Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

13. THIS SPOT IS A COMFORT ZONE ON THE SCARY RIDE TO HELL:

Did I mention that the title came to me in a dream? I'd be lying if I did. Actually the title was a daydream I thought I saw on a billboard as I was passing an Assisted Living Foundation Self-Storage Facility run by the Christian Methodist Foundation out of Weems, Georgia. There were three women in front of it on a small pedestal and they were singing ALREADY songs of the freaking Season to the passing cars while before them some crazy preacher-guy was holding a blowtorch and exclaiming : "Don't follow the same roadway for WE believe Jesus walked his way to the cross and I propound to you the astounding news that RIGHT HERE we have found the personal possessions of one Jesus H. Christ packed in Cubicle 129. But don't take our word for it - SEE FOR YOURSELF, capitalizing on the bare hands of God!! By Jesus Himself Let Us Pray!! We can circumnavigate the globe in an eternal electronic instant BUT we cannot escape the constant presence of the Lord and Savior Himself wrapped in gauze and bleeding from wounds with unending streams of honey succor milk and wine. Come drink!!" And then the damn women started singing again.

I was at some weirdly tired historical place today - it was signed sealed and delivered away already, taken over by Authority and the governmental tax thieves who run things such as this. A couple of big old fey white guys ran the Gift Shop, prattling on about the Thursday Afternoon High Teas - "which are quite wonderful actually." They wanted twenty-five bucks a person for some stupid Tea with crumpets (in some fucked-up fashion of English Royalty or something of such pretense), and this was supposed to be a place of the American Revolution where Hamilton and Washington and John Jay and all the rest of those historical sorts of revolutionary and VIOLENT figures hung out in the central New Jersey swamps. Now these fetid skunk-hollow gay old gentlemen are pushing twenty-five dollar high teas where Washington once slept. What the fuck's with that? And whose US Government National Park bullshit TAX MONEY pays for this shit!!!? Yours and mine, that's whose. Nobody says a fucking word about it. (see my photo blog for a few pictures). And OH!!! Did I mention it was ALREADY all set up for Christmas - little stupid dolls, wreaths, candles, sleighbells, etc., the whole bit. Whose idea was that? George F. Washington's too?

I have decided after some thought that the entire country has gone crazy. We live amidst huge consorts of insane people - going about their business and BEING CATERED TO in order to do it. The Powers-That-Be thrive on this addiction to insanity and continue to throw up newer and newer attractions towards the crazed people who do it all so that they can remain distracted and 'out there' and all caught up in their shit. There's layers and layers of this crafty tactic too : at the bottom, you have 'poor people' insanity - for the ghetto types, with pounding insensitive black welfare music criminal-margin behavior being promoted, liquor ads, cars ads, bling ads, sex, fashion, welfare, non-responsibility daydreams, entertainment fantasies. It's all targeted at the most directly indigent and addicted parts of the lower population - who are then kept in check in their half-urban, half-decayed leftover city section which are being gradually done over and rebuilt in a fascisistic-governmental style of cheap, subsidized duplexes and hospital centers. Indigent housing for indigents supported by the Socialist Government keeping them in place. Next are the totally crazed and ignorant suburban middle-class car crowd of the glitter-malls and food palaces of regular, normal, tacky fucked-up Amerika. they get the high-prized scarves, the games and the entertainment bullshit of the Malls (by the way, NOW being re-labeled as 'Lifestyle Centers' and targeted by the large corporations for expansion and advancement as the new social-ideological idea center of corrupt Amerika. If you DON'T believe me, too bad. I read it myself on the daily President's Corporate Bulletin Inside Report at a certain large bookstore chain where I work. It's sent out each day for employees to read.) These are the people, this layered and varied middle-class crowd, who buy the Lexus or the Benz of the big flashy SUV or whatever (or who think they must buy it), who sex up their 13-year old daughters into some whoredom of consumer frenzy and sexuality, whose propensities for consumption are sickening and legion (I remember when Consumption was but a disease of the 1920's), who can't walk, can't drive, are loud, obnoxious, brash and sickening. And to whom SOCIETY caters. At every turn. And then, of course, a few layers up we get the wealthy crowd. They need what they get, and of course they GET what they need. Capital gains tax reduction, tax breaks, write-offs, shelters for their money, investment opportunites, and the ultra-wealth of $2800 wristwatches, catalogue-shopping, custom meats and lifestyle choices, the three homes, the cross-continent vacations and the impressed, stratified schooling at vast, corrupt universities for their own kith and kin with preferential admissions and still more tax-breaks.

