This, in a nation of sugar-free raspberry Fig Newtons on store shelves and 35 varieties of scientifically-engineered Gatorade that all miraculously tasted like "cooked battery acid". In these days of "Be Like Mike" ads and the Nike "Swoosh" logo and a ghetto-fied Bugs Bunny "keepin' it real" with a backwards cap it was as if you were beaten straw upon the nation's racial threshing floor of "sporting prospects" as an overweight, uncoordinated half-Jewish kid "who perhaps had it too easy". Laughably so. . . . .

He knew not of cracked, dented, asphalt lots of "the lowest kind of poverty". . . . . where there was nothing but a basketball rim "yet no net" to jump up and bat with his pale half-Jewish "piano fingers". He knew not of local corner stores where winos wandered in and out with their rumpled paper bags o' Nightrain and would have hopped around and pointed with hoots had he made any kind of overture "to get down with the people, brother". . . . . like a man in a plaid suit playing "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" in a blues bar before segueing into a stumble-keyed version of "Mary had a Little Lamb" like so much rank, offensive amateurism.

A strange concomitant buddy-system between the rich and the poor you will find at the devil's auction block at the crossroads, known as "the curse of free time" as they share an uncanny fascination and "understanding" with each other. . . . . both wishing they could "trade places" like  a turn-of-the-millennium version of "The Prince & The Pauper" by that sage of human nature, Mark Twain. Criminals and spoiled rich kids. . . . . pimps and thieves and snickering teenaged elves and jail-bait that filled our malls in one cavalcading, snaking line like "The Headless Children" with smirking, ugly, leering, mean-spirited expressions. All of it lead to a skull opened up wide to admit them with stink lines of doom wafting upwards like "hell's barbeque shack". . . . . leading them on their jingling, jangling "Canterbury Tales" parade to self-destruction and county lock-up ass-rape.

Be life forever dubious. . . . especially down in my local community where wealth was its own "buddy-system" and everyone understood "what-was-what". Whether in lawyer's jackets or Jack Lemmon golfing shorts even if the rottener truths "went unsaid", as they putted at the country clubs, rubbed elbows at the finest restaurants, and had their traffic tickets "torn up" in court as "the law" looked the other way in this local "mutual admiration society", where disorder was pulled over and investigated as surely as a carload of black pimps with white teenaged girls snapping gum and "acting bad". Such "mixing" was tolerated for the sake of "good appearance", but the police came charging in with their flashing rooftop lights when it got more serious down at the local mall, the young perp's legs spread and hands up against the wall over shoplifting or drugs. Then the book was really thrown at them, and what happened next-- no one could say for certain.

As a sprightly young fat boy who mostly behaved (-- other than filching his younger brother's Halloween candy) I would live in a state of cautious, plodding world-denial as much as mortally, humanly possible that would pretend not to behold this ultimate "anarchy on the fringes" and what that said about his conception "of order".

So when Circuit City offered to sell me a warranty, I leapt at the opportunity.

"You could never be too careful", I figured as a frowzy 12 year old who was taking his vow to get into shape seriously and didn't want to be side-tracked by "extra expenses".

But I was "hard" on my gear.

If you use something everyday, a machine with "whirring" mechanical parts getting jostled like outback 4X4 bump n' jump racing with mud flying in your eye, the damn thing is liable to break down. I came in so many times to get my headphones and tape player replaced, that the store eventually made me buy a new warranty because I was warping the far side of their "bell curve" of "safe bet" probability. Basically, the assumption was that hardly anyone ever came in to redeem the policy. As the years went by, the models changed and so did Circuit City's approach to pests like me waving and pointing at their receipts. It used to be that warranties were transferable to "roughly equivalent items", but that too changed on the slow apogee, and this decent of "progress". Fancier features came along, such as "auto-reverse" or the ability to flip a tape over with the touch of a toggle meant "that more could go wrong".

The boy is back. . . . . ring up another warranty plan!

And over the next ten years you perceive an evolution in the design of the "Sony Sports Walkman", various stylistic changes perhaps unnoticed by anyone else as you commune with the silence in the predawn early morning hours like a basset hound after the fox in the misty English warrens, and each time the product is worse for the wear, shoddily made in China for 11¢/hour like the "glorping mouth" of globalization that being conscientious, keeping your fingers crossed, and pulling the lever for the Democrat could not stop as life became more and more degraded.

"It's really for the customer's better interest", said the sleepy-eyed black employee, a less hopeful post-denzien of those "ABC After-School Specials". He would have looked more at home standing out in a barnyard lankily with overalls and a pitchfork, flies buzzing around a pile of mule excreta. A slightly-more-alert-looking Eastern European girl worked the computer, peering into the screen with a dubious expression that belied "one lost deep in thought".

