Archive for October, 2015

We no longer give a shit about anybody we don’t actually know.  It’s how assholes are allowed to become even bigger assholes and believe all Mexicans and Blacks are lazy and nobody deserves food stamps.  It’s why rednecks think people even less fortunate than them are stealing from them instead of corporations, the military industrial complex and Wall Street. It’s how Ben Carson and Donald Trump are dominating the truncated attention span of the roughly one quarter of of our electorate that just can’t vote responsibly.

Think about it.  I’ve always called it the The One Quarter Paradigm.  When Nixon fled office ahead of impeachment, his approval rating was roughly 25%.  When Cheney and Bush escaped, somewhere around one quarter of our national pie was still rooting for the bastards.  The two most gigantic goofecocks of the century so far and brother Jeb is actually running on the keeping us safe thing.

One fourth of us are just enough of idiot to still get all wistful about them.

I don’t care who you are, that’s disgusting.

We must automatically saw 25% of all American voters off the top.

Too goddamn stupid to reach, much less help.

Relax.

Trump and Carson are less than the paradigm already.  They will fade.  Their replacements will perform the same.  The entire bench cannot be more than half of the paradigm.  Do the math. Republicans are going to lose big unless democrats learn lickety split to eat there own the way the GOP has been for a decade.  Margins could be pregnant enough to make all patrician efforts by the paradigm no different than pissing in the wind. Gerrymandering and disenfranchisement won’t matter.  The GOP is not a threat in the context of national elections. They have nobody with legs or lungs.  They will cheat like bastards and it won’t matter.

Me, I like Kasich. I bet he’s a lush.

So let’s stop wringing our hands and sweating through our frilly liberal blouses over them.

Two candidates.

Sanders and Clinton.

Unless we screw the pooch.

I believe one is far better than the other but that’s not important right now.  Bernie supporters that intend to write him in for the general election if they don’t get their way are idiots.  This isn’t a campaign for student body president.  Clinton supporters who screech about Bernie not being a democrat or claim that he’s never accomplished anything are just assholes.

If anyone tries to tell me there’s a sexist element here I’ll swing hard for the center of the face.

The Supreme Court above all else.

The republicans are doing an excellent job of making Americans look like dickheads around the world.  If liberals keep it up the world will finally figure out what dickheads all of us really are. They will turn against us and the weird places around the world who still covet our culture will just dry up.

Canada just showed us.

Again.

Grow the fuck up.

Drinks for my friends.

 

I’ve been pretty skeptical about the substantive differences between our two political parties for awhile.

Having said that, I still believe the democratic party is the lesser of two evils. So it it makes complete angry sense to me to avail myself of every opportunity to to mock, impugn, malign, insult and deride the spectacularly ridiculous and transparent antics of republicans. If for no other reason than to put democrats on notice that we smell bullshit and if we ever manage to wade our way through all of the republican fuckery foisted on us by the hour, democrats need to get that they are next.

It only makes sense to staunch blood from the most prolific wound first.

I fully expected Hillary to maintain calm and control during the Benghazi burlesque.  She did not disappoint.  She has balls.  There’s no other way to say it.  She was playing chess while the republicans on the committee dabbled at checkers.  She is whip smart and solid. She played them and I don’t doubt she actually set them up. With grace and aplomb.  She flat out outlasted them.  It was an awesome display of composure and command of facts, specifics and patience.

She crushed it.

I am enthusiastic about Bernie Sanders for reasons I think are pretty obvious.  But Hillary Clinton doesn’t suck.  I will vote for her in the general if that’s the lay of the land come next summer.  I’ll feel better about it because of her performance today.

If we’re ever actually able to make the entire republican bench cry in front of their mouth breathing, knuckle dragging base, it will be Hillary under the next microscope, not Bernie Sanders.

So here’s my point, Bernie Sanders’ influence on this election has been nothing but a net positive.  He absolutely has moved the entire conversation further left.  He alone is responsible for Hillary’s “coming out” on Keystone and more importantly, the TPP.  I do not trust her newfound positions on these things but it is measurable progress nonetheless.  She is too cozy with the puppet masters and that is a fact.

