"Ghostwriter" (2008)
Category: Writing and Poetry

tired all the time
because he masturbates so much
the boy in the boxers with the bag of doritos
high as a kite and clean as a whistle
he's taken three showers today
nobody ever said life can't be easy
the bachelor lights up on his back balcony
and watches stars fall over alleys of trashcans
takes out the dogs
meets his deadlines
makes sacrifices for his serenity
they call him a ghostwriter
they say he uses his typewriter as a pillow
and when he hears that ring
when the cursor hits the end of a line
and returns that's when
our guy never hits the snooze button
no, our guy is hardcore
doesn't always pay his dues on time
but stays true to his friends
he's got one fuck of a music collection
has read Crowley and Blavatsky
Robert Anton fuckin' Wilson
you know the guy
collects parking tickets
like they were baseball cards
and he had to have the entire collection
in mint condition
under magnets on his refrigerator
like so many city fingers scolding
you should not have parked there at that time
you know the rules
tired all the time
from driving all the time
knows the nooks and crannies of the city like a goddamned proctologist
drives aggressive but he knows what he's doing
uses his fuckin' turn signal
as a matter of principal
I never understood the guy.
smoked with him a couple times
think he used to date my sister
it's been 2,000 years since the birth of Christ
high time and low tide
gonna take out a gas station with a lit cigarette
as a sacrifice to my third grade teacher
take out all my sinus headaches
on Saudi Arabia
our guy cuts the engine and rolls down the window
watches his magnum opus take off her dress
pale thighs and black garters
four walls on fire in the night
four walls falling down all around
rain just like confetti
after a long muggy day in the backyard
shooting the shit and drinking beer

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"Oh Felix Culpa!" (2004-08) (excerpt 41)
Category: Writing and Poetry

My first experience with the literature of Robert Anton Wilson came at the age of twenty-one, not long before my first experience with psychedelic mushrooms.  The effects were relatively similar, both opening up my rebelliously young impressionable, recovering Catholic, conveniently Aristotlean mind into labrynths of avenues previously unscathed in the vaults of my brain.  Call it mindfuck.  Over marijuana and tea one evening a poet friend of mine from the local East Side scene handed me his old marked up and self-annotated copy of the epic sci-fi classic The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which Wilson had co-written with his late friend Robert Shea in the mid-seventies.  It was presented to me fondly by my friend, accompanied in our circle by other poet friends and an aged hippie folk musician friend who had also read the book, with comments by all in rich awe for its contents, concept, and parasympathetic multi-dimensional writing style.  I was told posthumously that their alterior motive for planting me in such a book was to "get me beyond all that Beat shit."  Indeed all I would read otherwise at the time was anything by Kerouac and his circle of friends.  Such as well was turned onto me by that same said circle of poet and musician friends, not unlike the Beats, but more modern and more Milwaukee.  It was not uncommon among us to pass on and exchange books that had an enlightening effect on us which we were compelled to share, much like our favorite drugs.  Perhaps Wilson was the next logical step in my extra-academic curricular journey through the vaults of mind-altering literature that began in my adolescence with Huxley and Leary. I have yet to come down from the RAW trip, though I've experimented mixing it with other Schedule III books in the same occult New Falcon Press family, to ever-astonishing effects.

            Though perhaps to a lesser degree than Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, the book is very much alive in that there a multiple protagonists in multiple places and times, though seemingly simultaneously, all dangling in and out of the limelight on a taunting collage just out of reach over the reader's not-for-long relatively infant, or at least virgin, mind.  You really don't know how naive you used to be until some 500 pages in some tastey poison between the syllables has interacted with the chemicals in your brain, stretching your synapses like some sick game of neural pilates.  It would seem Wilson's big trick is that he's secretly initiating you into the Illuminati as you go along, and it's not until you've finished reading it that you realize the operation's been done.  At least that's what my buddy Max told me not long after I'd put it down.  Wilson himself laughs at accusations from the likes of Lyndon LaRouche who try to pin him as the Grand Master of said secret society, which most likely no longer exists, unless under a different name.

            The most prominent of the epic's many characters is a Dante-esque conspiracy-chasing reporter who finds himself sucked down his own trail through Mad Dog County jail to be bailed by some hot-tailed psycho-nympho and then hailed aboard a submarine set sail for some apocalyptic rock festival led by the captain of the Discordian Society and a super-intelligent whale.  Finally the poor schmuck comes out from this crazy underworld back in bed with his ever-elusive lover, who might just as well be named Beatrice.  Alas in the end he still doesn't know whether he's just been through the inferno, purgatory, or paradise.  Nor will old Bob allow anyone but the Reader decide who were the Good Guys and who were the Bad Guys of this grand degree play.

           Because his schtick in this book is playing on a myriad of conspiracy theories all at once, half his characters are made-up (though they may pop up in other books), while half are either household names from history or names only known within occult circles (which I familiarized myself with only posthumously), and parts of the situations and events are all "true," parts of them part "true," and part of them not "true" at all, not only are you left in the dark as to when he is or isn't putting you or even himself on just to see how it affects the mind, but you come out that much more in the dark about the same in the "real" world, yet that much more enlightened for it.  Indeed Bob himself found that a few of the conspiracies he thought he had concocted of his own Imagination turned out to be quite real.

            The world created between its covers manifests itself Right Where You Are Sitting Now in an amalgam of conspiracy theories covering everything from Sirius and Atlantis to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Freemasons, and all its appendant, influenced and influential secret societies.  As a Mason myself a full seven year cycle of cellular death and resurrection later, I can look back and muse over how ironically my first "knowledge" of Freemasonry stemmed from the mock-conspiracy theories of an Irish-American pothead.  If Bob is a Mason himself, he wouldn't admit to conforming too indulgently into one specific organization's credo.  If he isn't, well then, he Knows Too Much.