Such enforced insanity leads us all along - it allows for Washington's corrupt morass of liars, bulshitters, scam-artists and creeps to continue to take us over and erect their nasty facade of Governmental fascism and in-our-face control. I make no apologies for my own ways of being or speaking things. I say what I feel to say about them and their ways. And they can go to hell. And then again, if THAT'S 'Freedom' by today's consideration, I guess I should feel lucky.

But let me tell you this. Anyone reading this scribble (I'm not actually sure there are any good bastards out there who actually read this stuff anyway), should walk warily into the face of trouble. You are considered (BY THEM) the enemy; and the more you know of this stuff, and verbalize it or mass together over it, the MORE trouble you'll get. Mark my words, now, BEFORE the fall. And I don't mean RESISTANCE in the stupid, cheap, tacky way of the little Cindy Sheehan weak-knee'd dream-fairy cohorts. That's nothing but a moving joke anyway.

Love and kisses to every asshole out there. Keep striding right into the wind.

12. I WANT SOME ATTENTION- DID I MENTION?

I'm getting pretty tired of silence - like some Almaretto Lady of Lourdes or something where the intense silence is supposed to be more important itself than whatever it is that is happening and miracles or apparitions or any of that sidewinder bullshit crap turns out to be movies played out on a cum-soiled sheet and the darkness of the room was only to cover the bad evidence of gloom I WANT TO FUCKING HEAR THINGS!! people names words comments reactions actions : I want a gunman at my door I want the Seventh Cavalry with Jesus Armstrong Custer in the lead just back from Iraq throwing bombs in the fedoras or Fallujahs or whatever the hell all that is I want ten little Indians of mercantile fame and Dutch East India Company heterosexual fat women cooking me five different kinds of beaded bread I want the radio station camped outside I want a church built on my God-damned holy fucking front lawn!! How's that for attention-getting. I want to be buried in a swamp with Whistler's Mother in attendance. I want Ezra Pound to throw batting-practice balls to my happiness in bloom. Get it? Can you? Do you? Everywhere I go I'm thinking of You! or of Where I'm Going! or of What Was Here Yesterday!

I write these stories NOT for the glories but for the resounding thud of the echo of night they bring in the long descending twilight of my germinated factoid seed and the tenth caller this morning will get my broken-down five-wheeled painted orange Lincoln Continental tractor - to have and to keep for the VERY REST of their ill-starred life.

Now I've said all that. It's your turn now. I never wanted to learn the meaning of meaning but somehow the corner's been shown to me - should I make that right to Paradise itself or stay left and meet YOU in the gloaming? Oh Stephen Jaybird Foster, where are you now?

...and a FOOTNOTE referencing John Brown:

[ 'All through this ordeal in my head I was thinking too of John Brown John Brown and no one else - except that I had supplanted the slavery of blacks on their plantation quarters with a greater slavery of mankind in general and Americans in particular - those who were citizens of the US of A and were still dangling from their well-stretched necks by the callous rope of coercion and indifference PURE AND PICKLED and made prideful by it all the same and the fiery torch of Right and Reason stormed the fronted barricades a'la John Brown and his fearsome crew and everything went wordless by and only the screams were heard - the hue and the cry - the open-ended native voice searching for : WHY WHY WHY!' ]

11. LOGICIAN/MAGICIAN ? WHAT'D YOU SAY? - True Story

So a week or so ago I'm in the old Princeton Cemetery walking along past the graves of Aaron Burr, his father the Reverend Burr, Jonathan Edwards, Sylvia Beach, Mayor Lindy Boggs, all the old Princeton University Presidents, and lastly the grave of US President Grover Cleveland himself (and his family members) and this guy comes up to me and asks if I can get him to the grave of Kurt Godel. I said I could, but it would be a walk - all along to the complete other end of the cemetary and past a little dog-leg in the grounds of the cemetery's layout. [Now I knew that NO ONE anymore really knows what a 'dogleg' is but I used it anyway and this guy didn't flinch]. After getting directions, he and his companion split up and he went on his way over to Godel's grave. In fact, because she didn't want to walk that far and back, he left his female companion with me, as I was still doing my viewing and walking on this way-other-side of the cemetery. All of which was OK with me.

