THE INFORMATION #1155 JUNE 25, 2021

THE INFORMATION #1155

JUNE 25, 2021
Copyright 2021 FRANCIS DIMENNO
dimenno@gmail.com
https://dimenno.wordpress.com

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.–W. E. B. Du Bois

WHEN THIS WORLD CATCHES FIRE
BOOK FOUR: AND IF THE DEVIL COME SHOOT HIM WITH A GUN
PART FIFTY-FIVE

272. EYES ON THE BROZE

When Professor Otremo made that crack about  black children killing each other for their sneakers, I decided to say nothing, just to see how far he would take this. What he said next was surprising.

“Listen, Purson–I was at a conference with some newly-minted educators–people with doctorates and the like–this was a few years ago. And I spoke to a very famous celebrity–a man whose name you would recognize in a heartbeat–who, incidentally, was a man of your race. He was dressed in a rather humdrum wardrobe–black dress pants, black jacket, yellow sweater vest, purple silk necktie–but his clothes were well-tailored and probably cost him a bundle. They didn’t just come off the rack at Kresge’s. And he wore a pair of custom-fitted tan leather shoes, with argyle calf socks. I have an eye for these things–in my profession, you know, you have to be able to read people at a glance. And this man was no ordinary academic. He reeked of money. And good taste. There was nothing garish about him. This was a man who was confident and self-assured, and comfortable in his own skin. I’ll go so far as to admit that he was the first black man I had ever met and spoken to at length, and I was very impressed at the way he carried himself. 

“Anyhow, we took a shine to each other, and so after dinner we retired to the library for cigars and brandy and Baba au Rhum. I had quite a long talk with him about various matters.  He was a very intelligent man–witty, articulate, well-spoken, and with a keen interest in the world around him. He also had quite an eye for the ladies, but that was neither here nor there. After we circled around each other for a while, conversationally sniffing each other out, as it were, he apparently decided that I was a man of good will–an ‘abolitionist,’ was his verdict. He then proceeded to prod away at me regarding what I sincerely thought about the race problem. Of course, we almost had a quarrel–on my part, there was a lot of plain talk about the underclass, and on his part, there was the usual face-saving guff about it also being a problem that white people had with blacks. ‘Why is it,’ he said, ‘that whenever a group of black people get together and are talking and laughing, the white people all have to stare at them?’ I said I couldn’t answer that. ‘It’s racism, is what it is,’ he said, and you should have seen the sad look on his face as he mugged at me and turned down the corners of his mouth and rolled his eyes just like a snotty teenager. I suggested that there was probably blame to be laid for this sorry state of affairs on both sides of the racial divide, and he vehemently disagreed, and we got into another little argument, but he gradually allowed that I was right, in a way, and then he started to tell me what he really thought, and proceeded to unload it all on me. He swore me to confidentiality–but there are no secrets between us, are there, Purson?” 

“I hope not.”

“So do I. Anyway, he let it sort of just casually slip that he was pretty high up in The Broze. He said it was a problem he discussed with all his fellow fraternity members–that there was a lot of sad-assed ideology behind white supremacy, and a good deal of it is aesthetic preference as well as a lot of pseudo-scientific nonsense, all topped off with a great big dollop of wishful thinking. ‘White people,’ he said, ‘like to imagine a world in which there are no black people at all. But there’s a big problem, because we aren’t going anywhere. This is our country too. We helped build it, we’ve been pulling our weight in spite of all the obstacles that were put in our way, and we’re going to reap the benefits just like everybody else.’ But, he said, there were admittedly certain black people who weren’t doing the race any favors, ‘and they’re dragging the rest of us down.’ Just like scorpions in a bottle.’ Those were his exact words. ‘Scorpions in a bottle. Dropping out of school, playing the fool, committing a crime, doing the time, and always out there running wild in the streets because the parents, well, the parents just don’t seem to give a damn about anything.’ His facial gestures were remarkably suggestive, I must say. “I am disgusted by those fools,” he said, and he made a hilarious gesture in which he held his nose. Back when he was ‘coming up,’ he said, everybody in the neighborhood knew everybody else, and what they were up to. ‘Back in those days, you couldn’t get away with nothing,’ he said. ‘If you was into something you shouldn’t of been, you’d get your ass whooped.’ I think he also threw in something about ‘anomie’.”

“Which is…?”

“I’m glad you asked, Purson. Anomie, that’s a fancy term that sociologists use. (Don’t get me started on high much I dislike sociologists.) It basically means a breakdown in values. You can’t blame it all on the fact that people live in highrises, he said. No, he told me, I believe that where there’s a will, there’s always a way. And that there’s two sides to every story, and sometimes more. Look at me, he said. I came up from nothing–and now I’m living the dream. Why can’t these kids today do the same? And you can’t blame it all on white people, he said.”

“Well…I suppose I would agree…you can’t blame it ALL on white people. Still….” 

“No, wait. Let me finish. He seemed entirely sincere in what he was saying. Not like he was trying to tell me only what I WANTED to hear. This is a man who was so rich that I’m sure he could buy and sell me a dozen times over. But he had the common touch. Just as friendly as he could be. Sure, he said, there were centuries of discrimination. But all that should be in the past by now. But, he said, the parents of these kids aren’t doing their jobs. There’s no respect for the damn father, because he’s not there. There’s no respect for the damn mother, because she’s off doing whatever, drugging, partying, and poor granny and even the great-grandmother have to be there to take up the slack. They give their kids ghetto names like Makayla and Imani and Ladonna and Jomo and Hakeem and Jamal and Treyvon–how are they going to find a job with a name like that? Would you hire a person with a name like that? he said. I wouldn’t. They probably already have a chip on their shoulder–just waiting for you to say something to them. Like the word ‘No’. When it comes right down to it,  he said, Mike and Jim and Bob and Mary and Jennifer and Amy are good enough names for me. 
“He went on to say that black parents don’t know how to manage their money. If they took all the money they spent on cigarettes and liquor drinks and buying their kids overpriced expensive shoes, and instead they invested that same money in tobacco and liquor and sneaker stock portfolios, they’d probably earn a lot more money to pay for the more important things, like an education for their children so that when they graduate, they can find a decent job.  But no–these economically ignorant ghetto people can’t be bothered to think about the future. They’d rather watch television than go to church, and they’d rather buy lottery tickets than go back to school and study and learn something and get a degree and try to make something of themselves. Sure, the cops come down hard on my people, he said. And that’s deplorable. But why do they have to run from the police? Why do they have to steal in the first place? Nobody ever has to go hungry in the United States, so where’s the logic in all this?

“Now remember, Purson–this isn’t me talking. This is a highly-regarded entertainer who put himself on the front lines during the Civil Rights movement, An educated man with a Doctorate degree. Very bright. He was basically saying that black parents don’t parent and black kids don’t know how to behave like decent kids, because of peer pressure. That the parents would rather sit in the projects and collect welfare money instead of making an effort to better themselves and move on up and out of there. He called it ‘a self-destructive pandemic’ of black parents and black children stretching back for three or four generations or more. And he said that it made him sick and tired. He said that black people have got to stop making all these sad excuses and learn how to play the white man’s game, or else they are always going to have these problems. He told me that he was in the highest tax bracket, 70 percent, and that he was tired. Tired of working hard for everything he had and always paying his taxes on time only to see all his money going to reward a person who dresses funny and doesn’t know how to speak proper English and who won’t amount to anything and who will grow up to be a pimp or an armed robber and end up in prison, ‘where MY tax dollars will STILL be supporting him’. He said he was sick of seeing more black men in prison than in college. 

“He also told me that he’d been thinking about these things for a long time and that, at first he blamed the white man, because it was white people who were the ones who promoted all the demeaning stereotypes in movies like Birth of a Nation, and characters like Stepin Fetchit, and Aunt Jemima, and Amos and Andy. ‘Back in the 1960s I was pretty sick of that shit, people making fun of Negroes, treating them like clowns, and I was angry, but then I realized that things were changing in the society, but that certain people weren’t changing along with them, and then I started to get even more angry, not at whites, but at my own people, and their attitudes, all their anti-whatever, and where they were going with it, which was nowhere at all. So I went back to school myself, where I met some very smart people, people who were smarter than me, and I started listening to what they had to say. They hipped me to a lot of things that I wasn’t aware of. They made me more aware of myself, and where I had come from, and what I had endured, and what all it was ultimately for.'” 

   
“Well…that was a very interesting conversation you had with the man, Professor. Who was it exactly that you were, ah, chatting with?”

“Oh…well…he asked me not to say. But he was high up in the Broze, and he was in a position to know what he was talking about. I’m rather surprised, Purson, that you weren’t recruited into the Broze yourself, before now.  Working class? Sure–but they always have room for a go-getter. We’ve been watching you, Purson, for quite some time, as I already mentioned. Don’t worry about your file–there’s nothing in it, until recently, that would reflect poorly on you, and, like I said before, you’re with us now, and the people who got in your way were just collateral damage. “

“Can I see my file?”

Otremo laughed long and loud. “Oh ho ho ho, no–there’d be nothing of particular interest to you in there.”

“Well, anyway, I’d like to see it?”

“It simply can’t be allowed. Policy. My hands are tied.”  

“Well…can we discuss it?”

“Surely we can. Levon…would you be kind enough to go and wait in the outer room until I call for you? It shouldn’t be long.”

Levon Martin gave me a long and soulful look, as if to say “watch out,” but the rest of his face was a glacial and almost spastic grin as he got up and slowly shambled his way out of the room. 

“The Thorazine shuffle,” I thought, with rising horror. 

But I tried hard to make my face into an expressionless mask.

*1 SALUTATION
THE LEMON DROPS

IN THE SPRINGTIME

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2-pWaU1Qkk

2*REFERENCE

CAPTAINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

www.amazon.com/Captains-Consciousness-Advertising-Consumer-Anniversary/dp/0465021557

ALSO SEE:
www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-history-review/article/abs/captains-of-consciousness-advertising-and-the-social-roots-of-the-consumer-culture-by-stuart-b-ewen-new-york-mgrawhill-1976-pp-vii-261-1000/635387C5730FC74B21564D14C66B6998  

SEE ALSO:
THE MECHANICAL BRIDE
No longer is it possible for modern man, individually or collectively, to live in any exclusive segment of human experience or achieved social pattern. The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race. There are no more remote and easy perspectives, either artistic or national. Everything is present in the foreground. That fact is stressed equally in current physics, jazz, newspapers, and psychoanalysis. And it is not a question of preference or taste. This flood has already immersed us. And whether it is to be a benign flood, cleansing the Augean stables of speech and experience, as envisaged in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or a merely destructive element, may to some extent depend on the degree of exertion and direction which we elicit in ourselves.–Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard, 1951), 87.
www.artforum.com/print/201207/twentieth-century-vox-marshall-mcluhan-and-the-mechanical-bride-31948

3*HUMOR

TOP TEN REJECTED JAMES BOND GADGETS

https://www.avclub.com/from-the-home-office-10-david-letterman-top-ten-lis-1798279782/slides/8

4*NOVELTY

Alonzo Tuske Hates the Beatles
www.nytimes.com/1964/02/09/archives/beatles-prepare-for-their-debut-police-patrol-their-hotel-and-guard.html

5*AVATAR OF THE ZEITGEIST

THE LEMON PIPERS

RICE IS NICE

https://youtu.be/aiRazGpWvbc

6* DAILY UTILITY

ORIGAMI

britishorigami.info/lister/legman.php

*7 CARTOON

BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH

MONSTERS

www.amazon.com/Monsters-Barry-Windsor-Smith/dp/1683964152/ref=asc_df_1683964152/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=459685758605&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17560598016931124082&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9001987&hvtargid=pla-919269545930&psc=1

8*PRESCRIPTION 

25 BEST MOVIES SET IN BOSTON

https://stacker.com/stories/13361/25-best-movies-set-boston

9* RUMOR PATROL

FREEING AMERICA ONE ENSLAVED MIND AT A TIME
thecommonsenseshow.com/conspiracy/your-child-not-safe-global-elites-child-trafficking-rings

10*LAGNIAPPE

MINISTRY

BURNING INSIDE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM5DOSC0jUo

ALSO SEE:MINISTRY ALBUMS, RANKED

https://www.loudersound.com/features/ministry-albums-ranked-from-worst-to-best-al-jourgensen

11*DEVIATIONS FROM THE PREPARED TEXT: A REVIEW OF OTHER MEDIA

THE CANTANKEROUS BEETHOVEN

“Prince, what you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.–Ludwig van Beethoven

https://www.dw.com/en/man-and-myth-misconceptions-of-beethoven/a-3592468

12* CONTROVERSIES IN POPULAR CULTURE  (UN)POPULAR OPINIONS

Music is good.
Coffee helps get you going in the morning.
Children often say amusing things.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/10/38-unpopular-opinions/

MODERN WISDOM NUMBER 275 JUNE 2021

MODERN WISDOM
NUMBER 275
JUNE 2021
 
Copyright 2021 Francis DiMenno
dimenno@gmail.com
http://www.dimenno.wordpress.com  

THE COOL-OFF: AN ACID NOIR NOVEL

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BETWEEN TWO LIARS

“What hath night to do with sleep?”–Milton

I sometimes talk to myself. But my saving grace, if I even have one, is that I’m usually sane enough not to answer back. Only time will tell. Only now, this time, I was standing at the train station and I was all in. All drugged up. Standing, but barely. Arnold, I told my pounding thoughts, Arnold–stop. But my brain wouldn’t listen. I needed a safe haven for my mind so I circled back on foot to Blinkey’s newsstand. But the thoughts still came. And I thought instead of Blinkey: his endless yarns; his tall tales; and his outright lies. Why do certain sad sacks always feel they have to come across as men of great distinction? I’ll tell you. It’s natural. It’s nature. Mother Nature. Protective coloration. It’s so they won’t be eaten up by–don’t say the name–bears. Or lions. Or the wolves. The ordinary business of making a living is dangerous enough. Quite perilous. Quite. Quite quite quite. Quite so. Why draw unnecessary attention to yourself? And likely serve as some hungry something’s surefire meal? It must be something in the heart. That is all.

Blinkey likes to talk. He is very fond of his oldest grandson. Wouldn’t stop talking about the boy. He thinks the world of the lad; thinks he can do no wrong; thinks he hung the moon. But the mockery of this life made sure that all of Blinkey’s thoughts and opinions were wrong.

In fact, most people are wrong most of the time.

Time. Time is a river; we get tangled in the shoals and snagged on the sandbars and are left beached and heaving on the shore.

Blinkey. What kind of cheap son of a bitch would eat at the counter of a Diner with a pretty waitress and leave a lousy one-cent tip? Not me. Let the moths fly out of your wallet, Blinkey, you blind son of a bitch. Leave a suffering buffalo nickel, at least. Don’t hold onto it until the Bison screams.  

Judge not. Sure, sure–but some chumps are just begging for a bruising. Like that grandson of Blinkey’s. Victor Morgan.  Arrogant snot. Almost fated to be, with a name like that. A real Greaser. Only fifteen and stealing cars since before he was old enough to see over the dash. Styles his duck’s ass hairdo with that icky sticky ooey gooey greasy kid stuff. Knocks up his Skinny Minnie. (She’s only fourteen.) Keeps a deck of Luckies rolled up in the sleeve of his t-shirt. And he’s always smoking those left-handed cigarettes, which make him goofy–and dangerously unpredictable.

Like I said, I sometimes talk to myself.  Arnold, I told my pounding thoughts, Arnold–stop.  

But wild thoughts were still cascading behind my tired eyes. I turned around and around and looked into a storefront window. My pupils were the size of dinner plates. I quickly put on my sunglasses. The boys on the Narco Squad would just love to get a gander at my glims. They’d see me down at the Station, and it wouldn’t be a pretty little love feast. No, it would likely be the old phone book treatment for Arnold. “Where’d you get the stuff? We’re not going to ask you again.” Phone book hurts plenty but leaves no tell-tale bruises. I’d almost rather be walloped by a bag of fucking Grapefruit. 

I turned to look at Blinkey. He was still raving about his rotten grandson; about he’s always stopping down by the newsstand to shoot the breeze. You could tell that he loved him to the moon and back. The surface of the moon, come to think of it, would be a perfect place for that no-account juvenile delinquent. No cars to steal or San Quentin Quail to knock up. No oxygen, either. Some people don’t deserve to breathe, but that’s not my look-out. Vincent Morgan had a face like thunder, all dark angles, which was fitting, because playing the dark angles was what he was all about. Him and a bunch of his dead-end buddies would beat on winos and goofs and any coloreds who were dumb enough to stray into their territory, which was called Blowtown. Particularly after sundown. Nobody was safe. These Blowtown punks would always cause a big ruckus at the Muni pool. They once beat a kid senseless down by the old canal. They even harassed the old Italian fruit vendors. The cops did nothing. Getting a grip on that wild bunch was like juggling sand. It wasn’t in their wheelhouse. They got paid plenty to keep the peace; but not enough to tangle with that crew of bummers and no-goodniks. The Blowtown Rangers would roam around Noxtown all night long looking for places to break into and stuff to steal. Good old-fashioned fun. Criminal mischief, the papers called it. Going on a shakedown cruise, as the locals put it. When the sun goes down, the zip-guns come out. Hopped up on goofballs and worse. They’d stay up all night and early in the morning they’d convene at the local playground and sit around on the swing sets and the roundabout and menace the unattended kiddies, telling them that there was no Santa Claus, or Jesus. Or God. One time, one of the low-grade morons took an unattended baby from his stroller and put him in a trash basket. Animal. No–even an animal wouldn’t do something like that. 

And this was the gang whose leader, Victor, was the apple of Blinkey’s eye. Victor. Short for Victorious. I don’t blame Blinkey’s oldest daughter, who is his mother. Her home is like a dollhouse. Sure, the dad’s a drunk, but it’s a good man’s fault, and who could blame him anyway, with a wild boy like that. 

Trouble is, we expect our children to be guided by our wise instructions. Our own experiences. But after twenty years, conditions on the ground have changed, and the kids know it, too. I imagine that a guy like Blinkey was 15 way back in about 1927. A yokel who danced the Charleston and ran away from home and eloped with a flapper. Back when even the shoeshine boy in the barber shop was peddling tips about investing in the stock market. That, of course, was the time to get out. Then came the Crash, when all the bears came out shouting Hallelujah and the bulls went home crying to their mammies. Nothing much else to do but listen to the radio, go to the movies, and fuck. So out pop seven kiddies in rapid succession. That’s when the cheese slipped off the cracker. Blinkey spent all his time during the latter part of the Depression endlessly hustling. His oldest daughter married young, in ’46. Does she ever come to visit him? Often. Nearly every day. She cooks for him, cleans his house, wipes the drool from off his stubble. 

Does hubby approve? Nyet. Like I said, a no-account drunk. No discipline in that house. Even the Marines wouldn’t take Slick Vic–‘Sinbad’ to his pals. His pals! Vicious Vic. The boss applesauce. Can’t you just taste the blood on his blade? Walking around Blowtown as if he owns the place. He was raised in a manger and grew up to be a charter member of the hot-stove league. His switchblade is a golden key that can unlock any door, and shutter any flapping jaw. He’s as cool as the other side of the pillow–always snapping his fingers and whistling some popular ditty like “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down”. He was put on the street called Earth and his motto is murder and mayhem. Tangle assholes with him and you’re done and dusted, because he just doesn’t give a damn. Even the meanest copper steers shy of that monkey. It’s the nature of the beast. Go after the easy prey. The old and the wounded and the wound-down tickers. You can’t beat back Father Time. It’s a losing proposition. How to live? It’s a three pipe problem. Time time time–oh what is to become of us all? It’s enough to make you think your way into the rubber room. You can talk nineteen to the dozen and still, you’ll never dope it out. Always play nice in the sandbox? A poor version of a porch philosopher. Because the gobble-uns will get you if you don’t WATCH OUT.

Sure enough, while I’m straining my brain, or what’s left of it, I hear a shrill whistling. The tune was the refrain to “Duke of Earl.” And up to the newstand sidles young Victor. Good old innocent Sinbad, and he’s just as nice as pie. He’s wearing a black leather jacket over a t-shirt and a pair of too-tight jeans, but he looks just as innocent as a lollypop-sucking toddler with a sailor suit and a boater hat with a blue ribbon. Funny how a chameleon can blend into the woodwork. A useful attribute.   
“Hello Grampy,” says he. Sweet as angel whispers. Sweet as honeysuckle on the vine. Sweet as a honeybee. Sweet as a cat with syrup on his paws.And dangerous as a bomb with a sputtering fuse. Calm voice, but wild, sweating eyes. “How are you feeling?” says he. There follows an endless litany of complaints. My sciatica is acting up. Business is rotten. Prices just keep going up and up. After about three minutes, Victor cuts him off. “I was wondering if you could let me have five dollars. You see…there’s a girl….” Blinkey faces him with a leering smile and forks over the half saw without a peep. So. That’s why he’s such a stingy tipper. Mad Dog Sinbad has got to have his goofballs, I’ll wager.

I know better than to interfere. Victor Morgan already has thirteen notches on his switchblade. No joke. Vicious Vic doesn’t lie to his pigsticker.

Time enough later on to beat the fear of God into the rotten little thug.

Naturally, only after I first take it up with The Big Man. 

2. OVER 69: THE MAGAZINE FOR OLD WHITE PEOPLE

Articles:
What canned salmon goes best with which Ensure flavors?
Living with your son and his wife on ten dollars a day!
“Old and In The Way”: An interview with David Grisman

“This so-called new ‘music’ really IS just noise, consarn it!”
“Today’s whippersnappers: Why they should be seen and not heard”
“It’s just a phase: How to deal with your unmarried granddaughter who only likes girls”

“How to Hire a Home Health Aide Who Doesn’t Steal”
“Spite Your Grasping Kin by Leaving All Your Money to the Cat and Dog Orphan Society”
“You Call It Fun. I Call It Communism!”