            Who and what the Illuminati are or were, whether they were or are good or bad, was never clearly stated, and deliberately so.  The specific entity begun in 1776 by Masons Adam Weishapt, Benjamin Franklin, and Count Cagliostro with the alleged intention of destroying the Catholic Church and freeing up the minds of the masses in preparation for the oncoming Aquarian Age of the Holy Spirit is so loosely misconstrued in the Tower of Babel world of conspiracy theory as an ongoing blanket secret societies, encompassing the entire heirarchal power structure from the All-Seeing Eye of Horus at the top of the pyramid, down through the Masons, the Federal Government, the Government, the corporate media, the Education System, and even the hospitals and post offices, who are all "in on" that blasted plan to control how we think and act.  The typical nutjub considers that looser misconstruction of the Illuminati to be that ever-elusive "They" or "Them" for which all "My" and "Our" beaurocratic handicaps are to blame.  In contrast, Old Bob prefers to consider said "Illuminati," responsible for and responsive to creating a Reality through our admixture perceptions (or vice versa), as himself and his friends.

            The illuminated head of our earthly divine RAW, as one brilliant channel of the Collective Unconscious, exists and works much like the Information Superhighway itself.  Like the Internet, the Mind of Bob is able to encompass a billion different complementing and contradicting theories as one surfs from page to page, none more or less credence over another than its links and sources could attribute.  I've read it said that the mark of true Intelligence is being able to hold two seemingly contradictory theories at once as true.  Wilson, in his virtuously lazy Taoist wisdom, surpasses this acid test by proving able to hold at once both True and False and Neither True Nor False all and every possible theory of anything, as filtered through the handicapped faculties of the human brain that thunk them into the even more unreliable scope of language, alas only a set of abstract symbols--the Writing on the Wall flashlighted deep within that burning Tower of Babel--to be drank to be made drunks of other just as if not less confused human brains still, concluding he just doesn't Know, and nor is it possible to.  An esoteric literary hero of Bob's who he seems so fond of glorifying, the Great Beast Aleister Crowley (33rd degree Mason, outer head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, member of the Golden Dawn, etc, etc) mastered and priested every religion all over the world, from Christianity to Satanism, Buddhism to Hinduism, and up the hill, through the tunnel, and back around again.  Just as the intrinsically eclectic music of the Grateful Dead in turn turned me onto so many different artists of so many different genres, from blues to jazz to bluegrass (which I might argue vary from one to the other in their respective cultural groove much the same as say Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism vary from each other), so too as to my fortune has the work of RAW linked and enlightened me to a delicious stew of quite a few other writers who in time have become heroes of mine as well.  Besides Crowley, Bob's bold palette of inspirators include such colorful folk as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Wilhelm Reich, Alfred Korzybski, Timothy Leary, Carl Jung, Israel Regardie, R. Buckminster Fuller, and William S. Burroughs, all whose philosophies he has over the course of so many books and articles convincingly isomorphed into one system of thought, the negative integer of the set of all thoughts unsquared. 

            It was Wilson who got me hooked into the isomorph game, seeing where various Belief Systems (B.S.) and symbol sets match up and agree beneath the surface of their arbitrary lingos.  For instance, did you know that just as the I Ching, that ancient Chinese oracle of Changes, once done on the shells of tortoises before the Age of Print, contains sixty-four possible hexagrams (8x8 combinations of upper and lower trigrams), so too does the relatively recently discovered Genetic Code that underlies all life contains sixty-four possible RNA combinations (see also the dueling black and white squares of a chessboard)?  Do you suppose that either relies any more on Chance than the other, or are they just different man-made language sets for interpreting the same otherwise intangible phenomenon along the same "cosmic" wavelength of apparent patterns?  And are the parallels between the lives and miracles of Jesus and such pagan sons of deities as Dionysus and Osiris attributable to the Hundredth Monkey Theory, or coincidence, or diabolic mimicry (as some might actually have it), or is it just the History of the Mind of God repeating Itself in varied loops through its componant individual human minds over Space-Time?  I don't fucking know, and neither does Wilson, but maybe we're that much more Intelligent for our modesty than Schmuck who thinks he can put these things to a definition by which to distinguish them from other such concepts.

           Years later I discovered a "non-fiction" book by Wilson called Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, at the time out of print.  It was sitting on the bookshelves of my old hippie Rainbow Warrior folk musician friend, who had since moved out to the "gorge-ous" upstate college town of Ithaca (the one in New York).  Back when I was finishing up Illuminatus!, quitting smoking, and vainly getting over an ex, he gave me my first dose of psychedelic mushrooms.  God bless that atheist for that.  With an ounce of local Blueberry at my disposal, I finally found an escape time to read Cosmic Trigger while getting over yet another ex, who I was still stuck living in the same house with.  Between intimate sessions with Just 18 magazines locked up in my tiny bedroom with just my cat and a bottomless pipe, I pealed through the book with glazed enthusiasm.  I was taken by his interpretation of Leary's idea of the eight circuits of the brain and how they fit with the ages of Man, in terms of both individual growth and the evolution of the species.  They also seemed to line up pretty interestingly with certain archetypes in astrology and the Tarot deck.  Wilson expounds upon the eight circuit theory and all its interesting isomorphs best in his psycho-neuro-semantic non-fiction thriller Prometheus Rising.

            It was in this same book that I first came across the theory that man might have evolved not just from monkeys, but from extra-terrestrials from the Dog Star procreating with monkeys.  Of course Wilson refuses to subscribe dogmatically to any ideas he might come across or upon, no matter how much ink he spills on the subject.  Even in his own experience supposedly communicating with our alleged ancestors he admits could have been influenced by a little too much Irish Whiskey, if not psychedelic drugs. 

            In a 1994 interview with James Nye in London, Wilson recounts meeting some bloke in Dublin who tried to tell him that an illuminated inner circle of Masonry above the 33rd degree (which is where some claim the Illuminati hide/hid) that is in touch with Sirius.  I don't doubt that our lizard-fearing friend David Icke would back up said bloke.  But Wilson would sooner chalk this up as what Hugh Kenner calls an "Irish fact," which, far from being a French fact or an English fact, or even an American fact, and definitely not a scientific fact, has "the wonderful Daliesque fluidity of a melting clock and the Joycean uncertainty of a rubber inch."  I don't know; none of my brethren in the lodge who have achieved the white hat status ever mention anything about communications from other planets, just other lodges, and only to invite our lodge to a charity golf tournament.  Then again, if it's so secret, I suppose they couldn't tell me anyway.  Perhaps they're hiding some kind of super antenna under those white hats?

