"Flight Recorder" & "Smokescreen"
Ever
been to a Winona Ryder message
board? You can see the fractured lens of reality these "worst of the
worst" stare out of, the ones whom I cheerily refer to as "my boys"
like a fat man in a Satan costume holding up a hand of cards, and tempting
them to drink and play "Black Jack" with a bared grin of Irish working
man's debauchery like a swung arm of brogue. I can't fault them for their
devotion. . . . . though their puttering up there has certainly dropped off in
recent years since this roar from a certain state has left them jerking up their
heads like ostriches.
A while back, one had posted an average of three messages a day,
every day, over the course of a three-year period. Though such a hobby leaves
little time for other endeavors, such as ballroom dancing, neither does bulking
up one's writing skills to produce a website like mine as a Navy SEAL of the
written word. Another cheerfully bragged about his Another went out and bought 11
"Replacements" CD's, a band that was one of Winona's favorites years
back. Unknown is if she still even gives a shit for their music, as he bops away
in ecstasy-- trying to channel her "dharma" 10,000 miles over mountains
and rivers and fields. Which, come to think of it, is the ultimate jangled,
flapping, disorderly sort of punk rock that a quirky, bonkers girl like her
would have listened to as a kid without a refined sense of taste. . . . .kind of
like how I was bonking my head up and down to Metallica's "Black Album" in 1993
and took it as "a higher authority" instead of a slickly-produced,
lunking, radio-friendly "piece-of-shit" that sent aural tendrils deep
into my medulla oblongata,
"the lizard brain".
Which, as one knows, controlled
the "kill, fuck, and die" function in our world of "Happy Mac's" and PBS
children's programming that did not respect my inner Tyrannasaur as I chafed
under the gelatinous, Afro-fied heel of Billary. Back then I would sooner watch H.R.
Giger's "Alien" chomp off the heads of screaming humans than learn how to type.
. . . . or see Sigourney Weaver prancing around in her underwear with her
ass-crack hanging out in the cutest plumber's smile a 12 year-old could imagine
until a clawed hand jerked out like a sex pervert's. It
was an angel/whore relationship with women. . . . . I remember in
the spring of '91 being turned onto the "Alien" series over at one of my
mother's New Age meditation partners' home on a windswept street in a hip,
tumble-down neighborhood She was the avatar of cool, mellow womanhood with a
black leather jacket and sunglasses-- an ex-Mormon from Utah who was married to
an Air Force test pilot. She asked the question,
200th
300th Winona-themed t-shirt made with a laborious iron-on
practice so subject to costly error and detail-oriented hassle that I gave up on
my amateur t-shirt business like Richard Nixon trying to go into a frozen orange
juice venture and the damn shipment exploding into a sticky mess on the train.
He was not a quitter, he just. . . . . chose a new strategy!
Shit happens! Mindy also instilled me with the idea that you
could be anything you wanted in America-- if you only worked hard enough. There
was an image of Arnold Schwarzenegger who came to America with nothing but his
gym bag and became the #1 bodybuilder and movie star in America, an image of
"Conan the Barbarian" hefting his sword in mythic destiny.
And another film we watched was "Beetlejuice"-- a bizarre,
"feel-good" movie about death that gave you the willies by sloshing its hand in
the dark waters of the cauldron and showing you that there cannot be light
without darkness. And in this movie was a teenaged Winona Ryder, dressed up like
a goth-witch. . . . . the most uncannily beautiful, luminescent creature I had
ever seen in my entire life-- then or since. I looked over at Mindy, I looked
over at Winona, I looked over at my own candy-assed Jewish mother who
overindulged me like a young Donald Trump-- and that was the troika right there
in that living room, as certain as the three beautiful fates. Something opened up for me in the universe where all the forces
of cosmic possibility fried through my stately, 9 year-old consciousness and I
knew this was a more important moment than saving an 8-bit, pixilated princess
in "Super Mario Bros." This was quite real, and zapping through me with more
power than the arcade game, "Golden-Axe" where you went around chopping up
townsfolk in some duped, 6th generation "Robert E. Howard" pulp fantasy. I was
the hero in this novel. . . . . but life happens while you're making other plans
and you fall to the easy temptation of milk and Oreo cookies and endless rounds
of "Super Mario 2" whose warped Middle Eastern motif channeled through Japanese
programmers then fed back to American audiences suggested the opium dreams of a
caterpillar burrowing through the sand in search of shit to suck on. I ask you,
historians of our Western decline-- "WHO REALLY WON WORLD WAR II?"
