Saturday, September 30, 2006

Hello, You're Under Arrest

Guilty or Not, You Die in Pakistan
I was just reading about some poor bastard in Pakistan who was charged with murder, cleared, charged with murder again, cleared, but Islamic law says, hey, doesn't matter, he's gotta die simply because he was charged with murder...guilty or not. Being charged with murder is enough to get your head chopped off under good old fair Mohammed's Allah.

It's kinda lookin' like Pakistan is influencing our Congress who seems determined to take all our rights away from us, take our identities away from us, deny us individuality, deny us private lives, deny us rights to not believe in any gods, especially the Christian (White Protestant) god, Yahweh...oh, I'm sorry, Jehovah...or whatever the hell is this god we Amuricans are supposed to sing songs to thanking this man/woman/human-animal hybrid for blessing us? George Steinbrenner, that big spoiled rich brat goofball, forces big fat insane Kate Smith singing "God Bless Amurica" every seventh inning on poor old loyal Yankee fans at every Yankee game. We're supposed to be singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," which is a baseball tradition, but since 9/11 all these rich asshole baseball owners have given over to "God Bless America." I don't think 52-million-dollar-a-year Alex Rodriquez, for instance, is quiting baseball to join the coalition of fools in bringing "freedom on the march" to Iraq and to fight those "terrerists."

That's the only aspect of baseball that pisses me totally off these days--its forcing this right wing bullshit patriotism on baseball fans. Of course, it's rich baseball team owners who are forcing us baseball fans to be for the powers that be--Hey, G.W. Bush, Baby Bush, Georgie Porgie--his old Pappy bought him a baseball team, remember?--he owned the Texas Rangers; he almost bankrupted the Texas Rangers; and by forcing the citizens of Arlington, Texas, to build him a very modern ballpark, he almost bankrupted that city crunched between Dallas and Fort Worth, a little city that used to have the 4 D Stock Farm with the accompanying Arlington Downs horse track back in the days I was a toddler.

So, hell yeah, baseball owners kiss Bush ass, noses deep in those nasty old flabby cracks; they are Plutocrats; therefore, they are Repugnicans and therefore they are racists, too; remember dear old Marge Schott?

Car Bomb Kills 39 in Kabul
Who cares? "That's war, folks."

More US Troops Killed in Iraq Than Died in All the Attacks on 9/11
Please don't count the dead "towelheads" who've died in this war or you'll get a more horrifying picture. Oh hell no; they don't count. Where's Colon Powell, he knows how to count dead US soldiers--he determined the proper ratios of dead US troops to dead Cong during VietNam. I think he figured out for every US soldier killed they had to kill at least a 100 Cong.
Using Colon's ratios it means we should have killed at least 300,000 Iraqis by now. We may have; who the hell knows?

Molly Ivins on Habeas Corpus
Here's an article from tough Texas woman reporter Molly Ivins on what G.W. "Georgie Porgie" Bush feels about habeas corpus. WE ARE ALL GUILTY OF SOMETHING!

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060927_molly_ivins_habeas_corpus/

The only rights we now have are the rights to be GUILTY.

Maybe it's simply you are guilty of ATHEISM.

Maybe it's simply you are guilty of BEING OPPOSED TO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION.

Watch out talking to those Islamic friends!!!

Be careful, some Spanish people look like Islamic terrorists!!!

BE CAREFUL, Islamics are everywhere; OH MY GOD, AL QUEDA has already invaded us.

OH GOD, WHY HATH THOU FORSAKEN US?

Praise the Lard!

F it, I'm howling at my full moon, dammit; I'm drifting off into an ethereal of my own design.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Friday, September 29, 2006

Loose Wig

Retract
I have to make one correction to yesterday's post. According to Senator Patrick Leahy, 32 years a Senator from Vermont (that's like being elected to your career--he's set for life with all his senatorial benefits and privileges--What a Life!), the Bushophiles did not do away with the Writ of Habeas Corpus (Who has the body?) on Amurican citizens, though that only means if they bust you for being a "terrerist" you're still going to Gitmo but, as a citizen of the good ole USA, "land of the filthy rich who are the free here," you have the right to a trial, even though the only trial you can get at Gitmo is a military tribunal--oh yeah, justice the military way! So I stand corrected.

Hauling in the Full Moon
I'm thinking of hauling in the full moon that hangs over my wolfhead and letting it shine in my subconscious for awhile. Am I going introspective? Maybe. Like a turtle slides back into its carapacic safety or a smart Amurican suddenly finding himself on a street corner in the center of Baghdad must head like holy hell toward the Green Zone, Margaritaville in the heart of the sunken city of Baghdad, where we're told the streets are quiet and safe, people drive like they do in the US, very safely, you see, obeying all the Neo-Con traffic laws; it's a sancturary where you can get some pork chops and bacon at the Halliburton canteen--Yep, an oil tooling company is in the food business through their Kellogg, Brown & Root division, they call it KBR, which originally was an offshore drilling company, once Kellogg alone and Brown & Root (check out that pair--great crooked Amuricans--the kind we should all be) on their own--all Texas-connected companies, mainly headquartered in Houston, the home of Pappy and Mammy Bush, and the home of the former Enron, you remember that company put together by Missourian Kenny Boy Lay, the guy none of the Bushes remembered ever knowing....HELL, WE'RE DEALING WITH PLUTOCRACY HERE NOW.

I once worked in a backoffice role at a major accounting firm, though in the early eighties when I joined this firm, they were beginning to promote themselves as "management consulting" firms with auditing and bookkeeping as a second-story operation, their main new business was consulting Corporate management and executives, you know about how to beat taxes both here and in the rest of the world, etc., that kind of statistical tax-dodging they were notorious for when all they were were accounting firms--like good ole patriotic Arthur Anderson--biggest acconting firm of the old Big 8, but crooked as snakes at night as the Enron book cookers--you know, where "creative accounting" originated, not just one set of books, hell no, how about as many as you need, each one a little more crooked than the next. This firm I worked for had been organized by an Englishman in Chicago back in the time of the last attempt by Corporations to take over this government. When I went to work for them they were a US company headquartered in NYC. Then they founded a World Firm. Aha! Then they announced all kinds of European offices opening up with their headquarters in London. Back home where they came from.