            (Maybe I'm in on the secret, too, and I'm just spitting out mocking denials upon you vulgar masses!)

            When I read a variation on the seemingly "out there" (so to speak) Alien Ancestor Theory in Zechariah Sitchin's book The 12th Planet, I came about as close as I'll consciously come to accepting a given theory without physical proof.  Or maybe the physical proof is too old and metaphysical for me to notice?  As time has passed since I finished reading the book, I have reciprocally grown less enthusiastically intimate with the idea.  Which certainly doesn't mean I don't believe it at all; just that I'm less likely to make any serious inquiry into my family tree in the stars tomorrow night.  I could no less throw it out for lack of concrete evidence otherwise as I could embrace it for lack of evidence in the first.  Like Leary said, there very well could be something in our obsession with shows like Star Trek and "spaced-out" Grateful Dead jams on acid.

            I wonder if Sitchin's twelfth planet and Sirius are the same place, if both or one or the other even exist?  Incidentally, the "tenth" and "eleventh" planets in Sitchin's theory would be the Sun and Moon, as the Ancient Sumerians apparently grouped them all together as "heavenly bodies."  Interestingly, the Ancient Egyptians, who got most of their knowledge and religion from the neighboring Sumerians before them, knew all about Sirius and its dwarf companion Sirius B.  Note that the latter can't be seen with the naked eye.  So unless they had telescopes back in Ancient Egypt, someone had to have some kind of contact with the "gods."  Could this be the source of pre-deluvian knowledge preserved perhaps in secret societies and the inner teachings of religion?  Wilson talks at lengths in Cosmic Trigger about the Dogon tribe of Mali, whose worship actually centers around the movements of Sirius B (by the way, that's why it's called the "Dog Star"; not because it's part of a constellation shaped like a dog or because it barks every time it sees another star).

            In tracing backward the fallen dominos of history like the tombstones of so many dead gods, it would make sense that this celestial reference to "the heavens" could be the origin behind the more connotatively supernatural "heaven" of Christianity.  Sitchin also asserts that the ancients' reverence for the number 12 as it represents their tally of the celestial bodies accounts for the amount of months in our modern calender, which came down through the Greek myths with their gods named for said spheres, as well as for the number of Christ's disciples.

News flash!

This peeking out of today's Oregonion, Ground Hog's Day (two more months of rain here?) 2006, page A10:

Los Angeles

'10th planet' found bigger than Pluto

        Scientists say they have confirmed that a so-called 10th planet discovered last year is bigger than Pluto, but probably won't quell the debate over what makes a planet.

      The astronomers who spotted the icy, rocky body-- informally called 2003 UB313-- had reported only a rough estimate of its size based on its brightness.

      But another group of researchers has come up with what is thought to be the first calculation of UB313's diameter.

      By measuring how much heat it radiates, German scientists led by Frank Bertoldi of the University of Bonn estimated that UB313 was about 1,864 miles across.  That makes it larger than Pluto, which has a diameter of about 1,429 miles.

      "It is now increasingly hard to justify calling Pluto a planet if UB313 is not also given this status," Bertoldi said in a statement.

        Details were published in today's issue of the journal Nature.

        Michael Brown, the astronomer at the California Institute of Technology who discovered UB313 and announced it in July, said the Germans' measurement seemed plausible.  He said his team is using the Hubble Space Telescope to directly figure its size.

            Looks like Sitchin was on to something before the "official" scientists.  So if that's what they're calling it "informally," I'm wondering what it's formal name might be.  UB313 doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.  And when can we get a satellite out that far to look for life forms...or should I say gods?  Considering how long they seem to live in all the holy books, old Jahweh and/or Zeus could very well be winking back down that hubble telescope, making sure little Catholic boys keep their hands off their own willies, and God forbid, each others' (Can they send down any fire and brimstone from that vantage?  I mean, is it Scientifically possible?). 

            I wonder would the typical fundamentalist be more elated by proof that his god really does exist physically, or would he further denounce the scientific community for heresy?  Would it in any way take away from the ingenuity of religion if we found that "God" really is real, He's just a hairless green man with big googly eyes that flies a spacecraft?  It would seem some nuts are only happy if the existence of their god is purely a matter of faith.  Personally, I see evolution as proof of an "Intelligent Design," and that "God" is not "dead," but continues to better "His" creation as Eternity moves along (Can Eternity be thought of as linear?  Conceptually, at least?). 

            Most likely if it's so far out and icy, it's too cold to maintain life.  So maybe "God" is "dead."  Of course, Sitchin's planet had a crazy course that took it right up next to Earth every so many thousands of years, the magnetism then causing a Great Flood.  So the last time that happened was probably when the "gods" taught Noah how to build a submarine (an above water boat just wouldn't do it against such a deluge) and gave him a bunch of test tubes filled with the DNA of different animals (seriously, you're not going to round up a bunch of wild animals together on a boat and hope they don't kill each other...or you...no matter what kind of Animal Planet Crocodile Dundee zookeeper old man Noah might have been) before their orbit threw them back out past the reach of any telescope that might not be invented for another so many thousand years.

            Anyway the whole Sirius/Sitchin shabang makes a hell of a lot more sense than that other more socially acceptable theory of some jealous and wrath-filled super-being Who created men in His own image, only to flood them practically out of existence because He didn't like their attitude or the way they were always killing one another out of jealousy and wrath.  Reap what you sow, indeed.  Maybe instead of creating men in His own image, He could've taken that extra step to make them even a little nicer.  Interestingly, the fallen angel who came down and tried to enlighten men a little earned himself the ultimate anathema, being forever blamed for all the evil in the world.  The poor schmuck attributed for All Things Good, God's own and only son, was hung on a cross screaming, "Father, why have you forsaken me?"  But at least He treats everyone equally.