“Four Cups of Tea With One Teabag? Here’s How”
“Teaching Your Grandchildren to Appreciate Nat King Cole With Strings”
“Newfangled Tablets: Can’t Read ‘Em, Don’t Want To”

“Jews: Still Don’t Like ‘Em”
“Teenage Curfews: The Foundation of Our Safety”
“What to Do When Your Wife Says Two Drinks Are Enough and She Wants To Go Home”

“Reviewed in this issue: Popular Old Bands: Wheezer, The Old Men On The Block, and The Rotting Stones”

3. MIDGET AT THE TEMP AGENCY
Hold off for a little man. Please be seated. We’ll be with you shortly.

We are rather short-staffed at the moment. Even though workers are in short supply, this job has long hours for short pay.

Hey–where are you going? I didn’t even tell you what the job is! You’ll be working in a shrimp factory!

4. JESUS AT THE LAST SUPPER
I always wondered if, at the Last Supper, Jesus turned the water into wine to avoid the corkage fee.

I sure hope he tried to make Judas pay the tip. After all, he DID have thirty pieces of silver.

But he probably just put the whole bill on his Perfect Master Card.

5. TWILIGHT OF THE GODS AND THE TACTFUL ROCK CRITIC
It was admittedly almost insufferably self-indulgent. But amusing. He lets loose with some scattered insights here and there.

I am speaking, not of the Davis Zep Biog, Hammer of the Gods, but of Steven Hyden’s book with a similar title: Twilight of the Gods.  

I suppose that if I had written such a book, I would have talked about my formative experiences in attending the arena concerts of Yes, Uriah Heep, and Jethro Tull, and about how much I used to like Genesis and ELO. And that Zep III is still my favorite. A high school classmate of mine, Doug Grant, said of “Gallows Pole,” “That poor guy. I always wondered what happened to him.”

Fortunately, while at college I spent most of my time catching up on all the classic 60s and even 50s rock which I was often deaf to the appeal of as a small child.

Here are the blinding insights from a book which will probably never be written:

Differentiating between degrees of trash is a fool’s errand.

Rock Critics are prone to treasure up obscure rubbish and downgrade music they perceive of as “uncool”.

Cult Artists tend to throw at you works which are deliberately abrasive, ostensibly to keep you on your toes, but how is this any different than promulgating power ballads?

Culture is a cruel game, and the rules are always shifting, like those of a fickle taskmistress.

Arena Rock is the American Gulag.

It is amusing reading Twilight of the Gods, in that this youngster Hyden has grown-up opinions all his own and isn’t shy about sharing them.

Real adults tend to be more circumspect.

“On the one hand, early Beach Boys sounds like Check Berry for infantile morons, but on the other hand, Brian Wilson’s gorgeous melodies of their middle period are close to transcendent.”

“On the one hand, Steely Dan sounds kind of self-indulgently grandiose and steam-pressed, but on the other hand, their sophisticated stylings exposed 70’s listeners to quality arrangements.”

“On the one hand, Echo and the Bunnymen come across as overly doomy and earnest, sans gravitas, like a deracinated U2, but on the other hand, by Porcupine they manage to transcend their faltering early work and fashion music which instantly signifies the early 1980’s.”

Et cetera et cetera ad infinitum.

6. LIFE IN 21ST CENTURY AMERICA

The next time you are cleaning nuclear waste from your genitalia and
grousing about how your testicles have shriveled, think about how
things used to be some 500 years ago. Here are some facts about the
2000s:

Most people got “married”, meaning a man and a woman were supposed to
live together for the rest of their long and miserable lives. They did
so year-round because the fools fancied they were “free to make their
own decisions.” Ha! Pitiful animals!!

Decontaminant baths were primitive, and usually consisted of a great
deal of bleach and some scrubbing. Pitiful, and nearly useless in
removing radioactive wastes and preventing their accumulation in the
thyroid gland.

These baths essentially consisted of a glorified shower. Workers were
actually trusted to bathe themselves, thus ensuring that many would
skip one or more crucial steps and spread their radioactive
contamination everywhere.

Primitive stone houses were held together with mortar, made from
common dirt, and, unbelievably, some houses were actually made of
wood–precious wood! Unlike our modular houses made of plastic
byproducts, these primitive cave-like hovels were often hot in the
summer and cold and draughty in the winter, instead of being suffused
with a warm green glow year-round.

There was nothing to stop insects from entering the dwellings of these
savages. Even mice, rats, raccoons, birds, bats, and other unspeakable
pests were a not-uncommon sight.

Many floors were actually made of wood. Precious wood!

(I swear that all of this is true.)

In those olden times, they actually cooked raw meat and vegetables,
sometimes with the dirt still clinging to them. You may find it hard
to believe that these primitive animals actually devoured with relish
such “grub” as loathsome root vegetables and reeking meat and fish,
but it’s a fact. Many people had at least heard of powdered nutrients,
but they were regarded as a novelty; “something the astronauts would
eat.”

Sometimes they would even eat pork. Filthy pork!

Those with money would indulge in a ritual called “eating out”, where
filthy strangers would actually physically handle food cooked in
kitchens of dubious hygiene. People known as “health inspectors” were
forced to regularly close down such places due to health violations so
egregious that even these primitives could not tolerate them.

People regularly ate staple, water-intensive crops
such as wheat and corn, and even rice. Valuable rice!They would often intoxicate themselves to near-insensibility with
crude, dangerous stupéfiants, which would, of course, only serve to
radically weaken their immune systems, which made them especially
susceptible to cancers, viruses, radiation poisoning, etc.

Back then, the United States was still considered vast, and much of it
was even thought of as “underdeveloped.” So it was that the
authorities looked, for the most part, with a lenient eye towards
swarms of alien interlopers who swarmed in from the far shores of the
teeming planet, bringing with them incurable diseases and exotic
customs even more unspeakably barbaric and primitive than those of the
“native born” Americans. These people were actually provided with
food, jobs, and health care, and in some instances were even provided
with a free education. All this money spent on harboring fugitives
and interlopers– while the radiation spread and nothing was done
about it!

Sure, today most of us live underground in vast subterranean cities,
and will pass or entire short existences from hatching to
disintegration without knowing the feeling of sunshine on our cranial
extrusions. Nevertheless, to live in that savage era when blood ran
dripping red down the mouths and chins of these unspeakably hairy and
smelly men and women is a fate no right-thinking humanoid would wish upon his worst podmates.

7. THE META METAMORPHOSIS

1
One day a loathsome insect woke up in a crawlspace behind an
old-fashioned gas range located on the fourth floor of a slum
apartment and found himself transformed into a neurasthenic
Czechoslovakian Jew named Gregor Samsa.
2
Where do I want to go with with this? thought Gregor, whom some might
have mistaken for the narrator of this tale, though they would be
badly mistaken.
3
Certainly the single mother and her twelve-year old son who played
inadvertent host to the naked, German-speaking, and very confused
Gregor wanted no part of him.
4
It was the dead of winter, however, and he was stark naked, and the
mother did not have the heart to turn out the young and not unhandsome
stranger.
5
Consequently, she borrowed some gaudy cast-off clothing from the pimp
who lived downstairs.
6
This was a man for whom she sometimes turned freelance tricks when the
welfare check was late and the Johns were streaming into his domicile
too quickly for him to accommodate them with his regular stable of foul,
albeit foxy, whores.
7
You would surely like to know what happened next, but Gregor, which is
not to say I myself, was having to make this up as he–or I–went
along.
8
In that way this story is very much like a memory that never occurred.
9
Let us assume that a man with the intelligence of a cockroach–because
he was, in fact, once a cockroach (or perhaps “dung beetle” is a more
appropriate approximation) was compelled at first to speak with a
strange gurgling sound.
10
Let us also assume, at least for the sake of story interest, that
Gregor eventually grew able to make sounds that vaguely, at least,
resembled human ones.
11
And now we introduce another character. The welfare worker.
12
She came around from time to time to check on the family, mother and son.
13
And on this occasion–conveniently, for the sake of our story–mere
hours after Gregor first revealed himself–she wanted to know what the
strange man was doing there anyway.
14
The mother was hard-pressed to give a satisfactory answer.
15.
The police were called and Gregor was taken to the local precinct
station. The kindly patrolman offered him coffee and a doughnut. The
taste of coffee was loathsome to him, though he eagerly devoured the
doughnut, for it was slightly stale.
16.
Because he was able to give no satisfactory account of himself, Gregor
was eventually confined in the county jail.
17.
Another character is now introduced–a psychiatrist.
18.
After three hours of questioning, the doctor of mind medicine was
unable to coax any identifying information from the prisoner, and so
about two weeks after Gregor Samsa first made his appearance, he was
confined to an institution for the mentally insane.
19.
There he was dosed with chlorpromazine hydrochloride and subjected to
electroshock. Thereafter, he languished for fifty years and,
eventually, died.
20.
It is not the grandson of the twelve year old boy of whom earlier we
spoke who is writing this story. Nor the mother. Certainly not the
pimp, or any of his whores, all of whom were barely literate at best.
21.
As for the psychiatrist–he drew up a few case notes regarding the
curious case of the amnesiac who was discovered in the cold-water
tenement dwelling of a incorrigible floozie.
22.
Upon his death, alas, those notes were destroyed.
23.
Therefore, by rights, this story should never have been written.
24.
This “Gregor Samsa” of whom we speak exists merely as a sort of
spectacle, fit only to be pointed at. Surely nobody with any sense
could find very much that is noteworthy about the tale of an admirable
beetle transformed into a useless man.
25.
More properly, this “Gregor Samsa” –is he not merely a memory that
never occurred? Yes. Therefore, let us conclude, then, with a quote by
the immortal Bard most appropriate to this circumstance.
26
“O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all
the uses of this world!”

THE INFORMATION #1173 OCTOBER 29, 2021

THE INFORMATION #1173

OCTOBER 29, 2021

Copyright 2021 FRANCIS DIMENNO
dimenno@gmail.com
https://dimenno.wordpress.com
 
La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.–Charles Baudelaire

WHEN THIS WORLD CATCHES FIRE
BOOK FOUR: AND IF THE DEVIL COME SHOOT HIM WITH A GUN
PART SEVENTY-THREE

293.  THE CONFESSIONS OF BABY BOY MADDOX PART 10

I was feeling desperate. There was a tiredness in my eyes that came from wrinkling up my brow and my other senses were on high alert; like when you know you got trouble and there ain’t nothing you can do about it. Squatting there as I was in the brick basement of the grand old Catholic Church–I disremember the name of it–Saint Somebody of Somewheres–it got me to wondering why God is all-powerful and yet He still wants to have all these inferior beings who spend all of their time praising Him; maybe He likes it because it keeps them out of trouble. I always thought that there was something fishy about the whole set-up; like a carny wheel gaffed to wow the rubes. It’s almost as if God were some sort of movie star who was kind of uppity and stuck on Himself and He always needed a whole lot of attention and praise while, on the other hand, the devil was a down to earth kind of guy like a factory foreman or even a cop–he has a job to do and he doesn’t like it but it’s his job and so never mind, he does it, and he don’t whine about it neither. 

It made me suspicion that the whole heaven and hell set up was an awful lot like the way the game was rigged right here on earth. Made me suspect that the whole thing was a put-up job, a very long and pretty story laid out all nice and neat–only who in their right mind would actually believe in it?  Kids, mostly, and old people. And crazy ladies, once they get to be a certain age. You always gotta watch out for those nutty crones–they’ll stab you with a hatpin if you insult their Lord and Savior, or suggest their biscuits taste like crap. 

I took a long time trying to dope out what the real set-up might be and I finally figured that the angels and and devils were all in my head. It was like I was a baseball player and the angels rooted for the home team and the devils rooted for the visitors and the angels cheered every time I batted up and hit a home run and the devils cheered every time I hit a foul tip. 

And I’m wondering, lying there sweating in that stuffy fucking furnace room, excuse me–what were the angels and devils saying about ME. 

I tried to tune in to what they might be talking about, but the transmission was all gummed up; but, naturally, the angels would be on my side while the devil would spend all his time jeering and calling me names and trying to put me in the wrong just so he could drag me down. 

But I couldn’t help myself; whatever I did, I did it without thinking; it’s not like I did nothing on purpose, except run away from the Convent Home. Everything that followed was me just trying to live day to day and not get run over. I had the thought that maybe I got myself into trouble sometimes just to remind myself that I am still alive.Back when I was all cooped up indoors I was like a beaten dog and once I got away I was more like a sly cat I guess, and if some little mouse or birdie got et up it wasn’t because I was bad–it happened just because I was in the wilderness, and what else was I to do? Men can grow to be just as wild as animals.

I left the church basement on Friday at exactly twelve noon. I knew the time because the bells were ringing. The way they sounded to my ears, they were singing a song of hate. I hate…I hate…hate…hate…hate. I hate…I hate…hate hate hate. Hate. hate. 

To my surprise, the doors leading to the outside were wide open and as far as I could tell nobody could have seen me leave, and I was surely glad of it. But picture my amazement when I walked down the stone church stairs out into the street and found myself in a completely white world, like I had died and gotten up to some sort of icy heaven. The snow was still coming down in swirling patterns and flying every which way. None of the buses were running, it seemed, and there were very few cars on the street. I went to the corner newsstand and saw the headline: FREAK COLD SNAP–CITY SNOWBOUND.  It was a good thing, I suppose, that the weekend was coming up but that didn’t make no difference as far as I was concerned because I had no place I needed to be except maybe inside somewheres, where it was warm.

 
And then to make matters worse it started to rain and the drops flew cold and hard and stung me on my bare face. I prepared myself for another night’s stay in that church basement–Saint Anthony of Padua, that was the name–only this time I decided that I needed something to tide me over so I bought some fruits and nuts and cheese and bread and milk. I found a gas station rest room and took a good long piss and then I headed back to the church only to find that the doors were locked.  
Or, at least, I thought so. Actually, they were only just about frozen shut with ice and so I gave an enormous pull and managed to open one of them. It was a big heavy door enormously large made of oak but reinforced with bands of iron. I walked up about three rows of dimly lit pews and caught a faint whiff of incense and saw the priest way up in front standing at the altar. I suppose he was fixing to say a Mass even though there were only about three people there and I didn’t want to sit through that so I stayed for about five minutes, praying, or pretending to, and then I crossed myself and made as if to go out the door but instead I opened and shut it and circles back and slipped down the wide spiral stairway and made my way back to the furnace room. I was glad enough to have a warm place to roost but I also knew that I couldn’t stay there for more than another night because there was a very good chance that I would get caught and then I’d be sent straight back to the Convent Home. Which would almost be as bad as getting froze to death.

It was then I thought about Madport, and old Blinkey the blind musician, and I wondered how he was doing and whether he was out in that snow only I doubted it, he was old and if he had any sense at all he was kipping in a flop, or somewhere as it was warm and dry. The wind howled and whistled outside the furnace room and I could hear the rattling of the window panes and I was glad I wasn’t in any of the outdoors places where I used to roost. Nearly all the warm and dry caves down by the hillsides on either side of the railroad tracks that cut through the east side would likely be filled with cold, wet, and hungry tramps. I’d seen it before, during a late spring cold snap and Tandy told me about how many tramps was too proud to go to the Sally and would shiver to death because they was too hard up. I had a lot of time to think about what it would be like to die of cold while I was crouching in the furnace room and making occasional little trips into the church kitchen, which smelled to me of cheese and bad lunch meat. I knew that even in the high summer roughing it in the woods was no picnic. But in the winter one small mistake could be deadly, and while I was glad that I was indoors for the coming of the blizzard, I knew that I couldn’t keep running from one place to the other and I began to make serious plans about finding a place outdoors where I could live and where nobody could find me and I wouldn’t be bothered any. 

I was also worried about Uglyface and his three bullies; I had the sick feeling that sooner or later I was going to run into them again. Even this church might not be safe; if I found this place then maybe they could too. It was nearly a week since I had run from the Convent Home and that was only place I could think of where they couldn’t follow me and I thought that maybe I was better off going back there.        

But then I thought of the older boys who stayed there as made my life miserable and I figured that I would try to put off my return to that so-called Home for as long as I could. 

I got to thinking of my life before I took up with Tandy; I hardly remembered my real mother at all; for a time I lived in an old farmhouse–little better than a tumbledown shack–way off in Gibsonia in the middle of nowhere with my mean “Aunt” Carp and “Uncle” Pike though I never did know for sure whether they were any blood kin to me at all. They made me work around the clock on their little one plough farm from a very early age; I had to sweep floors, make beds, wash dishes, empty the ashes from the furnace, and also perform farm chores like slopping the hogs and such. They only fed me enough grub as to keep me going and they dressed me in cast-off clothing that didn’t fit and gave me worn out shoes that pinched my feet. I had a feeling that they didn’t much care whether I lived or died. Old Tandy told me once about people like that; the “Baby Farmers” that leeched off the County; that they were the lowest of the low. I reckon that he told no lie. 

Uncle Pike was a drunk. Not a mean drunk; just the lazy, sleepy kind. Why was he killing himself with drink? Becuase he just didn’t give a damn any more. He kept himself plenty scarce, because Aunt Carp had a sharp tongue and she wasn’t shy about telling you where you could get off. No matter what I did to get her to smile at me or at least favor me with a kind word, it seemed that she just couldn’t be satisfied. She was one of them types of tutting women. Not saying they’re all like that, but a lot of women always want something, and they don’t even know what it is, but whatever it is they want, they let you know right smart that you ain’t deliverin’ it. More often than not, she would quit with her tutting and get up over me and snatch me baldheaded. It struck me at the time that they seemed incredibly old, though, looking back on it now, they were both probably in their late forties. But farm life ages you fast, and that’s a fact. They never bothered explaining anything to me, even if I asked; least of all, where they got their money from, but I think Uncle Pike had some kind of pension from when he fit in the Great War and maybe they was also being paid by the County for my upkeep, like Tandy said.

Gibsonia is in the far northwest of the city and it wasn’t at all built up like it is now; it was mostly farmland, then, and there was horse stables and dairy farms and it was bordered all around with forests so there was also saw mills. There was nothing to do there; the old couple didn’t believe in owning a radio and I remember on Christmas Day we would sit around as they cracked walnuts in front of the fireplace and read to me from the Bible–mostly all the bloodthirsty parts about sacrificing a fatted calf…and some other guff about a Righteous God, and His Chosen People.

 *1 SALUTATIONSTANLEY BROTHERS
PIG IN A PEN
https://youtu.be/twL-6F4TNE8

2*REFERENCE
Here’s a handy-dandy list of Sundown Towns.
justice.tougaloo.edu/location/massachusetts/

3*HUMOR
SICK BURNS
You take up all the oxygen in the room.

You’re your own worst enemy.

This is not a revenue-generating conversation.

God bless your day.

Your charms aspire to greatness.

If you’re so smart, say something that proves you’re a genius. (Then whip out a pen and paper and act as though you’re going to write down everything they say.)

ALSO SEE:
https://thoughtcatalog.com/lorenzo-jensen-iii/2016/11/sick-burns-the-100-greatest-insults-of-all-time/

4*NOVELTY

Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band – The Spotlight Kid Outtakes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCdwDSfsVFY

5*AVATAR OF THE ZEITGEIST

CAR TALK RIP

www.cartalk.com/content/i-drive-vw-rabbit-speed-manual-transmission

6* DAILY UTILITY

Busy With Those Reefers
www.google.com/search?q=busy+with+those+reefers&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS960US960&sxsrf=AOaemvJFRv0d3aitT8MuF6X9TXeAJF1lnw:1632829266689&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjem62Dy6HzAhX7FVkFHYH3CesQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1920&bih=969&dpr=1#imgrc=rkqycT97Xil8aM

SEE:
readallcomics.com/reefer-madness-tpb/

*7 CARTOON
ACID IS GROOVY, KILL THE PIGS
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/eToAAOSwHfdhFWtG/s-l1600.jpg

8*PRESCRIPTION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS NATIONAL JUKEBOX
https://www.loc.gov/audio/?fa=partof:national+jukebox

9* RUMOR PATROLTHE VICE-PRESIDENCY

Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea, the other was elected Vice President, and nothing was ever heard of either of them again.—Thomas R. Marshall, Vice President under Woodrow Wilson
content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,829748,00.html

10*LAGNIAPPE
TURTLES
YOUR MAW SAID YOU CRIED
https://youtu.be/zYVNJGOy3_I

11*DEVIATIONS FROM THE PREPARED TEXT: A REVIEW OF OTHER MEDIA
ADVERTISING
“A magazine is simply a device to induce people to read advertising.” –James Collins

“In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope.”–Charles Revson

“You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.”–Norman Douglas

“Mass demand has been created almost entirely through the development of advertising.”–Calvin Coolidge

“Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.” –Marshall McLuhan

“Advertising degrades the people it appeals to; it deprives them of their will to choose.”–C. P. Snow

“Advertisers in general bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists, pills, or the bottle.”–Marya Mannes

“Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.” –John Lahr

“History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.” –Malcolm Muggeridge

“I can not think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil.”–Arnold Toynbee

“Advertising – a judicious mixture of flattery and threats. “–Northrop Frye

“The art of publicity is a black art.”–Learned Hand

“Advertising is ‘an evil service’.” –Aneurin Bevan

“Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a permanent deformity like the Chinese habit of foot-binding.”–Dean Acheson

“Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.”–Paul Valéry

“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better “–George Santayana

“If we define pornography as any message from any communication medium that is intended to arouse sexual excitement, then it is clear that most advertisements are covertly pornographic.”–Philip Slater

“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”–George Orwell

ALSO SEE:
TEN WORST COMMERCIALS OF ALL TIME
https://youtu.be/01yx3V30yqc

SEE ALSO:

20 BIZARRE LAW FIRM ADS

www.inboundlawmarketing.com/20-bizarre-law-firm-ads/

ALSO SEE:HUCKSTER AND HICKS

https://youtu.be/dmFFR1asmtk

12* CONTROVERSIES IN POPULAR CULTURE
MADAME NHU AT FORDHAM UNIVERSITY
https://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_66E58DF84ED74CF588E38C0E71BAE5B3

THE INFORMATION #1172 OCTOBER 22, 2021

THE INFORMATION #1172

OCTOBER 22, 2021

Copyright 2021 FRANCIS DIMENNO
dimenno@gmail.com
https://dimenno.wordpress.com

He who does not see the angels and devils in the beauty and malice of life will be far removed from knowledge, and his spirit will be empty of affection.–Khalil Gibran

WHEN THIS WORLD CATCHES FIRE
BOOK FOUR: AND IF THE DEVIL COME SHOOT HIM WITH A GUN
PART SEVENTY-TWO
291.  THE CONFESSIONS OF BABY BOY MADDOX PART 9

Once again I started feeling sorry for myself and thinking about poor old Cadger Tandy and wondering why he had to die. One time he said to me, “Life is mostly hard work, Yob. By the time I was two they had me picking cotton; by the time I was six I could pick a hundred pound and earned me a whole quarter dollar. Back then–a quarter dollar–you could feed for five days on that, if you was smart. I hit the road when I was ten years old–not much older than you–got sick of staring at the rear end of a broke-ass mule–and I never once looked back. But I was never afraid of hard work; in this world, a man’s got to pay his own way. Because you can wish in one hand,” he said, “and piss in the other, and see which one gets filled up first.” 
When he was young, Tandy had traveled all across the land–picking hops in the Pacific northwest with the Injuns; chopping cotton in Texas and Arizona with the Mes’cans, scavenging for huckleberries with the fruit tramps in California, and picking apples with the apple knockers north of the Hudson valley. He did all kinds of work. Pearl diving at a fish joint in Charleston South Carolina; fortune telling with the carny in Indiana; working as a splinter belly in the Big Easy until the rheumatiz set in; he took a job as a rust-eater on the Milwaukee Road and the Oregon Short Line and as a smoke eater in the Pacific Northwest between railroad jobs. “Go figger,” said Tandy, “Dixie is warm but they got no truck with hoboes anywhere south of Mason and Dixon. Farmers needed hands during the harvest but once the work was done they didn’t want you stickin’ around. I was one of the lucky ones; I drifted around some and I took plenty of knocks but I always come out on top because I was a fix-it man. Not just old junk, neither; I had a line of patter that could gentle a railroad bull or even a mean Sheriff or a town clown. Here’s the trick. First, you make people underestimate you. Let ’em think you’re stupid. Let ’em forget that even stupidity can have an edge. Then and only then do you show your hole card. Life is no game and it’s no joke, Baby Boy; you’ll learn that soon enough. You sure ‘nough have to struggle, and sometimes you get so beat down so you don’t even want to get back up, and sometimes it’s better to simply run away, but every once in a while you got to pick yourself up and show your teeth. And…whenever you do wade in, Yob, be sure to do it with both fists flying–and don’t never look back. Things that happen today is what matters; yesterday is like nothing.”

