Empty Things & Hollow Rings

Things you
got goin'
ain't goin'
no place
at all.

Maybe
you ought
to go
and get
going on
getting
over
things you
don't get
and will
never
ever
have your
hands on.

And if
you are
fixing
some tricks
to make
it in
the mix;
get to
thinkin
sick things
to see
if that
which is
hollow
also

rings.

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Re: Small, Dry Places

Mr McSaddle:

You'll have to go someplace bigger
and less dry
to see how hot you really get.
And if you really put yourself into it
and I mean
REALLY
put yourself into it
you can burn that place down too.

Best Regards Via Seance,

Robert Frost

The Punishing Netherworld

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Living Comfortably
Maybe You Can Be A Pimp And A Prostitute Too

I know that it's been a while since I have made a post. But the reason for that is because my summer has been relaxing and I haven't been prompted to talk about anything. I've also become weary about what I post because, though this East Lansing/MSU community is the largest I have been a part of, it is also the most hyperconnected.

I think that it is possible that through all of my years that different parts of my life might have had these cosmically Seinfeldian interconnections all along. I have only come to recognize them in recent years because of the socially and technologically constructed parameters provided by Facebook™. Sometimes it chills me to the bone to see this macroscopic view of my social identity, which is itself shaped by this relatively new technology. Corporations and workplaces have come to look at peoples Facebook™ profiles when making hiring decisions, so apparently these things are being taken seriously. Maybe that's why the "Death To Israel" group has only 200 or so members despite an apparently well organized global jihad against the Jewish state. Then again, if you're serious about destroying Zionism, you might not want to organize it in the same place that is used to promote the César Chávez Day Beerpong Tournament (I'll be there).

It's just another thing we have to be afraid of, like tomatoes. The tomato recall disrupted access to tomatoes in my area for about a week, and it had a serious impact on me. I went to Subway on Monday and there were no tomatoes available as a topping, which made the trays of meats and veggies look woefully incomplete. On Friday I went to Taco Bell and I ordered three tacos "Fresco Style", which is basically –instead of cheese they put on a fresh chopped (in a food processor) tomato-cilantro salsa, which improves the product greatly. They said that they couldn't do the Fresco style because of the Tomato Famine. I wondered if I would have to emigrate away from my home the way my Irish countryman did in the mid-eighteenth century. I ended up getting substandard tacos within an vendor that is itself substandard to anyone with even minimal culinary decency. I understand why people give me shit for occasionally going to Taco Bell, but sometimes what's wrong is right.

The Spinach recall from last summer didn't effect me as much because I don't think that I have had fresh Spinach since the last time I've had a salad that cost me more than $8.00, which must have been in 2005, when I had money.

Honestly, though this simpler life is more rewarding. I am about the most comfortable I could be given the modestness of my means, whereas before I was the most miserable I could be given my affluence at the time. Sometimes working within limitations has some payoff.

Part of the reason I'm living comfortably is because my roommate, Billy had set us up with an apartment in an upscale student ghetto. It's spacious, cool in the summer, and its windows provide for ample natural light. Except for a laundry room, it has no facilities to speak of, but you can't beat $150 a month with your own bedroom. For my day job I mostly work for college prep related scams like Kaplan®. It doesn't pay bad, but it doesn't pay great either. Besides, exploiting the ignorant and weak has been losing it's charm.

My income is supplemented by a cheap source of alcohol, as I am providing free legal services to some illegal Mexican immigrants. They were being abused and exploited at a Chinese Restaurant in East Lansing. They were paid $6.00 and hour as dishwashers, cooks and bus boys. Their home was a basement shelter under a floor-board door in the kitchen where they were locked overnight without a toilet or running water. The 60 year old Singaporean owner with liver spots, rotted teeth and greasy thin graying hair would frequently grope the 12 and 13 year old girls, who were the oldest females of 8 children, none of whom were allowed to go to school.

I was waiting to pay for my Empress Chicken when one of the bus boys dropped me a note. In Spanish, the note had told me of his family's predicament. I think he expected me to contact the authorities, but that if I did they would be deported. So, I had opted to bust them out myself which turned out to be easier than it sounds. All I had to do was sneak by at 3:oo AM while the old man was out on the other side of town with some tween Eastern European hooker. I pried out the rotted wooden back-door deadbolt with a crow-bar that I always keep in the trunk of my car. Over the floorboard door under which the family was being kept, there was a large movable kitchen-prep table with all the wheels braked. Apparently the old man wanted to take extra precautions to see to it that the family didn't escape. I un-braked all the little black wheels and rolled the table off the floorboard. I snapped off the Master Lock with some bolt cutters that I borrowed from Billy. They were initially reluctant to come with me until the grandmother exclaimed, "¡Mire sobre Gabriel con el pelo de oro hermoso!" After they were free I had set them up with a Catholic charity that was sympathetic to their plight.

They charity set them up with a safe house in the rural outskirts of town where some of them worked the fields and some worked the local farmers market for minimum wage. They were also provided a shelter in the upper floor of a Victorian home. They are making payments to the host family toward a 1987 Chevey Astro with a leaky radiator that they got for $500. Manuel, the father and Carlos, the oldest son spend their evenings working on the van so they have it to get to church and to get groceries on their day off.