            In this all too often shitty junkyard we've made of Eden since eating those Noon Blue Apples, Wilson and his colleague Leary embraced the idea of space migration in much the same manner as Frederick Douglas preached that it was time to return to Africa upon realizing the American slave-life just wasn't nearly as cool as their white owners made it out to be when they first threw them on that ark.  Walk into any store in a town just close enough to the city where segregation still loosely holds and all the people who work the registers and bag the goods are a different color than the people buying them and see if you don't sigh like the Emancipation Proclamation never happened, or maybe it's even still the Dark Ages and people want to analyze your piss to see if you're worthy of working for them.  Maybe just look around and observe just who those people are who spend all their welfare checks on brand name clothing and useless but expensive technology just to make them feel like something.  They're the same people who make those shitty songs that you can't get off the radio, much less out of your head, shoot up to number one.  They've got all the time on their hands to give a shit about who does or doesn't get kicked off the island or fired or who what overweight nerd gets the best makeover on TV while waiting in line in Purgatory for their number to be called, like sitting at the DMV on a busy weekday reading Highlights for Adults and yelling at their kids only to be called up and told they're going to have to take the test again; they didn't pass.  Another three weeks; another lifetime.  It would seem that some poor fucks among us are still a little wet behind the ears from that old Biblical deluge. 

            Let the eugenics of Fate kill off those who will still argue between Darwinism and dogma, whilst the rest of us can climb on board those Wooden Ships that will take us so far away from the war that when all is said and done we have to ask our would-be opponents who won.  "Flying Mother Nature's Silver Seed to a new home in the sun..."

            This was the impression I got following Wilson's thoughts over to a book he helped Leary out with called Neuropolitique, explaining the same eight neural circuit path, which once treaded, lead the psychedelic alchemist back to his home planet in outer space, not by aircraft, but via ego transcendence and evolutionary illumination.  Is it any surprise that psychedelic drugs, those genuine eucharists, those fruits of knowledge of good and evil, are nine times out of ten the first refuge of the recovering Catholic disillusioned by the lack of any substance behind all that religious mysticism that could never hold much bongwater in the face of stubborn adolescent rationality?

            I share a writer's curse with Old Bob in that we can find all too much of ourselves in Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.  In The Earth Will Shake, Bob even instilled something similar on his protagonist Sigismundo Celine to the burning damnation fear of God religious retreat sermon Stephen Daedalus and every guilt-ridden Catholic reader of said passage had to sit through in the middle of Portrait.  Both Bob and I took not only to psychedelics, but to philosophies like Nietschze's and Reich's that would aid in our personal flight like Icarus to overcome or at least come to terms with the curse of baptism. 

shards of glass Reichian therapy headaches

ya know I'm just like you

medical marijuana moving to west coast

just like Dylan to Guthrie wanna meet Wilson, my hero

Oregon bud is like a big, sloppy wet kiss from God

the rain a nice break from the snow

I don't think Hitler had a dog

I don't know if mulberries bloom in March

but in the Pacific Northwest

everybody calls a bag a "sack"

you can get bubble tea at quaint and trendy Chinese restaurants

& never once asked if you've read today's paper

on Highway 101 a silver needle threading its way between the mountains and the ocean

the trapeze artist and the young ballerina

into the postcard of a sunset

the radio dial like an old friend

heaven knows the quiet resources of the soul

the empty hours sprawled out on a couch

not yet naked

if the cat could draw a bath & the coffee could make itself

Jesus would rise right out of the mantelpiece Bible

give you a wedgie & then disappear again

into the maple & brown sugar ether

hot, boiling oatmeal of my soul early Sunday morning

on a Pacific Northwoods American highway low-watt

country station

the sun is out at least

            because old as I am

I am a child of God

& if Father

            you are He that formed me in the womb

                                                                        which was Eden

            & the river which from there runs forth

                        the navel & I a navy sailor

                                    in the wavy sea

                                                I a fetus

            then my exodus across the Red Sea of parted menstrual blood

            & my newborn resurrected cry a thank you on high

                        to the dyad which bore me

then let all the dishes be clean

            the laundry be done

            & the floor swept to perfection

the sun shines through the window on a Monday afternoon

            because the Lord is my drug dealer

            & I am high as hell

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"Oh Felix Culpa" (2004-08) (excerpt 40)
Category: Writing and Poetry

I worked my ass off at Pizza Peddler for the month I had since Danker called me from S.F. over New Year's telling me he found me a home in Oregon before I actually moved.  The plan was to deliver as many pizzas as I could and sell as much of my bulky needless crap to friends and neighbors as I could.  Of course I hit a very slow time of year for pizza delivery with all the students out on Winter Break, so making money was like trying to pull teeth from a fish.  I sold a lot of my stuff, while not all I wanted to—I sold my canoe for $80—which I regretted as soon as I got out there and saw that I'd be living right on a river, and not too far out there are little islands where I can bury secret treasures in the spring, or apple trees, and reap the gold in the fall.  No treasure maps, just the mental compass.  I was going to sell my car and take a U-Haul truck, but my little blue Toyota—which I'd gotten out of my last relationship and was covered with her sunflower painting and what she called in an essay once my "politically correct" bumper stickers (God, I hope I'm not politically correct!  If I am I'm doing something wrong)—that little blue car that stunk like all the greasy pizzas I'd delivered in it and the seats all covered in dog hair—the old friend just up and died on me one morning on the way into work.  I had to miss some precious pizza delivering!  I was riding with my mom when we learned that a U-Haul one way to Oregon would cost me $3 grand.  Fuck that.  It was all a sign… good thing I didn't sell that car—I'd have really screwed some poor sap!  She seemed in such good shape for a '90 Corolla… only 140K… but such are the mysterious ways in which the Creator works.  When my old mechanic buddy Tony the mustachioed gay Italian with his pink canoped shop in the ghetto broke the news that she was indeed dead, Jim, he said he had some good news to go with the bad: a '93 silver Camry station wagon for only a grand.  A station wagon… that'll be useful for my big move!  My mom put $500 down on it for me—bless her heart.  So the plan now was to take a U-Haul trailer & hitch it up to my new used wagon.  In the meantime I had something to deliver more pizzas in again.  I had to take it back to Tony once because the battery needed to be tightened into place—I kept having to get jumpstarts from strangers or co-workers on my deliveries, it was quite embarrassing.  But that's the crazy life I'm used to… that's "me." 