Case closed. But forward years later onto the message board. . . . . where
said ostriches huddle around the watering hole all day, if not sitting in the
ass-bound chair of the sweet shit of their own overripe self-indulgence like a
fly-blown sundae that would make even a sick fuck like me turn his head away in
disgust. No, I would not
The
ole' gang refused to believe it at first. . . . . grasping at every straw of an
alternative explanation like "flat-earthers" trying to explain how an
orbiting satellite snapped pictures of our oblong planet in outer space.
Conspiracy theories, "mistaken identity", overzealous prosecutors, you name it.
The reasoning got pretty baroque up there, and eventually I drew so much ire
from the worshipful fan-boys by playing "devil's advocate" on the side of what
would be apparent "commonsense", that I got my account yanked by a huffy
administrator who would strike me as a ponderous, weighty "gentleman" of roughly
the frowning carriage of Matt Drudge playing "God" as "System Administrator"
with a bottle of Dr. Pibb in one pasty, meaty fist. As someone "who
went over the flight recorder" step-by-step, the incident was bizarre-- yes,
but made perfect sense with as more and more information got released with what
had been happening around there and with what a policeman would know about the
world with a jaundiced eye. As the crow flies, I'm reminded of a mafia kingpin
who in court wants to weave a tale and convince the jury that his housemaid's 10
year-old son playin' video games is the real "criminal mastermind" pulling the levers of
power yonder "behind the scenes". One would then have to ask who ordered that 1981 hit
on a rival boss that left a body badly shot up in the street in a puddle of
blood, if not a series of hot-wired Rolls Royce ignitions that took out his
sons, capo, and Chief Financial Officer which left metal shrapnel sizzling in
dented mail-boxes and snapped light-poles. The don puts on his Odus Temple
Illumi hat, which looks like a Masonic rip-off of the pope's headgear, and says
that the boy's prenatal spirit from the ether of the neo-Platonic "universal"
that circles the earth in a soup of unexpressed, yet inherent verbiage was
channeled through him like hell's wrath, and eyes glowing like coals-- made him
pick up that phone and order that hit. Or maybe the phone picked itself up by itself and floated across the room up
against his ear, where he spoke in an inverted, yet disembodied Satanic voice of
demons which are collective in legion-- like VooDoo Italy meets "Evil Dead". No, grandma can't be surprised by much, this old
sage waxing literal-minded about kitschy angels she picked up at a yard-sale two
Sunday's ago. But one thing did get her attention: a mounted trout, that with
the touch of a button folded away from it's perch and sung "Oh Susannah". There the thing was-- stupid, fish-lipped-- then it would get out of sync, so the head would fold away from the board and it would move it's lips even though no music was coming out except for the cheap mechanical works carrying on inside. Grandma stared down at the thing like a wizened Buddha, and pressed the button over and over again to see if that's all this piece of junk did. Apparently it was. That was humble life up in Eureka, Missouri yonder down Highway 44. Like it or not, it was closer to my world and the mentality of my old coach,
Larry Frost. . . . . lumbering around somewhere back in 1982 like behemoths on
"the losing end of evolution" as our world got ever slicker and abstracted from
reality. One had an image in the mid-90's of tech messianism of a cyber
rocket-ship made out of high-speed, cable-modem boosters thundering away from
earth and into star-dappled space and most definitely leaving that muddy, analog
"potter's field" behind where Coach Larry Frost in his blue canvas windbreaker
shook his pitch-fork in the air with a bellow and threw rocks. Yes, it was like
the crafty, geeky Odysseus of alt-rock and techno record-spinning blinding the
Cyclops. . . . . Robin Hood & his "Merry Ball-Lickers" of "Silicon Valley"
pranksters "getting one over" on the fat, southern sheriff as they
spooned around politically-correct yuppie yogurt and chortled over the
description,
The
shoplifting incident occurred, like our favorite little waif being plucked out
of society like a kitten by the nape of the neck and detained by the department
store security guards, later the police. The evidence was collected, Winona was
handcuffed, and a police car-- lights flashing-- took her down to the
stationhouse where she was duly booked, strip-searched, and eventually let go
into the enveloping night of consequences and glaring media attention.