He was little goofy-looking Jewish guy, I picked out immediately for a scientist or technician of some sort, and I actually could have cared less if I ever saw his sort again. They give me the willies, his sort - all precise, natty, neat, secure and thinking they're all knowing. And without a clue as to how nervously stupid they come across - like Woody Allen with a physics textbook or something. Nothing I care to deal with, 'cept for target practice (perhaps).

His woman, at the same time, was no prize either. Dumpy, eternally pleasant, pasted on smile, dressed like a frog. Turns out she was dying to lose him so she could sneak a smoke. He wouldn't allow her to smoke in his presence, and he was visiting from Maryland for the weekend and staying at her place - all the while, she said, complaining about it : 'it smells like smoke in here; you stink; your clothes stink; you shouldn't smoke'; etc. So she immediately starts puffing away.

I figured the visitation-sex must be so good for her (or him, or both) that she'd be willing to put up with it all for the sake of a penis - in this case, his. Just my thought, that was. That's not usually the stuff on my mind, and I could probably not care less actually, but the sickening sight of the two of them together in a form of enfouled joint-misery made me cringe. So I came up with the sex angle, OK.

While we were standing around making small-talk, not doing much, she noticed the nearby mausoleum. I forget the family name on it, maybe Murphy or something, but it was the usual - granite, boxy, with a heavy brass door, engraved, filigree'd, and seemingly left there for ages, untended. Inside, peering through the glass, one could see a crypt or two, two wooden chairs for seating, and a large stained-glass window letting in yellowish light. Rather nice, if not morbid. I told her, mock-seriously, that these things lately are being turned into great little coffee-houses and cafes. Very popular, especially in New England. She began to laugh uproariously. She said all it needed was a little neon 'Coffee' sign, a latte machine, and all that. We agreed it might probably just be the latest and newest trend.

Meanwhile Mr. Smokeless Himself comes sauntering back. He had satisfied himself by finding Godel's gravesite, as well as that of Sylvia Beach - whom he claimed not to know much about. I filled him in, cursorily - 1920's Paris, famed book-shop, Shakespeare & Company, where all the American literary ex-patriots hung out, Hemingway and all the rest - half the story. It worked well enough. He asked me if I knew of Godel. I said yes, and talked with him of Einstein, Princeton, Mercer Street, Einstein's house there, Godel's Princeton relationship with Einstein, their work together, their little rivalries, blah, blah. I said "not sure what I'd call him though - physicist, mathematician...". He piped up and said what I thought was a muttered "magician." I said "what did you say he was, a MAGICIAN!?". Aghast, my voice was. Sheepishly, he looked at me and said "No, no. I said 'Logician." Suddenly it all made sense.

We walked over to Grover Cleveland's grave - which they had requested seeing. He was surprised by the fact, as most people are, that there's not even a MENTION on his stone of the Presidency or his tenure there. I said "pre-media age; no one cared". They smiled. We said our goodbyes, it was nice meeting you, glad to help, etc.

I walked away. For all I know, they're still there. She's sneaking a smoke. He's staring at graves. Just like me. So logical, that is.