Tandy had a line in card reading and palm reading and what-not, and when I asked him whether it all wasn’t just a line of hooey for the rubes he laughed and said “It ain’t any such thing, Yob–there’s more things out there than you ever dreamed of. You can tell if it’s going to rain by the way the wind is blowin’–can’t you? You can tell if a dog is going to bite from the arch of his back. Man is a part of nature, too, and if you can read the signs he’s throwin’ off, then you can read into his heart’s desire. That’s the one thing you just can’t hide. The meanest man in the world has got some gentle in him somewhere, and the most kindly-hearted lady might harbor some of the most wicked thoughts, and will turn on you in a minute if it suits her. Most folks don’t want to be very good ner very bad, they just want to get along, but are forced into doing certain things because of their circumstances. What if I was to tell you that most people don’t really think more than three thoughts that fit together unless they make a supreme effort? And that only one man in a hundred can come up with a real plan and make it stick; and even at that I’m bein’ generous? The so-called educated types are usually the worst of all–they get to know a little and they forget how little they truly know. A man can discover a new star or planet, and in the meanwhile he can barely cross the street when it comes to managing his own affairs. All the suckers who get fleeced at the carny think they know more than they really do. I’ve seen it play out a hundred times. Hell, Yob, I don’t read fortunes–people TELL me who they are. I learned to read cards from a Swami at the Red & Black–now, that man had a gift. He told me you’d be stringing along with me. He didn’t give me your name; but he saw you. He also told me that you’d have many years of trouble, but that you’d make it through and come out strong. He said you were destined for greatness of a kind, and at a great cost. He wouldn’t tell me more, and he said he wouldn’t. He only done it as a great favor to me because I helped out a friend of his at the carny. You got a gift for the grift, Yob, but don’t you ever forget that you are only one man, and a young’un at that, and that you’re going to need a friend or two to help you make your way, because there’s plenty of wolves just waiting for your campfire to burn low, so keep your head on straight…and always sleep with one eye open.”

So there I was, it was about 8:30 in the morning; there were four mean customers out to get me; for all I knew the cops were on the lookout for a runaway, and I was looking at what was like to be the first blizzard of the season. I figured my best bet was to get on the subway and ride it south for a while and think until I could come up with a plan for where to spend the night.  

Somewheres around 11:30 in the morning, I finally ended up in a south end suburb called Queen’s Corners.  I found out pretty quick from looking around that there was no school that day, on account of the storm, and then I got the bright idea to see if there were any churches open. The Catholics was open for business; and, after sitting among the nearly empty pews and figuring out that it was reasonable warm in there, I decided to prowl around and see if there was a furnace room in there where I could hide out and what kind of heat they had. Coal was no good because someone would have to come down there and shovel it in and there was a good chance they would find me, Lucky thing for me that the church was heated with oil. Problem was, the room was very well tended and there wasn’t much junk down there to hide behind, but I found a dark corner with a broken-down kitchen table and decided I could hide myself behind that. My next step was to figure out how I could get something to eat. I explored the basement of the church and found they had a meeting room with folding chairs and a podium and off to the side there was a sort of kitchen with a stove and some food cupboards; but the cupboards was mostly bare; I found some crackers and some peanut butter and jelly, though, and I went to the furnace room and I ate my fill and then I crawled behind the broken table and got me some shut-eye.
When I woke up again I could see some dim light streaming in from behind the snow that had piled up in front of the windows looking down into the basement, but other than that I had no idea how long I had slept, or even what day it was, but then I crept out into the kitchen area and saw by the clock that it was 4pm. Then I heard noises on the stairwell and hid behind the kitchen door.

Turns out it was one of the priests coming down to check things out in the furnace room; he didn’t come anywhere near the kitchen though, and pretty soon I heard his soft footsteps going back up the stairs. Then I heard a whole lot of clattering from above; it sounded like he was locking the doors for the night, which meant that I couldn’t go nowheres, even if I wanted to. 

But like I said before, a full belly and a warm place to sleep sure took a load of worry off my mind, and there was even a bathroom off the kirchen for me to use if I needed one, so I was perfectly happy to camp out there for as long as it still kept snowing. It did occur to me that if I was caught the police would get a call and they would probably figure out where I had run away from and I would probably be sent straight back to the Convent Home. 

I had plenty of time to think and mostly I thought about priests and nuns and why you had to call a priest ‘father’ but a nun was always ‘sister’ unless of course she was the head nun and then you had to call her Mother Superior because that’s what she was. I wondered whether Mother Superior could tell a priest what to do, and whether priests and nuns ever got together and if they did, what did they talk about to each other, and what did they even have to talk about, other than how great God was, or something like that; did they maybe talk to each other in Bible verses? I had read the Bible, at least parts of it if not the whole damned thing, and I wondered if the people in the Bible weren’t just like movie stars to the priests and nuns, with the nuns thinking that Samson was cute and the priests maybe thinking that good old Delilah was a hot little tamale.

And then I got to wondering all about God, and thinking that He was a busy Man–Man?–and that even He didn’t listen to every single prayer,  or if he did, then he must have as many ears as a fly has eyes, in order to hear them all. Or maybe he could see the prayers too, in which case God probably didn’t look like a human being at all; maybe He was a cone or a crystal or maybe He was even some sort of Light that was everywhere at once, but didn’t interfere with nothing unless He felt like it. 
Or maybe, like a Big Boss, He had employees who did all the work for him while He just sat in his office and did all the paperwork. Maybe He was like the President of heaven and gave speeches to his angels and kept them in the dark about a lot of things and only told them what they needed to know.  

I thought and I thought about it until my head started to hurt and then I had another thought–what if there was no God? I found that proposition hard to believe because otherwise how did all this stuff get here in the first place and why do so many people believe in Him and even spend their whole lives working for Him? 

Faith is a funny thing to me; it’s like you’re holding your own carrot on a stick in front of yourself. I guess that if you thought about it too long it would drive you crazy. So I decided instead to think about angels and devils. 

Now, if devils liked fire it would stand to reason that angels liked ice. Devils ate fiery hot soup while angels sipped iced tea. Devils had big muscles and sweated a lot while angels were wispy things who stood around playing harps and praising God and all that. What all did they even have to do? Maybe they read the Bible–I don’t know. After all–they had a whole eternity to do nothing else.

*1 SALUTATION
DAVID BOWIE
FAME
https://youtu.be/J-_30HA7rec

2*REFERENCE
CORONAVIRUS MAPS
coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

3*HUMOR
How far is the Old Log Inn?
www.jokebuddha.com/joke/Old_Log_Inn

4*NOVELTY
BEATNIKS CORRUPTING THE NATION’S YOUTH
books.google.com/books?id=AtGGDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT11&lpg=PT11&dq=ginsburg+on+corrupting+the+nation%27s+youth&source=bl&ots=0PgwukNgq9&sig=ACfU3U1zcsW0S0tk5gqhGxZXKhIf2FxB6Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjF_sKp7I3zAhUzEVkFHZClBA4Q6AF6BAgSEAM#v=onepage&q=ginsburg%20on%20corrupting%20the%20nation’s%20youth&f=false

5*AVATAR OF THE ZEITGEIST
DEGREES OF SKIN BURNS
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/burns-degree-first-aid-burn-wound-fire-damage-to-skin-classification-hand-blisters-vector-infographic-treatment-burns-degree-200191907.jpg

6* DAILY UTILITY
SATIRE
www.britannica.com/art/satire

*7 CARTOON
BREEDS OF PIG
https://img.btdmp.com/10102/10102950/products/0x720@159711000614d14c68e0.jpeg

8*PRESCRIPTION
GIVE A DAMN
https://youtu.be/yuDBcpmiipI

9* RUMOR PATROL
PRICK UP YOUR EARS
Prick Up Your Ears is a pun on Prick Up Your Arse.

I don’t remember who told me this, or where I read it, but apparently it is so.

I guess it could also be interpreted as “Prick up Your Rears.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3APrick_Up_Your_Ears

10*LAGNIAPPE
THINK
THINGS GET A LITTLE EASIER
https://youtu.be/sH8go6bj-Y4

11*DEVIATIONS FROM THE PREPARED TEXT: A REVIEW OF OTHER MEDIA
REFLECTIONS ON EATING STOUFFER’S MEAT LOVERS [SIC] LASAGNA
1) A whopping 1620mg of sodium per package. But Banquet fried chicken (which I would no longer eat) has even more. Bonus: 85% of your daily allowance of Saturated Fat.
2) I bought a pan of the stuff to celebrate my new job back in 2014. I would of been better off paying triple and getting a pan of the real stuff from the Twins Pizza in North Providence.
3) I always thought that the Stouffer’s restaurant chain was swanky, but my high school English teacher Mr. Engel quickly disabused me of that particular painfully naive notion.
4) It takes 12 minutes to microwave the beastly thing, and it tends to form a hard crust on the bottom.
5) Calling anything “Meat Lovers” [sic] and actually eating it makes you feel like an ambitious dog.
6) No ricotta. Cheap bastards. Is dis a system?

12* CONTROVERSIES IN POPULAR CULTURE
Nolte: Howard Stern Proves Democrats Want Unvaccinated Trump Voters Dead
The three funniest words in the English language: “Howard Stern proves….”
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2021/09/10/nolte-howard-stern-proves-democrats-want-unvaccinated-trump-voters-dead/

THE INFORMATION #1171 OCTOBER 15, 2021

THE INFORMATION #1171

OCTOBER 15, 2021

Copyright 2021 FRANCIS DIMENNO
dimenno@gmail.com
https://dimenno.wordpress.com
 
To him who is in fear everything rustles.–Sophocles

WHEN THIS WORLD CATCHES FIRE
BOOK FOUR: AND IF THE DEVIL COME SHOOT HIM WITH A GUN
PART SEVENTY-ONE

291.  THE CONFESSIONS OF BABY BOY MADDOX PART 8

It was an big old enormous building I ran to, made of granite with a glass door and wrought iron and I guess it was the main branch of the Noxtown post office, and even outside it smelled papery and indoors it was gigantic, almost like a train station, and the main room had that air that smelled like stamp glue and paper and ink and the side rooms smelled like burlap and shoe leather and Pine-Sol and I figured I could while away a a few dozen minutes and I look up and there are all these wanted posters of public enemies and one of them was of the man with the bald head and scary black hair hanging down to his neck and a broken nose and it says that he was wanted in conncetion with several bank robberies and that he was armed and dangerous and that you shouldn’t try to a-p-p-r-e-h-e-n-d him yourself but you should instead call the local authories or the FBI; the poster said he has a scar on his face and an eagle tattoo on his arm and that he likes to gamble and he sometimes goes by the name of John Miller and I figured that was as good a name as any and if anybody asks me my name I’ll tell ’em I’m John Miller Junior and maybe they won’t trifle with me no more because if they do then my dad will come along and shoot ’em.  
As I was staring at the most-wanted public enemies list at that big post office, it got me to thinking about my real Paw and what he’d do if he knew about the mess I was in–probably nothing, because I guess he couldn’t care less, and then I got to thinking about my Maw, but then I heard a ruckus from the door. I heard one of the postal clerks yelling, “I thought I told you bums to stay out of here,” and old Uglyface was growling, “We’re looking for a kid, we know he’s in here,” and all of a sudden I get a sinking feeling because I know I’m trapped. 

But like old Tandy said, there’s always at least two ways to solve any problem, ya just gotta use your noodle, so I started thinking and I knew that I sure wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

I saw from where I stood in the lobby that there was a separate room where the mail was sorted and the door to that room wasn’t shut tight or even closed all the way, so I ran through it and guys looked up from their work and one of them said “Hey, you can’t be in here,” and one of the mailmen started to get up but I ignored him and was already out the back door and onto the loading dock where the honking trucks were all backing up to pick up their sacks of mail. It was starting to snow and the white flakes in the mid-afternoon landed on the white mail trucks and disappeared, like they was tiny dust specks of light sending little messages from heaven, though I knew better. The loading dock was in a fenced-in area and when I got to the gate it was locked so I climbed over it and then I looked left and right and a good thing, too, because after a minute or two I looked behind me again and there was old Uglyface and that gang of his, and they was hot on my trail. What did they want with me? I think I knew, and it wasn’t pretty. What they wanted. 

On top of everything else, it was beginning to get late and I knew I had to get cleaned up some before I could coop overnight in the department store like I’d planned. So the first thing I had to do was lose my new Prushan “friends” and then I had to wash up somewhere where I wouldn’t be noticed or bothered, a library or a hotel was out of the question; I could be followed and there were four of them, meaning they could split up and each one of them could be laying for me. Right then I was sorry that I hadn’t cracked Skinny’s head with a big rock like I’d tried to. I decided that I first was going to try to lose them all, and then I’d get settled in later. The best way to lose them was to go somewheres where they dast not follow me, but at first I couldn’t figure out where, and then I hit on it–a school. If I could walk into one of them without being noticed then I could find a side exit. I had seen from my wanderings that there was some kind of high school about seven blocks west of the department store, so I ran north and cut through the public housing hoping to lose them, and then I figured I could circle back to the big store.

I had a very close call up in the public housing–everyone was looking at me; they weren’t used to seeing strangers, and some of the colored kids started coming over to me to ask what I was doing there and maybe fight me but I come up to them first like Tandy taught me to do and I told them that some bad men were chasing me and they said shiiiiit, what do we care and I didn’t have an answer for that but then I said that if they caught me they’d probably kill me and then there’s be cops and a couple of the bigger kids knew I was on the level. I told them I needed to get to the high school to shake them off and one of them, he was all of eight, showed me a shortcut through the woods in the park up there. I made it to the high school and then I realized that it was locked up tight. But I’d managed to give Uglyface and his boys the slip, so then I struck south and headed back east along the main street that ran parallel to the Main Stem and I hit the department store at just about 5:15. I was all out of breath from half running and half walking the whole way. I stashed my blankets behind some garbage cans they had back of the place then went to the restaurant inside the store to get me a piece of pie,  and I had me some cherry pie and a co’cola. Then I got cleaned up in the men’s room and looked almost like I could have been a Junior High school student like the one or two who were also in the restaurant working on banana splits although I never could figure out why anyone would want to eat ice cream in October. 

I went up the backstairs to the fifth floor and luck was with me; the only store clerk in the furnishings department was busy gabbing with a pretty girl and he didn’t pay me no mind or even notice me and the place was practically empty and I slid under the biggest bed I could find and I waited. 

I didn’t feel safe even so much as to move an inch until I heard them turning the lights out around, I guess it must of been 6:15, and closing up shop for the day. It was plenty dusty under there and I was afraid I was going to have to sneeze but I managed to keep from breathing through my nose and after awhile even the dust balls didn’t bother me. They did actually have a night watchman there and I guess he carried a little watch clock with him as he made his rounds because every time he came upstairs about every two hours or so I heard a little clunking sound which I guess was him turning a key in that little lock, and once I heard him muttering “Another day, another dollar”.  

It had been a pretty hard day and I hoped that I wouldn’t have to wake up and take a piss but I went to the bathroom just before starting up the stairs and I figured I could hold it because I was careful not to drink any more. Still, I knew I’d be more or less stuck there under that bed until about the next morning at about 8am, when the store opened, and that I’d have to wait around for at least another half hour after that or until I heard people walking around because I just couldn’t just appear out of nowhere; people would wonder where I come from. 

It was about 4am that I got a bad scare. I heard a big thump overhead and I woke up with a start and my heart started pounding wildly until I thought it was about fit to bust. Turns out the night watchman was sitting on the very bed I was hiding under; I had crawled out from under the first one and found another that I thought would be a better hiding place and it was just my luck that the bum decided that he would take a little snooze. I was good and trapped.

Lucky for me the lunk fell right asleep and started right into snoring. After about five minutes I crawled out from under there and made it to my original hiding place and him none the wiser, or so I hoped. But I was pretty uneasy the remainder of that morning and by 8am I was itching to get out from under there and I could hardly wait so I took my chance and come out from under early on and looked up and who should be standing there but one of the store clerks. 

“What are you doing under there, kid?” he said, kind of surprised but friendly. “Just playin’,” I peeped, and then he made a grab for me but I was too quick for him and I made it to the back stairs and took ’em two at a time, wondering whether I’d be able to make it out of the store before the floorwalker was called in. 

I figured I had about a fifty-fifty chance of getting away and I didn’t like those odds at all but I didn’t see as though I had any other choice and so I kept going and I made it to the ground floor and was just in time to see the floorwalker in the big lobby running to catch the up elevator as it opened; of course, I wasn’t on it and practically before he turned around I made it to the revolving exit door of the same lobby and lucky for me the store was in fact open and so I made it out and ran down the street about half a block and then I started walking fast and finally had to courage to look behind me.

He wasn’t following me, but I had another problem. It had been snowing all night, eight inches had piled up, and I had left my blankets behind the store, and I couldn’t very well go back there right away. I walked along for about five minutes and then I said to myself, like Tandy told me, Oh What the Hell God Hates a Coward, and so I took the back streets and headed right back to the store–I figured the floorwalker couldn’t have gotten a good look at me and wouldn’t know me from Adam unless the store clerk had given him some kind of description. 

I was right; nobody noticed me; I managed to find my blankets; but it was starting in to snowing again. I was six nights gone from the Convent Home but I knew then that my luck was beginning to run out and that I had to stop jumping from one fix to the next like a hopping flea on a hot griddle. I had to come up with a plan. I had two dollars and fifteen cents in my pocket and the temperature was about thirty degrees–and falling. 

 
*1 SALUTATION
THEM
IF YOU AND I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOllaoSGDoo

2*REFERENCE
JULIUS EVOLA
 Julius Evola–that fave-rave of the alt-right.
“Americans do not think, yet they are.”― Julius Evola
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism

3*HUMOR
HEMINGWAY PARODY
Raymond Chandler, himself a Hemingway admirer and quite possibly the second most parodied American writer: “Hank unscrewed the top of the toothpaste tube, thinking of the day he had unscrewed the lid of the coffee jar, down on the Pukauuk River when he was trout fishing. There are larches there, too. It was a damned good river, and the trout had been damned good trout. They liked being hooked. Everything had been good except the coffee, which had been lousy. He made it Watson’s way, boiling it for two and a half hours in his knapsack. It had tasted like hell. It had tasted like the socks of the Forgotten Man.”
www.thedailybeast.com/why-the-hell-are-we-still-reading-ernest-hemingway

4*NOVELTY
J. EDGAR HOOVER
Hoover’s dog is buried in a cemetery.

His name was Spee-De-Bozo.

I am not joking.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/1827/spee-de-bozo

He looked like a bulldog himself.

But he favored Cairn terriers. And Beagles. He gave a Beagle to LBJ, who named him “Edgar”.

Predictable hilarity ensued.
https://www.presidentialpetmuseum.com/pets/johnson-dogs-edgar-freckles/

5*AVATAR OF THE ZEITGEIST
STARS MAY HAVE EATEN THEIR PLANETS
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/one-third-sun-stars-may-have-eaten-their-planets

6* DAILY UTILITY
Ostranenie
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100256378

Reminds me of the Russian couple taking a train trip on their honeymoon.

He: Nice trees.
She: …

60 miles later.

He: Nice fields.
She: …

60 Miles later.

He: Nice cows.
She: …

60 miles later.
He: Enough with the foreplay! Pulling up the drass!!