What it amounts to is whether we we move forward or keep from sliding back.  It’s either a political and social revolution or not losing too much more ground for at least four more years.  Maybe we’ll be more sick of this crap after that long but I doubt it.  The time is now.  It’s pretty plain that none of these jackasses on the republican bench stands a chance against pinball wizards like Hillary or Bernie.

Imagine Trump or Carson trying to pile on against either of them.

Light sabers versus cap pistols.

It makes me wish I was a comedian.

I can’t wait.

It’s ours to lose.

Drinks for my friends.

Once upon a time there was a band named Dumpster.

A Brian Huttenhower project. Famous A&R guy who signed Soundgarden and then succumbed to crack.

The lead singer was a dude named Robert English. He simmered. Brilliant blues eyes, big front teeth, one chipped in half and a bald head. Burly and coiled like he’d just been released from prison.  My sense was he would combust with violence like taking a breath.

I was afraid of him.

His girlfriend was all tall amber pale and vampy. She was a B level porn star and he was a heroin junkie. I feared him when he needed his demon but I liked him. Very smart and very funny. Tons of dark charisma. Nosferatu and Anton LeVey.

An anarchist.

A nihilist.

He showed up one morning to the recording session with an eyebrow missing. When I asked about it, he smirked, looked away and said he’d woken up with it  resting perfectly on his pillow. He said he decided to leave it there, just as he found it.  He described it with his hands.

He was lying.

There was maybe a radiation leak.

Dumpster was an angry band. Furious punk rock with excellent pop. Kelly, the drummer told me that Robert’s girlfriend had the ugliest pussy he’d ever seen. I didn’t understand until he popped in a VHS one day. It was an incredibly ugly pussy. The color was wrong. Like those badly lit menus overhead in cheap ethnic restaurants. Garish and glistening color with fucked up contrast.

We took a break everyday around six when she showed up with Robert’s rig in a small tin.  He didn’t want it around otherwise because he was serious about what we were doing.  He was limiting himself.  She nurtured with slender hands and a soft voice until he was high and then patronized with long fingers and dirty nails once he was.  She was was afraid of him but in love with what she wanted him to be.

She smelled of dryer sheets and feminine deodorant.

He told me a story about getting hit in the face with a full can of beer while walking along side a highway in South Carolina on a hot summer day. He said he figured he deserved it because he was just some fucking punk and that was how his front tooth was chipped.

He said it didn’t hurt much. He was lying to me about all of it.

I hated that.

He was a lion, just sitting and staring at me, tail flicking, sizing me up.

Until we did smack together, and he became a very dangerous cartoon.

We began to talk about it. I did my best.  It took a few days. He ended up being a pretty forthright guy. Heroin was pretty much the only drug I’d never experimented with. I was more than curious.  I’d seen people die from it. I was an idiot.

He was not about to be responsible . No way would would we be shooting it.

So we waited until we were finished recording one night and smoked it off aluminium foil, inhaling it with a glass tube.  Chasing the dragon. Bubbling brown sugar streaming down burning chrome as we followed it with a Bic flame from underneath.

He coached me the entire time.

Making sure I got a good hit and wasn’t wasting his dope.

It was pungent but sweet.

Curry and honey.

The high was ridiculous and overwhelming. Almost hot. Molasses in my head. I could not believe how comfortable I was.  An earthquake would have been a curiosity. We had beers and talked about what we were working on. We had another hit. He walked me through it again. We talked about his life. I didn’t understand how such an angry man could succumb to such flowery observations in such a syrupy calm and swampy Carolina drawl.

I wondered if he would be homicidal without it.

Some people need to be medicated.

The next night we finished and waited for the band to leave. We took a plate from the kitchen and I snorted grainy beige sugar into each nostril. His lines were longer and fatter than mine. I was glad of that. We took  a walk. I told the guard we’d be back on the way out the front gates.

Up La Brea and onto Sunset. We walked a while without saying much. The lights and neon were gorgeous and the exhaust and fast food fumes coated me so spectacularly pleasant. Enveloped in the city and it’s most lethal drug.