            Danker and I set out for Madison to pick up our other traveling companion—Duder.  It was night when we set out and fortunately we got pulled over early enough because the trailer lights weren't on.  We pulled into a parking lot and tried to figure out in the dark where the fuse box was and if it was even a fuse we had to figure out or what.  But we couldn't figure anything out.  We had to turn around and get it checked out in the morning at Tony's place.  Our first setback.  Turned out the trailer was breaking off my hitch, as well as the wiring that would make my rear lights work.  We had to first abandon the trailer back at U-Haul on Capital Drive, grabbing out of it only essentials like silverware, pots, and pans, important equipment, etc. and stuff it all in the station wagon.  Danker rented an SUV which I would have to pay for and we loaded up a bunch more of my crap in there.  We had to leave a lot of my shit in that trailer, which we just left in there for them to find and ask me about when I called days later to check on the status of my reimbursement for the trailer since the damned thing broke my hitch.  It proved just another helpful nudge from God, though, as the trailer NEVER would've made it through those snowy mountains of Montana.  I hardly survived them myself—had to be pulled out of a snow bank by a friendly guy in a truck in the middle of a horrendous snowstorm.  Otherwise we were just trying to shovel the snow from out around the tires using a broom and dustpan.  Anyway I told the nice lady on the phone just to have my stuff put in storage—which would cost me $80/month—and I'd be back to get my stuff when I could.  That's part of this mission which I'm on now—no bags or carry-ons or even extra clothes because I'm planning on bringing back in bags and coat pockets as much as I can, and mailing in boxes a lot of other stuff.  Mostly I miss my books—and a lot of the bureaucratic paperwork I'd need for various things—the title to my car, proof of my dog's shots, etc.  I'm hoping one of these days a friend of mine with a truck—perhaps John—would be inclined to grab the bulk items from my storage for me & drive them out to me in Oregon.  You can't take a queen-sized bed on a plane!  I've been using a cot that my landlord had sitting around at another place.  For the first few days I was sleeping on the floor.  Danker & Duder bought me a sleeping bag & a little yellow & white checkered blanket as soon as we got to Oregon—as well as other things like a bath towel & a very ugly table cloth—they couldn't have known I still had a nice one along that survived the trip.  They bought $115 worth of stuff for me at Target without much consulting first on the details, but at least I only had to pay them back $100.  Between that, putting half down on the SUV & various other bullshit, all the money I'd saved delivering pizzas & selling shit was quickly dwindling.  I'd be on a tight budget for my first few months in Oregon, so far away from my old home, and not knowing anybody but my landlord, his 16 yr old son, & the guy that does my landscaping.  Fortunately they're all potheads.  I got a half oz. On credit from my landscaper, who's also been enlightening me to the legal medicine process & what I'd have to do for a prescription or something. 

I couldn't begin to cover now the entire adventure of the actual trip out there, nor do I wish to.  It was very hectic even getting started, and as we were still in Milwaukee waiting for my taillights to get rewired, Danker was on the phone with Duder, who was granting me this opportunity via his uncle, the landlord.  Duder was getting very frustrated & ready to call the whole thing off & just "cut our losses."  But if I had to suddenly abandon my whole move to Oregon & face an emptied house, all that unpacking having just packed, and to face my old pizza friends, tell them I was ready to deliver for them again… fuck that!  There would be no cutting of losses… the trip would have to go on, I insisted, a little behind schedule though it was.  Duder & Danker had plane reservations back to Wisconsin once we got out to Oregon, & they needed time to help me set up the magic orchard.  After so much of Danker telling me to watch my speed on the way out there—cops are ruthless through the Dakotas & we had too much to hide—and he knew from my pizza delivering that I had a bit of a lead foot—it turned out he'd be calling me on my cell hone every half hour telling me to keep up.  But my dash lights were out apparently (probably from all that rewiring) & when it got dark I couldn't see my speedometer—or my gas reading for that matter—until I propped a flashlight up to it.  I had prepared an extensive pile of music that was to get me through the trip, but every CD I tried to put in would scratch up because the damn car stereo had no skip protection, and of course the FM stations were nothing but country music & Christian talk shows if anything came in at all & a tape got stuck permanently in the tape deck—fortunately it was a collection of mid-60's Dylan classics that have come to soundtrack my coastal car rides along 101 between new home & the closest city,  I found an easy listening station that I would normally abhor, but it cooled my nerves through those crazy twists & turns through the rainy/snowy mountains with my sweaty palms white-knuckled around the steering wheel, my whimpering dog on my lap & my cat somewhere lost in all the boxes in the backseats, meowing every now & then, as I'd drive sometimes no more than 10 mph, scared shitless as I was in my Midwesternity by the stormy mountains, driving like a dead grandma, much to the behest of my traveling companions driving ahead like high sleepless caffeinated maniacs & the locals piling up in a mass tailgating behind me.  By now our cell phone batteries were just about dead, so we couldn't just lose each other, as we allowed for the first half of the trip.  I had a $100 gift certificate for BP/Amoco gas stations that my brother had thoughtfully given me for the trip.  But the first BP/Amoco I filled up at could not read my card.  Al the time I lost while the counter lady tried to figure it out put me a ways behind Duder & Danker.  Apparently the card hadn't been authorized yet.  Past Minnesota, there really weren't many BP/Amocos to be found off 94 West, nor for awhile were there even any gas stations at all, particularly through North Dakota, which seemed to have nothing to it at all but one little factory city in the middle.  Bismark I think it was.  Otherwise it was just mountains & empty planes.  It was while driving through thus, now far behind my companions since my last gas stop, & with my dash lights out in the dark of night, something like 4am local time, when one light on my dashboard actually went on—my gas light!  But where to stop?  I'd seen a sign for a station a ways back, but maybe if I kept on track I'd find another one?  It was a risk.  After a few more precious miles, I elected not to take that gamble.  Hectically & having to go to the bathroom on top of it all, I begun hitting up 411 on my cell trying to find an open gas station.  Ha!  The one I'd turned around to find was closed, of course, at such an hour, and out there they hadn't yet needed to evolve or civilize toward 24 hour pay-at-the-pump service.  Still I parked my car with its empty tank right up beside one the old fashioned pumps, so at least I'd be in the right place when the time came.  I gave it a shot, but of course the thing was off.  It was a very, very cold night.  I walked the dog around & we both pissed on the store's back wall.  That'll show you fuckers for being closed & not having a pay-at-the-pump option!  There were trucks nearby an old shed where some people probably did some kind of blue collar white trash business or other—maybe they were into propane—I knocked around seeing if maybe they slept at their place of business & I could wake them up & badger them for some gas, to turn the tanks on please I'm desperate, but no luck.  When I was taking a piss I noticed a sign on the door saying they opened at 5am.  I checked my cell phone with the clock inside the closed store for the correct local time… 4:30, hallelujah!  The lady even came in early & turned the pumps on for us at a quarter to.  There was another car—a young couple—who pulled up shortly after me in a similar dilemma.  They had come from the Midwest, too—Minnesota—and didn't have quite as far to go as I did. 