I cracked a cute self-effacing joke about how it might be easier to take my business to "Best Buy", hoping to catch her attention. No such luck. . . . . and "Mr. Head-Scratching Sharecropper"-- looking all the part of a young African-American whose purview expanded across the earthly domain of "loose shoes, tight pussy, and a warm place to shit" missed who my comment was aimed toward. . . . . namely the Eastern-European canary, who continued to act like I didn't exist.  She might as well have been a statue, an onion dome, Gary Kasparov staring deep into the computer inside a chess match "with humanity's vanquisher".

Or she could have just been another oblivious, snail-eyed bureaucrat hypnotized by the monotony of the system to which she was wedded like an unlucky bride.

Yes, "the killing floor" of entry-level work that took in a mish-mash of people and "where only the strong survived" like an acid bath of sour working reality that burned the crud off of old railroad engines, like one of my Dad's summer jobs in his youth that made him grateful to be "a college man", the first in his family in fact. Aching shins and the low-down "scrounge" for the hard-bitten dollar where "The Temple of Consumption" was no longer "quite so enticing" as you collapsed in a chair after-hours. Grouse in a bar, your arms folded beneath you as the bartender in a vest polished glasses with a cloth.

"Uh-huh, tell me about it"

It was a "push-pull" land where renters bitched about losing their security deposits just as surely as landlords at another table painted a picture of a decimated property, waving an unlit cigarette through the air. A neutral third party observer couldn't say "what was what" as they looked on in the bemused, all-seeing narrator's eye of Charles Dickens at this small-claims "court of public opinion" no bigger than four, which apparently gave the victim & plaintiff "a bit of satisfaction" in a world where either "that bitch [or bastard] was crazy", no one lived up to their side of the contract, and bringing in the actual law "was probably too much work".

And no one wanted more of that.

I wasn't the most practical person in the world in the late '90s because I didn't have to work, allied with some of the scuzzier impulses of human motivation and "a warped incentive system" of this world that never changes, neither in heaven above nor on earth below. It was like the cute baby polar bear or child actor who was thrown cookies and attention their way all of their life but grew up to become a putridly grotesque adolescent who never learned to fend for himself.

The more weak and helpless he is, the more the world punishes and ignores him which only makes him rottener, until he can figure out a way"to stand tall & strong". The situation is made even crueler, when you've cut yourself off from a comfortable ride in upper middle-class circles and are knocked down to the harshest, most basic entry-level jobs which only makes you want to withdraw more into a sheltered world of sub-reality like a wild-man disassociated from all of humanity. Like a pilot shot down in the jungle with little hope of rescue, part of you pines for the comfort of human company but yet the silence of jungle and wreckage is very much a part of you.

One would "step out of the jungle" every once in a while to do business in "the outer world" where they did not quite belong, before fading back in like a highly-functioning autistic ghost. Where he lived, he constructed "a dwelling" so to speak. . . . . made out of the ruins of something he used to call "his old world" where he was "king", rising up like a vine-choked Incan temple swallowed up in the godforsaken clutches of Peru "where the gods had touched down once" and there had been golden abundance.

To bring down "these birds from the sky", the airplanes of arts n' entertainment and good magazine writing and a certain Hollywood actress, if not pretty girls in his local community-- he would superstitiously "build landing strips" and "radio towers" so they would touch town "and bring him happiness" from the belly of their plane. . . . ."the gods of CARGO".

Life was still very "hand-to-mouth" with the reality of ever-present nature. . . . . and by extension, the laws of the free market which had you dancing to Circuit City's tune unless you decided to exercise "your free will" and tramp off through the warped jungle of modern commerce elsewhere.

Yes, I cracked a cute, self-effacing joke that I ought to take my business to "Best Buy".

But "Jambo" nodded his head from side to side with the easy, splayed out warmth that was like hog-jowl on a biscuit, a banana plucked from a tree, and "the reason why white men can't play the blues" like so many glaciers and Ice Ages and cerebral bard's tales that sung of "nights of eternal blackness" instead of the tropical "lack of struggle". . . . . and informed me that the Circuit City owners also ran Best Buy.

"Well, a man can't rightly win, can he?", I asked. . . . . looking toward the Eastern European canary who continued "to read tea leaves" in the monitor like an occult art.

What did she see in there?

And that was the subject of my Led Zeppelin-inspired love poem that rivaled the flutery of "Stairway to Heaven", I was that possessed by the muse. . . . . a model of her dressed up as a Romanian peasant girl in a tunic with a basket of fruit upon her head.

I would say "my enthusiasm got the better of me" when I dropped it off at the store. An elderly grandpa glanced down at a second and smiled without reading it, impressed that each paragraph's scripting, curling font was in a different pastel color like a love, soft and undying. It must have reminded him of the ways of his own "winning youth", what he had always wished he had done like the narrator out of a John Updike story "but never had the follow-through" as he wiped a tear over his life with pathos yet contentment with "The Senior's Special" at Denny's. . . . . essentially cholesterol-free egg-whites dyed to look like "egg-yolks" as he patted "his ticker" with the cold wind of the grave threatening to blow apart the embers of his feeble existence. 