The CEO at the time, he was on a roll, making a million bucks a year and then, like a lot of these CEOs, he divorced his original wife, and married an heiress to a US company fortune, started trumpeting what he called "Bridging the Gap" (I think they paid a couple of million to an ad agency to come up with that tagline), and what he meant by that was he was for building a bridge from the USA to the rest of the world. See? Next step, and it came while I was still their under another CEO and his trumpet was blaring forth the coming of the Global Marketplace. Aha! This is about the same time Pappy Bush started thinking out his New World Order--which for some reason, pundits ignore; yet, if you read Bush's speech in which he declared a New World Order with those famous Thousand Points of Light you see very clearly what Baby George is really fulfilling, a love-me, daddy, move big time. (Doesn't that 1000 Points of Light BS sound rather Sun Yung Moonish to you? You know, he and Pappy are best of friends--in fact, Pappy may be in the ginseng root business with old Sunny Moon (who by the way claims a relationship to Joshua ben Joseph (better known a Jesus Christ) since he's related to Jesus's Japanese brother and actually knows where Jesus is really buried. Such cockamamy bullshit and yet millions of Koreans are devoting their lives and monies to this corrupt fool with a hold over the Bush Family because of corrupt dealings in South Korea--recall the president of South Korea was assasinated--that's while we still had thousands of troops based there. Oh heck, why am I bringing this bullshit up, it's past history--Bush has declared it "secret" so to hell with it.

Maybe like Internet bad boy Marc Perkel I should declare this country is no longer my country or the country I think of as Amurica. Perhaps my growl is worst than my bite.

How do you tell a hypocrite? First of all, all the things they stand for are based on lies. A hypocrite, for instance, says he believes in God when we all know the only God he really believes in is the God in God-Damn! His real god is Mammon, the god of wealth. His real goal is a Plutocracy in this country, though he stands like a coward and claims he is PROTECTING us, protecting our freedoms and rights by taking them away from us--how hypocritical, right? The Thousand Points of Light are the thousand reflections of the Sun (Yung Moon?) off the thousand mountains of gold owned by the Carlyle Group; or the glistening striking 1000 reflections off those huge pools of black gold that lie under those Islamic sands, dammit--yes, now's the time they believe in God, "God-dammit, Unka Dick, how the hell do I skip my ass around this F-ing mess?" (Except we're respecting the kiddies who read The Daily Growler and using a euphemism (F-ing) instead of the longer word our "president" really used.)

Amazing how they keep on winning our hearts and minds, even though we as hypocrites (like all Dumbocrats are hypocrites) claim we're opposed to them and we're tired of the Iraq War, when in fact we are a bunch of scared-to-death cowards, same as the Germans back when their unelected president declared himself Chancellor. That dude, too, took away people's rights at his will; why, it is rumored he even murdered at his will--why millions of people at a whack--yet, this real Devil was a Christian and a vegetarian--plus, hell, he was a pedophile, too. I think that's what we have to look forward to here; a Chancellor of that old German Chancellor's ilk. And I think we are facing a form of National Socialism which ain't socialism (we read that "commie") as we know it--service to the nation was this dude's demand and since he declared himself the PROTECTOR of the true German people (not those with the big noses), he decided what your service to the country would be; he decided if you could be a true German citizen or whether you needed to take a long shower up in the beautiful woodlands of Poland. He was taking his Neo-Conservative ideas and intending to forced them on the rest of the world. His method was his brand of "freedom on the march" as he sent his most-powerful-army-in-the-world in unprovoked attacks on their helpless neighbors, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary--leaving alone Switzerland...hummm...how do the Swiss get away with such respected neutrality?

Another growlingwolf Hero
First of all, I gotta say, that Bernie Kerick must be some kind of stud.

Good ole Jeanine Pirro is now on a hot seat because of him; she's the Repugnican candidate for Attorney General of New York State against a good-little-daddy's boy, Andrew Cuomo, yeah, Mario's son--the governor who built more new prisons in this state than any governor ever in the history of the US; he did it trying to get Upstate NY votes since the companies that once supported Upstate NY all bailed out and left 'em for China or Mexico--hey, they were bridging the gap, see?--leaving Upstate New York economically backwards. The prison industry saved some Upstate New York economies and a lot of folks who once made shoes, or men's suits, or assembled automobiles became prison guards and wardens and shit like that. "Hey, man, we get to slap the shit out of those New York City kneegrows" who are doin' 25 to Life for possessing an ounce of coke, while the coke dealers go about their merry ways, thanks in part to Jeanine Pirro's good ole goombah boy husband.

Recently phone conversations were leaked of dear sweet Jeanine, and she is a looker, too, and I'm sure has, you know, used it in her rise to fame and fortune, though being married to a Mafia goon meant she was already pretty well set, spilling her soul out to WHO? Three guesses and if you don't say "Bernie Kerick" then your guesses don't count. Wow, hot mama Jeanine talking about "F-ing" with old Bernie, the tender man, the tough MFer who women like mirror-mirror-on-the-wall Jeanine fall legs wide open for. An amazing man. He's ruined, yet he's not ruined. An amazing man. Bernie Kerick for stud horse of the year. Judith Regan ain't no chopped liver now either. Wow. He's making Geraldo look limp. I don't think he's got a shot at Wilt Chamberlain's record: 10,000 women. WHAT A MAN!