The sun was coming up as I got back on the road refueled to meet up with Duder & Danker at the established spot—a border rest area in Wyoming—where we'd get in a quick joint & trade places a little—Duder would drive my car for awhile so I could sleep in the passenger seat of the SUV.  We made no rest stops any longer than it took us to fill up on gas & munchies & look at a map—No, there'd be no rest for the wicked—just a lot of cheap gas station coffee & good weed, now & then some fast food & all the great cookies my mom had baked or bought us for the trip—bless her heart once again.  Now imagine a 2 day cross country trip across the country through the mountains, moving out of good old home Wisconsin for the first time in my life & so far away at that—imagine that not just on my budget, but on a diet of coffee, weed, & sugar, without much more than a few winks & a couple nods of sleep.  Danker kept going over with me how the hardcore travelers know to do it—just gotta have the music up loud & chew some gum if you're afraid of falling asleep at the wheel, gotta keep that foot numb on the pedal, eyes peeled to the horizon where before long the sun would be up again & you can't fall asleep at the wheel once it's daylight, so he says. 

Ah but through all our bad luck, we were lucky sons of bitches in the Long Run.  I know I said I didn't feel up to regaling the whole story, but there's the important chunk of it—you know me when my pen starts going it just won't stop—like a heart defibrillator across the page—one of those things that monitor the heart rates of the hospitalized (the near-dead perhaps) with zigzaggy red lines—that's how the roads can be, that's how the geography can be & that's how writing can be—it's only straight & narrow when the heart stops beating.  Just gotta keep running, even as that gas needle slowly dives toward that sad, little orange "E."

in that Oregon winter rain

like the last time I saw you standing still

it's in the way that you part your lips

brings the heebie-jeebies down my tattooed spine

lets the evergreens know who's in charge

ever since the war began

ever since I took that turn

and driving on through the night

the Montana mountains like somebody's bloated implants

and I tread in second gear through the snow storm

I enjoy driving through the mountains

like I enjoy rusty nails in my morning coffee

all across the country

in a station wagon

my good Jack Russell Terrorist on my lap

Wisconsin like an ex-girlfriend I'm still friends with

and still might sleep with every once in awhile

a world I knew nothing about

a world I had forgotten

not even inside of my head

where girls trade jars of their own urine

for anything they want but a new messiah

fresh like the frost on her pubis

I walked out & found myself starving

some people have lasers at the end of their fingers

some people swear they know more than their god

some people you'll never get to see naked

walk up to you & tell you things you don't want to know

I once saw a mermaid eating breakfast

at a bowling alley for bitches without bras
I tell you there's no better place of worship

than a bookshelf of nothing but tears

your book of poems sits next to

my Bible on the bed stand

I smell you in the lint around my window frame

for two long years I thought about going back

for two more years I thought of something to say

every day begins with a breakfast cereal

& a couple of coffee

every night ends with a good book & a joint

somewhere in the space between

            the Fall of Man and the Rise of Christ

the Logos exploded on the page

with your pony tail and your dark-rimmed glasses

kisses on your nose

like a play within a dream

like a ballerina on a tight wire

everything coming back at once

cymbals clash & the noon tide breaks

somewhere in the crest you're making good time

godspeed & all that bullshit

just send me back a polaroid of a goddess

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"Oh Felix Culpa" (2004-08) (excerpt 39)
Category: Writing and Poetry

in the times of men

when poets wrote love songs to strippers

I can remember well

like a dream

when Christ was more than just an allegory

& people ate grapes to relax

their test of time trophy erections

gleaming in the sun like a salute to God

in the times of men the world was pregnant

because we all knocked her up twice each

they delivered pizzas right up to our bare toes that smelled like wild ambrose & let me tell ya

in the times of men

when an old Italian man down the street gave us our meals

& we did him favors

that we weren't supposed to talk about

& we never have to this day

I'm a god & I'm a man

I'm a Catholic

like universal

or whatever the situation calls for

like wild ambrose, I'm telling ya

old Italian men from down the street

how dreary & sunless the day

& you know you gotta be at work

days on end without sunlight

& you're thinking of writing a novel

fictionalizing all your blessed misgivings

like you were the one & only golden child

of the blistering wind at midnight

your toes & your fingers

gone wading in that ancient 4am dew

well if that miscreant sun ever comes out today

tell you what I'm gonna do

walk my dog down to the pawn shop

trade in that diamond ring for a new used car stereo

& I'm gonna pump out all of my favorite tunes

singing goodbye forsaking tulip

mistreating misdemeanor of mine

I told a stripper I had lost a love

her name was the same as yours

we talked awhile & she danced for me

she took off her pants & I took ten dollars out of mine

she danced just like a puppet on a string

she rubbed her boobs against the floor

& waved her crotch in my face

but stumbling home drunk alone

I looked at my wallet 

& realized I was the object

a new snow was falling

& I dreamed that night of a young girl

the same basic face

whose father wouldn't let us in her room by ourselves

she said she had something to tell me

& she hoped I wouldn't be mad

they were moving away somewhere far away

just as well it was just a dream

in a couple moments I'd wake up with a hangover

& an empty stomach

no one else in my queen-size bed but my dog

man's best friend

having a dog is just an excuse to talk to yourself

yeah it's one of those kinds of worlds

I ran into that same stripper at her other job

she asked me if I wanted paper or plastic

I said someday soon

I promise

when we can just live in our dreams

someday soon like tomorrow

but all the stores were closed

it was some kind of government holiday

            "A glass of wine at a strip club?" a friendly voice down the bar a bit asked me.  She had dirty blonde hair and a very inviting, somewhat smile.  She wore a pink sweater over her black top, exposing only so much of her beautiful pale rack with a single mole, a beauty mark that goes so unappreciated.  Her legs were mostly exposed because she were but a skimpy black bottom.  She must be a dancer.