The family has been exceptionally thankful for my efforts to set them up with a better life. Also, because of a language confusion, they think I am some how in charge around these parts, like some kind of rural Mexican warlord. The grandmother calls me "ángel-mago" which translated means "angel-wizard". Because of these things, they supply me with one or two half gallons of good hard liquor every week. Usually it is Bacardi Superior or Svedka Vodka. Sometimes it's a decent Scotch or a bottle of 1800 Tequila. When times are tougher, they can only give me one but they always apologize and explain their situation. I always graciously accept their apology and tell them that they can make up for it when times turn around.

Maybe I don't deserve the credit for their well being, but I'll take it anyway. I figure it makes up for all the times I took the blame for things I had no part of. I learned from the best: the establishment hacks and special interest hay-seeds I used to work for in Lansing and D.C. I'm not sure if they'd hire me again if they saw this in my Facebook™ profile, but I've been making a good life without them.

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Too Big For Your Britches

Bruno's neck resembles pancake batter as it spills out of his shirt color while his necktie hangs loose and flaccid. It looked as though it fit him at one time, but he had gotten too fat. He came in at 10:15 AM, fifteen minutes before session and tapped me for all I had learned in the five meetings that I had been in since I had seen him yesterday at 3:30 PM shortly before he left back toward home with the female district aide.

I asked him if he had looked over the position paper I had given him. He said that he glanced at it and I knew he was lying. He asked me if the bill's sponsor had donated to the campaign, and I said that they had. The female district aide had intervened, saying that the bill's opposition would likely give him more for his next campaign, and he went with her as he always does when she has anything to say, which is seldom but still too often.

I had fifteen minutes to explain a days worth of work. I'll have to put the rest of into a position paper and hope without expecting that it will get read. That job had fit me at one time, but I've gotten too big for my britches too.

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The Doom Looms
It's Been A Long Time Since It's Been Cool To Be A Slacker

Finals week has reminded me of why I was so eager to graduate from college the first time. Thank god I don't have to take anything like chemistry, which has cumulative exams and requires you to actually comprehend the material.

HOLY FUCK what kind of place would I be in if I had to do things that I couldn’t bullshit? I'm at a point in my life where I can't do anything that can't be bullshitted– seriously, who would want to do anything in life that required actual competence, knowledge or skills? In order to succeed in such a field you would need preparation and effort. I am not down with that these days.

The other night I had a dream that I was in some beachside shack trying to write something on a typewriter. Some of the keys were hard to push down, and whenever I got into a flow of typing I would get to those keys that were harder to push down and looking upon the page under the ribbon I saw that I had letters missing in all of my words. It was full of typos and it was more of an incoherent mess than this blog. I wondered if it was an omen of some kind.

There is no shortage of people who want to be published writers, and the odds of success are against me. It is entirely possible that I will die in poverty. Not by suicide, that is too much of a writer cliché. No, I will probably be killed by another hobo for my last bottle of Wild Irish Rose. That fucker will know that he can't get me while I'm awake, so he will get me while I am asleep nuzzling my bottle by the burning barrel at the abandoned train yard. He will probably find a cinder block and crack my skull open, or he will stab me in the chest with a loose rail-spike that he found.

What a way to go! The irony of it will be that I won’t die as the result of my own alcoholism, desperation or destitution but rather I will die of someone else’s. It will be an irony worth writing about. Sadly, someone else will cash in on it.

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Some Better Poems

A lot of the time I find that I am
writing too many poems;
about heartache and my failures,
about lost love and cruel women,
about my grief and emptiness,
existential crises and my struggle
with odds and fate.

But I can't help but write
and the poems are all I’ve got to thwart the madness
from taking hold.

So bare with me
and I'll
make some better poems soon.
But the topics and the themes
will probably be the same.

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The Kitchenette Hotel

and why you wont run into Mitt Romney there.

What I would really like to do right now is lock myself in a Kitchenette Motel somewhere in the mountains. Maybe Colorado or Nevada. This idea is inspired in part by Jack Kerouac's Big Sur, which I am currently borrowing from my housemate. Apparently Ol' Jack went up to Big Sur to cope with a nervous breakdown and/or to detox from alcohol. . .I'm not sure if he got any writing done while he was there.

I wonder if those with artistic tendencies are pre-disposed toward substance abuse, or if merely the established culture of Bohemianism makes it part of the business. I imagine that if you led an ordinary life devoid of crisis, conflict, breakdowns and relapses you wouldn't have too much to write about. Not much worth reading anyway. I feel as though if Fitzgerald were alive today that he would at least embrace the recreational use of NyQuil™; it is after all the absinthe for the new crop of faux-Lost Generation writers.

Last night before bed, I laid on my futon with a note pad, trying to assimilate a couple of ideas together for a story that I'd like to write. Frustrated, I turned the television on to C-Span where Mitt Romney was doing a Town Hall forum in Cedar Rapids Iowa. A guy like Mitt Romney could never produce a novel, short story, or even a Presidential memoir worth reading; not because he is devoid of psychosis, but because he isn't the sort of guy to acknowledge it and work with it.

Willard "Mitt" Romney is certainly not the kind of fellow who would still have a pulse if he defied the Grand Wizard of his local Church and experimented with something like NyQuil.His suits are impeccable, his hair is flawlessly parted, and he has a handsome functional family. But no such things are what they seem and no doubt the Romney family has dark and troubling secrets, which is perhaps the cornerstone of Mormon culture. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, Mitt Romney embodies cold logic, crass literalism, and a tragic artifice built upon an erroneous foundation of American perfection and exceptionalism.

I hope you'll thank Mitt Romney to leave the writing to me.

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