So, I lift a glass of Poland Spring water to Jeanine Pirro.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Thursday, September 28, 2006

My Last Drunk

Totally Wasted
I went out last night with thedailygrowlerhousepianist and I shouldn't have, but I am a musician and I have many musician friends and one was playing over in the East Village last night and thehousepianist didn't really want to go but I insisted, so we went. It wasn't a problem until after the gig. thehousepianist was pissed off by the gig so we took a woman friend in tow and we hit the bars, ending up at my local Irish pub drinking shots of Jameson's whiskey and then every now and then shots of Sambuco the friendly and very good bartender laid on us for free. I don't remember leaving the joint, which isn't a problem, that has happened to me alot in the past, but when I woke up this morning...whew-babba...I found I had knocked my great Toshiba laptop off my loft bed and it lay dead as a damn doorknob on the floor when I came down this morning. So now I'm left with my old Toshiba Satellite Pro, which is a charming old wonderfully working machine, but not as fancy and nice as the one I knocked off the loft bed to its death seven feet below.

I took the drunkard's oath: "I swear I will never drink again, so help me __fill in the blank__."
There's a six-pack of cold Heinekens in my fridge but I'm resisting. It's a newborn growlingwolf. An alcohol-free one. Yeah sure. You believe that and you also believe G.W. Bush is our greatest president.

And our great "president" (we've got him for life, by the way--he's gonna name himself "Chancellor" soon, you watch) is also the source of some bad news that makes my old growling head pound more than the alcohol does. Congress overwhelmingly approved Bush's right to round up whomever he pleases, throw them in the hoosegow and let 'em rot there, since a part of the bill this bunch of asshole rascals passed does away with the Writ of Habeas Corpus (Slick Willie Clinton tried to do away with it, too, if you recall), which means once Bush brands you a "terrerist" and you're thrown in his hoosegow, you don't even have the right to know what you're charged with; you have no rights at all since the Writ of Habeas Corpus means that you have to produce a smoking gun or a body in order to convict someone of a crime. Bush now has the power to convict you of a crime simply because he says you're a "terrerist." You get it? That's despicable. The whole Congress should be IMPEACHED along with this asshole who is determined to bring this country to ruin, and with the help of his butt-F-ing Congress, he's going to more than succeed. He's gonna put us all in the fucking poorhouse, except there will be no poorhouse because he's cut the funds for poorhouses in favor of the rich houses, of which there are plenty. So, now, my fellow Amuricans, you better get rich or you're dead.

How to Get Rich Quick
As The Daily Growler investment advisor, I will give you three ways to get rich:

Invest all you money in the following stocks:

Halliburton
Pfizer Pharmaceuticals
Exxon-M0bil (except be careful here since for some strange reason gas prices are dropping
like lead in water)

Hey, why shouldn't we all get rich off this Iraq War our "president" has set up for us. As he says, "You gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps, travellers, to exist in my Kingdom."

Unless you're born a prince or a princess, you are definitely sailing in a sinking boat.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler





Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Mingus, Mingus, Mingus

The Culture Is Far Above the Horizon
While two babes of politics, Condo-leasing Rice and Slick Willie's Lucky Wife Now a Senator, go at each other over a really inane thing, whether Slick Willie allowed 9/11 to happen, which of course he did according oreo-cookie Rice and of course he didn't according to Hustlin' Hillary. Who gives a shit who's responsible for 9/11? How about, it seems to me, concern over a lyin' son of a bitch who's pretending to be president of us and who's draining our coffers and flinging it away toward his father's old degenerate friends like Unka Dick (this old son of bitch will never die no matter how many heart attacks some generous "God" nails him with), Rummy, Little Karl Rove, Paulie Wolfowitz, and all the gang at the Carlyle Group and that good ole Okie company, Halliburton...oh, and don't forget Bechtel, which old Pappy has a lot of interest in, while, in the meantime he pins us all down under a bunch of rules and regulations that seem to indicate WE the People are responsible for 9/11? That would be my concern and I'd slam both Condo-leasing Rice and Hustlin' Hillary on that one: Where do you sorry excuses for politicians stand on all that shit, to hell with Slick Willie and to hell even with Osama and Al Queda.

I say the US government F-ed up no matter who the president was. All presidents since Kennedy have been pretty much the same--bad economies propped up by world tensions and eventual wars--more and more death being the answer to horrible living conditions and privilege being the answer to the rich man's desires--and it is the rich who are responsible for 9/11, so if you're rich, then step up and take your responsibility proudly, like a good monkey patriot. We are ruled by humans who have only recently graduated from Simians to barely human beings--their objectives: more land to grow their bananas on; a craving every now and then for hot monkey meat, which they are ready to go to war and kill for; which ends with them taking human bones and beating on the Statue of Liberty with them.

Mingus, Byard, Richmond, Coles, Dolphy, Jordan
I have flipped off Condo-leasing and Hustlin' Hill to watch a video made 42 years ago in Oslo, Norway. It's Charles Mingus and his band blowin' the blues away against a solid sea of bleached white faces, though we know the Swedes dug jazz more than Amuricans, which is a real shame and one I'd like to debate somebody over. Mingus's music is OURS, true American music. Classical? Hell yeah; beyond classical, in an American transcendental state, a level above the reach of the ordinary. It's not meant for the ordinary. Brittany Spears is made for the ordinary; those poor sleazy little amateur American Idol jokes are the ordinary. Soap operas are the ordinary. The New York Philharmonic playing Beethoven for the 9,000th time is the ordinary.

Mingus is so far from the ordinary, even after 42 years, he hasn't been discovered yet really. Yeah, there are people like me out here who know his work. "Jaki Byard," Charles shouts, and then Jaki Byard, one of the most thrilling pianists I've ever heard no matter the genre, begins the introduction to another walk in the La Frontera (where Mingus was born to an army dad and a mother who was a prostitute but not to Mingus) ethereal that translates around all the cactii of the ordinary to come out clean and unscathed in a Pantheonic space of where the spheres abound with unique sounds and words and paintings and scultptor and even essays, some explaining the ordinary to the ordinary, 'cept to no avail since the ordinary are stuck in being ordinary.

