"Libertarian Psychosis"

On a given day, Bobby will flip a coin and seesaw between godliness & god-awfulness during the rambling course of one of his storytelling hoe-downs. . . . . oftentimes with greater turn-over than the ball crossing the court in professional basketball games.

There's his rough spiritual attunement, getting down on one knee and listening to cues from The Almighty, offering to lead the way to holy salvation like "John the Baptist" gently wading in the waters, and then in a moment's notice he's exploding with mirth over the "Tommy Lee/Pamela Anderson" sex tape where the two idiots filmed their honeymoon, the Mötley Crüe drummer in question sitting in the driver's seat and honking the car horn with his 10-inch dick. Quieter men would raise their eyebrow at the wild laughter as Bobby rocked on the porch faster and faster in his customary chair like a middle-aged prophet on speed.

"Let the bells of freedom ring" and a man in a three-cornered hat dance a jig through the village square and play on a flute, but the Founding Fathers posing with their powdered wigs and hands in their breech jackets, let alone the constipated ex-military men on antenna-in-the-dirt Christian radio who lean their bulk into the microphone and growl about "big government"-- scarcely intended anything like this.

"America was founded on dissent", goes the argument in town hall meetings by the liberal, spacey, and fish-eyed, but usually find the unclean idea "shushed down" in a panic like Puritans hissing at sinners at a public dunking. And after you see the kind of characters who gather around freedom taken to its literal wild-eyed and wooly-haired implication, you'd be hissing too. . . . .

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

For a strange, out-of-body experience, nothing beats a barbeque at "The Self-Help Center" where you can meet all kinds of dissenters. . . . . many at odds with the strictures of society and living outside of its confines like a tribe of primitives gnawing on hotdogs. It is here in this uneventful "hang-out" with a humming soda machine in the hall they smoke and slop coffee and head over to the wienies soaking through a greasy paper plate like a school of bizarre undersea creatures "gorping" toward the volcanic vents, sight unseen, in regions of the ocean so deep there's no sunlight from the ways and means and burdens and cares of the working world. So little energy to prime the ecosystem, so little current and activity, except for a volcanic spurt found in a monthly social security disability check fizzling up from the bedrock of government like "Ole' Faithful".

In theory, "The Center" is a cheery clubhouse intended to keep the mentally-ill socialized, engaged, tethered to the company of society, and prevented from "going off the deep end" into even stranger parts unknown. The higher-functioning swim for the surface before the pressure of necessity pushes them back down into the depths where they make their reluctant home.

Other than each other, there is no regulatory function to balance the hits n' misses in deviance and things get awfully weird. . . . . witchcraft, superstition, the occult. . . . . creativity sparking momentarily and then fizzling in on itself like some strange culture of all-too-human bacterial slurry. If the values of common courtesy are like bathers splashing around in the public swimming pool, then there's a lot of shit and piss and tampons and punctured blow-up dolls floating around in there for the lack of common consideration.

Jokes about pussy-- fingering pussy, eating pussy, and even jests about squirting pussy chortle around the tables, and not forgetting freedom's clarion call that makes "Ole' Glory" flap proudly on the masthead of the nation's capitol-- farting pussy.

I didn't say it. . . . . they did. Dr. Ruth would scope out "The Self-Help Center" and run screaming for the hills of Bavaria. Even therapists have standards!

This was freedom. . . . .

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

One time a delegate from the local libertarian party came to "The Center", trolling for signatures to legalize heroin. No one knew where he came from, only that this lanky, pimple-faced kid with long, blonde hair dressed in short-sleeves like an office clerk at some kind of stab at formality stood up on a table and started pontificating on his whacked-out positions. . . . . that all drugs should be legalized, that the right to all abortions should be up to the woman until the umbilical cord is severed, that 13 year olds should be aloud to drive and carry guns while police should be limited to nightsticks like English "bobbies". . . . . and so on, and so forth as the membership stared on overmedicated, lump-like, and flabbergasted.

The speech continued. . . . .

His plan was to rally the young, the indigent, the poor, the blacks, the gays, the feminists, the dope-smokers, and the radical pro-choice league into one liberal, grubby, spacey, and fish-eyed coalition marching on the state capitol. Today, Jefferson City. . . . . tomorrow, THE WORLD.

There were no takers. Even the mentally-ill had more sense than that.

The activist left, undeterred, and took his proletarian rabble-rousing to a stout German Catholic south St. Louis bar and offered to buy strangers drinks if they'd sign his petition. He tried standing up on the bar and going into his speech when he got thrown out on his ass with a mouth full of broken teeth. Though he screamed at the top of his lungs that he was going to sue, they slammed the door and let him wander off with his snapped clipboard and torn, crumpled-up pages.

The only freedom apparent here was the right to remain silent. . . . .