            I blushed.  "I don't go to these places much," I said.  "And I'm not much of a beer-drinker." 

            It was true.  The former statement at least.  I was twenty-seven years-old.  My first time in a strip club, aside from delivering pizzas to one or two, was somewhere off the toll-way in Indiana, halfway between Detroit and Milwaukee, on my way back from Springsteen's opening night show of the solo acoustic Devils & Dust tour, premiering his new song "Reno" (which got his new CD banned from Starbucks), in the middle of a big rain storm at about 1am.  It had been less than a month since I'd broken up with my underage girlfriend of over a year, half of it long-distance between Milwaukee and Seattle.  I learned quickly that the dancers were allowed to touch you all they want, but not you them.  I think I remember first learning that in some movie, but you almost feel kind of bad just sit there; a beautiful lady caressing you and shoving her boobs in your face, but you can't put a hand near her unless it's got a dollar in it. 

            I have this deep, philosophical theory that all men like to spend lots of money on women in hopes that it will get them laid, because they know all women like to have money spent on them, and girls will consciously or not flock to a man who can dish out a little cash, and things will go sour or even end as soon as money gets tight, so really the only difference between the capitalist sex industry and romantic love is that you cut out all the bullshit beating around the bush, so to speak.  It's a sad way to look at it, especially for a hopeless romantic Christian like me, but it sounds kind of witty, so even if it's not completely true and it's rather sad, at least it's destitutely funny.  Ironic?

            I didn't go to strip clubs much because, besides having an addictive personality and a thin, but loose wallet, I had been conditioned from childhood with that papal eugenics scheme, that ever-manipulative psychological handicap that creates psycho-somatic sinus migraines every time you spank that monkey on your back, that cancerous disease called Catholic Guilt.  Like recovering alcoholics, recovering Catholics are never completely cured-- they're continually recovering--and they can't even have one casual drink.  This may be why so many Catholics become alcoholics.

            In any case and in other words, I was a hopeless romantic.  My one goal was to get married young and have three beautiful kids, and I would be the best husband and father I could possibly be.  When I got to be twenty-seven and I'd been engaged twice with nothing to show for it, and my relationships seemed to get stormier and weirder with the years, I begun to get discouraged.  It was like the Boss once said, I was in the same relationship for so many years, just with different women.

            So what brought me to a strip club tonight?  It was the day after Christmas and I was so bored with the hoopla, the headaches, the obligatory family perkiness over traditions that had been losing their magic more and more every year since learning that Santa Claus was as much just an allegory for the boogeyman as that Jewish carpenter with the beard who watched you when you slept to make sure even your dreams were pure.  I had one of my infamous headaches that I usually blame on Catholic guilt, probably still from masturbating less than a week ago, I was tired, I was high, I needed something to do. 

            Well, alcohol usually doesn't help my headaches much either, but after four glasses of white zin and three lap dances from the mysterious young lady in the pink sweater, I was feeling fine.  Somehow it made it that much better on my conscious to give that sex symbol a pulse and a face, a sympathetic ear I can bullshit with at the bar.  Both of us being in the "service" business, we even got into talking about tips.  I decided that the shit she had to smile through for tips was much worse than what I have to put up with delivering pizzas, which I will bitch my mouth off about just because I like to hear the sound of my own voice complaining.  I was a little upset to learn that she didn't make a base pay; just tips and free drinks and one dollar of every cover charge.  I mentioned that the best part about jobs like ours is that we don't have to report all are taxes and contribute to any stupid wars or the war on drugs (I had to throw that in).

            Her face never left my mind after that night and I kept thinking of going back, just to see her again.

raindrop like a Zen koan

like a pebble of kitty litter

like splitting an atom on the pavement

a simple promise

a Cracker Jack prize

or a stocking stuffer

she moved like a haiku across the floor

in a cocoon of a sequin splattered dress

which she'd peel out of like a banana split

like a butterfly brilliantly colored

ready to fly

like bacon, lettuce, and tomato

on a Sunday morning

chain-smoking through her heart palpitations

sitting at the bar in nothing much

my legs were touching hers

and when I paid for our drinks

I got back less than I had expected

not enough left for a lapdance

which one last of before I departed

            was all I had come for

I thought I'd dropped a bill somewhere

            until I realized what had happened

and it's just as well

nothing worth it that doesn't cost more

            than you knew up front

in a couple days I'd be halfway across the country

            on my way to the coast

and my clothes would be all washed of that night

for now and for yesterday

I take my pen from out my pants

            and write like I know how

            There I was one day all dressed up in the shirt and tie my mama got me for Christmas, sporting a fresh forty-dollar haircut thinking I'd go looking for more substitute teaching jobs today, starting with Dominican High, the Catholic School my ma and her brothers and sisters all went to.  My Aunt Susie, who's nagged at my ears every family get together since I was young about being responsible and "smart," told me over Christmas that they'd bend down and kiss the feet of someone coming in looking to sub; they were just that desperate.  She said she'd write me a recommendation, and you know I'd be an asshole if I didn't at least give it a shot.  Don't want my whole family just thinking I'm a lazy pothead every time we get together for holidays and everybody's jabbering about who's getting married, what's the best new sports car this year, who's having a kid, who's got a new job or a college degree or is going to study in China or Amsterdam or Greece this summer while I'm just out there delivery pizzas to thankless white collar bitches on their lunch breaks or shady ass looking motherfuckers in the ghetto, and you feel just like DeNiro in Taxi Driver just praying that God would send his angels down and just clean up all the trash; the whores, the pimps, the politicians, the pushers; but still it's the chillest job in the world and you take it all in just like Harry Chapin sings: "...taking tips and getting stoned."  Well, that's me.  And when I got to Dominican and all the doors were locked-- I forgot that school gets out around three-- though maybe that was just a security thing I'm sure and I probably just had to push a buzzer somewhere or something, but I think part of me almost just didn't want to get in...intimidated by the prospect of "success," or even some kind of "legitimate job," even just substitute teaching?  You'd think it was my dream to be surrounded by suburban Catholic High School girls.  Alright, that was last year, and it ain't funny anymore.  Actually, a call I had received that morning from my buddy out in San Fran over the holidaze kind of stole my enthusiasm for finding a subbing job, or anything too committal in the Greater Milwaukee Area at all.  No longer did I care to contemplate dating the stripper I met the day after Christmas, or even to going back there.  Nor did I care to pine over that shy, blue-eyed brunette who answered phones at the pizza place anymore.  All the sudden it was all about Oregon.