And Eric Dolphy? What's to say about him? What went on in his handsome head?

Jaki's got 'em stompin' now; Jaki liked to stomp.

And one morning his daughter went in to wake Jaki up and found him with a bullet right square-dab through his head, dead as a doorknob. Where did the bullet come from that took Jaki away from us; no one to this day knows. There were no bullet holes in the window.

Mingus already had left us, riding out in a wheelchair under the bootheel of Lou Gehrig's disease.

Eric Dolphy has left us, too. His head blew up one fine day.

Little Johnny Coles, one of the true sweet trumpet players of jazz, basically unknown except to us who have the ears to understand jazz and we all know Little Johnny. What a sound! What an awesome cry he had. Yeah, Little Johnny's gone, too.

And Danny Richmond. Mingus's other self; always there. Mingus said he was playing a sax and Mingus said throw that damn sax away and play the damn drums. Sure, why not, and Danny did just that, became the ultimate Mingus drummer. Danny's long gone, too, now, though he did stay around and lead the Mingus band down on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for years.

Clifford Jordon.

Clifford Laconia Jordan (September 2, 1931, Chicago - March 27, 1993, Manhattan) was an inside/outside sax player who held his own with Eric Dolphy in the 1964 Charles Mingus Sextet.

So we see, Clifford's departed, too.

And yet they are so alive as I watch them performing on this old video. The music just washes around me with a soft summer breeze-like effect on me--I hear the world singing around me because human beings like Mingus only come around once or they never come around because they're never discovered; but Mingus was discovered and he did live and he's still alive as far as I'm concerned and I raise a shotgun into the air and shoot out the ceiling in his honor.

Mingus is so much more relevant to my living than anything Condo-leasing Rice and Hustlin' Slick Hillary have to "argue" about; yet, Condo and Hillary could hold more of my destiny in their hands than Mingus ever did.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

America's Many Sicknesses

Impeachment
Slick Willie Clinton, looking slicker than ever, I might add, has been peddled about on teevee for the past three days, especially what they are calling Bill's "standing firm" against Fox's little privileged A-hole Chris Wallace--isn't he old turkey-neck Mike Wallace's son? Mike's daughter, too, I think, got a nice cushy big-time reporter job with one of the networks. Nepotism is alive and well in this country; look who our faux president is.

Bill's prominent at the talk show tables because Karl Rove and the Bush Babies are trying to pin their failures in Iraq on him; they're trying to cut the Slick One off at the pass before the Dumbocrats trot him out in support of their candidates in the coming November elections (phony this time?). The Repugnicans even have Condo-leasing Rice nipping at old Bill's heels.

I saw Hillary out at some money-grubbing party function today defending the Slick One, a job she's certainly used to by now.

I have a feeling it's all a bunch of scripted bullshit; all these privileged bastards are in cahoots; either in Skull and Bones at Yale--didn't little Hillary go to Yale? or helping Pappy and the Contra crooks fly cocaine in from Nicaragua and fly arms back out again and back down to the Contra army--the good ole boys in that illegal little interference Pappy Bush ran during the Ronnie Raygun administration. Ironically, I just noticed that Daniel Ortega, the original Sandanista bad boy in that interference in a sovereign country's elections, is back and leading the current polls for president of Nicaragua in its upcoming elections.

Slick Willie and Pappy Bush are sure old buddy-buddies in their tsunami-relief fund hokkum show.

Same old shit. It just keeps coming around and back around and back around again and we keep on allowing these people to build their nest eggs at our expense--I mean Slick Willie was a $30,000-a-year governor of the great backward state of Arkansas before he took Dale Bumpers's place as the Arkansas hillbilly who the Dumbocrats need to coddle and cradle because they need the South's votes--the Dumbocrats always think they need the South--and you know why, because the Dumbocrats used to be the party of the South before they went and got mixed up in that Civil Rights BS old Lyndon "Nutsack" Johnson had to sign into law against his own Old South will. This all started back when good ole black-woman-lovin'-black-man-hatin' Strom "Get Me a Ho, Boy" Thurmond walked out of the '48 Dumbocrat convention--the one that nominated that little rat-bastard, turncoat Hairy Ass Truman, who was a hidebound racist, too, until he realized most of the voters in the Kansas City district he was given to run in by the Kansas City political boss was a black neighborhood. In order for Harry to get on the gravy train and get elected to Congress, he had to convince the black voters of his district that he was a fun-loving, bone-rattlin', dedicated white man of all the people, including, oh my God, even the Negroes. Then he had to pay back these Kansas City "kneegrows" for their helping him, so he promoted integration of the US Army. Oh my God. Strom Thurmond lost it and he and all his Dixiecrat asskissers, a whole slew of musty old Southern racists and hidebounder Klansmen, literally turned the Old South from a solid Dumbocrat bloc into a Repugnican stronghold with the Democrats for Ike movement then taking these sleazeballs into the Repug Party all the way, which they cutely tagged Dem-Ike-crats. It worked; the Old South became solid Repugnican. Hell, if it hadn't, we wouldn't have gotten old Pappy Bush elected to political office in Texas. Him and that old history-teachin' racist John Tower, the first Repugs ever elected to Congress from Texas. Even the ones who remained Dumbocrats voted as if they were Repugnicans--all because of the black man wanting to be accepted as a full human being and not the one quarter human role given to blacks by our so-great BS Constitution, written by old Tom "Once You Go Black You Can't Go Back" Jefferson, who Slick Willie's mother loved so much she gave it to her precious Little Willie as his middle name.

So from a $30,000-a-year Governor of Arkansas--next to Mississippi as the most backward state in the Union, married to a hot little hippy girl making a lot more than him in her little lawyer job down in Little Rock--remember, Hillary made $75,000 off a stock deal she hit on--that's what got her interesting in land development. So, OK, Hillary had some bucks, but not like the bucks she and Slick Willie had when they left the White House. They were both millionaires by then, all their expenses covered for life by his having been president and now her having been a senator--amazing isn't it? How come Slick Willie doesn't have an infomercial like Donald "I Say I'm Not Bankrupt" Trump on how to get rich quick. Get into politics, right?