*7 CARTOON
THE END OF THE GENERAL LEE
https://consequence.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/dukes-of-hazzard-confederate-flag-car-hurricane-ida.jpg?quality=80

8*PRESCRIPTION
DANGEROUS PERSONALITIES
One can greatly benefit from looking over this vital information, downloadable from the topmost citation.
https://www.google.com/search?q=checklists+dangerous+personalities&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS960US960&oq=checklists+dangerous+personalities&aqs=chrome..69i57.6879j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

9* RUMOR PATROL
COKE VS. PEPSI: A BRIEF HISTORY OF RACIST SOFT DRINKS
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/brief-history-racist-soft-drinks/318929/

Nowadays, of course, Coke…well….
Coca-Cola Asks Its Workers to Be ‘Less White’ to Fight Racism
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/366132

10*LAGNIAPPE
ROLF CAHN & ERIC VON SCHMIDT
WASN’T THAT A MIGHTY STORM
https://youtu.be/2OZBPK2N7qw

11*DEVIATIONS FROM THE PREPARED TEXT: A REVIEW OF OTHER MEDIA
JACK E. LEONARD
There was an anecdote of a comic who had to entertain a bunch of sailors. All he had to do was shout out the names of their ships, and he was golden.

This story, I believe, was in The Last Laugh, by Phil Berger. A book which every aspiring comedian of a certain age has read, and probably more than once.An excellent book.

Another quote:

“Gotta make with the laughs.’–Fat Jack Leonard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_E._Leonard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUWlrQ0TK8w

Prototype for Don Rickles.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/08/02/dont-call-me-sir

12* CONTROVERSIES IN POPULAR CULTURE
ABORTION
“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”–Gloria Steinem attributed it to “an old Irish woman taxi driver in Boston”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem

MODERN WISDOM NUMBER 279 OCTOBER 2021

MODERN WISDOM
NUMBER 279
OCTOBER 2021
 
Copyright 2021 Francis DiMenno
dimenno@gmail.com
http://www.dimenno.wordpress.com  

1. THE COOL-OFF: AN ACID NOIR NOVEL
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT

The light. The light was suddenly blinding me. Suddenly. Inside my head I wrote a letter to myself. Inside my head? Did I even have a head? Did I think that I would ever get ahead? Where was my mind? Where. Trapped. Inside the recesses of my skull. Mind going round and round and round and round. And round.

Arnold:  

You are a sad disgrace, you have not been successful in anything, and you have wasted your life. You are little better than a putrid punk. Why, I asked. Because your dirty savage hands stink of blood. You are an unrepentant bully. Why, I asked. You exploit the weak fish. You are an oversized delinquent. Why, I asked. You posture and you preen.

You are a mere thug. You have pretensions of nobility.  A mendicant in the guise of a brute. You only think you’re accomplishing some noble purpose. A rough and tumble ruffian. You never saw a brawl you weren’t eager to take some part in. Isn’t it so? You are an inveterate troublemaker. Always stirring up the shit. A servile goon. In thrall to The Big Man. A Hooligan for Hire. Bought and sold at whim. An arch betrayer. Always on the lookout for a wised-up dame or a crooked angle. That’s not true, I said. You know it’s the truth, I replied.

You are a Quisling of all things decent and good. Always. Most of all, you’re an angry young man no longer quite so young because you have seen too much and been in too many low places where terrible things have taken place, moving through your element like a shark who must keep swimming, or die. You are all kinds of heap bad medicine. No bueno, kimosabe.

What should I do, I asked. You should go to a hospital, I replied, and urgently request they bore a hole in your head–to let all the bad spirits escape.  

You could have walked down so many different paths. Could I, I asked. Yes, I replied. Paths that would have been better than the way you live today. You could have done nearly anything else. In any state in the Union. But you chose the easy way in and the easy way out. No good intentions. But the Road to Hell, all the same.

Who are you to judge me, I asked. I’m the best person to judge you, I replied. For I am…you.

Only to think:

You could have holed up in a dusty attic somewhere in a small town in Illinois, writing snarlface nasty letters to the Editor of the Bloomington Pantagraph which you keep and never send because you’re too damn stingy to use your hoard of used postage stamps. Or shave with water. Or bathe. Slapping on some cheap cologne every Saturday night doesn’t count.  

You could have been an ace stereo salesman in Baltimore with a toothpick in the corner of your mouth. Dressed in a sharkskin suit, selling junk hi-fi units and talking woofer and tweeter jabber forevermore with keen-eyed but paltry would-be playboy swingers, while their pretty but depraved blonde girlfriends with false eyelashes wilt and yawn and snap their gum.

You could have played fumbling stand-up bass in a seedy combo fronting a sweaty Elvis wanna-be, hopped up on the goofballs in a miserably hot roadhouse outside of Sacramento. And be pelted by rocks and bottles.

You could have been a God-mad street preacher, perched on a rock in the corner of a park, your long bedraggled coat caked in filth while you roundly condemned all passer-by as sinners.  

You could have sold overpriced sporting goods to kiddies, and their dads, and the used-up jocks who took up coaching football in steamy Huntsville, Alabama.

You could have toted chiseled granite slabs around an outdoor gravestone outlet in frigid Montpelier, Vermont. They’d call you “The Stone Man.”

You could have been a star used car salesman in rancid Weehawken, New Jersey. Selling dud jalopies to anxious mopes just itching to get the key to their own bus instead of sponging rides off of Good Old Dad.

Sold shoes out of a miserably drafty store in Wausau, Wisconsin. All morning and all afternoon you could spend bending down over and overwith glazed eyes and a sore back and touching the soft soles of haughty “society” women.

Sold cheapjack jewelry in Louisville, Kentucky to sad dowagers and pregnant, anxious girlies and their glum yokel boyfriends roped into a twenty-year commitment for five minutes of jolly old fun–the oldest fun.

Sold shabby home furnishings in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania to purse-proud suburbanites hoping to impress their vulgar fat-ass neighbors with their intrinsic good taste.  

Driven a shaky Big Rig across several Southern and Western states and crashed your uninsured truck, claiming as you crawled from out of the wreckage that, “Benny was at the wheel.”

You could have been a college football star in frozen Watertown, New York. Loved and worshipped by tens of thousands and broken into pieces by the age of twenty-two.

A shabby fat slob of a fry cook in a stained t-shirt dishing up rancid catfish and stale cornbread to slavering hungry chumps at some tourist trap down in humid Corpus Christi, Texas.  

You could have designed ladies’ hats under the name Mister Arnold for the Coco Chanel knock-off trade in Brooklyn, New York.

Be prematurely retired on disability and watch the static on a broken television in a basement apartment in quaint Wilmington, Delaware.  

Sold broken and repackaged toys out of a dubious warehouse in the heart of dusty Fort Wayne, Indiana to drooling infants, squalling tots, and precocious nine year old brats.

Delivered the mail in rainy Cumberland, Rhode Island and trampled the azaleas of some old biddy with petunias in her flowerpots, which you pissed in.  

Lived out the waning days of a too-short life assembling a ship in a bottle in muggy Key West, Florida.

Lethargically looked for clues while investigating suspicious casino arson fires in arid Reno, Nevada.

Sold off-priced teen apparel in Brentwood, Tennessee to fat pimply co-eds while their bored boyfriends leer and smoke and blow wolf-whistles at the sales ladies.

Or I could have been a candlelight scholar at some Cow College in Wichita Nebraska. And stared at some musty old tome conjugating archaic verbs until the letters peeled off the page and started dancing around the room in tight circles. Laughing. At me.

Or else I could have spun my wheels as a dopey shamus trying in vain to get to the bottom of a bottomless pit, which was what I was doing now.

I felt like shouting at all the cars travelling down the street. I think I actually said, “Fools! FOOLS! You’re wasting your lives!” But none too loudly–a fly traffic cop at the intersection was giving me the gimlet eye.

So I walked on. It was all I could do. It wasn’t even as though my feet actually belonged to me, but, rather, to some…monster. Who just happened to look…like me.

2. I HEART FRANKENSTEIN

Thursday October 29, 1812
Castle of Victor Von Frankenstein
99 Monster Island Road
Ingolstadt

My Dear Doctor Frankenstein,

On the date referenced above I had left my calling card with your servant but I thought that I might also take this opportunity to initiate a correspondence with you.

On Tuesday evening last at 10 post meridian an unearthly shriek, demonic grunting, and a series of sickening groans were heard to emanate from your demesnes, and it has also been brought to my attention yesterday that many of the municipal pump faucets that morning were seen to have been running sanguine with what I hopefully must assume was the blood of some animal.

I can assure you most sincerely that I do not wish to meddle with your property rights. I have no interest whatsoever in whatever it is you do in that castle of yours, insofar as your activities shall not have any effect upon the orderly workings of the Town of Ingolstadt.

However, when town residents repeatedly complain about the ghastly noises and uncanny doings emanating from your precincts, would you not agree that it is my duty as a town official to make a respectful inquiry?

Accordingly, Herr Doctor, would you be so kind as to send your representative to my offices on Friday, October 30, at 1:00pm sharp so that we might discuss this unpleasant matter? I hope that in so doing that we can therefore arrive at a mutually satisfactory agreement.

Sincerely,
Manfred Winkelstein
Director
Department of Health
Town of Ingolstadt


Thursday November 5, 1812
The Hon. Count Von Falkenstein
Lord Mayor
Town of Ingolstadt

Herr Mayor:

In response to your recent missive, countersigned by the Chief of the Constabulary:

Much to my infinite frustration I addressed the animal mutilation issue with Count Frankenstein’s attorney on October 30. At that time I was assured that the matter would be resolved in such a way that would be of mutual satisfaction to both parties. I’m afraid I grew rather insistent that the matter be resolved at once, and was blandly assured by Von Frankenstein’s rather smug attorney, Herr Blankenfeld, that such “unfortunate occurrences” were “regrettable”, but were to be regarded as “things of the past”. He further assured me that there would be “no repetition” of the “offending behavior”.

In no way do I find this man’s assurances either plausible or even credible.

From the start I have gotten the distinct impression that Frankenstein cares not for the rules and regulations of the town of Ingolstadt. His electric dynamo creates a noise nuisance and flocks of game birds flying over it have been observed to have been struck stone dead. As you know, Frankenstein has flat out refused to observe certain proprieties. I sometimes wonder if he is actually a Doctor at all. His actions seem to me either unethical or actually constituting outright misfeasance; notably, his late attempt, which you surely must recall, to pay his property taxes with straw rather than with gold coin; his persistent way of staring at one’s skull as though measuring it for some unfathomable but likely infernal purpose, and, finally, his publicly sworn oath to usurp such prerogatives as men of sense all agree belong solely to the Maker of the Universe.

Furthermore, in terms of getting him to make improvements on his property to bring it up to the standards set forth in the town building code, I have been aggressively lobbying his attorney for the slightest concession in regards to that matter, but Von Frankenstein has simply refused to budge.

I have had to put up with his stubborn inanition for the past week. Result: Once again, Frankenstein himself, or, even more frustrating,  certain creatures of this despicable man acting without his authorization, have given me one more of what have proven to be a series of shortsighted–can I go so far as to say  nonsensical?–promises; then he proceeds to do nothing, and, as the problem grows worse, more draconian alternatives will eventually have to be implemented, and months of delay will be the result. In the interim, I get a reputation for intransigence among the townspeople, the villagers are inconvenienced, and my staff is demoralized.

Pray forgive my tone, Herr Mayor. Permit me to assure you that I have been monitoring the Frankenstein matter. I  will call upon him again tomorrow at  2:30pm and will issue you a status report in regards to the situation no later than Monday, November 9.

Sincerely,
Manfred Winkelstein
Director
Department of Health
Town of Ingolstadt


Monday November 9, 1812
The Hon. Count Von Falkenstein
Lord Mayor
Town of Ingolstadt

Herr Mayor:

As I promised in our previous correspondence of 5 November, I once again called upon Herr Frankenstein very early that Friday and left my card with his servant, a nasty little hunchback whose face I seem to recall as similar to that of a man under suspicion by the Danzig police for a series of inexplicable cadaver mutilations. I was told that the Doctor was very busy and could not at that time suffer any disturbance.

I then rather slyly lingered outside of the precincts of his castle walls and, noticing that the Castle seemed to be suffused with a peculiar, unprecedented variety of ambient heat, I therefore out of a sense of idle curiosity measured with a mercury thermometer I happened to have to hand the ambient temperature immediately outside the castle walls and achieved the following results:

10:45am: 52 degrees (the outdoor temperature was 38 degrees.)

11:15am: 61 degrees (the outdoor temperature was 42 degrees.)

12:40pm: 68.8 degrees (the outdoor temperature was 42 degrees.)

1:40pm: 75 degrees (the outdoor temperature was 44 degrees.)

At 1:55pm the temperature outside the castle wall registered as an astonishing 84.2 degrees, while the outdoor temperature was no greater than 45 degrees. The temperature of the exterior walls seemed to be rising at a rate of 7 or 8 degrees every 60 minutes. Flocks of migratory fowl are once again observed to drop stone dead when flying over the castle. At this time I myself feel rather enfeebled.

I immediately set forth upon my steed and after a nearly two hour ride called upon my old friend Professor Gruenberg at the University here. He told me that the phenomenon was virtually inexplicable to him–unless Frankenstein were somehow tapping some source of enormous source of energy within the thick stone castle walls in excess of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit; one, furthermore, sufficient to throw off the above-mentioned radiant heat as surplus temperature. Professor Gruenberg has suggested that  the government in Danzig be notified and the militia should perhaps be alerted. I will await your instructions in these matter.s In the interim, I shall keep you apprised of developments as they occur.

I have also noted with some alarm that as the icicles which flange the castle eaves are melting, and that the water therefrom turns to steam before it even hits the ground. The outdoor air intake which serves to ventilate the interior of the castle is covered with a sticky red fluid which might be…blood?    
Sincerely,
Manfred Winkelstein
Director
Department of Health
Town of Ingolstadt

Tuesday November 10, 1812
The Hon. Count Von Falkenstein
Lord Mayor
Town of Ingolstadt

Herr Mayor:

Quite the afternoon. Seeing double. I called upon Frankenstein this AM. Felt I would be remiss in my duty to the village if I neglected to attend to this situation as quickly as possible. F. most hospitable. Offered me a delicious herbal tea. Head feels kind of funny.

Sincer

Tuesday November 10, 1812
The Hon. Count Von Falkenstein
Lord Mayor
Town of Ingolstadt

Herr Mayor:

The matter regarding Victor Von Frankenstein has been resolved in a most satisfactory fashion. Frankenstein’s experiments are wholly benign. The Doctor was merely conducting a series of procedures the results of which bid fair to offer great advances to medical science. The intense heat of the castle is caused by insufficient ventilation. The problem has been rectified. For my part, I have signed on to become the assistant of the good Doctor Frankenstein and am therefore resigning forthwith my position as Director, Department of Health, Town of Ingolstadt.

P.S. Please address all future inquiries regarding the state of Frankenstein’s affairs to Herr Blankenfeld, Esq.

Sincerely,
Manfred Winkelstein (alias “Igor”)

3. THE HISTORY OF POP 1952-2009
MOLDY FIG & THE JAZZ REVIVAL –“Desusifunido” (1952)

PEOPLE FROM TV, “Last of the Dancing Gypsy Bears” (1953)

THE CARNY ELITE, “Daddy’s Scratchy Face” (1954)

THE SONIC BOOM—“Ready to Rock” (1955)

SINISTER CHIPMUNKS, “Ten Times Bigger Than the Biggest Rat” (1956)
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_2OgpsMgKSls/SVz6…0-h/mickey4.jpg

http://johnglenntaylor.blogspot.com/2008_12_28_archive.html

THE SUNSHINE HEPSTERS—“Fun is Fun” (1957)

THE FAMILY GARAGE–“Um…”(1958)

STABBITY MC STAB STAB STAB, “A Cat Named Frankenstein” (1959)

THE WAY COOL—“One Two” (1960)

FAITHFUL AND DISCREET SLAVE CLASS, “Alpha 66 Is Go” (1961)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithful_and_discreet_slave
THE BLOOD SURFERS, “Boom! (Mr. Atomic Fireball)” (1962)

CARLOS MARCELLO AND THE LIVARSI NA PETRA DI LA SCARPA ORCHESTRA, “(And) The Hits (Keep Right on Coming)” (1963)

DAD & THE SURFERS–“I Live in The Doghouse” (1963)

GOLD TOOTH FATTY, “Busy With Those Reefers” (1964)

REVEREND DEVILLE, “Stinkfinga” (1964)

THE FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTHS—“The Reason” (1965)

UNCLE BENZEDRINE’S ALERTED RICE, “The Sugar Cube Ride” (1965)

TINY SINESTRO, “Squeaky-Clean Suckers With Deep Pockets” (1966)

THE 8-TEENS–“It’s All About Me” (1966)

BOLSHEVIK EXPROPRIATORS CLUB, “Tender Effusions of Laxative Woodcocks” (1967)

THE BLACK BEARDS—“Making Cowboy Love” (1967)

THE WHITE BEARDS—“Mr. Captain” (1968)

PRESIDENT CORNBALL & HIS ADMINISTRATION, “Conspiracy Dogs” (1968)

CIGAR SMOKING ZOMBIES, “We Who Are Not We… And Yet ” (1968)

SAURON’S FLAMING EYE–“When the Caissons Go Rolling Along” (1969)

TURN ME ON DEAD MAN, “And They Are Mild” (1969)

THE SPRINGTIMES–“Ride the Chopper” (1969)

CELEBRITY KILLERS, “Our Religion Is Love” (1970)

HAPPY HIPPY AND HIS HOEDOWN HUMPERS–“Far Far Out” (1970)

SOME DICKHEAD ACADEMIC, “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire” (1970)

LYSERGIC REFLUX, “Cape Does Not Enable User to Fly” (1971)

HE WHO IS GOD HAS SAID IT, “Panic Inducing Marijuana” (1971)

THE PRETEND–“Money for Rope” (1971)

THE THIRSTY GIANTS, “(Theme From) Godsmell” (1972)

THE ALCOHOLIC BEARS, “Let Unconquerable Gladness Dwell” (1972)

BULLETPROOF WITCH, “Acid Dog” (1973)

I GOT A HARD, “Tubular Smells” (1973)

http://www.atomicavenue.com/atomic/TitleDe…x?TitleID=17507
LADY OF PAIN, “J’Adore” (1974)

HIERONYMUS POP, “Drunken Ira Hayes” (Dance Remix) (1975)
http://www.harpers.org/archive/1880/06/0002694

THE ANTI-ROCK EQUATION, “Pass the Mighty Waterfall” (1976)

TRIPPY DINOSAUR–“The Fairy and the Zephyr” (1976)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuristic_Dragon

PSYCHO KITTY AND THE POWER BIGOTS, “I Heart the South” (1977)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_New_York

DAGGER STAB LEGEND, “Zip-a-Dee-Dada” (1977)
KLARK KRYPTONITE AND THE KETAMINE FIVE,”The New Breed of Scumbag (Who Cannot Fight Without a Weapon)” (1978)

JOEY HEROIN, “Mr. Heroin Nerves” (1979)

SHANTY TRAMP, “Ass In Pocket” (1980)

GENTLE BEN–“I Love Unicorns” (1981)

THIS MAJESTIKAL ROOF, “With An LSD Girlfriend” (1982)
http://www.wmbr.org/Cheese-96.html

TOOTHBREAKER, “I Wanna Hold Your Purse” (1983)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_at_the_W…ey_(1983_album)

THE TUFF-GUY HARDCORE SENSATIONS, “Thor’s Ever-Loving Hammer” (1984)

THE SATANIC ROCKETS–“Napalm Conspiracy” (1985)

WHISTLING FACE SYNDROME, “A Rage to Die” (1986)

THE TEMPLE EXPLODES THE CHICKEN CUBE, “Liquor Store In Nox Town” (1988)

TEOTWAWKI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_Ennd_I_Feel_Fine)

FASHION GORILLAZ, “It Makes Me Want to Kill Myself” (1989)

FIVE CENT TZAR, “The Very Special Episode” (1990)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_special_episode
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main…ySpecialEpisode

PERPETUAL RAIN–“Funny Ha Ha Ha” (1991)

THE INTERESTING LESBIANS, “Big Chief Hug ‘Em and Kiss ‘Em” (1992)

THE SQUEEGEE MEN, “Fill Your Den With Liquor Using Food Stamps” (1993)
As the late Lee Atwater, Rove’s mentor in pseudo-populism, explained in 1984 to Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall: “In the 1980 campaign, we were able to make the establishment, in so far as it is bad, the government. In other words, big government was the enemy, not big business … If the people are thinking that the problem is that taxes are too high and government interferes too much, then we [Republicans] are doing our job.” The best story, Atwater continued in his candid disquisition, was of a welfare recipient who “fills his den with liquor using food stamps.”