I think the frozy 12 year-old in the beginning and this grandpa would have been "the best of friends". . . . . two men pushing an empty, rattling can back and forth with a stick. . . . . grown stale & old before their time like so many faded photographs "of a life that never was".

Meanwhile, a teenage girl with an auburn ponytail stared on with curious cat's eyes, amazed that any kind of teenager would put out such a sensitive effort and wouldn't-it-be-so-special-if-someone-had-ever-done-that-for-me. Such sweetness in the air, the portent of wedding bells "and growing old together" as Eastern European grandkids played on the carpet and asked to hear about folk tales "from the old country".

I gave "Gramps" an outline of who the girl was, stumbling with my description like a foreigner who wasn't good with words. But "he got the idea", and promised to pass it along when she came to work that afternoon. I was somewhat disappointed; I had intended to deliver it personally like the most gallant of poets,

At home, I was all but dangling a sandal on my foot. . . . . when the war planes came.

The phone rang, and there was this dispassionate Spanish voice on the other end of the line. It is the tone of Don Juan, a concierge down at the front desk at a five-star hotel in Mexico.

Teenage girls in my class would blurt out "Oh my God. . . . ." in shocked disquiet. Such a heaviness pervaded throughout the room as everyone stared down at their desks and the teacher pressed on like a goateed samurai with a wolfish, clear-eyed stare as an inquisitor, a prosecutor at Nuremberg stripping bare all coddled assumption of 1990's American comfort.

As someone who was "damn-well familiar" with this stuff, I didn't think that nice teenage girls "fluffing their hair" like a Green Beret colonel's little girl running out to hug her returned father out on the tarmac should necessarily be exposed to such awful things. It was up to young men to be hardened to the truths of the world, to be the strong ones, to know these affairs, and above all to be the ones to scoop the dead, floating possum out of the swimming pool while his loved ones "shivered in the house". At this age the only thing the average teenage girl should be thinking about is gabbing with their friends down at the mall about boys. And preferably about me, who in my estimation, was a hero worthy of a brave chest of medals "and flowers laid at his feet" for the hurdles of disillusionment he had known. . . . . like the tolling of the bell as he listened to Metallica's "Ride the Lightning" and contemplated "the black ice of 1984 DOOM metal" with Spenglarian heaviness.

Just call me, "Count Pompous" with a monocle. . . . . yes, as the world veered ever-closer to nuclear annihilation and the eyes of a mechanical owl screwed around in its head to somehow connote "the system going haywire" in a Soviet-era film from 1920.

Needless to say, my nickname was not "Disco Charlie". . . . . or even "Donkey-Dick". And my "batting average" with girls stood at .000 which was practically worse than any kind of "player" that ever was. He'd pitch, but he couldn't hit-- and would strike out so the bat would go whirling through the air and crunch against the glass over at the St. Louis zoo where he'd watch the tortoises fuck and wish "he was quicker on the uptake". At least his father, who had sired him-- managed, hadn't he? And his father before? Going back like eternal "links in the chain"?

As bookish and scholarly as my Dad was, there was 'ole Chesley who was as mean and ill-tempered as ever in my living memory of him as a recovering alcoholic with battered knuckles and plenty of medical problems that ultimately pulled him down in 1989. Once, he had parked in a handicapped space at the hospital. Another grizzled old veteran from World War II took objection because there was no handicap sticker on his license plate. They argued about his prerogative, and the man punched out the passenger's side window with his fist. Grandpa snarled and floored him to the asphalt with one punch. Even when the old bear sat in the easy chair and I was sitting on the carpet, pulling at his foot, he would jab me hard in the ribs with his socked foot and laugh.

I shuddered to what he would think of me now. . . . .

In his office, where Mr. Lockhart conducted 10-minute student/teacher conferences to nurse along the pathetic, slime-trailing state of our five-part essays we didn't particularly care about, I noticed this bookmark hanging by a yarn noose (red) that had a quote by the famous ashcan of an atheist lawyer, Clarence Darrow:

"I never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure"

I think one "intuitively understood" that grueling "survivor's satisfaction" when someone you don't especially like "bombs out" and "ain't coming back".

Then my fuel gauge showed "empty" and my panels went haywire, full of distortions and faulty-wiring of untreated anxiety and bad depression of a human aircraft that was "a lemon" from the beginning when it was rolled off the line, now falling out of formation into the upper reaches of "the jungle canopy" where I made "a crash landing". . . . . too mortified to call for help.

Even if he had hollered "May-day, May-day!" into the CB with mounting desperation, what could have anyone really have done for him? The problems were way too great, much too deep-seated, for minor advice or piddling pointers as "he was going down to die". But he would never plead. . . . . he would never show desperation. . . . . he would never "call out". . . . . because that was "the path of REAL MEN". . . . "going off into that good night". . . . . disappearing off the radar screen like the ghost of heroism. . . . . "over & out".