It all has to do with history. Even the history of impeachment. First president impeached? Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's vice president--a good ole Tennessee boy--and you all know Tennessee's the state that gave us the Ku Klux Klan--yet this good ole boy from the South refused to turn on Lincoln's "freein' the slaves" (again, another two-faced politician who freed the slaves against his will) and refused to help the racist old Southerners overturn that order and put them damn slaves back out in the fields where animals like them belonged--"Out thar with my best mules. Workin' sun-up to sundown. That's what made the South what it is today, a mule and a darky out in those fields from sun-up to sundown."

It's still the same old shit going on; don't you see?

They impeached old Tricky Dick over Watergate. What a scandal, eh?

They impeached old Slick Willie 'cause he had "sex" in the Oval Office, even though the Slick One didn't consider it "sex"--hell, it was a blow job; down where the Slick One's from blow jobs is all right; they ain't sex; hell, ever boy gets a blowjob 'fore he's a real man--especially from all them thar little black gals down in the bottoms where a white man's king and don't have to give nobody no rights if they ain't able to prove they're Free, White, and Twenty-One. We're going back to that philosophy again with the Repugnicans recently voting in the new voter ID card requirement. Did any of you all ever have to pay a Poll Tax to vote?

History repeating itself.

Impeachment Is Still on the Books
I watch all this silly bullshit with Chris Wallace and Slick Willie and Condo-leasing Rice saying Slick Willie used torture and it was OK but Georgie Porgie wants to use a little torture to protect us from Al Queda and we start throwing rocks at him. Boo-hoo-hoo. A bunch of spoiled brat millionaires--or billionaires in the case of the Nazi-money-rich-already Bush Family Circus.

Is Georgie Porgie unimpeachable? I guess he is. Let's see, he was never ever clearly elected president, not in either 2000 or 2004. He was also the first-ever human-animal-hybrid to be appointed president by the Supreme Court, a court GP's father and Ronnie Raygun had given wholehog and wholeheartedly over to the oddest balls in Amurican juriprudence, including Clarence "Long Dong and Cunthairs" Thomas--why it's Token on the Supreme Court--'cept Clarence looks more like Chef than he does Token [sorry, I'm throwin' in South Park references again].

Let's see, Georgie Porgie sat reading My Pet Goat to a classroom of bebop kiddies while NYC and his own Washington, District of Corruption, were under serious attack from at that time at least in the We the People community. Even when it finally hit Bush that it was serious, he didn't take control and go back to Washington, oh hell no, he flew like the AWOL coward he is out to the safety of SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebrasky. No one was in charge during those attacks. Unka Dick you say? Unka Dick was hiding away like a scared rabbit in his underground secret bunker.

In a rather weird turn of events, Bush, when he finally did make it back to the White House, invented the War on Terrorism, even though he had no evidence there was anything called Al Queda, anybody really named Osama Bin Laden, and how come he flew the Bin Ladens in this country, and they were thick overhere, over 100 of them, the hell out of here even before he had revealed that Osama Bin Ladin was responsible for 9/11 and by God "we're gonna find him and bring him to justice, by damn."

Oh such a wonderful disaster, an viable part of old Leo Strauss's idea for world conquest, the basis for his whole Neo-Con project that he'd taught to Paulie Boy Wolfowitz (now head of the World Bank--yo ho, he got all the money under his control) and Little Karl Rover (Let Rover Come Over).

With the powers to declare war in his mitts, Bushy Boy began talking out both sides of his monkey mouth and then he becomes the mighty Commander and Chief of the World's Greatest Army so, hell, we'll just go cook those towelheads right there in the sands from which they sprang, so he sent troops against the Taliban in Afghanistan, who really had nothing to do with 9/11 except they protected our invented bogeyman whether he existed there or not--except if he did exist there it was because of us and our CIA who organized the Mujahhadeen, of which the Taliban and Osama were factors, against our enemy at that time the Soviet Union (remember the Soviet Union?). Then after attacking Afghanistan, this little lying creep announces he's going into Iraq, too, preemptively, yep, attacking a sovereign nation without provocation, based on lies, all lies, lies, and more lies. Same as the old reason to start the VietNam War full-flare was based on the Gulf of Tonkin LIE.

Liars. All of them liars. The Repugnicans claimed when they impeached Clinton that the president lying was reason enough to IMPEACH HIM. Did you all hear that? And yet we can't impeach the most needing-to-be impeached "president" in our history. IMPEACH BUSH! should be the rallying cry of all liberals, the Dumbocrats, the Greens, the Naderites, all of US, WE the People; it should even be the rallying cry of the poor duped soldiers doing the dying for this little prick's showing up his cowardly old wimp of a father, Pappy Bush, who, in case you've forgotten, bailed out of his crashed plane in WWII before all of his crew got out of the plane, an offense punishable by courts martial and possible execution in the Military Code of Justice. I think one of Pappy's crew died in the plane, but I may be practicing Swift Boat tactics on that one, though I'm pretty sure I heard one of Pappy's crew say one of his men died after Pappy was out and safe on the ground. Hey, these guys are my heroes, how 'bout you guys? Commander in Chief Georgie Porgie "Mission Accomplished" Bush and old Air Force Cap'n George "Ready or Not, Boys, I'm Bailin' This Crate" Herbert Walker Bush, the most successful family in recent Amurican White Trash history.

So we can't impeach Bush. It's too politically incorrect. Holy shit. Look out for the unpredictable from this Bush Klan in the coming weeks. Osama dead! Could be, though the Taliban is saying he ain't dead. We say he never existed. Oh no.

Impeach Bush? That's the easiest solution to getting this country headed in the right direction--not again, but maybe for the first time in our history--the right direction being the only good direction LEFT.

thegrowlingwolf

for The Daily Growler

Monday, September 25, 2006

Tune Out If You're a Minor...or if you're a miner.