10. THE NECKLACE WAS A CHAIN:

Local elections are the biggest joke in the world. They're crawling all over themselves now, in Edison (NJ), trying to figure out just how to undue their own fuck-up. Literally, crawling. The mis-shapen Democrats, with the large main faction of anti-Choi idiots pretending to be 'Fusionists' (read Spadoro-ists), face the crisis of having a Asian (Oriental) winning the electon - the same Oriental they've been fighting for months (since he ousted the incumbent) so as to carve him up as the 'outsider' candidate representing the 'hordes of Chinamen' taking over South Edison. He won by like 274 votes or something, and Stephens and his crew of tankard-hoisters are livid. Refusing to concede. Double-talking about re-counts. Confused as all get-out. It's funny, by the way, how you're now supposed to say 'Asian' instead of 'Oriental' or Chinese or Japanese or Korean. These election losers are all over themselves thinking of how to say anything with a negative connotation about Choi - yet to say anything but 'Asian'. If one were speaking of 'Europeans', you'd say Italian or French or Austrian or Swiss. Yet, no one says 'he's just a European about Stephens, although that's what's happening when you force yourself to say 'Asian' instead of Korean or Japanese, etc. Funny world. Choi won, as I see it, and sore-losers can be the biggest pain-in-the-asses in the world.

The New York Times finally got rid of Judith Miller. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. Now they should just make that the beginning of a total housecleaning and get rid of the whole bunch of fabulists - lock, stock, and barrel. That newspaper's become a daily pile of shit.

Have you seen the newest US Army commercials? Some underprivileged black guy trying to get to his distressed mother's mind about his decision to join. He uses every reason in the book, EVERY, except any that count, and she's supposed to fall for it. 'I want to get ahead; travel; learn engineering; see other cultures...' What a crock! They might better own up to reality and have the kid say - 'Mama, America's nothing but a cultural ghetto to me, and I want to get out of it and bring that same ghetto to other places. I want to shoot and fight for what we don't have anyway. I want to be duped into thinking I share the power of a great cause. Mama, I may even want to die. Anything's better than this rope with a noose I'm holding now.' Truth in advertising has apparently died, just like the 2,055th soldier.

9. THE POWER OF NATURAL ENEMIES:

Are you proud of yourself now? You've invented a suitcase you can live in but you can never get out of.

Irving Berlin knew nothing of music. He only wrote for the black keys because that's all he knew to do. He changed his named from Izzy Balin - My Goodness! A surprising compromise. Linda Eastman was not an Eastman. She'd changed her name from Linda Levine when she began snapping portfolio pictures of fucking rock stars in her pushy, two-bit way. Look where it got her. Toots Shor was really Eddie Mercantalado - he'd done 11 years in a federal prison for stealing pictures of Roosevelt's wife posing naked for Arshile Gorky. The Armenian Relief Fund was the initial cover for the World Wildlife Federation. The first carmaker was a fellow named Entree Shiu. He invented the first 'you-drive-it' hearse. The idea went nowhere.

I'm a little tired of people misunderstanding where I'm at. Nobody wants to accept the presence of Evil, and when I bring it up they all laugh as if I'm interrupting their party. Bastards croak all over the world and no one winces. The idiots are out in streets again - breaking windows and torching cars - and that's covered as 'their' version (seriously) of a foreign policy. The world is fraught with self-destructive tendencies. The only real matter is anti-matter; and the only reality is that REALITY doesn't exist. The 91-year old man's fortune-cookie message, I noticed, read 'you're going to die in your automobile at a way-too early age.' He seemed non-plussed and ordered more tea. A man came up to me and asked - "Where are you going? Where have you been?" I pointed, with each arm in a different direction, behind me and in front of me. He smiled, and said - "Be careful of this weather. I heard they're calling for patchy frogs."

If you can't get with this program, with my opportunities for your Salvation staring you in the face, then what you should really be doing is wiping your own ass with your own bare hand.
Smell the purloined flowers on the way to Hell. Park the car in a one-way garage, because 'you ain't goin' nowhere'. Tell everyone you know that the post office is reeling from graft and corruption, the walk-in clinic is a bed of thieves, the hospital wherein your mothers and fathers died is really, before all else, an experimental mortuary connected to the center of the Earth, that the brain cancer caused by cell phones was really there before the phone, that your spiritual side is as deliciously feeble as the opacity of your soul - in reverse importance to the order of Angels. That everything in your hand has all been there before. That the power of natural enemies is their sense of their own sinecure ('an office or position that brings profit and advantage without involving much work, responsiblity, etc.' Also, a church office that pays a salary without involving cure (care) of souls . From the Latin 'sine' (without) and 'cure' (care).

It's all so perfectly clear and simple to me....