Because its without descent that I’ve lost my mind

Today I had to send an attendance sheet to HR that basically said that one guy didn’t attend the training because he’d called in sick for the day.

Then I thought “what if he wanted that under the radar to give himself an extra day, what I’ve I’m fucking up the program.”

I started thinking about what Truth is and why everyone values it so much. Why everyone feels safe and secure when everything adds up. Then I came to this…

The truth is in fact intellectual communism. This is going to come off like Colbert rallying against the public libraries but I’m just going with my gut lately until I start getting comments in this bitch.

The truth, and therefore honest people, mean that no one has to do any work. Theres no research, theres no work put it, if we’re all honest, we’re all just lazy fucks who want truth handed to us. I for one don’t care for it.

I think theres a mistake in finding virtue in an honest man, he can’t be trusted to lie for you, he clearly can’t differentiate between what is a worthy cause to lie for and therefore one has to take his morale judgment into question. If you can’t find anything to lie about, one may want to get his heart checked.

Machiavelli was looking to get back into a city, and while I’m not sure that madness is much better, its not political motivation, and autonomy, for whatever currency would have it, seems to carry with it an intrinsic value. If that last statement holds true we may be able to reason that lying holds intrinsic value because its inherently independent from the true. In a capitalists sense, lying in uniformly singular. One story, held by no chains of truth will change slightly from here to there thus rendering each mans story his own.

Heres where the work comes in, and its written on the same premise that one should read multiple news mediums should that person want the facts. Bias is removed when 12 papers, news channels, and periodicals have similar facts, we can cut the fat. The highlights are there, and so is the case with stories. A man who works can find the truth, and the truth is, its intellectual communism.

And here i dreamt I was a ringleader

The clown on Boylston has a flower on his lapel

That squirts water and his bow tie spins. He reaches into his bag and pulls

Three balls; red, yellow, and blue.

He tosses them in a recycled fashion and the children with their balloon stare

Intrigued enough to let their mothes drop open. When they recompose themselves

Their throats to dry to call the first time to their parents. They cough and repeat themselves

With such earnest conviction, and their parents feign emotion so as not to discourage.

They watch again as he turn the elongated balloons into fish, and stars, dogs and rabbits. Their old

balloons slip from their hands and float high into the early afternoons star-speckled purple, erratically

moving from side to side, knocked around like a ship in the currents. The children don’t care, the ferris

wheel is called, its lights bright enough now, unchallenged by the sun to draw them in. They ride with

their cotton candy, like pink and blue fire up into that night sky where the world is visible and their

stomachs drop. A car below curious hands are dropping pennies through quickly constructed steel

girders, with patches of blown out bulbs and chipping paint. The rides around it spin and spin and play

music that intertwines with the smell of greasy dough and cigarettes and the old men, holding the

pretzels and soda watch the younger men with their chests puffed out like peacocks throw baseballs at

tin cans and prove their worth to adorning girls who cherish the giant stuffed animals for what they are,

an adornment of pride, a symbol of small town recognition’s high society. The clown stands between me

and the Ferris wheel, each juggling their own, giving the small time bar maids and the divorced janitors,

whos children only know sacrifice a seed of a dream. The courts and the jester travel the country, and

make kings of the poverty stricken for a night in mid-august when the world has forgiven the day.

Who knows what I mean when i'm drunk?

and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun. -- William Shakespeare

these writers are all drunk or starving.
They've given up writing for the bloches and swirls that are the given precedent for a manufactured cover. the books have been judged and their voting yes.
the bars twisting mahogany beams knot them selves above my head and dive down into the corners and swing for my head.
Two old me perch like owls on sliced up old bar stools and their bristle-wire beards crawl toward the floor. I cling to my glass like it might run away and imagine their conversations, like currents in the ocean that steer the ships against their mothers wishes. This glasses run tall and hide in their brown jackets and the head gives it away.
i throw my glass across the table and the waitress asks if I've had enough. I'm embarassed but I order another and feast on the bowl of pretzels.
Theres 15 feet of snow in East Wisconsin and the dawns not on the horizon. We're all hoping that we're trapped in this bar, like a family of strangers, hanging from a tree that grows top down in the tangled support beams of Landry's Juggling Cactus.

Still, their ain't got nothing on Bartly's...thats for god dman sure. No man on the great plains knowns what shrimp really tastes like. They just pretend thats what the pink curls are int eh frozen section.

You can do better (politics)

I just finished “What’s the Matter with Kansas” which is a relief because the text was occasionally dense and more often dry but I knew what I was getting into. The other reason it was great is because it ended smarter and better than I thought it would.