The jungle beckoned. It was now what he called "home".

"Cope", is what I had been told by Mr. Lockhart, a goateed samurai of a teacher.

So he would. . . . . like "The Jap with ideals" who was still fighting World War II nearly 30 years later on some obscure island in the Philippines.

At some point, years later-- I was trekking through the Galleria like a commando with a machete. It was the cold, grey Christmas season. This was about the time that my gallbladder was acting up, and I was taking medicine to soothe down the nausea before I passed "a stone" and quit shuddering around to throw up in the parking lot behind restaurants like an anonymous lurching pedestrian from "Night of the Living Dead".

Dizzy from nerve medicine, groggy, my voice half-slurred like a booze-breathed lout drunk on wild-rice sake, rockets seemed to streak across the walkways, ceilings, and shops, bursting with red light glare-- a surreal experience of over-stimulation as my consciousness danced, wavering in & out of focus with my pumping blood. As I passed the railing overlooking the foot court plaza, there was the high school jazz band playing some swinging numbers and adding to the holiday spirit. For a second, I could not help but think of some of the kids from my high school who were dead or worse, scattered like leaves strafed in the wind by the Kamikazi planes of idiocy and fate. If not unresourcefulness, wandering around the rubble of their 20's like cloud-eyed zombies fiending for drugs.

I recalled that I needed to get my watch band fixed. . . . . because time now had meaning. I had made it so with my fanatical one-man regime of self-discipline and held onto that fact like a lifeline as I staggered through the madhouse of American commerce.

This was truth.

I entered the watch shop, almost a kiosk stashed in a corner, and saw a beautiful girl working behind the counter. She was red-haired, grave, from the Ukraine, and all business as her blue eyes narrowed on my watch and she worked on it with tiny screwdrivers and minute precision like a clockmaker in a fairy-tale. I began to drift off, to dream of the Ukraine-- castles made of ice, Russian boyars licking beef fat from a platter, playing chess with a beautiful girl such as this in a cold room with her as my instructor, and I imagined embracing her and pressing my face to her warm chest and just melting away like a child knowing he was safe. Women, beautiful women from the East, stars in the sky by which men pointed their ships.

I flirted with her to the best of my half-assed ability. She paused. And smiled. That is, before going back to work with the same grave expression. I wanted to break down her icy countenance, melt down her frigid Eurasian race-soul, but she had a ring on her finger. But that didn't mean that I hadn't fallen in love with her, this Eastern Star, and wished her a very happy holidays.

As I walked further down the mall aways, I saw a pretty girl standing by a lonely kiosk with a stick of lotion in her hand. She seemed a bit sneaky and comically self-aware, her eyes half-closed like a Slavic cat's as she held out the lotion in her hand like the golden apple of wisdom to mall-rats and jail-bait with a certain sense of existential distance that knew there were fatter partridges to spit than down here in this indifferent mall's concourse like the glistening "slllisshh" of pantyhose and rustling shopping bags as the American consumer fucked themselves deeper into debt.

Whether with scented candles, Harlequin romances, or Botox surgery as they applied make-up in the mirror with their mouths slightly ajar, dark circles around their pouched, baggy eyes and Clairol-dyed hair in one, piteous splotch known as "the bath & beauty" industry. And not forgetting guileless young fawns with "Crackerjacks" for brains whose skinny shanks would make fine places for their ever-stupider boyfriends' humping pelvises and then giggling about it on their cell phones as if they had invented "sexual trampoline" and "snotty bed-sheets" that stunk with human wretchedness.

I had to go over to talk to her, this scene was so outrageous.

"Hey, what are you selling today?".

"Lotion", she said in a Slavic accent, straightening up for a sale but yet eyeing this unusual customer who stood there like "Big Foot".

"I see that business isn't exactly booming", I shrugged pathetically.

"Ah, but you are the Sheriff", she said, pointing to my cowboy hat with the badge tucked in the band, her eyes widening with mock significance. Either that, or a red-scruffed repressed-Jewish liberal arts professor-type with a taste for funky hats. "You'll help me out".

"Lotion? Lotion?! Real men don't use lotion. But I'll buy some for my mother. How much for the one you're holding?".

"$15 for this one, though we do go up in price".

"Uh, I'll take the one you're holding. Are you from another country?".

"Israel".

"Shalom", as I kissed my fingers and held them up in the air with a vague sense of Zionistic mysticism for the destined home country. She looked around and scrunched up her features with the absurdity of it all. Like an actor in a very strange, improvised play.

But then with craftiness only known to a race of peddlers and middle-men blown clear around the earth in the longest, most tortured disapora that made "my jungle jitters" seem like getting lost along the beaten trails of "Lone Elk Park" yonder Highway 44, she took my hand and gave me "the treatment". I wanted to howl with laughter as she went into her sly, Eastern European spiel, asking me questions and answering them before I could reply as she dabbed on cream-- "made from the salt of the Dead Sea itself"-- and make my grip about as soft as Moses's baby ass in the bulrushes.

