Non-Hollywood Compos Mentis

A Daily Growler Bulletin: Go to wood s lot (Google it since Foxfire won't allow me to link it). They've got a display there of photos taken on the campus of Kent State University as Amurika's own National Guard, now getting their poor dispensible asses blown away in Iraq, 2420 now and risin', do you think in retaliation for what they did back on that dreary kind'a chilly May 4, 1970, day when they fired 67 rounds in 13 seconds killing four of Amurika's children, one the truly gorgeous Allison Krause, there, innocently holding hands with her boyfriend that day, curious about why the overdressed, scared out of their wits, ninny-baby toy soldiers were marching toward her? And they came on toward her hyper and over-ready-to-kill, their penises shrunk to belly buttons and their chicken fingers quivering and jerking against the triggers of their weapons as they cowardly followed the orders they had been given, orders that told them they had to kill their own; "Fuck those hippy assholes...let's show 'em who we are, men, let's mow those little sissies down." God how there is always those who so easily hate anything that dares to be different from them, especially to hate those who were taught right up the road at Antioch, Ohio, to resist their threats through civil disobedience, peaceful arm-linked determined protest, putting flowers in the barrels of weapons, offering love instead of war, offering up their bodies on the frontlines of defiant marches, marching for peace the same as the haters marched for military demonstration.

And the last thing the beautiful in love Allison Krause saw, who would have probably gone on later that day and made passionate love to her boyfriend, was her own firing squad. She had been judged guilty and sentenced to die by a big-gutted, ego-crazed, local, cigar-chompin' hillbilly hick who had risen in the part-time soldierboy National Guard to a rank high enough and with enough authoritarian power to order young, goofball, hick, full-testicled, chickenshits (that's what the regular army called them) to murder their own kind, for all they knew, their brothers or sisters or cousins or kin. Check it out and then come back to the Growler and join thegrowlingwolf as he leads us in a "Gimme an F...Gimme a U...Gimme a C...Gimme a K...Gimme a Y...Gimme an O...Gimme a U...Gimme a FUCK YOU." There was a man at the recent FANTASTIC million-hero-Americans march against the war in New York City who held a sign that should be held up in Congress every time a president begins babbling insanely about having to have a war. His sign said, "FUCK YOUR WAR"--black on red; that's all it said. Here's to the good Allison Krause's desires; may they be revived in some young woman today who'll stand up to these asshole sons of bitches that are dragging this country into a bottomless pit...for the Hell What? For Allison Krause and the others who died at Kent State that day in May in 1970, I say we wish the whole f-ing lot of those lyin' connivin' uncouth heretic dumbo-sapiens that lead us by striking constant fear on their drums of horror up and gone. PLEASE, GOD, OR JESUS, OR WHOEVER THESE IDIOTS TRUST, COME AND GET THESE BASTARDS SO WE WHO LOVE THE WORLD AND LOVE LIFE AND LOVE DIVERSITY AND LOVE COMBINING DIVERSITIES IN NEW EXPERIENCES OF LIFE CAN GO ON LIVING FULL LIVES. THE MEANING OF LIFE IS NOT TO DIE BUT TO LIVE, DAMMIT, SO LET'S LIVE RIGHT STRAIGHT INTO THEIR GUTS!!!! GET 'EM DOWN FOR THE COUNT. "YERRRRRRRRRR OUT!"
_____________________________________________________________

Everyone I've ever met...
my workmates, my companions, my lovers, my wives, my best friends, my brother, my nephews, my nieces, probably my children if I had any...welllll, I may have one, but that's another story for another day, is heavily, some outright maniacal, and most almost intellectual into an appreciation of films, movies, the cinema, the flicks...WHATEVER! Jesus!

Have you ever watched wolves eating after a tough but successful pack take down of a sweet, healthy, plump, bubble haunched, hot-ripe-blooded, tasty smelling female elk? Boy howdy do they go at it. I mean, they go way down nose-first into that hot, steamy, blood and bile gravied belly and bowel sizzling stew of meaty, sinewy, gritty, gutty, mixed-odored (foul and redolent flooding into those wide-open flaring wolf nostrils), piss-tangy, shit-sloppy goodness to literally DEVOUR this elk babe, growling in glee with their jaws filled to choking, then gagging as they try and lunge those big clogs of hot juicy vittles down their hungry throats, yowling and snarling as they try and eat the whole damn thing in world record wolf time. That devouring is so pleasurable to these wolfies, they go out and do it to every day of their growling lives. It's a function of their survival wit. That's the way I write. Aha, see, I've led you a full circle around Old Robin's barn (surely in at least dilapidated condition by this century, if still standing at all) just to get you to ME. Such an ego. What I'm driving at is this--my film criticism: rather than sit 3 hours in an unlighted room, after spending 10 bucks--hell, make that 20 bucks 'cause I gotta have me a gigantic BUCKET of that filthy, vile, baby-shit-smelling popcorn and a big-size cardboard goblet containing a slugfest of dirty ice and pure unadulterated, heart-stopping, corn-syrup cola or I can't stay awake during most films, I'd (Id) rather spend that time WRITING. Look how much I can write in 15 minutes; can you imagine how much I could write in 3 hours non-stop?

