greasy Grass...a vindication of the Rights of Man.

The only soldier to survive, John Martin was delivering a message when Custer was defeated.

I’ve been reading Securing Helmand by Jeffrey Dressler of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) about Marine Corps operations since 2008 in Helmand Province west of Kandahar…I recommend it for any wanting to get into details of this war. Helmand Province is the main poppy-growing region of Afghanistan...the biggest heroin suppliers in the world…and I'm finding with Google Earth the pretty red poppies in dark green fields…it would take a brigade to burn them out…and a division to prevent re-planting...my there’s a lot of poppies. They make some people fabulously wealthy and turn millions into sleepwalkers…but look at the jobs they provide and the infusion of cash into the economy.

“It’s only business.”

Helmand is Afghanistan’s biggest province and the size of West Virginia … snow-capped mountains snake down from the north like coral reefs to rocky hills and level plains by raging rivers in deep warm valleys which is the breadbasket of Afghanistan…the mountains dig like claws into the ancient enduring landscape…thousands of squared-off fields of lucrative crops near the river…the country’s longest river…an ancient smuggling route to and from Baluchistan and Pakistan to the south…Taliban will fight like hell to keep the money Helmand Province produces…this year they are re-starting military actions in the north to interdict a new supply route and draw forces from Helmand with the harvest season approaching...but the honest marines say opium is only one of many sources of Taliban revenue …they won’t shrivel up without it…they tax other crops and other things too just like the Vietcong...our allies and business partners the Saudi family for example give them money too… General McCrystal doesn’t go in for poppy-eradication…it might upset the farmers…no one mentions that eradication would reduce the heroin supply for millions of others and US consumers around the planet.

Nobody but I...and I am who? promotes the notion of sending a couple of thousand American farmers with tractors and seeds to plow and supplant wheat vegetables and fruit for the poison poppies. Poppy farmers like farmers everywhere only want to make an honest living and be left alone. And here’s the topper: extensive irrigation canals in Helmand’s lush valleys were dug by the United States in the 1950s. You can see them from the sky of Google Earth. It looks so peaceful down there.

Good luck marines! I dig you guys, but I have to tell you the truth: many of you will end up addicted to something and sleeping on the streets or in prison…the suicides of course are already out of hand… spouse-abuse is an epidemic…many of you will end up divorced and hated by your kids…you can’t go around killing people and watching your friends torn apart and come home healthy and whole…that only happens in the movies…I know some of you guys…still young and starting vigorous businesses…computer-repair startups and software companies for example...making money with former military skills…drinking and coking it up every night and lying like hell about everything anymore…still fist-fighting like in the Service…you won't heed warnings either…I was probably just as confidently arrogant when I got out of the Crotch. Blessedly, I hadn’t been in a war and had less to feel guilty about then.

Don’t you wish our babysitting televisions would show us the actual wounds? Let's have some real reality tv…show the kids what bullets and bombs really do to human bodies…people don’t explode and tear along anatomical lines…let us hear the grunts of shock...the cries of surprise...the moans and screams of agony…a man burns like any other meat in a fire…the flesh turns black and the exposed meat splits and looks almost edible…so show us the burned flesh flopping from the cooked pink muscle hanging in the tree…show us the eyeball with half a face attached and lying in concrete dust…yes show the whole picture…it’s the only way kids are going to learn that war isn’t a video game…show it until they throw up…show it until their parents throw up…the only way to end war is to make people hate it...it took millions dead and two world wars before Europeans finally got wise…there’s little room for love in the antiwar game…there’s only one true love anyway and it ain’t human…you have to not so much love people as hate war to bring an end to it. You must be disgusted by it. War is the most-horrible thing we do. “War is hell.” We keep forgetting it. We avoid the sordid details to our own peril. We live in the heart of the hell of war and don’t even know it. But some do. Some know that hell is of our own construction.

“…half the story has never been told/but now you see the light/you better stand up for your rights/most people say, great God will come from the sky/take away everything, and make everybody feel high/but if you know what life is worth/you will look for yours on earth”…

Ah, hell war, and hate; there they are again. Do I hate? I don’t think so. I can’t think of anybody I hate…I don’t let myself feel that one emotion. It’s too dangerous. I can see how a Jew can hate Hitler and a Palestinian hate a Jew and so on…but I don’t feel that myself…there’s nobody I want to destroy even if they’ve already been destroyed…there are things I’d like to change though…but I know you can never destroy an idea…ideas continue living in your own head even if you kill everybody who thinks them…ideas are as Eternal as you are…and you can’t make lovey-dovey with a homicidal maniac so how can you negotiate? It's an insoluble contradiction even a paradox…Cormac McCarthy couldn’t make the Taliban war any more despicable bleak or uglier...I believe reports of rapes of women and male captives…especially of boys…well what do you expect?...a religion that prevents boys from knowing girls by means of violent death?…what did you think?...a religion that stones a woman for showing her face? Onanism must be endemic…masturbation and sadistic sex the common affair of deprived males growing up. The men don’t understand the women at all. The women understand them only too well.