DSM-IV, “The Colour of God” (1994)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-IV_Codes

JEHOVAH VACUUM CLEANER, “Dance Floor Shiny Under Junkies” (1995)

BLIND BEHEMOTH, “Ha Ha You Are a Slave” (1996)

MR. BLOWJANGLES, “Sign of the Breast” (1997)

SCREAMING MONKEY HEAD, “Pimp and Circumstance” (1998)

FIRM BUT FAIR, “Satan’s Cheerleader” (1999)

THE HEAD DRIFTS TOWARD THE BOTTOM, “Baby Made a Boom-Boom” (2000)

ROBOT SPYMASTER, “Normal Sadness” (2001)

UNITED STATES HEROES, “Tough Guys (With Something to Hide)” (2002)

SMASH UGLY, “Midget Down” (2003)

PIT BULL DEFENDERS, “We Make ‘Em Die ” (2004)

THE MARTYRS–“Life is Gray” (2005)

SPLENDOURS AND MISERIES OF THE PROSTITUTE, “In the Cave I Met a Hairier Version of Myself” (2006)

SEED RAIN AND THE BAT SHIT FIVE, “Rubbing One Out to April” (2007)
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:auMFdi…lient=firefox-a

FOOT OF ENGORGED BRAWN, “I Trust Diet Smith’s Robot” (2008)
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:yuFmYs…=clnk&gl=us

HELLO BECOME LOVE GIANT!, “Just Let Me Put the Tip In” (2009)

183 DIFFERENT BOZOS, “The Freeway Is Our Ashtray” (2009)

TOP 10 COUNTRY HITS
RABBLE AND THE ROUSERS, “Coonie Up a Gum Stump Shoo Fly Shoo”
THE COWBOY LEPERS, “Dead Dog in a Carnival Costume”
THE ASS WRANGLERS, “Fifty Dollars and Time Served”
THE POTATO-SEED EATERS, “Hominy Wishes And Corn Likker Dreams”
THE FLOATING OUTHOUSE LOGS, “Paw Ain’t No Kin to You”
THE BIG STICK COUNTRY SQUIRES, “Billyclub Breakfast”
WHEN COUSINS MARRY, “Fire Bad”
PURTY MOUTH, “Corn Syrup Uber Alles”
OYER & TERMINER, “Cream of Tobacco Soup”
FOUR ROSES AND A THORN, “Benny at the Wheel”

4. SITUATIONIST NURSERY RHYMES
LITTLE JACK HORNER
Little Jack Horner sat in the corner, eating his Christmas Pie. He put in his thumb and he pulled out a plum and said “My selection of this plum, which clarifies my intention to make an ideological statement, symbolizes what Sigmund Freud would call a food-dirtying motif, and represents the expropriative greed of a state of arrested development, stemming from a childhood burdened by affective deprivation, due to the depredations of a ruthlessly exploitative mercantilist society, which rules and fragments the nuclear family by means of the iron law of wages. Nevertheless, what a good boy am I!”

OLD KING COLE
Old King Cole was ruthless in his oblivious exploitation of his objectified and thoroughly pacified salaried robots, who brought him his pipe, bowl, and fiddlers three, stupefying palliatives which made the otherwise intolerable boredom of his hegemonic regime palatable.

THIS LITTLE PIGGIE
This little piggie went to market (in spite of the massive dislocations caused by the breakdown of the spectacular commodity economy); this little piggie stayed home (thereby demonstrating, by his refusal to participate in a corrupt system, the vigor of his struggle for autonomy); this little piggie had roast beef (and was thereby culpable of depriving the Third World of badly needed grain); and this little piggie had none (finally breaking once and for all the chain of Karmic retribution)–and this little piggie cried wee wee wee all the way home (demonstrating, in so doing, an admirable spirit of communal solidarity by refusing to be passionate about his own alienation).

THE INFORMATION #1170

OCTOBER 8, 2021

THE INFORMATION #1170
OCTOBER 8, 2021
Copyright 2021 FRANCIS DIMENNO
dimenno@gmail.com
https://dimenno.wordpress.com
 
A sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption. ― Guy de Maupassant

WHEN THIS WORLD CATCHES FIRE
BOOK FOUR: AND IF THE DEVIL COME SHOOT HIM WITH A GUN
PART SEVENTY

290.   THE CONFESSIONS OF BABY BOY MADDOX PART 7
What I found in the household furnishings section of Card’s department store was every kind of chair and table and lamp, and bookcases full of crummy books but I guess you weren’t meant to buy ’em, they were only there for show. And there was also sleepware, and that gave me a bright idea. So, real casual like, I looked at the beds, and some of ’em were bare mattresses but most of them were fully made up beds on frames and I figured I could come back there at around four or five o’clock, just about an hour or so before they closed, and that’s where I could spend the night. Sure, I thought, they’d have a night watchman, but you could be damned sure he was probably a drunk, and lazy too, and he wouldn’t look under every single one of those beds, and I figured I was all set. 

But there was still the question of how I was going to kill five hours, so I left the department store and had me a good look around the Bigtown neighborhood so I could get the lay of the land, so to speak.

Two blocks east and right up near Canal Street was the police station. I’d passed it walking into town from the train station and given it a wide berth and headed south. After about three blocks there was kind of a warehouse district, with stores that sold blue and pink baby clothes and lawn supplies and bath fixtures; plus all the little fix-it shops they used to have; radio repair, appliance repair, television repair. There were garment factories and cold storage places and here and there a couple of used car and auto body shops, and also a whole lot of bars. There was also an old factory with a faded painted sign all up and down the side of it advertising Tom Tucker Mint Ginger Ale, only the smiling gent in the top hat had a big chunk of his ruddy face all worn away from soot and rain, so that he looked almost like a monster. The further south I walked there more bars there were; and finally I came to a highway underpass, and, sure enough, they had a hobo camp there. I saw a trash can fire and bedrolls and I thought I was going to be OK because the Boes would steer me right once I told ’em about Tandy, and I could ask after Squinty and maybe he’d be there and I could get my ten cents back and I could also tell ’em how Blinkey had done me a good turn down in Madport but the important thing was that I could talk to some living, breathing people who wouldn’t automatically turn me over to the cops, excuse me, the policeman. 

Of course, you know, by that time, the early 1950s, all the old hobo traditions were starting to die out. Cadger Tandy, he hardly ever got tired of talking about the olden days, back in the twenties and thirties I guess, where there was hoboes everywhere, most all of them men and boys, and how they would ride the rails up and down and from coast to coast, and how some folk feared and hated them, but not everybody, because a lot of hoboes would work if you give ’em a chance. A tramp was another story; he was only just in it for his own self, and would work only if he was starving, and if he had to. Bums never went nowhere and never did nothing and was mostly good for begging, and they would turn up their nose at any work, honest or not. But a hobo was a proud man, Tandy said; he would work at any job from chopping wood to chopping cotton, from picking apples to turning a cider press, and he wasn’t too proud to dig ditches or post holes or put up fence posts if that’s what was called for. It wasn’t as though those kinds of jobs weren’t still around, it was more that the good old days and the good old ways was as good as good and gone; there wasn’t as many farm families as there once was formerly and there wasn’t as many hoboes, either, for that matter–most men who took to the road in later years were mostly shiftless rubber tramps who’d much rather stay in the city and mooch on the stem rather than going door to door and look for honest work; they’d rather steal wash from a clothesline than ask for a job of work. And, you know, times had changed; people had their own washers and dryers, they had gas and oil and electric heat and they didn’t need no wood chopping done, except in the country; and even there, a lot of the family farms was gone and those as were left behind had all sorts of machinery; and you needed experience to work it.

These days, said Tandy, there was plenty of people who didn’t trust you if you didn’t have no fixed address; you couldn’t very well put down that you lived in a camp out by the woods or off the highway somewheres. People started taking to locking up their sheds at night, and they didn’t look none too kindly at what they called trespassers, even if it was some poor sick old hobo trying to get in out of the rain. It’s gotten so you can’t even sleep in a barn or under a hayrick no more, said Tandy. The whole country seemed to have got richer and meaner; not that there weren’t rotten people back in the olden days, but after the second big war people had gotten harder and were always hollerin’ about communists and they were a lot more fearful of the men with no…what was that word he used? Credentials. He spat out the word as though it were bitter poison.  “Nowadays they want to see some kind of ‘credentials,'” he said. 

Hell, Tandy was smart, but even he couldn’t account for the change; it was as though in twenty years we were living in a different America; people in a hurry all the time, full of nervous energy, always having to look at something or do something or be somewheres, and if you weren’t just like them then there must be something wrong with you. You must never wear brown shoes with black pants, Tandy said with a lifted pinky finger and a mincing voice, and if you don’t have a sharp-looking hat then you must be some kind of bum so keep away; and, if you wore a pink shirt, why, they’d run you straight out of town; never mind that you were a hobo who smelled of sweat and cinders; you had to be all soaped up like a French cathouse and smell like Right Guard and Vitalis; Tandy said it was the terrible terrible war; it made people different; bitter inside at losing all those years of their lives and all their missed business opportunities; but it also made people feel superior to hoboes and the like. Tandy worked hard when he was able and always gave it his best, and he never felt sorry for anything he ever done, but he told me that the day of the hobo was just about, vanished was the word he used, and that nowadays no man in his right mind would try to do what he had done and take on the whole world. There was no longer a place in this world for men like him; a young fella was better off if he got a square job; anything; no matter how menial; pump jockey; fry cook; tattoo artist, rat-catcher, bug spray man–it was all the same much better than racing hot rods down quiet streets and wearing leather jackets and lounging around in front of candy stores like all the young punks and bums in the big city; breaking into warehouses; robbing square johns; shaking down store owners; sticking up gas stations; strung out on junk or peddling reefers.  

Tandy had a pretty good idea that all this kind of behavior was a one-way street and that you were better off in the army. Maybe that’s why he wanted me to quit the road and he was hopin’ I’d get caught; only he didn’t figure on one thing. I wasn’t ready to be tamed just yet; I just wanted to drift along in the breeze for awhile. I liked the road and I wanted to be like him, only I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that he was just about the last of his kind and that something was coming along and I don’t know what that was going to replace the old-time hobo but that it was likely that this new breed was no kind of example to take off after. 

 
So I go to the underpass and I figure, I’m thinking maybe that these are some kind of hoboes or maybe tramps and I guess they had me pegged as some kind of runaway or maybe they thought I was a punk. 

So it was about two in the afternoon and the sky is turning grumbly and gray and blue like a bad bruise and I figure that under a bridge would be a good place to be but then I take a good look at the men who was there–four of ’em–and I get a real bad feeling.  
They was all dressed in old suit jackets and raggedy pants and dirty dress shirts. One of them was a fat man and the other one was thin as a rail. Three of them had on hats and the bareheaded guy was a baldhead with long hair down the sides of his face which made him look like a clown but they was all of them some mean-looking customers. One of them in particular scared me half out of my wits. He was a clean-shaven man, taller, and slightly better dressed than the others; his hat was almost new. One side of his face was normal and he kept it turned mostly to that profile and he calls to me, says, “Kid–c’mere,” but I kept my distance and he said “Kid, c’mere–we just want to talk to you,” and I edge away and then he turns his head slightly and it’s like he’s got an ugly shrivelled midget face growing out of one side of his head; it was all wrinkled and red and kind of lumpy and he laughs only it was more like a snarl and he says “C’mere–I ain’t gonna bite ya,” and I stand there and I says “Whaddaya want?” and he says, “Ya got any dosh?” and I still had a couple of dollars but I lied and said “No, I don’t,” and he says “You’re Tandy’s punk, ain’t ya?” and I says “I ain’t no punk,” but I don’t like telling him Tandy’s dead and me without nobody to look out after me and I start to walk away real fast like and Uglyface says, “It ain’t no use runnin’, punk, because we’re gonna get you,” and I turn around and say “I’ll be damned if you do,” just as smartly as you please, and he makes a lurching movement as if he’s about to chase me and I pick up a big rock and I say “You lay one finger on me and you’ll have three faces, ya ugly bastard,” and so he backs way up and he turns to his pals and says, “Smart kid,” and then he turns to me and says “You think you’re pretty smart, don’tcha,” and then I run and the skinny guy is chasing me shrieking I’ll get you but he falls down on his face after about a quarter mile and I let the rock go and nearly hit him as he’s lyin’ on the ground and it was the biggest regret of my life that I didn’t get him but good. “Next time,” I yell back at him, “Send your grandmaw.” And I keep right on running away. 

So now I am headed back to the main stem and when I get there I’m still out of breath and the sky is getting angrier and I decide to take shelter in the nearest building which just happens to be the Post Office.

*1 SALUTATION
THE PRETENDERS
THE WAIT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1kntkCmoSQ&list=PLkd4HdEojDiWV3vGJ_aPrYH0eFS0RSP__&index=6

2*REFERENCE
HOW HIPPIES CHANGED THE WAY WE ALL EAT
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-hippies-changed-the-way-we-all-eat

ALSO SEE:
Once children have been indoctrinated into the expectations of a dominator society, they may never outgrow the need to locate all evil outside themselves. Even as adults they tend to scapegoat others for all that is wrong in the world. They continue to depend on group identification and the upholding of social norms for a sense of well-being.
http://old.ekklesia.co.uk/content/cpt/article_060823wink.shtml

3*HUMOR
A TECHNICALITY OF SCREWING
https://books.google.com/books?id=vsZYihpCoHMC&pg=PA160&lpg=PA160&dq=technicality+of+screwing&source=bl&ots=q8i1jBz9Xy&sig=ACfU3U2guuk1BfbSpTeR65fTxwQWPT58sA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiPsfSN1rrxAhWRc98KHRQ4CZIQ6AEwD3oECAsQAw#v=onepage&q=technicality%20of%20screwing&f=false

That’s the kind of joke I imagine Morey “The Human Joke Machine” Amsterdam would tell at a Shriner’s Convention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morey_Amsterdam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6u9FkFkPXo

4*NOVELTY
The wicked parody of Time (the magazine–not temporality itself) which Ross’s venerable magazine published, before it was quite so venerable.
https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/timespeak-backward-ran-sentences-until-reeled-the-mind/

ALSO SEE:
GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY IN WHICHY THICKET
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1975/2/27/golden-anniversary-in-whichy-thicket-pbtbhe/

5*AVATAR OF THE ZEITGEIST
THE ORIGINS OF BUGS BUNNY
I thought of a spin off: Buck Bunny, The Richest Rabbit in the World.

Prompted by a display of popsicle brand treats intended for the small fry, sold by the Hope Creamery, whence I recently fetched Marge a hot fudge sundae.

There was Beast Boy (from Doom Patrol and Teen Titans), Captain America, and Spider-Man.

And, off in a corner–not part of the roster which included such Johnny-Come-Latelies as the Powerpuff Girls, Spongebob, and Angry Birds–was good old Bugs.

Whose attitude partakes of the Bowery B’hoy, or “Soaplock,” a stock figure from the 1830s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowery_B%27hoy
https://lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/exhibit/bowery/

Although Tex Avery was the father of Bugs as we know him, Ben “Bugs” Hardaway was his namesake. Bugs was allegedly based on Clark Gable and Groucho Marx.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/66703/11-mischievous-facts-about-bugs-bunny

Here is something I’ll bet you did not know about Salvatore Dali.

([Dali]  left New York en route to Cannes, carrying a 5-foot-tall, purple Bugs Bunny doll that had been given to him as a bon voyage gift.) “This is the most ugly and frightening animal in the world,” he said. “I will paint it with mayonnaise and make it an object of art.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-01-24-mn-969-story.html

I predict that someday cartoons featuring Buzzy the Funny Crow will be X-rated.

God save us all from cheap cartoons. They were invented by the devil, as torment for our crimes.

6* DAILY UTILITY
Whatever Lola Wants (Lola Gets).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kjQmgm0r4g

*7 CARTOON
BAZOOKA JOE AND TIJUANA BIBLES
The man who created Bazooka Joe also did art for some of these.
https://dulltooldimbulb.blogspot.com/2009/10/bazooka-joe-and-tijuana-bible-eight.html?_sm_au_=iVVFRPQ5N3L7Qwpj803WKK6HVL2M2

What I once said about the best American Literature being found on Bazooka Joe wrappers now seems prescient.

8*PRESCRIPTION
DALE A. COOPER
IMPRESSIONIST FOR CHRIST
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ9omP40NG0

9* RUMOR PATROL
“The slap-and-tickle Squire”.

Dates all the way back to 1974:
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/11/23/archives/trial-of-briton-who-spanked-girls-amuses-public-perfectly-normal.html

10*LAGNIAPPE
The Velvet Underground
Jesus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6FIjp8nJV4

11*DEVIATIONS FROM THE PREPARED TEXT: A REVIEW OF OTHER MEDIA
CLIVE JAMES

Clive James loathed the middlebrow about as much as I do.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/clive-james-got-it-right 

*11A BOOKS READ AND REVIEWED

AMERICA ON FIRE. HINTON. ****

BAD DAYS IN HISTORY. FARQUHAR. ****

BATMAN: THE ADVENTURES CONTINUE. 1. DINI. ***1/2

BOLD! DARING! SHOCKING! TRUE! SCHAEFER. ****1/2

THE COMIC BOOK GUIDE TO GROWING FOOD. ****

CRISIS ZONE. HANSELMANN. ****1/2

CULTISH: THE LANGUAGE OF FANATICISM. MONTELL. ****1/2

DARK NIGHTS DEATH METAL. ***

FACTORY SUMMERS. DELISLE. ****1/2

FUTURE STATE: BATMAN: DARK DETECTIVE. ***1/2

GREEN RIVER KILLER. JENSEN & CASE. ****1/2

GRUNT. ROACH. ****

HARLEY QUINN & POISON IVY. ***

HAROLD GRAY’S LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE. 12. ****1/2

HAROLD GRAY’S LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE. 13. ****1/2
HAROLD GRAY’S LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE. 14. ****1/2
HAROLD GRAY’S LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE. 16. ****1/2
HARRIET TUBMAN: TOWARD FREEDOM. WHITMAN & LEE. ***1/2

I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN. MURPHY. ***1/2

KING IN BLACK. ***

KING IN BLACK: AVENGERS. **1/2

KNOCK OUT! KLEIST. ****1/2

MODOK: HEAD GAMES. BLUM & OSWALT. ***1/2

MORE BAD DAYS IN HISTORY. FARQUHAR. ****

MR. CONFIDENTIAL. BERNSTEIN. ****

MY BEGGING CHART. ROBERTS. ****

NEW MUTANTS 1. AYALA & REIS. ***1/2

ONION SKIN. CAMACHO. ***1/2

RIVER OF INK. APPERT. ****

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES. DOUGHTY. ****

SUPERMAN 1. HERO OF METROPOLIS. ***1/2

THISTLEBONE 1. EGLINGTON & DAVIS. ****

UNIVERSE 1. THE PAST IS NOW. ****

12* CONTROVERSIES IN POPULAR CULTURE
JESUS
If Jesus were alive today, would he play slot machines? And if so, would his winning pull be three turtledoves?
https://images.tuckdb.org/postcards/images/000/122/003/mid/2011_08_29_15_56_30.jpg

Adam and Eve would be seated next to him, and their winning pull would be three snakes next to three apples. “You have WON–The knowledge of Good and Evil! HOWEVER….”

The tripartite slot machine display is the new trinitarian religion. The Church of Christ, High (Holy) Roller.

He will comp you a penthouse suite in heaven…with a free buffet.

It’s all a Cosmic Gamble, innit?
http://www.applegateinsulation.com/Press-Room/Applegate/445166.aspx

How come we don’t worship the Pope? I mean, I suppose some people do. I wonder if Catholics imagine they will be denied heaven if they don’t have a snapshot of the Pontiff lying around.

Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?

I hear you have to get a 5 on 5 APs to be admitted as an undergrad to Cambridge, but only 3 such scores to be admitted to Oxford.

Well! (Loquitur: Jack Benny)

If Jesus got into Cambridge, would he go to Jesus College? And…would he refer to it as “My College?”
https://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/

Don’t get me wrong. I like to kid Jesus. But seriously….

Or should that be “Syria-sly?”
εἰς ὅλην τὴν Συρίαν, eis holēn tēn Syrian

Thanks to Jack Chick, I’ll never forget the line,”You see, Duke, He was beaten to a pulp for you! That’s how much he loved you!”
https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/reading-the-gospel-according-to-jack/Content?oid=880638https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/11/8/13426962/jack-chick-alt-right-fundamentalism-tracts-catholics-trump
https://www.thekjvstore.com/the-sissy-kjv-tract/
Taken from the well-known Bible verse, “And it came to pass that Jesus was woe beset upon by ruffians who were sent at the behest of a hairy man who was a sacrilegious hauler of goods.”

Meanwhile, I direct your attention to this ominous portent:
https://www.mtairynews.com/features/church/90775/unsettling-signs-of-jesus-return

THE INFORMATION #1169 OCTOBER 1, 2021

THE INFORMATION #1169
OCTOBER 1, 2021
Copyright 2021 FRANCIS DIMENNO
dimenno@gmail.com
https://dimenno.wordpress.com

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.–Benjamin Franklin

WHEN THIS WORLD CATCHES FIRE
BOOK FOUR: AND IF THE DEVIL COME SHOOT HIM WITH A GUN
PART SIXTY-NINE

290.   THE CONFESSIONS OF BABY BOY MADDOX PART 6
My mind was racing as I walked in the house and stepped into a smoke-filled living room full of frat guys and co-eds from a nearby girl’s school. I tried to lose myself inside the group of students but a big beefy fellow, a football player from the looks of him, asked me where I thought I was going and I told him I was lost and trying to find the subway station and he said why did you try to sneak in here then and I said I need to use a bathroom bad and could I maybe use a phone so I could call my folks and the big mug immediately gentled up and said sure, Kiddo, and he showed me where the bathroom was, and while I was in there I dried myself off the best I could; the bathroom was on the second floor of the wood-frame frat house and I saw a cop car parked out in front and I knew they were on my tail and that if I didn’t get out of there I would be trapped, sure enough. So I eased my way back downstairs and made my way to the kitchen. There were some couples smooching in there and I asked one guy what time it was and he didn’t even look up. Drunk I guess, and he said half past the monkey’s ass and quarter to his balls, and I looked over the refrigerator, and there was a clock and it said 9pm and I saw there was a door from the kitchen leading out to a porch so I went out there. The porch overlooked a gully behind the house so I screwed up my courage and jumped with my bundle onto the cold hard ground, hardly any grass, it’s a wonder I didn’t bust my ankle as it was about an eight foot drop and I hit the ground and rolled around in the nearly frozen mud to break my fall and some guy standing on the porch said “Did you see that?” and I got to my feet and took off running but then I had a thought and I circled back and looked up at the porch, underneath at ground level it had those wooden slats with criss cross holes in them, like the top of a pie, so I prised one of the three sides open and crawled in, it was kind of dusty in there and it was all I could do not to sneeze but it was mostly cement under the floorboards there, so I got into the crawl space just as far as I could and just waited to see what would happen.