I come from writers. One of my great-grandfathers was a teacher, violinist, Scottish tenor, and a locally renowned poet. He passed his poetic soul on to his daughter, my grandmother who was a published poet and novelist. Her son, my uncle, was an early aviator--he flew a bi-winged Curtis Jenny back in the "seat-of-your-pants flying days" and once took a shot at flying this fine little flying machine straight up over 14,000-foot Pike's Peak, but he couldn't gain enough altitude, the plane was capable of 16,000 feet, but in that thin air, no matter how hellatiously he jacked-off that phallic throttle, the little plane just couldn't create enough lift, couldn't get it up enough, but Katie-bar-the-door, my uncle almost killed himself trying, almost throttling himself as well as that fine little flying machine to death. He wrote a manuscript about it he called Barnstorming that was damn exciting to read to me though it was never published. I even caught my mother writing poetry one time, after she had become a professional dietician and wrote a column for her state dietician association's newsletter. I can still remember one of her lines--"I see a face in this rose sent to me for attraction..." I thought that strange. By then I was a college lad, you know, an asshole know-it-all who smoked a pipe, wore Kangol sky-tops, all decked out in super, continental-cool pants, shirts, jackets, and sox I bought via mail-order from Milton's Clothing Cupboard in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and I posed as a sensitive very romantic poet, and, by God, by the time I was a senior, I had published 3 poems, like I admitted earlier, my first in the Piggot, Arkansas, daily newspaper's poetry column. But my brother was the champion writer of my relations, and as such, he's always been my pride and joy and greatest inspiration, for he made it to the top of a writing ladder, ending up going to his fabulous final resting place out on a far western bluff overlooking a bottomless panorama of wide-open prairie spaces with 27 published books and hundreds of newspaper columns, magazine articles, short stories, and unfinished manuscripts under his belt, even a book of poetry published right before he died, most of them drilled out two-finger-newspaper-style on his old Underwood typewriter--he only became a computer guy, and it was a terribly old word processor, near the end of his writing days, which were right up smack-dab to the day he died. He had written a column for a large southwest big-city newspaper for several years, especially after he retired as a writing studies department director at a large southwest university, and he had never missed a column deadline. He wrote his Sunday column on Saturday and faxed it to the newspaper and it ran that Sunday, and he died the following Tuesday of brain cancer, the newspaper commemorating him by saying that he not only got his final Sunday column in right on time but had also sent in four extra columns, which would be running posthumously for the next month. That urge to write at whatever the cost of time is blazing through my blood, yep, through all those romantic relatives of mine, as a continuing present (thank you, Gertrude Stein) keeping me in the continuous present tense of being a writer and not being able to not be a writer. And so I receive extreme pleasure from writing voraciously and ferociously, the same pleasure those wolves derive from daily devouring a female elk. Oh the howling is so pretty in respects to old Mister Moon for illuminating such a lucullan meal prepared with such lucullan care and fun.

It was in college that I developed as a writer. It was after I got laid regularly for the first time in my romantic poetic life, innocent fornication with a writer-whore of a young, young girl-woman. I mean, hell, she introduced me to John Cage's music and her uncle who personally brought her her first John Cage LP was the head windowdresser for Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City, and he told me, if I ever lived in Manhattan, "the only place to live in New York City...certainly not Brooklyn...or, ugh! the Bronx," I would always sleep with a light on and the radio on since, as he put it, "the noise of the city at night is so terribly, frightfully lonely." Oh the poetry that poured out of me after we would make clumsy but smoking hot sex in the backseat of my dad's big Fleetwood Caddie parked out in a moonlit cornfield by the state insane asylum. We got the shit scared out of us one time--I ejaculated prematurely all over her pretty blouse I was so scared, but that's another story for another day. Also, besides my sexually-inspired romantic efforts at poetry being inspiration, I went to a college that turned out great writers so I didn't want to look like a dilettante around future Amurikan idolized writers like went to school there, one of whom went on to become filthy successful, filthy rich, writing a slew of thick novels that were gobbled up by Hollywood, and he wrote more books and then he made out of one of his books the most successful television series ever televised. And he and my brother were friendly competitors long after both that writer and I graduated from the same college and I was totally forgotten by all, including my brother, this famous writer, and that college.