For all intents and purposes it’s a book about how the conservative wing of the Republican Party ousted the moderate’s in Kansas state government. It talks largely about how the conservative wing are so focused on wedge issues that good economics went out the window. It spends a large amount of time showing how religious fervor on the great planes had been hijacked and used to push a no-government policy when it comes to economics that only really serves to screw the small time guys (the religious people) who were the rank-and-file of the Republican Party out there.

But he made an important point, only in the final chapter which I think makes it stronger. I’m not going to write the whole thing, but the phrase that caught me was “The Republicans didn’t so much win Kansas as the Democrats abandoned it.”

When we think of “liberals” as Thomas Frank (the author) points out, we think of celebrities from all stripes commenting on how we need to save animals, or not make fun of ugly people, how we should be vegetarians and save whales. And how ultimately, the democrats have courted this mentality very heavily for the past two decades, leaving the factory workers of the heartland with no help and less of a voice in federal government. Frank notes how we shouldn’t begin to wonder why the people, looking for someone to speak to them choose those who at least spoke to their religious convictions as opposed to...nothing.

Democrats aren’t bad people, and neither is being someone who enjoys a leftist government, but the Democrats elected to office have been a fucking sham. If its not Clintonian “triangulation” or Nafta, its this idea that anyone gives a fuck about how someone feels. The Blue Dog movement isn’t filling the gaps for those of us who want to have a government who wants to fix social problems, not moral ones.

To me there’s a better way to just about everything, and you need only take an issue into account to realize that any ass on the bus can figure out a better way to ride the bus. Congress is madness and that’s true, but we need to start holding people to the fire. If you allow yourself to be ignored, then you invite this level of terrible government. Shrinking the government is blaming the wrong malfunction.

When you look to government and see corruption, we should see laziness in ourselves for not voting with good intentions.

Government went sour in the minds of the people and we’re loosing the American mindset. We’ve gotten fat and lazy, both physically and mentally. Start local, and you can demand better. The movements that gave us the greatest leaders started years before they were realized on a national level. They were born in the backrooms in bars, at kitchen tables and today they’ll likely be brought to life on-line, finding a trans-national audience all the more quick. The tools of the masses are allowing bigger jobs to be started and executed sooner. All we need to do now, is develop the minds of the masses to remember how to take pride in themselves, in their cities and state, and most of all in country and government.

Friday Night at the VFW

The spirit has gone out of me. Life is good and I am happy. My torment isn’t over, its just over for now, and I don’t have anything to pull myself through. Writings been like the blues, and I sing them to get over them. I used to swing a pen like a weapon, but the wars over and now I just debate diplomats over tea and scones. I rue an image that has me swapping stories at the VA Hospital. Only the reservists survive in my line of work, and the guys that really know combat bite the dust, its part of the job, it comes with the territory.

Still I can’t help it though. I was born to write and when I think back to the times when I was as crazed as Gloucester in the rainstorm, with my hair on end and the sweat on my palms racing against all physical limits of speed, writing like the story would die if I took my time; when I’d bathe in the salty whaling graveyards of New Bedford and stare back at my grandfathers yellow house, with its chipping paint and its roman pillars, and the stone rock jetties that sectioned off the lower south end, I want to pour it out of me, as if these imagines are a source of the breath in my lungs. They give me and make me what I am, and its something I can’t ever get enough of. The tore down the old playground behind Bennett school, and it can only live on in pictures, but pictures can’t tell you how the world looked from those tires and planks and how you remember a school with no chimney having a billowing black cloud coming from those imaginary bricks, when the leaves changed color and you were fine in hooded sweatshirts and your cheeks were numb but you refused a hat.

There’s no picture that knows what a trip down 44 smelled like when you were late and you wanted to be early because on the other end was the only thing you really wanted. They mocked the discipline when I was at UMass as a monk-like pact of poverty but the world still needs writers because the intangible will die without us. All I can do now is pray I speak of the passion well enough to sound the rallying cry; that the young and lamentable can feel the stories inside of them. Until I have a reason to paint again, I’ll stick to politics. Someday the ghosts will come back to haunt me and when they do I promise I’ll give you the best of what’s killing me.