Onanism: Masturbation; coitus interruptus; self-gratification; onanistic. (for those unfamiliar with the term.)

The American people are too disengaged from the actual war to understand how war is destroying them…they don’t see it…or maybe they sense it when reading layoff notices and filing job applications…when they read bulletin boards over the shoulders of dozens of other job-seekers…when their cars are towed because they couldn’t afford auto insurance anymore…when $10 barely buys a meal…when they learn that the war has already cost nearly a trillion dollars…or maybe they know it but shrug it off like other things they can’t do anything about.

The whole war is a Great Masturbation. After the orgasm, exhaustion; a vague sense of disquiet, and time-wasted.

And what to do? Don’t ask me. I don’t know what to do other than protest and keep on keeping on.

That’s why President Barack Obama fascinates me…he seems to think that he knows what he's doing…he never quits…I think he intends to give them a thrashing, build some infrastructure, deliver a stern lecture, and leave…he’s moves on the world stage with the confidence of a tuned athlete in and out of every event with perfect balance proper words and subtle humor...he keeps me laughing even when I'm dissatisfied with the policy…the opposition whipped up by the hatemongering right wing media gets nastier everyday…but he doesn’t lose his cool…he’s the President…he’s in charge…he has to set a good example...he never returns an insult…he won’t lower himself or the Office…he tells it like it is: FOX isn’t a news organization…it’s a political organization…why should he let them in the White House?…who elected FOX? …the brave and direct honesty of it blows my mind. The applause of millions.

Lou Dobbs and Glen Beck take the hint and choose a logical path past the dilemma of exclusion…he won’t let them in the White House so they want his job… they’re running for President! Ha, ha! It’s a hoot…every dumbass in the country will vote for them…or for Sarah…if they can get out of the saloon that day…Yee haw I’m proud to be a redneck from Brokeback Butte…” Look honey, she’s just like us. She don’t know shit.” The joke is that it will turn the Republican Party into a banana-split with nuts and whipped cream.

I have a real old friend from the Marine Corps who thinks Michele Obama is the ugliest First Lady in history. Go figure. I can’t help but laugh at his poor dumb racist ass; that the only thing he sees is the color of her skin, and thinks it ugly…whew…talk about retarded; but I love him anyway. I good-naturedly answered that she’s the most-beautiful woman I ever saw in the White House. I pointed out her genuine smile and obvious love for her family, her generous heart, concern for others, and intelligent discourse. I said I even felt some love for her. My friend laughed it off saying he always knew I was nuts. Then I told him Obama is the best President I ever saw, and that confirmed it for him. We’re still friends though. I’m not a fanatic; I can’t let politics interfere with friendship. I might be nuts, but I know which side my bread is buttered on, and my friends are few-enough already.

Obama’s foes are attacking from every side. Any little thing will do. The daily lies of “death panels”…”socialism”…”dictator”…”tyranny”…”traitor”…"communist"...”legal citizenship”…and yesterday a criticism of his "irritating" overuse of the term, “unprecedented.” They call his speeches “lectures;” and wish they could lecture so well. But they can’t burn him down because he’s stolen their fire. Now he has the flame…he is the flame…and,

“He’s the strongest nigger in the world.” (Rush Limbaugh; quoted by an anonymous source on the internet.)

They can’t get over it, and it scares the hell out of them. Ha, ha! Ha, ha!

I never had so much fun playing armchair politician.

Dancing with Baptists

2009-11-15T05:52:00.004-05:00

I think I always wanted to dance, because music always got me going. Music was magic to me. My sister Pat and I (and everybody else then) listened to radio music, well before television became our Keeper. Popular, country, cajun, and gospel were the fare. Of course, being raised Baptists in southwest Louisiana in the '40s and '50s did not make one a dancer. Once, we were walking along with our grandmother Louise past a Pentacostal Church, and rocking music came out the front. People were clapping and singing, and there was a drum.

"Holy rollers," my grandmother said disgustedly.

I don't know if she ever danced. It's hard to imagine, but anything is possible. She had ridden a horse a hundred miles on her honeymoon, and I saw her several times tapping her feet to music and laughing. She was Irish before she was Baptist, after all. I think she believed that her Lord Jesus wouldn't approve, and that was the main thing with her.

I don't know what Baptists have against dancing. (It's the sensuality, stupid.) I haven't identified with the church since I was 12, and I do recall a preacher now and then denouncing dancing, but only in general terms, lumping it in with drinking, taking God's name in vain, and extra-marital sex; all sins that you can burn in hell for. But if I have to spend the lifetime of the Universe in hell, I'd rather be in for dancing.