All of this, just to get her phone number?!

I looked down, half-bemused and half-sadly, and understood something about the world. She was definitely smart enough to understand the existential absurdity of this life, working 12 hour days/6 days/week on an 18 month foray into The United States to bring money home to her family abroad, but she was wholly "a creature of sales"-- and as I would learn, the best one they had-- who was intelligent enough to objectify her surroundings with a cute, Slavic wink.

Her philosophy in life was "the freedom to", which she took with great liberty-- and not "the freedom from" where you live in disillusioned, shivering fear of a world never made "good enough" nor could ever be whether by government or "Sesame Street" world-denial and the rotten bone-yard of false puppets/prophets that were laid out like "Cookie Monster's" stinking corpse.

Crumbs, crumbs, crumbs. Just what "Cookie Monster" was left with after he had gorged himself into oblivion and "the cupboard was bare", going down and fighting squalidly over the rotted remains of "PBS kids' programming" in the trash can of "Oscar the Grouch" as discord came to Sesame Street and "Big Bird" was hacked up for barbeque.

But here was my cherished sales-girl, another Eastern star from beyond the port of Odessa. She was pro-active. . . . . she was beautiful. . . . she was definitely a more pleasing visage than some of the starker-eyed photographs I've seen of Ayn Rand who looked like she was "good friends" with that owl with its eyes screwing around crazily in its head like Russian madness. . . . . some kind of Gogol Bordello of shrieking kooks gripping the iron bars and pickled fetuses floating in jars like aborted potential in a scientific/mechanical/Marxist world "gone mad" where "the candle now burns at both ends".

Or whatever it was that some high-brow cunt like Virginia Woolf said, staring on with a pompous, "goosed" expression, before she filled her pockets full of stones and drowned herself in a pond like a throw-away gag out of "MAD" magazine.

But ignorance shrouds "the higher understanding" of a young man who would half-piece-together the puzzle, but then walk away like a shivering beggar pacing around his cold, unlit garret hollering and kicking things, not understanding that under the floor stands the greatest treasure of personal empowerment if only he would think to peel back the floorboards "and find out for himself".

He tells them about falling in with a bunch of flower-children, a bunch of passive dopers from N.O.R.M.L. (-- The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) and what life was like amongst the booted stoners.

"Hippies are weak!" the throng agrees. What a league of clear-headed realists.

He tells them about a youth pastor's attempt to rope him in to the fold from a college activity known as "The Current Issues Discussion Club".

"Organized religion is false!" the throng declares. A gang finding stark truth wherever it may lie, ghoulish and beastly.

A young man with long, blonde hair like a Swedish scholar in a gruesome black, "death metal" t-shirt starts speaking in a grave, meticulous, monotone voice how everything in the end comes down to "a handful of maggots" as we're consumed into nothing, pathetically enough.

The concert starts, the most god-awful racket of atonal thumping that sounds like the engines of an aircraft up-close, and "Beetlejuice" covers his ears in wincing agony. He gets up on the stage to dive into the audience, half-wandering around and doubled over with his eyes squeezed shut as he bumps into the band members who continue to play with detached, scowling expressions, and walks right into a nest of towering speakers, which totter over and fall on him. The music is interrupted with a lurch. . . . . My legs stick out from under the Marshall stacks like the death of Metallica's Cliff Burton who died in a tour bus accident. The Swedish scholar of death and destruction says "that's not cool" with great shock and disquiet. Feedback shrieks as pop-eyed roadies scratch their heads and tug at my body.

Such, such was life in "Death Metal" gulch. . . . . where shows like "Slaughterfest" or 12 hours of death metal for $10 were mostly an excuse to set up a sawhorse with a board and sell liquor, though in this case it was an actual bar. Where petty vendors sat unhappily with their booth of wares, hoping to sell the revelers CD's they had either already bought out of specialty catalogs, or-- as long-haired marauders standing around roguishly in cargo shorts and scrappy black t-shirts, shaking their heads "no" like the craftiest of thieves from the "Dungeons & Dragons" universe. Yes, where the advantage, the apparent "upper-hand", was flipped around with an opportunistic "ha-HA!" like the cagiest of urchins holding a dagger to your throat.

Where the audience trope was either fat moose with squash-like skulls and shaved heads tied into top-knots, or defeated pirate "queens" walking around with sagging leather pants looking deeply unemotional with their hand on their hip or concert-goers so overcome that they raise their arms in front of them with their hands hooked into claws in a moment of dark, churning rapture "that is only over so quickly". For in every audience, there is going to be some "snappers'. . . . . like Elvira, "Mistress of the Dark" feeding fish-heads to a pit of alligators. Some stand stock-still, some pad away with a waddling gaie and glide under the water with a "slisssh", and still others thrash their heads around with a roar.