I waited there an hour until I figured the cops had given up but I still didn’t go anywhere. I was more sure than anything that the cops were still out there looking around for me. It was strangely warm under there and I wondered why. It was too dark to see but I felt around under the foundation of the building–there was just enough room to stand–and I found a metal door. It had a knob and I pulled at it and was shocked when it opened up so I slowly peeked around to the place where it opened up into and I saw a furnace room, fairly large, with plenty of spaces to hide in. This was a bit of luck. There was all kinds of junk stored down there–broken armchairs with the matted slats busted open like some drunken oaf had sat in them too hard; summer screens for the upstairs windows; cases of empty beer bottles; and a big concrete sink against the wall. Just as quietly as I could manage, I moved some of the beer bottle cases in front of the concrete sink and crawled under behind it and made myself a cosy little nest, With a little bit more luck I figured I could maybe get some shuteye and on Wednesday morning I could make my way to some place where the cops wouldn’t think to look for me. It was noisy upstairs; the college kids was dancing and talking up a storm and the music was loud, the sounds of lots of drums and saxophones but I was so tuckered out I’ll bet I could of slept through World War Two. Four mostly sleepless nights had gone by in which I had managed to dodge the cops and I wondered what tomorrow would bring. I was scared, a little, but mostly, I was excited.

When I finally woke up I was halfway starved. You get a sense of the time from living out in the woods, sort of an internal clock, so I supposed it was about seven am and I figured it was time to be moving on. I knew I shouldn’t but I decided to go upstairs and see if I could find something to eat. I made my way to the kitchen; it was a mess, butts and bottles everywhere and the whole place smelled musty and dead. I opened the refrigerator; there’s a big half-empty bottle of milk and I slugged that down right quick and there’s a loaf of bread and some packaged lunch meat and I grab that for later, and I’m just about to tiptoe back downstairs and go out the way I came in when from out of the corner of my eye I sense a movement.

It was a girl. “Oh,” she says. “Hi,” I say. She’s not bad looking; a redhead, but she dyed her hair blonde. She was kind of mousy looking. Nice little bubbies, as I recall. She was wearing a white blouse and a plaid skirt, like she had just stepped out of a convent school; and she smelled like rose water; all the way across the room I could smell it. “What’re you doing?” she whispers. “Getting something to eat,” I whisper back. I say to her, “I live down the street and my parents had to leave in a hurry, my brother’s in the hospital and they didn’t leave me anything to eat.” She’s heading for the door, probably going back to the bedroom to tell someone I think, but then she pauses, digs in her purse, hands me a dollar, says, “I won’t tell,” turns to me, says “Be careful,” and heads out the door and then poof, she’s gone.

I headed back down to my hidey-hole in the basement, put the bread and meat in my inside jacket pocket, gathered up my blankets, and headed out the way I came in, though the outside furnace room door and out into the area under the porch.

This was more than 25 years ago and I can still remember how the girl smelled like rosewater. She’s probably close to being a grandmother by now. I shouldn’t have eaten the lunch meat though. It was bad, and I was awful sick, and I immediately had to shit, which I did sitting on a log in the woods behind the gully. Served me right.  

I made my way through the woods until I found a street not far from the college campus, I walked a couple of miles to Central Depot and I got on the subway and took a train heading into the big town. I figured I’d hit the main stem. By about 8 am it was starting to get busy with people going to work. I found a hotel right in the center of town, the Madison, nice place, but it ain’t there no more. I found my way to the men’s room in the basement and I camped out in a toilet stall for a good long while. It was one of those fancy hotels with dark wood paneling every which where and the bathroom was pretty big, too, only there wasn’t no washroom attendant and that was good because I was in there for about an hour or so and he might of gotten suspicious.  

By the time I left that place it was still rush hour; plenty of traffic, lots of people on the sidewalks all rushing to get somewheres, and me, I was faced with a long day of scrambling for a place to roost. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise–being a vagabond is no bed of roses; it’s a full-time job. You develop an instinct when you walk down the street past a line of parked cars; you got your eye peeled for whether someone might have left a package in the front seat or maybe some groceries but on that day I had no such luck.

I crossed the bridge that spanned the river and found myself on the South Side, which was where all the winos and the drunken bohunks lived, but there wasn’t much shaking down there, only the damndest bunch of hard up looking greasy spoon diners, and sooty little factories that made spools and buttons and copper wire, and dirty little brick bars on every corner and here and there a liquor store and a candy store and a cigar store and a hardware store and a storefront church and a beauty parlor.  I just kept on walking south. Saw the train station but I gave that a wide berth, and then I got closer to the center of the South Side. I looked up at one of the houses and saw there was an old granny woman sitting on her upstairs porch stroking her long-haired cat, which was almost as large and fat as a medium-sized dog. Card’s Department store looked pretty good. I could coop up there in the bathroom for a little while, just to get out of the cold; frost was in the air, I had to keep walking to keep warm but my feet were getting tired. At least I had a few bucks; I figured I’d get something to eat in the department store restaurant and if the waitress asked me why I wasn’t in school I could say that the boiler had broken down or some other damn fool lie and we all got sent home. Or maybe I’d tell them I was going to see the dentist and if they asked me where my Mama was I could say she was shopping. But, as it turns out, the waitress didn’t care; she just took my order. But what I ate went right through me because of the bad lunch meat I’d eaten so I raced to the bathroom, and crawled under the door of the stall so I wouldn’t have to pay the nickel. I made it just in time which was good because it would of been too bad if I had shit myself. I waited in the stall for a while just to make sure I was done and from the next couple of stalls over I heard a ruckus; I guess now it was two fruits going at it, maybe they didn’t know I was there and maybe they did know and didn’t care.    

I got the hell out of there; I was very leery about being someplace where the cops might bust in.

I spent the whole rest of the morning just looking at the stuff on the various floors of the department store. There were seven floors. Up on the second floor the dummies in ladies’ clothing gave me a weird thrill. There was a jukebox in the Young Miss department. That was a new one on me. I heard Eddie Fisher, Perry Como, and The Ames Brothers. Then the echoey voice of Joni James was singing “Why Don’t You Believe Me” backed by a swirling old-timey orchestra. “I love only you,” she warbled, and as the orchestra reached a crescendo, I wandered up the escalator to the third floor and looked at all the sad old turtles and parakeets in the pet department, and the shivering puppies and the angry cats in their pens, and the big tanks of tropical fish stupidly gliding back and forth. The fourth floor was men’s wear, hardware, and the sports department; it was pretty dead; clerks were standing around smoking, shooting the breeze; they saw me there but they didn’t take no notice.

Well, by then I had had enough, but I figured I’d take the elevator to the top floor to see what was up there, but it was all offices and I quickly vamoosed; I took the stairs down to kitchen ware on the sixth floor, and then I figured what the hell and I went to the fifth floor, and, lo and behold. It was household furnishings.  
   
*1 SALUTATION
DAMON & NAOMI
EYE OF THE STORM
https://youtu.be/ZuvpIkI7MO4

2*REFERENCE
WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN
www.classicfm.com/discover-music/humour/world-smallest-violin-music-origin/

3*HUMOR
BUMPER STICKERS OF PEOPLE YOU SHOULD AVOID
My Car is Jealous of Your Shiny Car
My Other Spacecraft is the Starship Enterprise
Caution: Recombinant DNA on Board
Honk If You’re A Migrating Goose
This Machine Kills Fascists
I Sleep On a Kryptonite Pillow
Ask Me About My Particle Accelerator
L. Ron Hubbard Is My Co-Pilot
I Brake for Biological Mishaps
Caution: Nuclear Reactor on Board
People Say I’m Aggressive, But My Gun Says Otherwise
I Love My Dog Which Used to Be a Cat
Easy Does It But Man Could I Use a Drink
I Brake For Twisted Circus Dwarves
Ask Me About My Tarantula
Stop Senseless Violence–Bring Back Sensible Violence
My Son Is An Honor Student At The State Prison Farm
Christ Is Crucified and Yet You Laugh
I Love Absinthe
Why You No Be My Friend, Esse?
Methamphetamine Is My Co-Pilot
Jesus is Coming Back Soon and Then We’ll All Be Destroyed

4*NOVELTY
A HATFUL OF RAIN
https://youtu.be/s-NPlLJgN3M

5*AVATAR OF THE ZEITGEIST
WORST BABY NAMES
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
www.newshub.co.nz/home/lifestyle/2019/11/the-20-worst-baby-names-of-2019-revealed.html

6* DAILY UTILITY
MAMMALS GETTING BIGGER
www.sciencealert.com/the-spread-of-cities-is-causing-many-mammal-species-to-get-bigger

*7 CARTOON
POOP HOLDS THE SHOE WHER IT IS
dfc.furr.org/companion/Poop.html

8*PRESCRIPTION
GANG AWARENESS GUIDE
www.bothellwa.gov/DocumentCenter/View/350/Gang-Awareness-Guide-PDF

9* RUMOR PATROL
BLACK COPS SPEAK OUT
https://thecrimereport.org/2021/03/02/stop-turning-your-head-black-cops-speak-out-against-blanket-of-racism/

10*LAGNIAPPE
GOOD RATS
https://youtu.be/-QiztLDquc8

11*DEVIATIONS FROM THE PREPARED TEXT: A REVIEW OF OTHER MEDIA
RUSH
Actually, Rush are not really that BAD. Just palpably mediocre & derivative. They’re the kind of band that people who drink Ice beer would enjoy. Stupefaction guaranteed, or your money back. They boast the kind of screaming guitar sound that every 14 year old aspirant to rawk Godhood longs to master. And they never met an overwrought emotion that they weren’t willing to promote and amplify in a strangulated voice. Their 19th album is actually pretty listenable. 19th time’s the charm, I suppose.

SEE:
SOLILOQUY
https://youtu.be/szLVsv0QUvc

12* CONTROVERSIES IN POPULAR CULTURE
METH COOKIES
www.nwahomepage.com/news/meth-cookies-lands-on-online-map-for-signature-food-of-arkansas/

knpr.org/desert-companion/2017-07/meth-lunches

khqa.com/news/local/do-you-live-near-a-meth-house-this-interactive-map-will-tell-you-10-23-2019

THE INFORMATION #1168 SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

THE INFORMATION #1168

SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

Copyright 2021 FRANCIS DIMENNO
dimenno@gmail.com
https://dimenno.wordpress.com
 
Once you’ve started to leave, you will run your whole life.― Charlotte Eriksson

WHEN THIS WORLD CATCHES FIRE
BOOK FOUR: AND IF THE DEVIL COME SHOOT HIM WITH A GUN
PART SIXTY-EIGHT
289.   THE CONFESSIONS OF BABY BOY MADDOX PART 5

After breaking into the deserted concession stand at the drive-in theatre I guess I was more tired than I thought because I fell right to sleep at around seven and I didn’t wake up for about twelve hours, and only then because of the sounds of traffic coming off the two-lane highway there. So I lay down for a couple of hours, drifting in and out of sleep and thinking about them nuns, how mad they probably were because there wasn’t any trace of me. It never occured to me that they would be worried about me because I might be sick or dying, and they weren’t, I was pretty sure. I found out much later that the cops, I mean the policemen were on my trail; some of them wharf rats down by the docks had been questioned and gave out a pretty good description of me, so it’s a good thing I didn’t hang out in Madport very long and milk the paper-selling dodge to death because then I would of been nabbed for sure.Gleason’s Corners was on the other end of town, practically, and pretty well tucked away from all the hubbub of the big town; it was about seven or eight miles north of there and the last place anyone would think to look for me.

I had boughten and stolen enough food to last me a couple of days, and all that Monday I just lay there in that concession shack; it was like one of those places you see on the beach in the summertime, only smaller and with a round room instead of a rectangular one. There was some old newspapers there and while it was still light out I read them, and then I read them again, and then I tried to read a Bible they had there but the tiny print made my eyes water and I just kept dozing off. That was all to the good; I dasn’t leave there in the daytime lest somebody seen me crawling out the window, though there was a fat chance of that; it was a perfect little hideaway and I wondered why no other Boes had come across it. I figured it was because there was no way in except that window, and nobody but a kid could fit through. They had a wooden stool in there and I had it propped up against the door so if anyone opened it I would hear them and could crawl under the grill in a hurry and chances are I wouldn’t be seen. It was a good thing I thought ahead because on Tuesday morning at about 8am I heard footsteps. I was already awake so I grabbed my blanket and crawled under the grill and was tucked away just in time to hear two cops talking and a jingle of keys, and then the door opened. I could tell it was cops because the way they groused about “the goddamn Sarge” and “What am I, the fucking night watchman?”

But after they left I knew that someone must of seen me walking up that road on Monday and that this little place probably wouldn’t be safe any more.   If only they had looked around a little more they might of spotted something; the only time I had ever left the place was on Monday night, to piss and shit, and maybe somebody saw me then only I doubt it; like I said, the place was pretty remote, it was fenced in on all sides and at the far end behind the big screen there was a sloping path leading to the forest and that gave me the idea right away to check those woods out and see if maybe there was some place I could bed down that night, just to be on the safe side. It was really too bad that them woods was a bust. I had already decided that I couldn’t go back to the concession shack, though, at least, not for a while, but I also got to thinking that if the cops was still out looking for me I’d have to stay off the main roads so I just kept going deeper and deeper into the woods, and let me tell you, it was a real education; some of those paths hadn’t been used for years, it was a lucky thing for me that it was mid-October and the underbrush had thinned out some, but I still got snagged by vines and stickers more than once. I figured it would be better to be heading east, further away from Arcadia and the Salt River and more toward the lake, where I knew there was hardly any people and maybe I’d even come across a summer tourist cabin or something. No such luck, and I walked for several hours, lucky it was still daylight, trying to not get my shoes wet so I wouldn’t get a trench foot. I was wearing sneakers, and thinking that somehow I was going to have to get me a pair of boots.

It was starting to get dark by then, and I was bone tired and near done in, and I was beginning to stumble in my stride and I cursed the damn Sarge and the damn cops and the damn nuns and most of all damn Cadger Tandy, for having to up and die on me. I don’t suppose you ever really been lost until you’ve been lost in the woods. I wasn’t too worried; at the time, I figured the lake couldn’t be too far, although I found out much later from looking at a map that it was actually miles and miles away, and to the south.It was already getting dark and dark white clouds were scudding over the new laid moon which was about four days from a full moon so that gave me some light to walk by. I figured that pretty soon I was going to have to make camp in the middle of nowhere and get frozen half to death unless I could find a spot that was dry enough for me to make a fire and then I stopped and smelled the air. Gasoline, and I could tell there was a road ahead and let me tell you I was damn glad of it. I could follow it along and it would lead me somewhere and by this point I didn’t much care where that might be; I had walked for about eight hours all told and would roost anywhere, just so long as it was dry and warm.

And then I saw a light off through the trees in the distance and I knew it wasn’t the moon; it had to be a streetlamp.     Turns out I was right; there was a road, a winding suburban road, but that light wasn’t a streetlamp; it was a lamp in front of a house, and then I saw a little dog chained to a stake next to a doghouse and he was barking like mad. He kept right on barking, paused for air a couple of seconds, and got his wind back and started barking some more. Then I heard the thump thump thump of a basketball. Some kids were playing a game in the light of the house lamp. One of them, a girl, said “Queenie, hush,” and the other one, a boy, said, “What’s got into that damn dog?” and then the mother came out and told them to come inside to do their homework and get ready for bed and don’t say “damn” and the dog kept barking and pretty soon Paw came out with a flashlight and I went back into the bushes but I guess Paw must of heard because he starts towards me with the flashlight but then he must of thought better of it because he said to himself, “coon,” meaning a racoon and he brings the dog in the house. And peering out through the leaves I see the dog, a fat little chow dog, yapping at me from the bay window, and so I figured that I better make myself scarce before Paw come back out so I head northwest up the road.

   
And then it starts to rain. Quiet at first, then in buckets, but lucky for me I found a bus shelter so I didn’t get thoroughly soaked through but pretty damn near. 
I was cold and wet and I knew before long I was likely to get even colder, and there was no chance I would be able to get dry soon, and I damned Queenie the dog, and for good measure I also damned Paw with the flashlight, and the boy and the girl, and also the mom who said not to say “damn,” because why not. Then for some reason I got to thinking about Blinkey the blind man.

Pretty soon the bus come along and I got on, not thinking, just wanting to get warm. The bus was nearly empty. There was a roll-away sign on the front of the bus, but I couldn’t make out what it said in the dark and rain. I didn’t know it, but it turns out the bus was headed straight back to Arcadia.

Now, here’s the difference between people like you and people like me. People like you can stand a rough break; you figure it’s nothing personal. With people like me, it’s different. Everything is personal. I won’t stand for insults. What I see is MY reality, and everything else is like nothing.  

I went to the back of the bus and it lumbered and shook through the rain-flooded streets, climbing steep hills, and finally hitting the main stem. The bus driver, a geezer, was in a talkative mood. The old geezer was saying “Where you headed, Sonny?” and I decided to move up to the front of the bus so I could jump out at a likely place. This was a mistake because then he could see me good, and there I was, a kid carrying this big bundle, and it was as plain as the nose on your face that I was a street kid. I asked him where was the bus going and he said he was making his last run of the night and where was I headed anyway? I told him I was looking to catch the subway to Madport–that was all I could think to say–and that was another mistake because it put me right at the scene of where the cops all knew I had been last spotted. He said that after he made his run to Arcadia he was going to the bus shack at Central Depot and though he wasn’t supposed to he would take me there. 
The bus was warm and humid and I was all in from stomping through the woods all day and I very nearly fell asleep but I knew that something was up with the bus driver and all his questions and so I fought to stay awake. He made a stop at Nob Hill to let some passenger off and that’s when I made my move and jumped off the bus. He said “Ho, Sonny, this ain’t your stop,” but I was already out the door. 

Of course, I had no idea where I was. Nob Hill, even back then, it was a college town, but of course, I didn’t know that. I’ll bet that driver radioed the cops because before I managed to get two blocks I saw a black-and-white up the street. I could hear the sound of a party coming from a nearby house; it was a frat party, though I didn’t know that, and I figured I could try to lose myself in there until the cops went away. It was a desperate move, but I was bound not to be taken and I figured, well, any port in a storm. And so, not without a little bit of squirming anxiousness–you know how you get when you’re waiting for someone like a nurse to jab a needle into your arm?–I walked up the driveway. 

And my mouth was dry and my heart was fluttering and beating fiercely as I walked through the open door of that decrepit whitewashed party house. 

 
*1 SALUTATIONABC ALL OF MY HEART

https://youtu.be/KkADe6E46jA

2*REFERENCE
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
www.lib.washington.edu/preservation/preservation_services/conservation-1/raleigh

3*HUMOR
JACK ROY
Jack Roy was a siding salesman.

Then he changed his name to Rodney Dangerfield, and the rest was history.

books.google.com/books?id=EXoxjnFwpuoC&pg=PA306&lpg=PA306&dq=%22Jack+Roy%22+%22siding+salesman%22+%22the+last+laugh%22&source=bl&ots=CydGkSVK03&sig=ACfU3U3u_EhQagzurMjRyf5OCyuKoD_TiQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiO14uTq6nyAhUwmWoFHc8MA-0Q6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepage&q=%22Jack%20Roy%22%20%22siding%20salesman%22%20%22the%20last%20laugh%22&f=false

4*NOVELTY

BEST MANGA EVER

Not really. 

www.cbr.com/best-manga-ever-myanimelist/

5*AVATAR OF THE ZEITGEIST
ASTARTE
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astarte

6* DAILY UTILITY

THE NOVEL

The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600: Steven Moore: 9781441177049: Amazon.com: Books
www.amazon.com/Novel-Alternative-History-Beginnings-1600/dp/1441177043

The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800: Steven Moore: 9781441188694: Amazon.com: Books
www.amazon.com/Novel-Alternative-History-1600-1800/dp/144118869X

The Novel: A Biography: Michael Schmidt: 9780674724730: Amazon.com: Books
www.amazon.com/Novel-Biography-Michael-Schmidt/dp/0674724739

*7 CARTOON
JOURNEY
www.goodreads.com/book/show/2383814.Journey_Volume_1

8*PRESCRIPTION

WIN A DATE WITH FRANKIE AVALON

http://i.pinimg.com/564x/23/f3/44/23f344f7f6fdcb5f21630ebffb9f961d.jpg

9* RUMOR PATROL

WHY FULLY VACCINATED PEOPLE CAN GET COVID
www.cnbc.com/2021/08/10/breakthrough-covid-cases-why-fully-vaccinated-people-can-get-covid.html?recirc=taboolainternal

EXPENSIVE SHOTS

www.local10.com/news/local/2021/08/26/not-vaccinated-against-covid-its-about-to-get-very-expensive/

10*LAGNIAPPE
PETER MURPHY
DUST
https://youtu.be/DZ4DKkeP714

11*DEVIATIONS FROM THE PREPARED TEXT: A REVIEW OF OTHER MEDIA

BURL IVES

https://youtu.be/QKOz-wfp-A0https://youtu.be/Vo13knUSesA

12* CONTROVERSIES IN POPULAR CULTURE
WHY ITALIANS GESTURE WITH THEIR HANDS
It’s all about survival, Man.
According to some, the origin of the habit can be traced back to the Greek colonization of southern Italy; in those times, Poggi explains, cities were extremely crowded and body language was particularly important to catch each other’s attention at all levels. Other experts think Italians develop a special language made of gestures and signs between the 14th and 19th century, when large sections of the peninsula were occupied by foreign powers, namely France, Spain and Austria.
lifeinitaly.com/italians-speak-with-hands/

ALSO SEE:
www.babbel.com/en/magazine/why-italians-talk-with-their-hands-and-scandinavians-dont  

THE INFORMATION #1167 SEPTEMBER 17, 2021

THE INFORMATION #1167
SEPTEMBER 17, 2021
Copyright 2021 FRANCIS DIMENNO
dimenno@gmail.com
https://dimenno.wordpress.com
 
Never ride faster than your guardian angel can fly.–Anon.