7 + 12 = Bad Math

It's a Saturday and I'm haunting old theaters, the ones with classic movie lines on the walls, like cinematic make-up that makes them feel better about themselves. And the butters running down my fingers and its better than you can expect it, and all the slurping noises turn the heads around me but I'm lost in the movie. I'm sitting here alone because I'm feeling spontaneous and these boring half-wits can't really keep up. 'sides they already had plans to sit around and do nothing, or clean up their bathroom or fold socks. Their telling themselves that this frontier lifestyle is close to godliness and that due diligence is an adult lifestyle. They paint me as a child but I've seen the bad backs of the old men at the bars in their blue jump suits with their name stitched on, and their faces bear the marks of painters, growlin about what might have been and what ought to be from their stools glowering down upon their children. My words spill out like Radiohead videos and I can't really make sense of it. It just comes. The concepts swirl on the screen and I am taken in by how well the director and composer worked together on this character. With one guitar they've captured the desert in its peaceful solitude with its vibrant colors and savage terrain. In my head there is a portrait of a woman glaring downward telling me to be myself, and self is an operative piece. She tells me I'm a man alone and that I will know greatness when I give up on these fantasies of taking everyone by the hand and living in a well structured little community. She is the city and she harbors chaos and I try to block her out but that's why I'm in this high-mounted bijou in the first place. The film ends and the wind on the common runs through my hair. I’m sitting on the planks of a Ray Flynn-era bench and watching the toddlers waddle their way from catch to the playground. Today is boston and my ideas for moving have gone to see the dead letter office.

I think that I always wanted to fork this fucking tree to the hard left. To find some French girl who was half Columbian that needed to move to Miami or London or Seattle and loved bad coffee and loved Joanna Newsom. I wanted something that was so unlike my family, she was unlike me. And when stupid men attempt to engineer their passion they always end up miserable. I was still running from a bloodline that was never intact to begin with. I was hoping for some diluting body to enter the pool.

I put too much stock in nature, never realizing that should that be the be all end all, I’d be just as happy with this crass herd of jackle I was dealt. Just as I had done prior, I could so do again and my future was mine to take. Should this end in hydrogen and fire, I would still come out better than I’d ever gone in. The differences were no longer physical, and not traceable on paper. By the eye of the inexperienced, I’d given up. My favorite political move has always been to let them underestimate you. Arrogance is to be punished and I’m 3 feet high and rising.

Even though I hate the second person...

i still can't get the ending right, but with a few exceptions and awkward lines, I like where this came out, as I do with anything that comes to be on the fly...

You hate being miserable, so you just get addicted. You thought you’d smoke cigars instead of cigarettes because they were trashy and you didn’t want to look like your Uncle Paul who had one of those cartoonish small tattoo’s on his forearm where you could see the lack of commitment, or money, or tolerance to pain. He might as well have gotten the thing in prison and if smoking cigarettes gets you closer to that, you’d assume not smoke anything. Still you thought this was something that looked cool and when you spoke to the smoke shops owner, he told you that this was a coinsure item, like wine, and that these were in fact “not cigarettes.” That was really all you needed to hear. This was in league with Yachting and dog shows, you were classy and going places. You bought six and a butane lighter.

The gin’s always been there, it was your first alcoholic drink ever. You had no idea what you were doing so you mixed it with iced tea but once you figured out how to steer that ship it was tonic forever. You hate being in your own apartment, the summers ending and the fruit flies are fucking everywhere, dive bombing into your drinks and food, and that fan you bought at the supermarket just isn’t cutting the mustard. Its enough to keep the humidity at bay, but you’re still sitting naked on a towel when its real bad out. The water bills through the roof and its still fucking august.

You bury yourself in the complications of small time addiction because it gives you something to manage. The efficiency of things is a fascination and it’s always a chase for the quicker, meaner, cheaper…you’d be lying if you said you did these things only to forget about her, because in truth, even when you’re with women you’d call yourself a tinkerer, but theres an escape in it, if only a small piece.
These addictions linger, and most days you’d say that’s a bad thing. You still drink, and smoke, and eat pizza from the greek place up the road where they can prep your onion pizza and two snapples when they see your number pop on the caller id. You’re like clockwork, and for all you like to figure things out you don’t disassemble yourself all that often. Or maybe you just know what makes you work and you stick to your guns. Still, for all the residual effects of a bad lifestyle, you welcome it on days like today.

You get a letter from her. Its out from nowhere and on the surface its plutonic but you think that underneath you can see the small embers waiting to explode into that passion that was. Or at least you’d like to think its there. Just seeing it, even days later makes you smile and you try and shoo it off like the fruit flies because you need to move on and find yourself a new girl. You’re still there though, and you hear from some friends she has a boyfriend which pains you slightly but you know he’s not long for the picture. You count time like a prisoner on his cell wall, with slash marks carved with crude tools, these aren’t days, they all blur, its all just tallies without her and they are carved into the walls. You wave your hand as if this is another fly around you, and decide the wild shores of the Republik would do well to liquor you up and head out for the bus.