This, our ultimate public display of nihilism. Churning guitars, thumping drums, atonal sensibilities, the spotlights clicking blood-red and corpse-green on the maned, cartoonish performers, the fury of the mosh pit. Dancing in a circle, pushing and shoving, "what goes around comes around", beefy onlookers on the sidelines helping you along with a propelling jostle, a sweaty hand rudely leaving your back, the heat and humidity of close bodies, will and shadow. Glorious, blood-soaked carnage, lurching zombies gnawing on ropey intestines, total punishing immolation. After the "song" ends the entire hall erupts in a collective "eeeeeeeagh" the sound that evil, primordial slop would make in a belching, sulfurous crater like either a goat-headed barbarian about to cut down screaming peasants or some fat, pimply illustrator's pizza n' beer-induced ulcer of "gastric distress".

Later, my friend and I were resting out against the venue's wall, sat down like heavy metal urchins trading boasts and complaints about life like two callow youths at the crossroads of Damascus.

Joey was basically from a straight-laced, well-to-do family out in the suburban sprawl of the county whose parents did not understand his gnarled, shivering, passive-aggressive tendencies. They were hardly "creatures of deeper reflection" as they threw up their hands and let Joey be Joey, too sure of an answer once they had it as an apparently "all-American" family who could not behold the screwiness of the household that passed before their very eyes. The more loud, obnoxious, and self-assured they'd be, the more that Joey would withdraw into his world of sheltered sub-reality where screaming, rotting Christ's coexisted with sexy "barbarian queens" with incredibly toned thighs along with "Snuggles", the family-cat who wandered into his lair and purred for attention like the warmest of friends.

Our reverie, however, was broken up when a crafty black bum came up and squatted down before us with a "whoosh" of sweet wine and held out a ring in his palm as he studied us intently, two scared white boys under his seedy gaze that held more "badness" than any issue of "Pit" magazine could manufacture with it's dancing grimoire of Medieval death that ultimately looked so juvenile and ridiculous upon the hard streets of downtown St. Louis that catered to "Blues musicians" and characters who really had "sold their soul to the devil down at the crossroads". Where "bad men" didn't have to advertise it, but "just were" with shades and mope-mouthed expressions with lines on the lip that might as well have bodyguarded for Malcolm-X. Where "Tales from the 'Hood" was a lot more Voo-Doo superstitious to the white, suburban Western mind than the nearly identical cover of Megadeth's "Killing is my Business. . . . . and Business is Good!". . . . . even if the film produced by Afro big-wigs like Spike Lee felt more as it it was executed by a bunch of dubious 12 year-old's, putting one over on 'ole whitey. Point this out, and they would merely grasp their lapels like Don King and say that "it takes a nation of millions to hold us back".

(Only in America. . . . .)

"Gentleman, gentleman", our intruder said with slowness, with weasel-eyed intent, his face all grizzled and his teeth like corn-cobs like the fare thrown to him at "The New Life Evangelistic Center" by the Reverend Larry Rice, a broom-pusher of a thankless white man who never lost his selfless drive to help the hurting and run an algae-low UHF television station that no one watched.

"I haven't eaten anything in three days and I have this ring. Now, I stole this ring, and I'm willing to sell it to you good-lookin' cats for $80. You amenable?"

Both Joey and I whirled our head toward each other, this lure of "fast cash" and "hot goods" and "excitement" burning through the air like either a downed electrical wire or a snorted line of cocaine before our senses overtook us.

"Uh, accepting stolen property would be a felony, sir. We don't have $80"

The bum stalked off, spitting "FUCK YOU, man" over his shoulder as if he had bitten down on a rotten crawdad. , , , , like a ripped-open shit-bag of "bad feeling".

We looked after him shocked, then to each other, barely comprehending what had occurred as death metal kids stood around outside the clubs in cliques and half looked on.

There was a Slayer album from 1983 called "Show No Mercy" that was supposed to have been the vaunted forefather of our movement, even after 15 years built on the idleness of doodling, jacking-off teenaged fantasy. The opening blazer was a anti-social curio entitled "Evil has no Boundaries". . . . . well, that evening it certainly did, whatever the prerogative of snorting, Teutonic, goat-headed barbarians with National Socialist undertones, though most of us were "too pussy" to admit it. . . . . as the moment for the ultimate "death-strike" disappeared and we had an image of an old, cruel, demented emperor sitting alone and impotent on his throne muttering to himself with spells that didn't work as marauders sacked from his palace all around him.

"Home? I have no home. Hunted. . . . . Despised. . . . ." Bela Lugosi spits from his perch, gripping the sides of his high-backed professor's chair-- "pursued like an animal through the jungle for 20 years, but I will create a race of atomic supermen and TAKE OVER THE VORLD!" [sic]. Then he toddles off with a dignified version of a Transylvanian count's version of dignity, with a cane and one foot in the grave. . . . .