And may a 15th vampyric
Italian nobleman with a cruel mustache and feral eyes thrash around in a coffin,
making love to a willing, waifish, hollow-cheeked peasant girl at the howls of
the witching hour with a vignette of gothic romance about two cuts below Anne
Rice at her most decadently putrescent. Yes, without even the humor and
self-awareness of Elvira: "Mistress of the Dark" who will send you a pre-printed
autograph signed "Yours Cruelly" if you write away with a little bit of money to
join her fan club. . . . . that warms the hearts of goof-off's like us with a
pleasant tingling below the waistline that ain't morbid and would save the
coffin for grandma, hobbling around as she is like an old Lutheran slug.
Yes, as even today these pop-trendies wander around blathering into their i-phones like stick-legged Steve Jobs disciples with a cup of "Starbucks" coffee in one cyber-monkey fist. The only thing "green" in this world with the next coming bubble is the jungle canopy as your plane crashes down into the jungles of Vietnam and you face nature, red in tooth and claw like driving away a jaguar with a sharpened stick. Sweet dreams, Obama voters. The only all-consuming point of transcending "Singularity" you'll know is when you're reduced to bear shit and are being consumed by the beetles back into the worthlessness from whence you came.
I am reminded a bit of a kid I knew back in elementary school and how it plays into this.
The happy-go-lucky prepubescent hustler. . . . . one part Don King, another part Tom Sawyer. To fully understand the dimension of this young man, you have to see the "Yellow Key" auto insurance commercial. It was the kind of thing that played on the dead tide of daily block program slots, akin to the total lack of enrichment found in Nintendo summers and cheap cartoons on local television stations. As it went-- regardless of past driving records, no insurance, driving while suspended, or new to the area, they'd insure anybody-- holding you over the barrel and reaming you up the ass with the fine print. But up front, there was no "fine print". . . . . just the commercial shot "on the cheap" of a guy waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles and told flatly that
"You need proof of insurance, sir". The man is stunned. Then out of nowhere:"Excuse me",
a black guy in short sleeves putting his arms around the hapless white sack of shit like a hip cartoon character. He then gives you the pitch for the service, his Afro-ed head tilted back in ironic comment. What is required is 1) Driver's License and 2) Paycheck Stub. As the guy runs off to get those things, the black pitchman flashes an easy smile and gives the camera a thumb's up. Livin' large with quick fixes and the hip dodge.Maybe it was not quite as brazen as "Lee's Pawn and Jewelry" located on Dr. Martin Luther King Drive in a rundown part of the city-- simultaneously the area's largest pawn shop and jewelry outlet in the area. Kind of funny how black people used each other to get ahead while never escaping their wretched social conditions. But we were too young to know this back in the 4th grade and our affluent school district was an innocent, gracious host to the desegregation program, notwithstanding the uglier truths of the world.
Happy-go-lucky was the way to go. . . . . And there Frank was, playing the amateur magician out in the hallway. He wore white gloves, and let smoke rise with the snapping open of his hands. Yet his gloves were covered with the cheap powder that stank. Then there were the card tricks; you could kind of see the trick cards at an angle but pretended to be in awe and let him play the part of the trickster. Indeed, there was no such thing as magic in the world. . . . . these simple tricks ordered out of catalogs and manufactured out of China by bowing workers, pushed back into the shadows next to the exploding jump-kick of Jackie Chan promotions "where good always won in the end". Home of the cheap clicking frogs that you won at carnivals but that broke just about as soon as you got home. And not to mention fireworks-- the stink of sulfur and shredded paper littering the ground after the device expended itself. Like torn lotto tickets, or empty bags of Cheetos fluttering across a ghetto parking lot.
But it was good to believe in magic, that a little bit of destiny could exist for a pair of ten year-olds standing out in the hallway. That we would both grow up to become rich and famous and fabulously successful, that all our dreams could come true on this swirling speck of planet earth.
But Frank crashed. As a teenager he became a bold delinquent with a taste for danger and accidentally killed himself while playing a game of Russian Roulette with some friends in an abandoned warehouse. If you trace "the flight recorder" and who Frank was, then all of this makes perfect sense of why it happened the way it happened.
What I hate is the idea that anyone might hold you confused within "a smokescreen". . . . . walking away with your finger in the air and supposing that you'll believe "like a good citizen" because you're trapped within a point of reference and don't have the courage "to break out".
It's like when ole' Herman would pick up his daughter and two half-Lutheran grandsons at LaGuardia airport in New York. There he would stand there, stooped with his gray cap covering his snow-white hair and escort us to pick up our luggage as his voice rose like a swelling horn that became irritable partly out of habit, partly out of facetiousness which we found so funny.