Glazed and nestled in the soft wholesome fibers of Hollywood autumn twilight. I asked about his anger and whether heroin might be what balanced him. He took his time and finally said he imagined there were better things out there but he didn’t know what they were.

He was telling me the truth as best he could.

He asked me if I was having fun and I told him I was floating in bliss. I said to him I can never do this again and he smiled for the first and last time I ever saw and said under his breath he hoped not.

I never did.

It still haunts me.

Don’t doubt that the randomness of life is in someway synchronized with all the things that we don’t understand about the universe. It’s what we do know that confounds us. All the while, what we don’t know blows us along.

Drinks for my friends.

It’s interesting isn’t it?

Two republicans have dropped out of the race because God told them to get in and then God told them to get out.

Right there on live television they lie.  And they are incredible, massively audacious, thundering lies. There has never been more effrontery.

These motherfuckers.

The entire GOP is completely bereft of anything at all.

Anything at all.

Then there’s us.

If you don’t support Hillary, you’re a he-man woman hater.  A chauvinist.  You  bristle at her pantsuits or criticize her for big bad Bill’s blow jobs.  She shamelessly milked that the other night. Waiting for the swinging dicks and the feminists to clash.  She’s a corporate trollop and a hawk.  She has mad skills.

It’s not untrue.

Or, because you dare to hope a consistent man of integrity like Bernie Sanders has a chance of finally breaking the forty year grip of neoconservative and neoliberal fuckery, well then you must just be looking to suck a fart out of a unicorns ass.  Because he’s a grumpy loser who’s never accomplished anything.  Because he’s a “socialist” and too radical.  He’s a populist.

It’s not untrue.

Like this is some sports rivalry.

The pregame for the democratic debate the other night might as well have been produced for the goddamn Superbowl. I was offended.  I was thoroughly nonplussed by Cheryl Crow singing the national anthem.   It’s what’s on TV so what the hell. It had tremendous production value.  I was expecting a prize fight and tons of blood.  I didn’t get that.

Social media is a petri dish for this nonsense.

There’s no way left to get the masses to understand that we’re all in the same boat.

Liberals are just as goddamn dumb as conservatives and the corollary is that democrats are no longer different in any meaningful way than republicans. Yes, the democratic debate was classier and far less callow.  But it’s over and not one thing has changed. There is no better evidence than assholes from both parties acting and responding in exactly the same way. Like it’s recess on the playground.  It not the democratic debate this that proves this, it’s the obsession with who won.

It occurs to me that the entire point of a political debate is not whether there is a winner or a loser, but rather how the game was played.  In other words, how good you looked.  The problem is with the immaturity of the electorate.

They can’t all be assholes.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

Let’s set an arbitrary figure.  Say $100 million. If you have 100 million dollars all to your lonesome and you are not a world class, king hell, reigning champion philanthropist, you suck. That’s more money than you can ever spend on yourself and like five generations to come.

Here’s what’s worse.  If you aren’t spectacularly generous,  you are saying that somehow you have been gifted with a provenance of wisdom and prudence so divine as to allow you to decide who eats and who starves. Who freezes and who gets a bed and a blanket.  Because you could make an actual difference and you don’t.  If all you bastards got together, you could literally save the world.

I’m talking about the 1% here.

The filthy.

Rich people can be disgusting. Most seem to hate the poor.  They actually believe poor people are somehow infected with failure.  Like it’s a disease.  They are are afraid of them.  Afraid of us.

I’ve always wondered, in terms of personal fortune, what really is the difference between $20 million and $200 million?  What the hell?  When do you stop caring how much you can accumulate?  How do the vulgar rich not understand there’s a finite amount of money and at a certain point  they are manufacturing poverty?

I’m paraphrasing a famous author when I say that socialism never caught on in America because most of the electorate view themselves as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires.  The pollution of ideology.  The absurdity of the carrot and the stick we’ve all been offered.

So we worship wealth.  And products that make us look wealthier than we are.  The rich do the very same thing only better.  We envy them.  We want to live in those cool living rooms we see in the movies. They do.  They live there.  Prosperity has become a euphemism for greed.