********************

Why, perhaps loitering outside the local 7-Eleven in the trashy part of South St. Louis. There we'd be in cum-crusted stocking caps, our hands in our filthy pockets. Obviously we had no money (-- 39¢ between us), and were going to stretch the limit of convenience store "value"-- at our gross convenience. What distortion, as we hung our mouths beneath the soda fountain and had a "free drink". No cup after all. And we helped ourselves to some "Big Bite" hotdogs. No bun, after-all.

So it didn't count.

"Get out of my store!" the Pakastani pointed with indignation, as we "flossed" with "Slim-Jims" and scratched our balls.

"Fuck you, immigrant" I slurred. "You're takin' away American jobs!" as Thor and I stumbled off into the night.

There was the prospect of us swiping a bottle of "Elmer's Glue", with the idea of sniffing it to get high. Cheap thrills. There we leaned against the wall, huffing the ineffectual, curdling fumes up our crusted nostrils, and hooting.

So much for "a race of supermen".

The point was proven when we would stand outside a local pizza joint with a sign that read "Vito's paid me to hold this sign instead of asking for money". For two hours of advertising, we'd get a few bucks, soda, and pizza. My god, the charity of liberals. . . . .

We'd take part in bizarre medical experiments. We'd sell our semen. We'd lease our bodies to a hog rendering plant for $27 apiece. We'd loot a Catholic church for valuables. We'd dig up graves for jewelry. A day's pay on the wild side. Sure beats getting a respectable job. . . . .

Another insanely hilarious topic-- because it's so forbidden-- is the Jews. The more they walk around like Barbara Streisand with their hand on their hip, trying to direct the information flow of society like the press office from "The Anti-Defamation League", then the more they add to the snickered adage about "clothes & class" and the obvious trait of "nose & ass" with the sad attrition of time. And the angrier they get, the more they scream "Anti-Semitism!", then the more it's inherently true as their castle of rotten liberal-arts assumptions come crumbling down, leaving a woman balling her fists and shrieking on a pile of broken tschokies as we rotten jungle-men laugh at the show and fling shit like monkeys.

Whatever our superstitions, the cold, clammy shawl of autumn has a way of bringing out pagan attitudes that you would have thought had long since been sloughed off from "The Old World" ways. A market caters to the gothic, ghostly, ghastly, or just plain GORY, for those bottom-feeders who want to consume on decay like goliath beetles crawling over puddles of blood and sucking away, waving their antenna.

You had the pudgy spiritualists with dark circles under their eyes who sat there in their rocking chairs like Mary Todd Lincoln but uglier. . . . . like a scuzzier hold-over from the 19th century. All too often, it crossed over the line into "leprechauns" or "faeries" with a completely straight face, or bizarre stories about UFO abductions that sounded more like anxieties about antiseptic modern medicine and the diminishing of the human spirit into a frail, delicate, oval-headed shadow of his former robust glory-- if not dread over modern technology in its sweeping 20th century entirety. Or it descended into the level of tabloid featurettes of how a crack-brained old woman would claim to see the spirit of her deceased cat in the sunset.

(I could just see that cat yowling, on fire-- "Help me! Help me! Help me! RRRORORORR! I'm in hell! Why didn't you dream up 'a hot dog'?")

But the strangest thing about these stories, is that some of them can be roughly corroborated. Whatever we choose to believe about the world out of "high-mindedness", over time the tales slowly assert themselves with similar common denominators. UFO & paranormal phenomenon all seem to happen at the same spots over a period of time at locations known for curious geological features or atmospheric distortions, if not energy fields-- that play around with our material assumption of the world we call "home".

Spirit and emotion is channeled. . . . .

Like any young guy knows around that time of Halloween when Silo-X opens. Adrenaline, girls, candy wrappers, puke in the parking lot, mock-death, that would define the rich scent of possibility for a teenager waiting around in line at this regionally-famous attraction as cut-rate as it is legendary with 20-pack ticket specials for church groups.

Kids come from all over the place-- the four corners of St. Louis out here where the highways meet-- to partake in this yearly autumn "homecoming" out in a cornfield that welcomes the coming November rains, when it begins to get chilly and look especially "medieval" with St. Louis' long tradition of church and university spire. Yes, the gray stone and stained glass casting judgment on the merely frivolous.

But this is our holiday, our youth carnival before matters get too frosty and serious-- before school really begins to grind down like a tractor combine in a field of corn, or even the harvesting of wild things before the wheat is separated from the chaff and sold to market, the inferior materials burned to ashes. Before the good times are taken away with the dismantling of this "carnival", as the lot of us stand around in carefree, yet self-conscious cliques. Flannel shirts and scrunched-up features of immaturity, mostly boys but some with attractive girlfriends who make you stare straight ahead, so you don't get caught "looking too long".