Finding Out About Women's Breasts

I had admired nude women since I was 12 and a member of my family bought a newstand, magazine, and tobacco shop and I started helping him out by sweeping and mopping out the place on Saturday mornings for a dollar. One day, my relative was in his office doing the books, I went behind the cash register to check out a rumor going around at schooI. I was definitely not allowed behind the cash register when the relative was around or one of his workers, so I took this opportunity to run back there really quickly. The rumor at school said that my relative kept "nasty" magazines in an out-of-way place under the cash register. So I propped my mop up in the bucket and ran like a rabbit back to that forbidden area and WOW to my surprise I got back there expecting to have to search but all I had to do was look down and JESUS there they were, the nudie cutie magazines, with something called Modern Model on top of that evil little stack. Damn, it had a naked woman's photo on the cover--well, she was naked but not all that exposed. BUT...I found just by flipping up the cover, that BOOM, there on the inside cover was DOUBLE JESUS, the prettiest young woman I'd ever seen totally naked, sitting back on her legs, leaning back on her hands, and in so doing lifting her NAKED BREASTS up, up, up and away into my superman-libidinous desires. HOLY SODOM. I couldn't keep from daring to continue to take in those photographed naked breasts until I heard a noise from the offie and I quickly returned to my mop and continued sloshing the soapy water around the linoleum floor, though the knowledge that those magazines were just a few feet away under that cash register and that there were many many more unexplored pages in that tempting pile drove me almost as batty as a belfry bat. I had that photo in my waking and dreaming hours for the whole next week until I got back down there that next Saturday morning and, yep, I dared to check out anothers couple of pages and another couple of beautiful girl-women all nude, their breasts totally expose, nipples and all, sticking them out at me, tempting me, causing me pain between my legs. The Holy Grail for me--those nudie magazines, which when I later cashiered in the store became a constant source of young man sexual relief and also a source of extra-money since I'd steal a couple every now and then and take them to school and sell 'em in the boy's bathroom for a buck a piece.

The first real, actual, right-before-me-eyes woman's breasts I ever saw totally uncovered and used to titilate my youthful lusts was at a central north Texas county fair. I was with four of my best buds tooling around town in one of our showy cars intending from the beginning of avoiding the stupid fair, but then we met this Chevvy load of girls we knew at the Dixie Pig Drive-in and they said they were heading for the fair, so hell, suddenly so were we. We'd get there before them, we hottied in our best duck-tailed coolness.

This night we were tooling around on zoot-cool wheels, my friend the tobacco chewer's customized 49 Mercury, a green metallic beauty, weighted and shocked low to the ground, the body stripped of its chrome, the remaining holes filled, then the whole body sanded smooth as glass then painted metallic green, the paint baked on and then it, too, buffed until it had the just-right nonreflective brilliance (these customizers hated reflections off their car bodies--they wanted you to see their customized work right there in your face, every flawless span of it with no distractions--absolutely entirely photographic if you will--these guys did however use chrome heads on their rebuilt motors and Hollywood glass pack mufflers, though the tobacco chewer had taken the chrome off his glass pack's dual exhausts--Hollywood mufflers had the best damn low-mean sound when you revved your motor up to 300 rpms--those glass packs sung beautiful songs, a duet of harmonious pipes). A true cruisin' automobile.

By the time we got to the fairgrounds, we were definitely in a sportin' mood. On a poon search. Remember, we males have sportin' blood in us--well, some of us, though I admit, I do--I've actually enjoyed a couple of bullfight seasons in Mexico; as a kid, I got thrilled almost to death at an illegal cockfight; I've bet heavy on the nags, too; I've shot craps against alley walls, once in the backroom of a whorehouse (Papagaya's) in Nuevo Laredo, Tamalpias, Mexico; sportin' blood; yep, sports betting, too--you know, with a real bookie of perhaps Palermo heritage. We were four teenage mockers struttin' like rutty Tom cats down the alley of a county fair midway with its seedy, seedy hot dog stands and cotton candy stands and its many games of no-chance and then the filthy, oily rides (the Whip, the Bullet, the Rocket, the Octopus, the Caterpillar, the Wild Mouse), and then--YES, the sideshows. We strutted into the pits of a little Hell we'd discovered. First we passed the freak show. We weren't lookin' for those kind of freaks. Then we stopped a couple'a seconds in front of the African Dip where a big black dude was sitting on a jumpseat above a tank of water. He was hollering some shit at us white folks and the white folks loved it. Yep, those were the days of separate-but-equal Texas--the blacks had their own night they could attend the fair and then they were only allowed into the rides area and then the sideshows but not at the food stands. Silly shit, but it happened. This racist amusement, the African Dip, gave this black dude a chance to vent his hatred of the white man with impunity, unless you call having your jumpseat pop open under you when a white man hit the red-bull's eye trigger at the side of the tank punishment. It looked like a hell of a lot of fun to a fun-loving wide-eyed white boy like me. Then we got more black entertainment at The Cotton Club Review from Harlem. You know, a Slappy White-type comic out front of a string of black babes, some of them a little long in the tooth, dressed in coochie-coochie outfits, showing some tit and showing a lot of ass and promising all the white boys ganged around the platform in front of the big tent perhaps some nakedness if they behaved themselves, blah, blah, blah. The band was good; they were playing a Clifford Brown-Max Roach vehicle called "Blues Walk," that I knew because I had the Brown and Roach LP it came off of.

And then, down just past the Cotton Club Review, back a dog-trot off the main strip itself, a little white sign shaped like an arrow with green letters saying, "This Way to The Green Valley Nudist Colony." The Green Valley Nudist Colony. Now they were talkin'. Wahoooo. That's what the hell we'd were at that tacky fair for.