Cat puke would confuse them.  It would ruin their day.

I don’t get it.  But, I like money too.  Who doesn’t?  I was at the mall today and I shopped.  I didn’t buy much but I enjoyed my consumer experience.  I really love ostentatious indoor shopping malls.  I could spend hours in Williams Sonoma.  I could live there.  L’occitane is my favorite goddamn store.  I chose between Hot Dog On a Stick and a Mongolian barbecue.  I came home with a gorgeous cologne on my wrist.  I loves me some mall.  Retail therapy.  I love that shit.

I’d like to believe that if I won the lottery to the tune of say, five million, I’d buy an Audi R8, some new clothes, a nice watch and a modest house.  Then I’d enroll in some history and literature classes and find an animal shelter to volunteer at.  I’d get organized enough to eat mostly healthy food, exercise and spend way more time with friends and family.  I wouldn’t be available before noon no matter what.

I don’t understand why people who hoard houses full to bursting with useless possessions are regarded differently than people who hoard more money than they can ever possibly spend.  We are disgusted by the former but celebrate the latter.  Seems like the same disease to me.

Most filthy rich people in the world didn’t earn it.  They have no idea what it’s like to spend physical, intellectual or emotional capital day in and day out to barely get by.  Most of them inherited it from ancestors who made a career of screwing labor and they, the scions, make a career of the same.

Not a novel conclusion I know.

I’m not here to split the atom but i’d like to point out the obvious.

Understand.  The decisions we make every day are because of decisions they have already made.  They are running our shit.

It’s just weird how we revere these people.  With few exceptions, they contribute nothing to society.  Most of them are in fact, a cancer infecting the rest us one way or another.  They buy our representatives, they buy entire governments.  They pollute our air and water and food without fear of sanction or censure or punishment.  They invest in and make shit loads of money off of war.  Most of them don’t give a mad fuck about anyone but themselves.  They are sociopaths without the habit of serial murder.

Yet we have at least two presidential candidates running based solely on the credential that they are oily affluent.  One is leading in the polls and the other is gaining.

Their popularity is far more an indictment of us than it is of them.

Hang the rich.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

I don’t cry very often but when I do the tears start by coming out the sides of my eyes, run past my ears and my jaw, down my neck,  kinda like sweat.  It’s not until I’m really bawling that the front of my face gets soaked and my nose is running.

Once that happens, that’s when I know I’m fucked up.

My cat is dying.  She’s seventeen or eighteen years old.  Her kidneys are in an irreversible state of atrophy.

She’s old and all stove up.

Her coat is matted.  She doesn’t groom much these days.

I pet her and there are clumps.

I guess she can’t reach anymore.

Otherwise she’s still rabbit soft.

She’s a spectacularly patterned calico with huge eyes even for a cat.  Gold or green depending on kelvin temperature or her mood ring head.  Those big eyes sit a little deeper than they used too.  Despite very old bones, she walks the apartment with dignity.  Always regal but those eyes are a little confused of late.

She’s never been sweet or loving.

She’s always been cranky and particular.

I adore her.

Her name is Swirly and she’s gorgeous.

She weighs about nine pounds.

Down from twelve.

Like I said, she’s not sweet.

She can actually be a little cunty.

She happened upon me during my salad days so I’m not exactly sure how old she is.  I’ve been her dad forever. She came to the warehouse as a kitten and started visiting my office and sleeping in my chair when I was gone for the day so I became her dad.  I bought her food and scooped her box.  Took her to the vet.

When I got to work back in the day, I’d drop my Starbucks and backpack in my office and head out to the warehouse where she was always waiting to announce her self from various corners and elevations.

She would say my name.

I would go to her, say her name and rub her face and chin.

When I left that job I took her with me.

She’s lived with me in seven different places and in two states.  Over a thousand miles in my car.

Now I come home and she’s bathing in the sun coming through the sliding glass door.

I always stop to watch her breathe.

To make sure she’s breathing.