But Herman didn't notice that we boys were laughing at his old, peculiar East
Coast ways that were hard-bitten as they were irascible even into his '80s as he
swiped through traffic and hollered
However, my brother and I both found ourselves in a place where we were just about the equivalent of "Shemp" & "Larry" from "The Three Stooges" and were stranded in an ethnic "No Man's Land" without direction. To the extent that they might raise their fist, but never have "the force of conviction" to follow through with their swing because in their heart they were sheltered cowards. Maybe things would have been better for them if someone had taught the boys warriorly principles or how to survive in the mean streets of the city, like Herman's generation had.
But this was very hard to explain as our lives took a deviating flight path. . . . . Maybe things would have been different if my name was "Harvey" and I was from the New York suburbs and I was going to my Bar Mitzvah in 1966 with friends and family and supporters-- in other words, DEEP COVER in that community-- that would have given my brother and I a cushion of emotional support. It would have been only natural that we would have went on to become doctors or lawyers or other high-paid professionals instead of struggling, overqualified media types in a shrinking sector that sinks to the lowest common denominator when user and content become one and the same and it's impossible to turn "a real living" short of selling one's soul to the grubs.
Gotta love it.
A smokescreen can either be one of falsely-assured success or desperation when you can't see through the illusion because you don't want to threaten your world-view.
I once set up a date with a girl where she billed herself as "an intellectual" with a snorted horse-laugh. I posited to her a two-part question:
A) What makes you an intellectual?
B) How can you be so sure?
And I told her to take her time because that could be "a real mind-fuck of a question if you're not prepared". She came off like a total pompous idiot who reminded me a great deal of myself a couple of years back when I was only trying to cover up the maggoty stench of my own insecurity and where I stood upon the anvil of things. But she came across more like a squalling ape who had gone too far out on a limb and was having a perch sawed out from beneath her like something out of a "Warner Brothers" cartoon. If she came across like a dopey-voiced "Elmer Fudd" with Asperger's Syndrome trying to be something more, then I was "Bugs Bunny" in on the joke where the laws of gravity very much applied as the limb bent and snapped. Yes, sending her down in a shower of leaves, screeches, and hot ape shit.
Have some "Gorilla Glue", "Asp-Hole". . . . . and come
back chastened & wiser
for your fall in Michael's fun-house!
Perhaps we joke that we are
"THE BROTHERS MIGHTY" and have plenty else to do instead of falling for the some of the most common of man's petty foibles. Like the losers hanging out at the local Applebee's "with time to kill", your author has an occasional night or even wherewithal if he's up to it to shoot the breeze at "the crossroads of the world" and twirl his fingers through the hair of Conchita, the beautiful, plucky half-Jewish/half-Mexican waitress who waits tables and has scant seconds to talk with him as he pours his heart into a glass and they briefly smile into each others' eyes, for 'lo-- there's for more pressing matters to power-lift his concentration. Most of those characters around that bar are hardly "solid territory" anyhow, on which you could lay down track to send "The Iron Horse" thundering from coast-to-coast in steel-smolten capitalistic triumph, but the track would sink like muddy, unreliable ground in a quicksand of human dubiety that neither liberalism or trans-humanist posturing can fix, nor a trillion-dollar stimulus plan.
But the one thing he
won't do "is eat shit", or live without honor. The awful truth
about human behavior is that we'd keep on doing what we're doing like pirates,
thieves, mercenaries, CEO's, politicians, generals, and yes-- web authors until
someone came along "and knocked us off our high horse". I know
when I did wrong things I was less sorry for what I did, but "more sorry
that I got caught". Only when someone could explain to me "the
upside of virtue" and "what was in it for me" would I take interest.
It's why I don't devote this website to an ugly girl. And if I did, it would be
to get a charge out of feeling morally-superior over others. "What
a champ!" remarked an anonymous
poster on the message board, who should fortunately remain anonymous, as
Winona pressed through the raucous, scratching camera crews of tabloid
television.
The
message board flipped around suddenly, and wished her a speedy recovery.
"WE
LOVE YOU WINONA!" they posted
ad-infinitum, even as she "dried out" in some fancy Malibu clinic. Maybe
we get the kind of fans we deserve, but I'd like to at least THINK that I'm
a cut above as your "Navy SEAL" and half-Jewish bullshit artist. *******************
And the verdict
was handed down. . . . . guilty on all counts. She was duly sentenced to
community service, rehab, and psychiatric counseling, if not a suspended
sentence for sundry mischief that would make Beavis & Butthead howl as they
played air-guitar and made the sign of the devil like "The Headless Children".
"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!")
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