"You boys 21, right?" the old dude at the opening to the tent in which the Green Valley resided. "Oh, hell yeah, Your Honor," we all chirped. "Well, then come on in boys, except first I gotta check..." Uh-oh. IDs. "...to see if you got a 50-cent piece, you know, boys, the price of one of these here tickets."

We handed this chisler a half-a-buck a piece and he gave us back a ticket then ushered us through a curtain that had a handpainted view of the actual Green Valley Nudist Colony somewhere out in the hills of California we assumed, a delightful Wateau-like scene complete with barely visable but noticeably naked maidens enjoying life all over that pleasurable Green Valley.

Inside the curtain were two lines of hump-shouldered boys and pot-bellied older guys, all rarin' to go to the object of their desires just behind an unpainted plywood wall separating us from the treasures of feminine wile we'd paid 50 cents to see with two big holes cut into it just big enough for a horny fool to stick his noggin' through.

I got in one line with the duck--we called him that because his mother looked like a duck not him. There were seven guys ahead of us. Then we heard the guy at the front of our line say, "What the fuck! I just gave you another 50 cents, goddammit." Then a couple of geeks from the freak show I guess went and ordered the guy to leave and he left but he was cussing out the world as he left. "Bitch. She won't show it boys for less than 2 dollars."

"Wow, duck, what the hell; I've only got a dollar and a half." "Don't worry; I've got a fistful of halves. She'll show us her snatch, but that's what costs your ass." Holy Christ, my timbers were shivering in anticipation of feminine nakedness as we gradually shuffled forward. It took a long time with some of these guys. One guy had his head in the hole a long time. The rest of us got antsy and started bitching about us not getting our turn. "Hold your horses, boys; there's plenty'a time; these little ladies aren't going anywhere."

Finally my time came. "OK, you two heads in the holes." He was talking to me and the tobacco chewer who was sticking his head in the other hole. In went my head. I looked over and saw the tobacco chewer's head but we didn't anything. We were looking down at a red pallette surrounded by pillows that I saw were trying to invoke a Persian spirit in us. Yep, that's what the Green Valley Nudist Colony was, a Persian fantasy in all kinds of reds. Then the girl came into the little room and sat down on the pillows. She was between our heads and we looked down on her and she was just right beneath us. She wasn't bad. In fact, I found her damn pretty. She was a Beatnik-looking girl wearing a Persian costume, shear pantaloons, and a top like Jeanie wore on the I Dream of Jeanie teevee show--you know, fabulously built Barbara Eden as a genie who lives in a bottle with a US astronaut--hey, I believed it was possible in those years! Then there was music. It sounded like Hawaiian music and this babe looked up at us and batted her eyes and took off her little see-through bolero top. She didn't look anymore naked to me than she did when she had it on.

"Ya wanna see more throw another quarter through the hole." I now know she had a Brooklyn accent.

Wha? We protested. "Either you throw a quarter in here or we'll throw you out." We through in a couple of quarters.

She wiggled around a bit, batted her eyes, and then quickly, like a snake, flashed her tits. It was so fast I thought I saw them but I wasn't for sure. I certainly hadn't seen enough that I was up on a sexual high. It wasn't sexy.

"You want me to take my top off you have to throw in another quarter."

Wha? Again we protested. It was getting serious. I only had one quarter left. I threw it in.

She wiggled around a little more and then, like a flash, she floated a veil up from somewhere and while it fluttered over her breasts she whipped off her top and lay back on the pillows, waving the veil over her naked breasts. Ah come on, we started saying. The tobacco chewer said, "Come on, baby, let us see 'em. Come on."

"Throw in another quarter...." Shit. She had us over a barrel. "Can I borrow a quarter from you?" I asked the tobacco chewer. He threw in fifty cents.

Again she wiggled, moaned a little, and then, in a breathless sort of way, she let the veil creep off her breasts a little at a time and then, shhhhhwish...off came the veil and there they were? Naked titties. Dairies, as my dad called them. Hermans. Bosoms. Boobies. Boobs. And she then jiggled them and they were so beautifully erect and they weren't big but they were perfect to me--they looked just like those naked breasts in the many girly magazines I'd pored over. "Can we touch 'em?" the tobacco chewer asked.

"No." the Brooklyn Persian girl said. "I'll spread eagle for a dollar."

What? What had she said. I didn't know what that meant.

The tobacco chewer quickly threw a solid dollar into the room.

I was broke. I looked at the tobacco chewer. He looked back at me and shrugged his shoulders with his eyes; he was tapped out, too, now. I pulled my head out of the hole and asked a guy if he could loan me a dollar until I found my friends and I'd give it back to him. He told me to go to hell and get the hell out of the way if I was broke and let him look. The nudist colony attendant told me to move it along--no money no fun--plus, when the next guy in line tried to go up to the hole he told him he had to wait until the tobacco chewer got his money's worth. The guy started cussing very viciously at the attendant but then he calmed down. I was told to exit down a little hallway like way and I pushed into a curtain and suddenly found myself in the room with the Brooklyn Persian girl. She was taking down her pantaloons. "What the hell are you doing in here, get the hell out of here, Randy, get this asshole out of here." The attendant jerked my ass out of the room and said, "That way, you little bastard" and pointed me toward the real exit.

The tobacco chewer had been the only one of us to see her spread-eagle. He talked about it gushingly all the way back to town. I couldn't believe I missed that. Simply because I hadn't had a dollar. But, I'd seen naked breasts. Live. Jiggling right before me eyes. They danced in my memory like the Sugar Plum Fairies in Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite.