She doesn’t like the new low protein food for senior kitties in the beginning stages of renal failure.  She did at first. Now she won’t eat it.  She wants the fast food. Fancy Feast and Sheba.  She hoovers that shit and ignores the food that will prolong her life.  She doesn’t have many teeth left so I always get the kind with gravy. She’s not big on fish or seafood.

She gets dehydrated and bound up so she can’t poop.  We take her for an enema.  We have an aircraft carrier sized sectional that she owns about one quarter of.  A blue camping tarp half way between the east and west wings of it that we put the puppy pads on. She does her business there as exclusively as she can.  She lost interest in the litter box some time back.  We have a deal.  It helps me to monitor her progress.

She still likes to piss on whatever is on the bathroom floor.

The worst part is dosing her.  The irregularity regimen.  Holding her down, holding her head, prying her jaw open to squirt two different medicines down her throat from syringes.  She hates it and so do we.  It takes two of us.  I feel really bad when I miss or it spills out of her mouth because she can’t deal with it just then.

She gets a stay from the dosing for a day every time she bequeaths a turd with any heft.

Someday soon I’ll be holding her while she dies or after she’s dead.

One way or another it’s coming.

I’ve known her for a very long time and I’m watching the end of her life and she seems to know all about it.

Maybe the best and worst parts of people animal relationships is that we can’t actually explain things to each other.  We talk.  We communicate.  But we’re never sure how thorough we are being with each other.

Maybe that’s best.

Her end might be up to me.  It could be my decision.   I’m agnostic.  No “Rainbow Bridge” for me.  I hear they will come to your house now.  Home pet euthanasia. I’m pretty confused but I imagine that will be the most comfortable way for both of us.

She hangs a little closer these days.

These days she flops at my feet while I’m at the computer.  These days she doesn’t always look me straight in the eye and hiss when I pick her up to kiss her voluptuous head.  These days she seems to finally appreciate the comfort of love and affection while realizing it has nothing to do with her dignity.

We’re getting to know each other better.

She’s still beautiful and she talks more than she used to.

I’m her dad.

I’ll remember her sleeping.

Snoring.

This one is gonna hurt.

EPILOGUE:

She was just here, at my feet this very morning. The Swirl Swirl Girl Girl.  I followed her from water bowl to water bowl for an hour.  She would stand, dip her head to drink but never actually drink.  She asked for more food and she ate a little.  She smacked and licked at the gravy.  I couldn’t understand how she could manage that but not drink. She didn’t either.  She looked at me and asked for a solution.

I was pretty sure last night that today would be the day.  I got out of bed last night and came to the living room and out to the balcony, leaving the sliding door open in case she wanted one last time on my lap.  She did.  She purred her rare and subtle purr.

She peed at least twice through the night but she hadn’t pooped in almost four days.

A little after 9 am, I made an appointment to euthanize her for 1 pm.  I spent the time between watching her and realizing how uncomfortable she was.  She was restless and confused and indecisive. Her face had become a mess in the last week.  Her sunken eyes had started to run relentlessly so the sides of her nose were now bald of fur and raw from her attempts to groom.

As an agnostic I’m often confused at the energy and angst we are compelled to devote to existence and consciousness that is obviously finite and always terminal.  Why do we have emotions and love that can be so painful if there never has been any hope of it lasting?  I wonder at the point of it. Days like today reveal the absurdity of it all.

There’s no tragedy here, just aching sadness from loss.  No real regret, just a profound sense of bittersweet.

A hole where there was a whole.

I stroked her back and kissed her head as she died.  Afterward, as she lay dead on the shirt I wore just yesterday, on the cold stainless steel examination table, I took the opportunity to fondle her beautiful white paws.  She never let me do that when she was alive, always snatching them away.

However benevolent, she was neither sweet, nor affectionate.  It didn’t stop her from being dignified and absolutely fabulous.  I imagine I will miss her in some amount, for as long as I live.  She was lovely.  Eighteen years is a really long time.

It’s impossible to kiss your cat’s head too many times.

Rest in peace Swirly Girl.

Goddammit.

I miss you.

 

Drinks for my friends.