see your name on a bar of soap

while taking a shower this morning

see you dancing in my head like a stage

the other night

see your name & place of business

on a take-out order at my pizza job

some other lucky driver got that delivery

there's always some one else before me

I just don't think about it

all I see

that dark curtain

I'm sitting on a little stool

and you

you're the dancer I can't touch

relief from the holiday stress

see the future & I still don't know
.. -->[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]-->
.. -->[endif]-->

but I'm running away in my blue bumper-stickered Corolla

to Oregon to buy an organic farm

your eyes and your smile would look nice in my rearview mirror

& I need to find a mother for my

Jack separation Russell anxiety Terrior

& Beagle mix

with the pretty red bandana around her neck

Currently listening : Rust Never Sleeps By Neil Young & Crazy Horse Release date: 1990-10-25

11:23 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

"Oh Felix Culpa" (2004-08) (excerpt 38)
Category: Writing and Poetry

It almost seemed at some point like Kiley and me were dating, though I didn't want to assume too much.  A new co-worker of ours, who at first tried to hit on me until she learned that I was infatuated with Kiley, found out for me that she was no longer seeing that guy.  In fact apparently she'd been single the whole past few months that we'd been hanging out now and then.  According to this new co-worker, whose name was Sarah, Kiley was just waiting to find out "if I was a good kisser or not."  But when we went out for a fancy dinner and drinks one night and I really thought the timing was right, I leaned in for the pitch and she just brushed me right out of the batter's box.

ever since that first missed kiss situation when

I leaned in & you leaned away leaving me

standing on air like one of those

cartoon animals who take a few moments

before falling off the cliff when they

realize there's no ground beneath them by that

time you were up at the bar buying me

another glass of white zinfadel it would be

the last of an evening I shouldn't have gotten

behind the wheel just to run from but it all

fell out just like loose change & fallen stars

in one good gag reflex & there was still more

left to puke up in the morning ever since

that moment of I still don't know what to say

would you have kissed me back

if the weather was a little better

if the troops were all home safe

if the right guy had one the election

if the Packers were having a better season

if Christmas came a little earlier

if the Earth wasn't tilted on such an axis

& if gas prices were just a little cheaper or

would it have even mattered anyway?

I don't know but at least I got

a little pucker of the same air you had

just been breathing what seemed like

a million milliseconds ago

            I didn't give up completely, though my pride was curbed.  When Christmas break came around, Kiley went home for the holidays and then off to Mexico for awhile with her family.  It would prove to be our silent and subtle parting of ways in this lifetime.  At least before she left I gave her a sweet little Snoopy Christmas card expressing my feelings the Hallmark way.

            Before the break was over I had not only moved on and made a few visits to the sleezy part of town, but an unexpected call from a friend out West over vacation was about to ring my bell.  More of that as our story goes on...

            For now it was the night after Christmas and all through Milwaukee the neon bar signs were covered with snow.  My sinus migraines had put a bit of a damper on my first holiday with my new niece, whose name Keely was eerily close to that of my last lost muse.  Being born of my sister who had married into Judaism by a nice guy with a knack for kabbalah and the esoteric, she was the first direct relation of mine to be born with the Moses in her blood. 

            I gave her her first menorah and she gave me the best smile that could poke through my headache just enough for me to manage through another holiday in the suburbs.  It also helped to have a traditional, a third annual, midnight toke with my Jewish brother-in-law on Christmas Eve.  I sat as enthralled as the newborn beside me when he lit the seven candles of my Hannukah gift to her and he explained their significance for the sake of the infant, as well as all of us naive Catholics.

            My favorite present that year was this used laptop I now write on, given me by a buddy of mine, an ex-friend of Peter's, who I'd sell pot to in exchange for help with my incorrigible computer.

            The holidays over, I was free to toke all I want in the comfort of my empty home.  Boredom and a burning wallet from Christmas cards, pot profits, and the money I'd made at the 11th Annual Christmas Eve Eve Barbecue Black Jack games with my old buddies from high school sent my Corolla wheels upon the snowy freeway over the river and through the hills to the South Side of town for more relief for my relentless Catholic guilt headaches.  It was Henry Miller's birthday, the day after Christ's.

I am the Catholic stripper

I take my clothes off for Christ

& if you give me a dollar you can dance with me

you are the soap in my bathwater

I will set myself free for you

on Sunday when they hand out palm branches

I will break mine in twain like

the lucky wishbone your legs

the pillars of the inner temple

sanctum sanctorum of my selfish dreamscape

at the $10 Black Jack table on New Year's Eve

Catholic stripper strip for me

the Packers won today & a light

snow falls down on the homebound traffic pumping out

all the classic hits of the sixties and seventies

my baby flew out to Mexico & that's why

I'm here at the altar tonight it's been

five months since my last lap dance

forgive me oh Catholic stripper like a snake

I implore you with a dollar bill

recycled tip from delivering pizzas

Catholic stripper behind the nylon curtain

strip me of my sin once again

Glenny-
Have you missed my long, fascinating emails enough?  Yeah, I've been working my
little ass off at the Peddler, although every day has been pathetically slow & tipless, except New Year's Day, which was rainy & crazy & of course I was still recovering from the night before...but we'll get to that soon enough, actually in a separate email.