I didn't realize people danced until I saw my mother, after a six-year absence, dancing with her new husband Sidney in 1949. I was eight. I remember how ecstatic she was on her second wedding day. She was very beautiful. And Sid, who had a wonderfully authentic smile, didn't look at all unhappy. That came later.

In the fifth grade we learned the square dance (for squares) and the fox trot. It felt funny having a girl in my arms; we never seemed to get in step, and I felt awkward and shy. I wanted to dance, but I spent more time watching than dancing. I didn't like the feeling that eveybody was watching me and thinking I looked ridiculous. I didn't know they were mostly feeling the same way, and nobody was watching me in particular.

By then I was into jazz, old and modern, because I was a radio freak (still am,) and Lake Charles had two good jazz stations. KLOU had Rick Nelson playing everything from Glen Grey to Miles Davis, and KPLC had Ivory Alexander, a black man believe it or not, playing everything, from King Oliver to Billie Holiday and John Coltrane. I loved it all. I wanted to be a drummer. I had perfect rhythm but didn't know it then.

After we moved to Metairie near New Orleans I discovered dixieland. This music blew me away. I couldn't help but want to dance to it, and sometimes I danced alone in my room with the noise from a clock radio, puny beside today's volume, driving my mother nuts-enough to bang on my door with her shoes. I have to mention that I was also banging on an ironing board with drumsticks.

I started going to parties of schoolmates, always the girls', in seventh grade, and we danced. I had the fox trot down by then, but I was, no pun intended, still pretty stiff with the girls. It amazed me that fat ones always danced better. They seemed to float over the floor. It was easy to glide them in any direction. Believe me, fat girls can dance.

And then in eighth grade Elvis and Fats Domino hit the scene. Everything changed. Wow. We started dancing to rock and roll, and nobody knew what they were doing, or what they were supposed to do. We must have looked like a bunch of out-of-control robots out there; rigid white kids prohibited by custom from moving their hips. Adults who had jitterbugged during the war stood on the side and shook their heads. Anyway, we tried. A lot of guys gave it up for the rest of their lives. But I never stopped trying to get it down.

Fool, you say, why didn't you take dance lessons? Well I did. My friend's mother gave Jim and I ten free Arthur Murray dance lessons in New Orleans on his 16th birthday. We held sexy older girls (about 19 and 20) in our arms, and tried to learn the mambo, the samba, the cha-cha, the rhumba, and my favorite, the tango. But after the lessons were finished I didn't dance any of them for years, and now I would need more lessons.

The Marine Corps happened. After teaching me the rudiments of killing people, the Corps transferred me to Okinawa for two years. I danced with prostitutes in bars. I'm sure I wasn't anything special on the dance floor, even though I probably looked better then.

There wasn't much dancing for me after that, until, in 1968, I discovered marijuana, lsd, and psychedelic music. Suddenly, everybody was dancing better. It took me years to realize that my favorite dance music is Bob Dylan's. Yeah, I hear you laughing. But I never heard a song of his I couldn't get moving to.

I was sharing a house in Hackensack, NJ, with two other newspaper reporters, stoned on acid one night. One guy was sitting with his girlfriend on the couch, and music was blasting from two large speakers. A sudden urge to dance seized me and brought me to my feet. For the first time in my life, I dropped my inhibition against public dancing, and let go. I flew around the room in a dance that would amuse a professional dancer. But I didn't care. I felt very free for the half-hour I did that. They watched tolerantly, smiling.

When I finally stopped in a sweat, I told them that I thought maybe I could be a dancer. They politely agreed.

But I never did become one. My life drastically changed. A whirlpool swept me into it. I swam with the current of alcohol, drugs and jail, under-employment and anger, and poverty loss lonliness and despair, for nearly forty years. Not much dancing. But I never lost that perfect rhythm. I don't think you can lose it.

I still love music, and there are few things I'd rather watch than a good dancer. I've continued to dance alone in my rooms and apartments all these years. I found that due to long periods of not-doing it, some yoga postures are beyond the capabilities of advancing age. But I'm amazed and grateful to find that dancing is restoring my muscle tone, and strengthening muscles whose weakness causes much lower back pain in older folks. And I'm happy to report that I finally learned to let go and shake my ass. It's easy guys; you just dance like a woman until you get it down, then add your own style. Why do women dance together all the time? Because most men don't like to dance, and women are better dancers. (They move their hips.) They want to be seen!

I still dance alone. It's okay. I'd prefer a partner naturally. But that would require risky human contact, and no other animal has ever caused me so much trouble.

For now I dance with Eric the cat. (I use a string.) He doesn't seem to mind, and doesn't seem judgmental. I don't care what he thinks anyway. I'm sure he doesn't care what I think. One thing you can say about cats: they don't lie, and they don't pretend. They can't shake their butts though.