On a series of television monitors, a "get-up" affixed on top of poles like severed heads, is the image of a reporter interviewing a sector commander in military fatigues. The sergeant denies rumors about mutants, ghosts, and interdimensional rifts on this particular military research site, even as otherworldly groans shudder in the background. Clearly the lid of "disinformation" and "cover-up" can't hold the truth in check as gunshots are fired off screen and the camera pans back on the nervous reporter closing out his broadcast as the image fades, only to resurrect itself on video.

No one is really paying attention anyway. . . . . except for the outsiders trying not to look conspicuously alone. As the line draws closer to the entrance, the kids' conversation gets more intense, their laughter more shrill, like a bunch of children waiting outside the dentist's office who don't particularly want to go in but can't back out now in front of their friends, or even girlfriend. Because who wants to look like "a pussy"?

Inside the attraction, the goers shriek & laugh , crook their arms, and lean back from masked assailants, their giddy expressions caught in tenths-of-a-second poses from the strobe lights. The black kids move away with particularly elastic, guffawing expressions; a few make a motion to sucker-punch the costumed apparitions.

Ah, the experiences of a desegregated society!

Within this particular clump of strangers, a white man in his late '30s. Perhaps a "little old" for Silo-X, what with his greasy hair, a bald spot, "mutton chop" whiskers, and eyes sticking out over the rim of eyelids, but looks at his diverse company and figures "that's alright, man".

Somewhere in Silo-X's 10 square acres, I run over a wooden bridge-- rolling logs lashed together-- reeds waving morosely from a fetid pond. And there, lit in red, is a phantom helicopter. Grinning skeletons, under military fatigues and flight helmets, threaten me with mock-death. An audio recording of splashing mortars hurries me over the bridge. Here in 1994 when this reminiscence happened, a nod to our peaceful times with no future wars on the horizons.

All the "terror" was confined to entertainment and teenaged conundrums, our self-centered world with what was true right under the nose of our purview, ignorant of the harsher truths out there of how the world actually worked that we would learn in time. But it sure seemed real. . . . . and we emerge out the other side triumphant. We have flirted with death and survived, making us "feel more alive". If you block that yearning to reach out to the dark, then what more is it then a perversion of "the life instinct" because the very existence of life depends on contrast, duality, and the tension in between. As long as kids know enough that they can reach out there, and then snap back with the triumphant forces of light-- then nothing says they can't be saved.

That's all there is to tell about that side of it. But if anything, it jolted into motion a sense of smoothness and harmony when you're yanked out of your own mental prison and back into the world, the cosmic beat of things where "no man is an island". It's like watching two people having "a connection" through a conversation. Over time, if you watch them, they will begin to mirror each other's body language with blinks and gestures. This is an example of us falling into line with "a kind of power". When children play on a playground-- having a good time-- they form a rhythm that can be mapped out on a computer screen, further evidence of the emergent property of harmony. When we are spiritually "out-of-whack" we have friction in our lives like a broken, limping machine and are in fact, "dead-beats" in the great cosmic rhythm. This power is like the energy that flows through the waves of water in a lake. The water is not moving forward, but is actually rising and falling. . . . . and it is through that wave that you can see the action of God. The power goes through the point of least friction, of least resistance. When we're outside of "the plan", we fall into the wrong things. Don't think that you ever have to be "this", that you ever have to be "that", but seek out the plan and "get back with it" by participating in the world.

That's one side of the coin. . . . .

Certain scientists who deal with quantum physics, the kind of science that verges on "science fiction", speculate that "consciousness" was formed in the universe with the "Big Bang". This is important, because the very act of observing something will determine its outcome. The universe "knows" whether you will check out the results of an experiment, hence existence itself. I tend to believe that human brains have built up the ability to receive this consciousness which exists in the universe like ether, though the mind/body is an imperfect antenna. I tend to be a "Platonic Idealist", which is to say, I think on some level, ideas have a spiritual existence in the universe and that we can "channel" these ideas through symbols and role-playing. Just call me the Shaman!

Well, well, well.

At some point you write and "do this" regardless of whether or not your work "will see the light of day" and "get signed" by a magazine or a major publisher. If you set out to be number one "by cutting along the dotted line", you'll never stand out in "the rat-pit" of über-competition where everyone is selling "the same product" right down to the limboing, cut-throat descent into free-for-all Malthusian hell where there ain't enough sustenance for all. But on the other hand, if you load your "Mad Max" mobile with a rocket-launcher and an eight-foot metal pike and some long-vanquished opponent's charred, mohwakwed skull on your dash-- then "that might just give you a chance", (Or make you a post-apocalyptic clown gunning the engine on the outskirts)

But if video rental logic has told me anything, this divine stranger, mythical hero, what have you-- is in store for "a cosmic adventure" when he vanquishes his enemies, gets the girl, and brings peace to "happy valley". And may the gods shine on "this bard's tale" below. . . . .

Thank you for participating in my
Virtual Reality "Head-Trip"

(Not Really!)

*******************

"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

("I heard that, Missy!")

© 2010 by Insufferable Industries

Drop "The Bard" a line at
michaeladams_s@yahoo.com

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