WHEN THIS WORLD CATCHES FIRE
BOOK FOUR: AND IF THE DEVIL COME SHOOT HIM WITH A GUN
PART SIXTY-SEVEN

288.   THE CONFESSIONS OF BABY BOY MADDOX PART 4
So I come up with this wild plan for squatting inside a store or supermarket after dark, but it all hinged of course on the neighborhood. Too far out of the city and people would be curious about how a strange little kid got there and who I was and who I belonged to. Too close to the city wasn’t no good either; too many eyes watching; too risky. It had to be somewhere in between for the first night, and I was lucky; I prayed to God; figured it couldn’t hurt and something said to me what train will bear me cross so wide a town and a little voice guided me and told me to hop on a subway car, random, and head straight to Madport, and that’s exactly what I done. It meant I had to pass through Arcadia and I wasn’t any too thrilled about that, in case the cops, excuse me, the police were watching, but it just so happens that they weren’t, maybe they had already given up, and my trip went without a hitch.

Now, back when I was a kid, in the early fifties, they didn’t have no hippies or beatniks, but they did have greasers, and little kids who wanted to be ’em. So I figured that if I was going to blend in in Madport, I had to get me a windbreaker, and so earlier on before I caught the subway I managed to snag one right off the bat at a little department store right off the main drag of Harmony. Nice thing about being a kid is that they expect you to pocket some little toy or candy treat; not to make off with any sort of clothes. I was in and out of that store in two and a half minutes. I ‘d already scoped the place in and out an hour after I first blew into town.

When I got to Madport I found the supermarket I had in mind. Didn’t take long. Measured it out first. It was three in the afternoon. Sign on the door said the market closed at seven, being as it was a Saturday. It was what they called a Superette; The Madport Food Store; a large enough place but kind of small and kind of mingy compared to a real supermarket. It was a calculated risk, but you know how they say that beggars can’t be choosers. It was mid-October; I knew that when the sun went down it would be getting pretty cold and plenty fast. When I first scoped the place out I noticed that there was this nice little crawlspace way back in the store, near the frozen foods. It was a cardboard bread display. It had enough room underneath it for me to get comfortable as I could get on the hard-ass floor. I smuggled one of my blankets in there under my windbreaker and stashed it there in the space without anybody seeing me. I stashed my other blanket behind the wall of a gas station garage; I figured that if the superette didn’t work out I might be able to camp out in the rest room of the garage–back then, they didn’t lock the shithouse. I already knew the gas station was closed on Sunday; I also knew that I could lock that door from the inside.

The Superette caper went almost without a hitch. I walked in there at 5:30, behind some old grandpa; waited for my main chance, and got in my hidey-hole right away. What I didn’t count on was the night watchman. I think actually he was the owner of the store; he must of lived upstairs….

I swear that he come down those stairs every hour on the hour. There was this dog he had upstairs; it kept on barking. Must of smelled me or something, I dunno. Guy kept coming downstairs and walking around–I was terrified that he knew I was there and I thought that maybe the garage rest room might of been a better idea. Finally, about eleven at night he went to bed and I drifted off. Woke up at about 4am to the sound of a truck backing up to the loading dock in the rear. The same guy kept coming downstairs; first for the milk man, then the egg man, then the bread man, who came in and took all the old bread to sell in the day old bread bakery and it was only sheer luck I guess that he didn’t see me lurking under there beneath that flimsy cardboard display. I guess Monday morning was the delivery day, it didn’t seem right to me, but what did I know. The milk man tried to short count him on the empties; some of the eggs from the egg man were cracked; the bread man tried to palm off some stale old product. To top it all off, at about 6am the guy brought the dog downstairs, and that’s when I knew I was sunk. All I could do was to wait for the dog to sniff me out, and I’ll bet he would of, except suddenly there was a rat and the dog went crazy with barking and went after it. I made a break for the back door and somehow the guy didn’t see me, ner the dog, or maybe he did, who knows. I got my other blanket from the gas station and hightailed it out of that neighborhood in a hurry. So then I headed back for the train. I figured I could hoof it back from Harmony and go back to the jungle near Arcadia and camp out at my old spot, only I couldn’t count on jumping the turnstile at 7am without being seen so instead I walked around Madport, taking in the sights and trying to scope out someplace where I could lay low.

So I went to the wharf. Cold–freezing, actually–hungry, tired, still only two cents in my pocket, not knowing what my next move would be. I don’t mind telling you that right then and there I was ready to pack it in and let the coppers take me back to the Convent Home and face the music.

But I’m glad I didn’t. Instead, I just wandered around for a couple of hours.

And then I ran into this blind beggar. He was sitting on a park bench, picking away at a beat-up old guitar, and he had a cap next to him on the bench, filled with a single dollar bill and some small change. Pretty unlikely place for him to mooch on the stem, it seemed to me, only the fishermen were coming in with their first haul. They were dropping dimes and quarters in his cap; some of them knew him; “Hello, Blinkey,” and “How’s it goin’, Blink,” so I guess he was some kind of neighborhood character. I looked at him and said, “Now if this blind man can make his way in the world and he can’t even see, then why can’t I?” And I knew what I had to do, and it was the hardest thing I ever done; I had to ask the blind man if he would lend me fifteen cents. Blinkey made it easy. He’s already heard me and probably smelled me too and he called me over and said “Young man, you come here. What is your name?” And I told him. Pretty soon I was spilling my guts to him. And he actually asked me what he could do for me. I told him I needed fifteen cents. I didn’t tell him what for; said I’d pay him back. He told me to help myself, and that’s all I took was a buffalo nickel and one thin dime. He must have had the hearing of a bat. He said, “An honest boy.” Only he wouldn’t of said it if he knew what I was up to.

Long story short, I took the nickel and dime and I went to the vending machine outside a nearby restaurant and I bought a Sunday paper. Actually, I paid for the one but I scooped up about fifteen more and wrapped them in my blanket. It was a long walk from the main stem back to the wharf, but I had a plan. I went to all the chophouses where the fishermen were eating and I sold them papers, every one, and I ended up with a little under four bucks. Now I was in business. So I gave Blinkey his fifteen cents and told him not to take any wooden nickels and I vamoosed it out of there before he could ask me any questions. I went to the nearest greasy spoon and ordered me up some grub. Bought practically everything on the menu. The place was cheap but the food was good. Breakfast set me back about 70 cents, and a ten cent tip, because I felt grand.

It was about ten o’clock in the morning. I got on the subway with no problem, but instead of going back to the jungle I just rode around all morning and afternoon thinking, trying to come up with a plan.

I didn’t know the train system that well–me and Tandy mostly stuck to the country towns out yonder–but the subway was warm and I scrooched up in a corner and sorta halfway dozed off until I got to the end of the line, and then i would cross over and get on the train heading back the way I came. I didn’t know where I was going, but my belly was full and I had about three dollars in my pocket and now I knew at least one other human being in that city and so I felt at that point that I was having all kinds of luck.  

It’s always amazing to me how a little snooze and a full belly can lift your spirits and clear your thinking where before everything was gloom and hopeless like.

I guess I drifted off a second time when I was on the subway. When I woke up it was the last stop on that line–a little place called Gleason’s Corners. I’m supposing it was about five in the afternoon and just starting to get dark but not there just yet. I figured I would try cooping in a supermarket or a gas station, but I knew I had to act fast–in a small burg like this most places would already be closed on Sunday, and that turned out to be the case.

I got off the subway and hit the street and headed west on foot and it wasn’t too long before I came across an old drive-in theatre, closed for the season or maybe just because it was a Monday or maybe the place had been shut down for a long time.  I don’t remember now just which. Anyway, this place was a real find. It wasn’t at all spoiled as some places are from too many tramps as has cooped up there. The concession stand was locked up but I looked around and, sure enough, I saw a little window about six feet off the ground and I figured I could go the jump and I managed to find some rubbish laying about and boosted myself up and in; I was quite a good little snakesman in those days. The place was cleaned out; it was nothing more than a little hamburger and hot dog joint with candy and gum and whatnot; a two-man operation from the looks of it, just small enough not to be too drafty, and I had my blankets and was all set. The only thing that worried me was that the window was the only way back out, so in case anyone came in I had to figure out a way to hide in that cooped up space but I finally found enough paper little and stuff to partially cover me up and I wrapped myself up in my old blanket for good measure so that if anyone happened to come in it would take them awhile in the dim light to notice that anything was unusual.

*1 SALUTATION
REVEREND ROBERT WILKINS
PRODIGAL SON
https://youtu.be/A7SDdMo9BTU

ALSO SEE:
I almost wrecked my car in a Western Massachusetts blizzard on March 4th, 2012. The roads were icy and my front bumper was covered with ice and I slid into, collided with, and glanced off of a guardrail.
And guess what was blasting through the speakers?

THE ROLLING STONES
I Just Want to See His Face
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EymLq0htbL8

2*REFERENCE
DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH
https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/glr9j1/do_your_own_research/

3*HUMOR
TIGGER IS GREAT AND YOU SUCK!
www.avclub.com/tigger-flag-exposes-the-rot-tearing-apart-the-united-st-1847457750

ALSO SEE:
MICKEY MOUSE CLUB
GUEST STAR DAY
https://youtu.be/qZ1r81dJ2bg

4*NOVELTY
Fibonacci sequence.
en-us.fievent.com/e/fibonacci-day/3217062

5*AVATAR OF THE ZEITGEIST
Time to normalize nipple hair
https://www.allure.com/story/normalizing-nipple-hair

6* DAILY UTILITY
FLU PHONE
https://challengepost-s3-challengepost.netdna-ssl.com/photos/production/solution_photos/000/018/622/datas/xlarge.png

*7 CARTOON
OLD SPICE COMMERCIALS
https://youtu.be/Hq2SlCja3zo

8*PRESCRIPTION
“Random”
How Paul McCartney and John Lennon accounted for the songwriting strategy and production details of late Beatles songs. For example, “Mr. Kite”.
www.songwriting.net/blog/bid/108943/5-Beatles-Secrets-about-Songwriting-I-wish-I-d-discovered-decades-sooner
pretty-eight-machine.com/the-eight-strangest-beatles-songs/

9* RUMOR PATROL

JERRY LEWIS
Jerry’s strongbox (full of dope and pills)
www.gq.com/story/jerry-lewis-interview-gq-august-2011

10*LAGNIAPPE
DOLLAR BRAND
ANCIENT AFRICA
https://youtu.be/3yl0Y7Axa-k

11*DEVIATIONS FROM THE PREPARED TEXT: A REVIEW OF OTHER MEDIA

DISNEYLAND
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mikespohr/17-photos-that-are-all-too-real-for-anyone-who-hates
I went to Disneyland once, in 1981, and tried to swipe a flag from the steamboat ride–but an attendant made me put it back.

Strangely enough, the tour guide for the nearby Universal Studios tour looked like an alcoholic Walt Disney.

12* CONTROVERSIES IN POPULAR CULTURE
CUCUMBERS
“It has been a common saying of physicians in England, that a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.”
c. Boswell: Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

https://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclopedia/6688/

THE INFORMATION #1166 SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

THE INFORMATION #1166

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

Copyright 2021 FRANCIS DIMENNO
dimenno@gmail.com
https://dimenno.wordpress.com
 
There is no love sincerer than the love of food.- George Bernard Shaw

WHEN THIS WORLD CATCHES FIRE
BOOK FOUR: AND IF THE DEVIL COME SHOOT HIM WITH A GUN
PART SIXTY-SIX

287.   THE CONFESSIONS OF BABY BOY MADDOX PART 3

It was on the next morning after my sound sleep deep in the piney woods that I started in to fretting. All kinds of thoughts were crowding in, trying to get my attention. It was about seven in the morning, and cold, and all I wanted was to get more sleep. 
But then I thought about the ‘bo, Squinty, and what might have happened to him. Maybe the cops had picked him up. Maybe he blabbed. In which case, I had no business going anywheres near Harmony; they’d be waiting for me. Even staying within hailing distance of the hobo jungle was kinda iffy, though probably safe enough for a day or two. 
What would be really good for me would be if I could find some kind of cabin that was abandoned and live out the winter there, but I didn’t have the foggiest idea how I would be able to find such a place, and Tandy wasn’t around to give me no advice. I thought of praying, but decided it was a mug’s game. I didn’t have a friend in the world and when I got up I saw my first sign of trouble. 
As I crawled from my shelter of wood and corrugated tin I, there it was. Frost. On the ground. There’s been an early cold snap this year and I knew then that I had to find a place to roost before the rest of my food ran out.
And that’s when it hit me. What better place to hole up than one of those big supermarkets they had out there on the fringes of town and sometimes in the city as well.  I knew the layout of those places; they always had cardboard and plywood display bins that were hollow and where a kid of my size could crawl under and keep hid out of sight.
I figured there was no time like the present, so I began hoofing it into town by fits and starts, staying off the main roads and taking my bearings by the sun. I headed east. At worst, I would hit civilization of some kind or other in an hour or two, maybe even get to a subway station. I had only two cents in my pocket but that didn’t worry me none; I had plenty of practice with the old one-two technique where you’d pretend to drop a coin in the slot with your left hand and pull back the turnstile bar with your right and ease on through. 
Another thing working in my favor was that it was a Saturday; no nebby-nose would be wonderin’ why I wasn’t in school. I wasn’t dressed like I’d been on the road. My clothes were clean and once I found a roost I could stash my bindle with my blanket and other gear somewheres safe for when I needed ’em again.
I wasn’t going to settle for the first place I lit on: I would scope out three or four places and rotate my hidey holes, just in case some fly clerk or manager caught wise. I knew there was always a chance that someone would notice I hadn’t left the store and go lookin’ around for me; I had to have an airtight alibi all lined up or else I knew I’d get shipped back to the Convent Home.
I’ll tell you now why I left that place; the nuns were mean, but you could tolerate their little fits of temper; they were no worse than most adults, although some of them acted like they wanted to kill us. I suppose that if one of ’em had killed a boy, word would get to the priest, but I also supposed that he wouldn’t care a damn about it. That’s just the way some of those Sky Pilots are–so full of the love of God and angry and spiteful at the rest of the world for some reason known only to them. Maybe some of them didn’t believe in God, or even like Him. And maybe some of them wanted to tell God to shut up.
The place wouldn’t have been half bad if it were just the nuns and the tired old priest. But the sisters counted on the older kids to keep order and all that power just naturally went to their heads. You see that a lot with a lot of grown men, like fathers, and bosses, and cops, excuse me, policemen. 
It wasn’t so much that you had to make someone else’s bed and also your own; it’s just that all your best efforts were never good enough. If you couldn’t stretch the sheets so as to make a penny bounce on that bed, then you’d be handed a beating. They older kids would slap and punch you, just because. Because they could. Just like a mean little shaver will kill a fly or a moth or step on an ant. Some kids get a kick out of looking at dead things. Makes ’em feel special, like God or something, I don’t know. Who can explain it? Then they work their way up to mice, and cats and dogs, and pretty soon they start in on little kids. Not just twistin’ their arms around their backs or makin’ them eat dirt, neither. It’s the things the older boys would say to you that could drive you crazy, make you think you’re hearing voices that ain’t really there. Like, you’re lying in bed, trying to get warm, and you can hear them right up next to your ear sayin’ I’m the ghost of your Paw, and No one cares for you, you’re nothing, you ain’t got a friend in the world, I could kill you dead right now and wouldn’t nobody miss you or even care. 
This would go on in the daytime too; around the clock. Two or three of the older boys would push right past you in the chow line. “Out of the way,” one of them would say. “You don’t exist,” another one would say. 
The older kids would find the one thing you cared about and they’d steal it or break it or piss on it and if you had a little pet, they’d kill it and leave it in your bed and if you looked at them funny or talked out of line or even if you didn’t they would make your life a misery. What makes people do like that? I could never figure it out. After only two weeks of that treatment, it starts to wear on you, especially if you’re not used to it. I finally lit out on Friday the 16th of October. And I knew only one thing: If I ever went back to that place, I would find a way to pay them all back. It wouldn’t be nice and it wouldn’t be pretty and after I done it I would be sent to some place even worse and so for my own protection I decided that I could never be caught or if I was caught that I would have to fix it somehow that I would never be sent back to that Home. 
It’s almost thirty years later and I still dream about the place. The dream is always that for some reason the law sends me back there to serve out my term even though in the dream I’m a full-grown adult and it’s the same set of clowns and I’m still the odd man out. 
I was lucky at that. Those older kids gave unshirted hell to the smaller kids that was truly helpless. I was a hobo kid; I had a thick skin. I could take a beating, and I was strong enough in my mind that they couldn’t get into my head, maybe because I knew I had an escape hatch; if things got too rough in the Convent Home I could bail out and hit the road. Don’t think for one minute I didn’t think about the kids I left behind. I dreamed of going back there with a couple of big sturdy Boes and taking care of those punks and telling off that Mother Superior and setting them kids free, but I knew it wasn’t never going to happen; for a lot of those kids, that kind of life was the best deal they were going to get. They might be farmed out to foster care, some of ’em, and one or two of the luckier ones might even get adopted, and change their name to Brown or Jones, but most of ’em was either going to end up in the Army or jail, or probably both.  Take your fucking pick. You gotta wonder sometimes what kind of God is it that makes the world work the way it does, and I figure it’s not some kind of God at all but maybe some other kind of lower power, a devil, maybe, that God put in charge of people like us to test our faith in Him when we see that the big guns get off with all kinds of mean stunts and if they’re punished at all it’s usually a slap on the wrist for them; but trashy people like us, we’re special cases and we’re in for a dose of hell on earth. 
I’ll tell you what I did on the night before I left that place. I’m confessing to all of it so I hope you’re taking this down. First, I stole the Mother Superior’s wristwatch and stuck it under the bed cover of the kid who used to whisper things in my ear late at night. The other two kids, the ones who pushed me around in the chow line, I figured I’d get them later, someday some way somehow. You can’t just let things go unpunished; it’s not fair for innocent people to forgive the guilty. Didn’t Christ chase the money-changers out of the Temple? Sure, them older kids was also miserable and they also had it rough, but they were mean as snakes all the same and I’d of seriously fucked them up if I had a chance. You’re looking at me funny, but sometimes a fella is just plain bad and needs to be taught that every once in a while a rotten apple will get what he deserves. Makes me sound like some kind of cop, now, don’t it? You know as well as I do that most cops only go after the bad guys. They let civilians off with a warning. Preserve and protect. How I used to wish there was some kind of cop at that Convent Home! But I also used to wonder that, if the cops were so good then why would they send me there and why would that place even be allowed to exist?  They had to know what was going on when they took kids there. Had to. But nobody wanted to mess with the Church. Got me to thinking that the priests weren’t men of God; they were men who served the Devil. Maybe there are some good priests, sure; maybe one: but I doubt it. 
You notice that the rich man’s priest allows all kinds of devilry, only at a higher level. The priest always knows who’s pouring the wine. “Cleanse my heart and my lips, almighty God, that I may worthily proclaim your holy Gospel.” Imagine…telling poor people they’ll go to hell for stealing food! Imagine telling young soldiers it’s A-OK to kill a godless enemy! OK, I’m not smart. Maybe I’m off-beat and on the wrong track, but I think a lot of the priests, they’re just like so many Trusties and the world is one big jail. And if you’re gonna break out you gotta have a tough hide and a stronger mind, so that you just don’t give a good golly damn. Because you’re not ever going to find any real justice in any world you’re in. At best, you’ll find a process. A way to keep the troublemakers at bay. A way to thin the herd. But won’t nobody ever step up and put the skids under the fatsos who torture people? Not unless they’re low-lifes and probably not even then because it’s a dead certain face that lowlifes only torture their own. They stay out of the better neighborhoods…if they got any sense at all.

 
*1 SALUTATION
JONATHAN RICHMAN & THE MODERN LOVERS
AFFECTION
https://youtu.be/L9P-fIgVzY0

ALSO SEE:
J. RICHMAN
LIVING ROOM DEMOS
https://youtu.be/ttQS4XnwbL4

2*REFERENCE

MINI-BRAINS

www.sciencealert.com/scientists-used-stem-cells-to-make-mini-brains-they-grew-rudimentary-eyes?fbclid=IwAR2f79Gf46D6rnZxstJRH06kVz47ryf6TrRk1mqe22hfZsyi-b-sYq9b-hU

3*HUMOR
“The more it
snows-tiddely-pom,
The more it
goes-tiddely-pom
The more it
goes-tiddely-pom
On
Snowing.

“And nobody
knows-tiddely-pom,
How cold my
toes-tiddely-pom
How cold my
toes-tiddely-pom
Are
Growing.”

The above lyric is culled from the fifth page of Mr. A. A. Milne’s new book, “The House at Pooh Corner,” for, although the work is in prose, there are frequent droppings into more cadenced whimsy. This one is designated as a “Hum,” that pops into the head of Winnie-the-Pooh as he is standing outside Piglet’s house in the snow, jumping up and down to keep warm. It “seemed to him a Good Hum, such as is Hummed Hopefully to Others.” In fact, so Good a Hum did it seem that he and Piglet started right out through the snow to Hum It Hopefully to Eeyore. Oh darn—there I’ve gone and given away the plot. I could bite my tongue out.

As they are trotting along against the flakes, Piglet begins to weaken a bit.

“ ‘Pooh,’ he said at last and a little timidly, because he didn’t want Pooh to think he was Giving In, ‘I was just wondering. How would it be if we went home now and practised your song, and then sang it to Eeyore tomorrow—or—or the next day, when we happen to see him.’

“ ‘That’s a very good idea, Piglet,’ said Pooh. ‘We’ll practise it now as we go along. But it’s no good going home to practise it, because it’s a special Outdoor Song which Has To Be Sung In The Snow.’

“ ‘Are you sure?’ asked Piglet anxiously.

“ ‘Well, you’ll see, Piglet, when you listen. Because this is how it begins. The more it snows, tiddely-pom—’

“ ‘Tiddely what?’ said Piglet.” (He took, as you might say, the very words out of your correspondent’s mouth.)

“ ‘Pom,’ said Pooh. ‘I put that in to make it more hummy.’ ”

And it is that word “hummy,” my darlings, that marks the first place in “The House at Pooh Corner” at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.–Dorothy Parker

4*NOVELTY
This is a notoriously poor novel manuscript.
ansible.uk/misc/eyeargon.html

5*AVATAR OF THE ZEITGEISTA

HATFUL OF RAIN

https://youtu.be/s-NPlLJgN3M

6* DAILY UTILITY

THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN

www.classicfm.com/discover-music/humour/world-smallest-violin-music-origin/

ALSO SEE:

NIRVANA LAWSUIT

Next up: In related news…the dollar bill is also suing.