I began reading books like a wolf gobbling some fresh bloody rich throat flesh. My writer grandmother had been the head librarian at my hometown's Carnegie Library, so I, like my brother wrote so famously about himself, grew up in a library. I remember the first time I entered my college library how my jaw dropped open. It looked like a Mount Everest of books , that formidable to me, certainly 50 times the size of my grandmother's Carnegie Library. Even though its five floors of stacks of books severely challenged me, I determined to try and read every damn book there was in that overwhelming building.

Ironically, I found my first favorite writer in the paperback rack at the college bookstore. Further ironically, he was a Brit and further ironically, he was a detective novel writer. OK, OK, yes, I generally utterly despise all things British, but, hey, I'm a tolerant man, not mean--except don't get me started on British music or British rock bands or the Beatless-Beatles or that other OH MY GOD AWFUL band that I can't say their name I hate 'em so, but I'll give you a clue, the world's absolutely worst rock and roll (sic) band ever, wouldn't know the meaning of a rolling stone even if it hit'em right between their coke-high eyes.

This British detective novel writer's nom de plume was John Dickson Carr. The first book of his I read, and I highly recommend it as an introduction to the dude, was The Blind Barber, a well-written hairraising blood-curdler featuring the deductive reasoning of a character Carr called, Doctor Gideon Fell, a huge man who needed two canes to get about and whose detective style more resembled that of old Doctor Samuel Johnson than it did Sherlock Holmes.

I devoured all of John Dickson Carr's books, and there are over 20 of them and all of them aren't Doctor Gideon Fell mysteries, though the Doctor's are the ones I really came to treasure. I even took to talking like I thought Dr. Fell would talk, like he talked in the books, you know, of deep, profound pronunciations but liberally spiced with a lot of harrumphs and guttural hums, as though he was constantly pondering a better way of explaining one's deductive reasoning powers in a manner something just less than a genius could understand.

Carr also wrote under the name Carter Dickson; these are still detective novels but they are set in 17th and 18th century London, which Dickson map-like explores in words, descriptions that make you feel you are actually in London, in its filthy, slimy, vulgar, disease riddled, cesspool streets, alleys, and women's bedrooms, especially one scene where the undercover detective of the book is making out with one of the most famous desired courtesans of the day. It's one of the most real scenes I've ever read in a book; I mean, Glory!, when this babe starts taking off her clothes and Dickson explains to you how the various smells change as she takes off each layer of her tight clothing, starting out as an essence of sedating perfume to gradually diminuendo by stages from that sedating essence of roses down a scale of essences to drop off into the dead fish slop odor of her unwashed naked and scaly vagina, flaring bleeding redly its need of a priapic plunging to unstop its uncleansed depths to make room for another batch of a spurted nozzled stream of male seeds drilled down deep into the deepest dirt of that vaginal garden of rotting love. This woman was a notorious beauty, until her false beauty was exposed, as the detective, the dick, sweated like a doped racehorse driving for the finish line down onto her beautiful face, his heavy drops of sweat washing away the thick rice powder and rouge from off her real face of pockmarks and scars left there by years of untreated venereal diseases. The rooms weren't air-conditioned in those days, you dig? It was not easy to take a bath either; maybe once a week, and then you might have to bath in excessively dirty and heavy scummed water. That fine writing turned me off sexual activities for a while, until I realized next time I was performing with the woman I love, how naturally beautiful she truly was without the need of make up--a totally unmarked face growling sweetly back up at mine.

This all started when I went on l. hat's great www.languagehat.com and he introduced me to this writer, Richard Powers. Any writer who says, "The novelist's job is to say what it means to be alive. I don't think there are any wrong ways of doing that; I think there are wrong ways of not doing that....," receives my immediate attention--he went on to say deeper "more triangulated" things about writing that were certainly worthy of my pursuit, because what he says in this interview reprinted on the fabulous wood s lot site is exactly what I started off talking about how I couldn't get into films because I sure as hell had rather write--because as long as I am writing and I am seeing my words dancing out before me in an organized chorus line of rhythm-ing narrative onto a screen or page, then I surely know I know what it means to be alive. IT MEANS EVERYTHING, for there is only the secular, dear friend, only the secular.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
___________________________________________________________________
The Daily Growler Quote of the Day
"On the rampage. Stampede. Over the precipice. Bango! Anything that nourishes violence and confusion. On. On! No matter where. And foaming at the lips all the while. Shouting Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Why? God knows. It's in the blood. It's the climate. It's a whole lot of things. It's the end, too. We're pulling the whole world down around our ears. We don't know why. It's our destiny. The rest is plain shit...." Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, Grove Press paperback, 1961.
___________________________________________________________________