It wants a newborn baby boy.

*7 CARTOON
PEYOTE ART
https://www.google.com/search?q=peyote+art&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS960US960&oq=peyote+art&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2j0i22i30l7.2928j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

8*PRESCRIPTION
STAND
The song “Stand” by R.E.M. is not to be expunged from the record as it is not a memetic hazard.
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4987

9* RUMOR PATROL

THE PRIEST’S SECRET PRAYERS AT MASS

https://parishableitems.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/the-priests-secret-prayers-at-mass/

10*LAGNIAPPE

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

STEPHANIE SAYS

https://youtu.be/whn3K9Ll5aE

11*DEVIATIONS FROM THE PREPARED TEXT: A REVIEW OF OTHER MEDIA

CHIMP HAVEN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwI3W4BLXSE

*11A BOOKS READ AND REVIEWED

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, JUNK. BITTMAN. ****1/2

THE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED. GREEN. ***1/2

BATMAN EARTH ONE. VOLUME 3. ***1/2

THE BATMAN’S GRAVE. ELLIS. ****

BATTLE FOR THE SOUL. DOVERE. ****1/2

BEHAVING MADLY. APELDOORN & YOE. ***1/2

BEYOND THE BURNING. TUCKER. ****

THE BIG BOOK OF WEIRDOS. POSEY, ET AL. ****

BRONTE. SANTONI. ****

COMMANDERS IN CRISIS. ORLANDO & TINTO. ***

CULTURE WARLORDS. LEVIN. ****

THE DIRECTOR. LETERSKY. ***1/2

THE FACTS ON FILE DICTIONARY OF CLICHES. AMMER. ****

FICTIONAL FATHER. OLLMANN. ****1/2

FOR JUSTICE. BRESSON & DORANGE. ****1/2

FREIHEIT! GIPONTE. ****

HATE MONGER. GUERRERO. ****

I ALONE CAN FIX IT. LEONNIG & RUCKER. ****1/2

I AM NOT STARFIRE. **1/2

IN. MCPHAIL. ***1/2

MAKER COMICS: SURVIVE IN THE OUTDOORS. LAWRENCE. ****

MARVEL-VERSE: LOKI. ***1/2

MARVEL-VERSE: SHANG-CHI. ****

ONE-PUNCH MAN 22. ***1/2

REMEMBERING JIM CROW. CHAFEE ET AL. ****

THE SECRET TO SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH. BECHDEL. ****1/2

THE SINCEREST FORM OF PARODY. BENSON. ****

WAKE. HALL. ***

12* CONTROVERSIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS

We evolve in everything in steps which at least partially replicate what has gone before.

Example: Applause when a guest star walks onto a set is a television convention. It was also a radio convention. And before that, a theatre convention. And long before that, apes would hoot and grunt when an alpha male strode onto the savannah.

Perhaps technological innovations are merely biological adaptations writ large.

Recombinant DNA: We bring…things…to life. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5178364/#:~:text=Recombinant%20DNA%20technology%20is%20playing,devices%2C%20and%20new%20therapeutic%20approaches.

MODERN WISDOM NUMBER 278 SEPTEMBER 2021

MODERN WISDOM

NUMBER 278
SEPTEMBER 2021
 
Copyright 2021 Francis DiMenno
dimenno@gmail.com
http://www.dimenno.wordpress.com  

1. THE COOL-OFF: AN ACID NOIR NOVEL
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FACETS

I wanted to go home fast but, in my dazed and bedeviled condition, I wasn’t any too sure I would be safe there. Or, for that matter, anywhere. Paranoia, is that what they called it? Maybe in my case it was also something called akrasia, which I read about one time. Going willingly toward the bad. And as I walked down the bustling streets, every worn face I would see told a story that I didn’t want to read. So I thought of the sins of my past life, which were many. That I would be going to hell, and it wouldn’t be fun. Sure, all the other sinners there would be fun. They were regular fellows. They tended to lush it up in taverns. They left watching television all night after work to all the square Johns. And their worn out wives. Her fighting it out with him every night about his not making enough money, and his boozing, and his chasing women–and brawling in front of their sullen brats in some mildewed apartment on the fourth floor of a walk-up cold water tenement flat. I thought of some of the television shows I’d caught glimpses of. The Danny Thomas Show. There are rumors about what Danny Boy REALLY likes, and it wasn’t very nice. Red Skelton. Insipid. It’s widely known that Red is a violent drunk who likes to watch dirty movies. Petticoat Junction. Low-grade moron fare. The Beverly Hillbillies. Execrable. My Three Sons. Kid stuff. Perry Mason. Unintentionally funny. Route 66, with its tricky piano score. Two chumps roam from town to town doing good deeds. Cringe worthy. Jackie Gleason, a big fat slob with a drinking problem.  My Favorite Martian. Please. An affront to humanity. And tonight like every Sunday night would be the Ed Comatose Show. According to the paper, it was a rerun. Tonight’s guests: Fat Jack Carter. Xavier Cugat. And Connie Francis. How could people watch such rubbish? Akrasia. I felt like going home and throwing the blasted tube out the window. 

But I didn’t. Instead, I guyed myself into thinking good thoughts. About love. About what I was like, and how innocent I was, before I took on my dirty work for The Big Man. I wandered off to Holly Park and picked up an early-fallen leaf. It was all green in the center, but it had some ragged red fringes along its outer edges. It was from a towering old oak. A tree that was older than God from the looks of it. I looked into the veined patterns and saw in it the mocking face of Pan. It was but a momentary glimpse of the wild God. It slowly changed in its aspect until it became the face of a girl I had once known. Sasha. Zosh, they called her. A plump but pretty blonde. She was prone to prance around my apartment naked. Nothing shy about her. She looked especially fetching while pulling on her pantyhose and spraying on her deodorant and perfume. She was mincy and flouncy and girlish and saucy–everything a guy like me was in favor of in a gal. She had a sweet voice and was always saying things like, “I like you, Arnie–you’re funny.”  But otherwise, she wasn’t much of a one for deep conversation. But then…then she started making demands. Mostly, that I make an honest woman of her. Her? Nix. She was OK for a weekend romp with a Bim, but I preferred to Rhumba with a gal who was more than just a sexpot. I didn’t realize it then, but Zosh was the prettiest girl I would ever have my way with. You ever notice how woman can be smart, especially about other people, and managing household finances and the like, but dumb when it comes to other important things, like truly understanding the ways of the world? That was Zosh. Her family was poor and probably never bothered to tell her what was what, because they didn’t know themselves. I found myself having to explain myself to her, only I didn’t like to have to explain myself. I don’t think any man does. And so our love grew cold, as love does tend to do.  

I bent down to pick up and look at a piece of yellow glass on the park path. In it I saw the face of Iris. She was another wild one. A tigress in bed, always clawing at my back as though marking her territory. Her face wasn’t much to look at–rather thin and parched-looking–but she had a spectacularly slender body which was padded in all the right places, and she sure knew how to please her man. She had been married once, a fact which she failed to divulge until her nosy older brother blurted it out one time. She was also much more educated than I was, with a Master’s degree in something or other, but I didn’t mind. Unlike with Zosh, her company was improving. She thought I was amusing. We had a lot of laughs together, sure. I could always make her laugh. Even if it meant me having to tickle her.  Her brother dropped some hints that she was a maneater, whatever that was supposed to mean, but I ignored them. I should have listened. As it turns out, she was very high strung and would frequently walk out on me whenever we had even the smallest argument. I guess that she didn’t like being bossed around, and I was a man of force who liked to take things in hand, so sooner rather than later we drifted apart. “I can’t marry you Arnold,” she said to me the last time I saw her. “You’re nothing more than a thug.” Who knows what happened to her? I can’t even remember her last name. Levinski? 

I looked into a gasolene-tained rainbow puddle and saw in it the slowly resolving face of Myra. She was a client of mine from back when I first started as a private eye. She was convinced that there was someone else who was using her name and causing all kinds of mischief with her identity, and she wanted to meet this other Myra in person to tell them to stop, and she wanted my help to do it, and money was no object. I was always up for a wild goose chase, if it paid well, so I took her assignment and was surprised to find out that there actually was another Myra who was trying to palm herself off as an heiress. Or was I only imagining things? Anyway, the real Myra was always hot to trot, and, even though or maybe because she had a lumpy body like a bag of potatoes, she was wild in the sack. It’s too bad she was nutty as a cashew, because her old man had a lot of dough from some invention he had cooked up back in ’49 that he had patented and made millions on. She was always showing up in strange places, weeping, and calling me up to come get her and take her home, because she was confused. I felt sorry for her, but I eventually had to cut her loose. She was too much in the way of trouble to suit me. That kind of trouble is not my business. She eventually got married to a Wall Street broker–it was in all the papers. 

Dames–they’re either stubborn and dumb as a rock or high-strung and ditsy. I was still trying to think of love and all like that when I looked at the reflection in my shoe and saw Anita. She was a hillbilly gal I wooed and lost when I was on a fishing vacation in the mountains. Seems as though her brothers all hated me, her Pappy hated me, and her mother was not so sure but was not really inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt. First time I encountered the old man he pointed a shotgun at me. “Easy where you point that thing, Pops,” I said. “That weapon just might go off.” If he had pulled the trigger, which it looked like he desperately wanted to do, he’d have blown my face to kingdom come. The only thing that stopped him was that the local preacher man happened to be in the room. There’s no second chances from a shotgun blast at close range. That’s why sheriffs favor them. Anita was hot–boy was she hot–she would jump on me like a dog on a bone, morning, noon, and night. But she was none too tickled when I pointed out to her that I was probably her first suitor who had all his teeth and wore socks, and didn’t sign his name with an X. The old man was none too happy that his wayward daughter had chosen a city slicker as her swain. But unbeknownst to me, she was also keeping company with some bumpkin from the big stick country, and he knocked her up and then had to marry her right away, which was a lucky thing for me because I sure didn’t want to get in the way of the old man’s 30-06 loaded with 220-grain bullets–bullets which he made himself, in the basement of his mean hillbilly shack.

I left the park and hit the Main Stem and looked into the display window of a shoe store and then…then there was Desiree. The love of my life. Dark and slender, a little horsey-faced I suppose, but dynamite in the sack. Dark and slender; yeah, she was my type. But she treated me like a dog. Because I was a dog. Woof woof. The big problem with her was that she wanted me to get a job, a regular job, a “real job” she called it. No more of this private eye business, which she called “boys playing at acting tough.” “If only you knew,” I said, for want of a better comeback. Maybe I should have gotten a job in a shoe store. Nice indoor work. And someday I could own my own shoe store and boss around a snivelling clerk. “Tough luck, baby,” I said to her. “We were never meant to be.” “If only you were HONEST,” she said. “Honesty is for stooges,” I said. And I got my hat and walked. 

 
2. POLITICALLY INCORRECT NAZI CLASSICS

RACE WAR AND PEACE
WHITE BEAUTY
TO KILL ANOTHER MOCKINGBIRD
ARYAN AFRAID OF THE DARK?
HATE STORY
WHERE THE WILD THUGS ARE
HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE SHEEPLE
THE CAT IN THE HATE
ARYAN BEING SERVED?
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT OF WHITE PEOPLE
THE POGROM’S PROGRESS
TO BOY, WITH HATE
PREJUDICE AND MORE PREJUDICE
BLACK NOISE
WHITE SARGASSO SEA
I DON’T KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD DOESN’T GO FIND A JOB
ARYAN EXPERIENCED?
THE WHITE SHEET OF COURAGE
CATCH-14
1988
CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HITLER MAN
ENCYCLOPEDIA WHITE
RIDERS ON THE STORMFRONT
SOUR SOURBACK’S GOOOOOOODASS SONG
THE WHITE POWER AND THE GLORY
RACE WAR AND REMEMBRANCE
THREE CUPS OF TEA PAID FOR AT MY EXPENSE
THE WHITES-ONLY FOUNTAIN HEAD
WHITE LIKE ME
BEANER AND NOTHINGNESS
THE WHITE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT
THE GORILLA WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
APE FEAR
WHITEGUY
A TALE OF TWO CITIES, ONE ALL-WHITE, THE OTHERS RUINED BY NEGROES

3. CONTROVERSIAL OPINIONS

“Aquaman is the worst hero ever.”–James Cameron

Who needs coffee? I already have a bitter taste in my
mouth first thing in the morning. And at every other
time.

You’d think if God truly loved the world, instead of
giving it His only Son, who nobody appreciated anyway,
he’d give it something it really needed, like a new
car or a private sauna or something….

Face it: Even if there were a God, he’d probably be
too busy to bother with you.

Many celebrities are boring, vapid people.

Batman could beat Spider-Man. Let’s face it; he’s way
smarter.

There is no Superman. As a matter of fact, there is
also no such thing as a mild-mannered reporter for a
great metropolitan newspaper.

Nostradamus was overrated.

Chicken Little was underrated.

I know from personal experience that most winos can’t play the harmonica at all.

Whenever it says collector’s item, it isn’t. Ever.

Nearly any early Beach Boys song could be made into a blues
song.

Life is good when death is a curse but life is better
when death is a blessing.

Orthography is not morality. Being able to spell and
use proper grammar doesn’t mean you’re smart. It just
means you’re educated.

Nitrous oxide is an asphyxiant at high concentrations.
At lower concentrations, exposure causes central
nervous system, cardiovascular, hepatic,
hematopoietic, and reproductive effects in humans. Or
at least, that’s what they say. I wouldn’t know know know.

The primary reason the US got involved in Vietnam was
not to stop the spread of communism. No–it was to
control their rice! THEIR VALAUABLE FUCKING RICE! I
WON’T SHUT UP! GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME!

Sometimes Pete Townshend’s lyrics were pretty bad.

The E in E=MC2 stands for Elvis. The equation means
that Elvis is better than any 2 members of the MC5.

Cheney is Bush’s surrogate dad.

There are 300 people in my tribe. If you are in my
tribe I will listen to what you have to say but I will
fight you. If you in some other tribe, I will pretend
to listen to what you have to say and then I will fuck
you over. If you are in some tribe from far away, you
are not human and I can ignore you except when it
comes time to kill you, for that is when you will
become the devil. But, strange to say, after I have
fought you, and after I have enslaved you, I will
begin to eat your food, pay attention to the visual
motifs of your culture, and listen to your music –all
of which you have appropriated from my culture and
then fed back to me.

Undifferentiated irony is no longer amusing, and
hasn’t really been since about 1964.

There is no American genius but in enthusiasm.

Every social class teaches you to be stupid in its
own way.

We’re all on a train to nowhere.

We are told to think for ourselves but nearly always
required to think for somebody else.

Nightclubs are gulags for self-styled hipsters.
Restaurants are the opiate of the middle class.

When people say “Why can’t you be more considerate of
others,” what they’re really saying is “Why can’t you
be more considerate of me”.

A good way to find out what others think of you is to
accuse them of all your faults.

Living? Our celebrities will do that for us!

We are living in a post-truth society. And that is
also a lie.

According to Pavlov, animals in a cage faced with two
equally unattractive options will bite the apparatus.

The kin of deceased people are not always brave.

The old are not always wise.

Cynics are not always wrong.

It’s probably cancer.

Everybody complains about getting old but nobody does
anything about it.

As I grow older, flatulence is becoming a type of
fashion statement saying “Leave me alone because I
just don’t want to be bothered.”

“You know, those people shouldn’t have been there
anyway.” Says the bitter coot. 

Why do men worship God? I suppose for the same reason
puppies whimper when you run the vacuum cleaner.

My dog is my best friend, which is why I don’t go out
on dates any more.

Ever notice how a guy having an orgasm starts to talk
like Frankenstein? “Uhn…I…arg….”

Pick one pocket, it’s a crime. Pick a thousand
pockets, that’s called ‘market research’.

Running away from your problems never solved anything,
but at least you get a cardio-pulmonary workout.

Whenever you see ‘please advise’ in a message, it
means nothing good.

No date movie with a live monkey in it will ever result in
you getting laid.

After 35 years of mediocrity, Woody Allen is beginning
to irritate me.

No matter what he does in the future, I will always
fondly remember Spike Lee as ‘Race Riot Man.’

Rocky is not really a very good movie.

The band Kiss is essentially a cynical marketing
gimmick, and their music is laughably monochromatic,
so those fans who discuss the nuances of the band are
merely making fools of themselves in a public forum.

The Star Wars “films” are essentially very slick
B-movies riddled with cliches and fakelore, and any
fan, die-hard or otherwise, who gains any sort of
spiritual sustenance from this source is merely
revealing an utter lack of assimilation into the
cultural conventions of an infinitely varied
civilization.

Discussing the foibles of sports figures and other
celebrities is a useful conversational ice-breaker,
but mulling over such matters should not be the be-all
and end-all of what one has to say. Endless
contemplation of the antics of the current flavor of
the week do not constitute nourishing brain food.

Glorifying one’s own over-indulgence in drugs is the
infallible sign of a peasant mentality.

Parroting back received wisdom and propaganda as
reasoned argument is the antithesis of discourse.

The Dead were alternative once.

“Fascinating” is a good all-purpose reply to nearly
anything, since it can mean that the subject matter is
so good that it’s extremely interesting, or so bad
that it’s perversely enjoyable.

Mama Cass was a fatso, but she didn’t really choke to
death on a sandwich. Now was Mick Jagger caught eating
a Hershey bar out of Marianne Faithful’s asshole. And
I’m afraid a gallon of semen was never found in the
stomach of Rod Stewart or anyone else. The human
stomach only holds about one gallon.

The ability to rate things is overrated.

Life is unreal, life is an illusion, and because my
heart is pure I have the strength of Zen.

4. WORK IN PROGRESS: HUCKLEBERRY FINNEGANS WAKE

…riverrun past pap’s and Nigger Jim’s leads us via
circumlocutious locutions to Aunt Polly’s house.

All about Jim, the house, and old time and old times. All agog I and the water house got a tree full windy
and then all was gone smash, and how the bank was to unfurl and drown drown, and ho what signs when they’re dragging all over that
ribboner; but it is how it was; I wouldn’t be romanticipating
or be generousted to be the colds chickenest sent west of the
mourning, and before when I run off from Pap and they
mistooken me for a murder victim and they said I died
o’er in that cabin and the judge says “Well, I
reckoned so the whole time. “Oh, go for a light.” I
said, moral: in for dough, in for a dolour, and said
Jim, his head hanging, Jim, he said his thinking’s “Ize a spirit fit
for a pine box.”  And then I come to the raft Huck Honey.

The Mississippi wigwam floated and flecked backward
and we took all the riverroad’s lines, evening as it
turned was as much in our favor as it was in say, Cairo. And
so we lazed. I could aim my rifle so the bees would
know I only singed them and that was mighty smart. We just
floated that way for weeks; and hunted this and the
the other and could we be any more free yet, with the
days rolling by after a lot and bime by, I was about to
look in out of that old me for the source of my
sourcelossness. But it–as any a tiny steamboat as ever was–
capsized us in the night at what was almost the final night of
our girth for we was starving. First daylight burrowed.
There was a house and a man all gashly and there, that
was a body, and all else, a littersomeness. I thought about
what happened and up I spoke and Jim was all mysterious and
said “Shet de eye; a log hut is all this is wuth.”

I said “Jim, that king and that duke is snakes, don’t
you think? That’s their majesty.” “No,” says Jim,
“Don’t, don’t, be careful, dere’s country jakes you
got about here who I want to not see me for for
another day.”

Somebody sold Jim out, our own humbug royalty and
letting him get sold and telling them to tell me why
was to get from them the old line, “What we done we
done it for yousterity.”

“Yes, so he didn’t never do me no wrong” and yet I went
away saying “I want my nigger,” at the time being tame about it.

They was the tarnation and so I took in the country then
when and as I could. I would swell with words about
all the murdered around me earthside out it froze me
and by and by a rifle patron rings out but I couldn’t
hold a candle to it, it wouldn’t be Senegal, in the dark,
and sunrise by certain would bring the dogs, and old man Mose,
and about them a strangersomeness like where they told
you “We don’t know you and there’s no place for you here.”

I plugged along and saw they had swung a limb right
over the tree and I paddled off all pale all hanging
by the rope was dead and it was off all; Jim said he wanted
to go to Ohio, and yet now I was in the thick of
murder; I remembered that; I remembered the house on
the river and the cellar. So I found Jim and he asked
for help and I told him Uncle Silas was coming he may
be iron-jawed but maybe there’s a heart in the salty
old bird.

So soft and they’re talking away she warn’t sure if I
was Tom or Sid. So I laid that still, and Topsawyer says: “I
know by the way you care about that nigger
that you don’t have fun with one
you’ll have fun with nether”; and the thing I was
going to do there with the chained one; I know there would
be a reckoning they done it on the reckon I didn’t
know why. I asked.

“Why, what wreck? and I knowd Jim was done eatin’ supper and with Mars Tom, and Tom Tom
drooped down on the Oconee River exaggery every time and I
bet he was going to come to harm in it. “

Who’s the runaway in Miss Watson’s way? Tom’s gunshot wound that
made up another mark if it’s being pain not so much,
and he wanted it? What’s done easy’s not worth to do, and
snother smother thing to sing out to explain the house wreck
reckon the reckoning’s in the mawning this awning and I had a notion
agin a motion, and Jim grabbed me take me free.
I says there might be millions, why can’t I see
what I came to see because you see, I didn’t.
“You fetch yourself away Marse Huck
one day I’m ‘fraid some one will come one with rats to
say about dat wreck so I tell you now. It was Pap.” I forgot about a soft bed
but if it ain’t the river it ain’t got all the excesses and I
warn’t knowing what to make of it. Well, Ben Rogers,
and like them, is used to it but when I was out in
the thick  of it, why it warn’t no time at all as I forgot
what I was about and set to shouting, and
crashing every which way and I knowd I was
pretty poor about taking my ease and acting sivilized
so away I go westward ho so after I lit out I was in the light away alone alas as