Later, after I was fully mature, I was 26, I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in an artist's studio. The artist was a Santa Fe legend who had come to Santa Fe from Philadelphia in the 20s after studying with Robert Henri at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. This guy was also a best friend of the artist John Marin and in this studio I found a whole shelf full of books on Marin and then I found a folder full of letters from Marin to this artist. The letters were marvelous reading. All about Marin's techniques, how he painted, sketches of his studio at the Chelsea Hotel in NYC; sketches of Santa Fe, too; then a whole binder full of sketches of women's bust with emphasis on drawing their breasts. In one note by a beautifully drawn pair of perfect breasts Marin wrote, "You do not draw a woman's breasts with the nipples pointing straight out at you; one breast points one way, sort of at a diagonal slant out from her body while the other breast points slightly more toward you but still at a slight angle outward. One nipple points one way the other nipple the other way. Also, on most women, one breast is slightly larger and rounder than the other." I never knew that, even after looking lovingly long at my wife's wonderful breasts so many times. After that, it became so obvious to me. So that a woman can suckle two kids at once, I assume.

At that time in Santa Fe, I was still with my gorgeously endowed ex-wife. She said she had had 40Ds since she was eleven--and what breasts she had; they were so perfectly developed as an integral part of her fecund body; they were full and healthy, heavily light, and lushly warm and nourishing, with rose-budding nipples, and I lavished between them on many a night of love; and I made mad kissing love to them at every opportunity I could take for ten years I was with her. You couldn't look at this beautiful woman without bringing into her beauty her breasts; they were so evident and though she had been ashamed of them as a kid, I made her feel proud of them as a woman and she allowed them to be admired, so fittingly a part of her lush and totally seducing symmetry.

I only recently found out my ex-wife had passed away 2 years ago. And again, only recently, I contacted one of her nephews to verify the fact she had died. Yes she had died, he said. And what did she die of, I asked. Breast cancer he replied. I cried after we finished to call. I didn't cry for her breasts, no, I cried for her. Even after those beautiful breasts were surgically removed, the cancer kept on biting into her beauty, chewing her up; even after horrible radiation tried to kill it, it rebelled, stood on its hind legs and continued chewing into her. She opted to discontinue radiation, it was too painful for her; she said she'd rather be dead, so she was hospiced in the adobe house out in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos she had built with her own hands and with her friends and family around her, she died. They cremated her and bought a young Aspen tree and put her ashes in the hole and then planted the tree in the hole. If you've never heard the wind playing the harpstrings of an Aspen tree's leaves then you don't know how serene a sound it is; how peaceful and contented it leaves you feeling. I remember a contentment I had many an evening nestled against that good woman's breasts, feeling the warmth of her sweet-pumping heart rocking me into the arms of her Morpheus calm.

I hear her harp a playin' as I now swing back in time; in that wind I hear her singin' that soft song she's left behind.

thegrowlingwolf

for The Daily Growler

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Never on a Sunday

Watching Vulgar Television
I don't have cable; sorry, I just can't see paying a 100 bucks a month for the same old shit with just more commercial crap no matter the nature of the programs or channels.

Everything on teevee is a lie. What? You heard me: everything on teevee is a lie. What about football and baseball games? you ask. Well, I could get into that but it's pretty simple; games could easily be rigged, scripted, how the hell do we know? Conspiratorial bullshit, you say. OK. I like conspiratorial bullshit, but then I see the world as a big cartoon so conspiratorial bullshit is a part of the whole reality, which to me, isn't real at all. What's real? What's natural, that's what's real. Thinking leads to reality. If you don't think about it, how do you know it's real?

On this day in the world billions of people are worshipping various gods, some with 8 or 12 arms, some with elephant heads on human bodies, some totally invisible but with presence enough to scare enough hell up in most true believers to the point they would kill for there scary invisible masters. I see this happening among the freaky fundamentalist Protestants in this country, the cracker faction of what was originally a group of redneck hicks who called themselves the Assemblies of God, a fairly high-class hillbilly church whose off-branches are receptacles of some of the dumbest human beings on the planet, especially those fools who worship their invisible Gawd in the Churches of God or the Four Square Gospel churches (founded by sexual nutjob Aimee Semple McPherson out in L.A. back in the hot-damn 20s and 30s, whose followers were the Dust Bowl refugees from the Okie-Arkie-Texas-Eastern New Mexico areas. Most of these churches's preachers come out of the Jesus-Camp campuses like big old hardcore Oklahoma hick Oral Robert's 2nd-rate college in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Or old pig jowled Jerry "Fatass" Falwell's jokey Liberty University. Or the up-in-the-hills true hillbilly hick college Bob Jones University in the advanced-thinking state of Tenn-y-see, where they look like monkies but claim they're human beings. Clarence Darrow tried to tell them, hey, you guys have evolved beyond the monkies you look like but these folks rejected him as the Devil and desired to stay monkies who believe they were created by an invisible being who they say they look just exactly like. Holy Cow, Jehovah's a damn big monkey of some kind.

Bulletin: Did you know Pickles's chief of staff makes $149,000 a year? The total salaries of all 400+ White House staffers, it includes writers, ethics consultants, advisers, is 44 million bucks a year (that's our money, folks).

Vulgar Teevee (cont'd)

The Holy Roller evangelicals were thick on the morning teevee programs. There was old Uncle Creflo Dollar (oh how proud he is of that name) and his wife Taffy, who kind'a used to look like a piece of Taffy until Creflo got rich and gave her a makeover and though she's still a big boned country woman ("Big Old Country Girl" by Johnny Otis tells it all--"You can take her out of the country, boys, but, you can't take the country out of her"), he's citified her up to at least high-class Atlanta standards, Praise the Lard...and pass the biscuits. Creflo's whole thing is--oh, did I forget to tell you Creflo's a black dude--I think he went to Oral Roberts--but his thing, like all the Holy Roller dudes whether white or black, is that all the money in the world belongs to God (Jehovah--Creflo calls him something else, Elohim, maybe)--the Devil, Creflo says, stole all the money in the world from Elohim and it's OK for Christians too steal it back or, dammit, take it back--you know, steal it back and put it in God's bank, which, by the way, is owned by Creflo Dollar--all the property titles are in his nonprofit church's name, see, that way he don't have to pay one dime of taxes on his big ole hell of a holy empire--Praise the Lard. Creflo's Rolexes and Armani suits are simply a part of his professional uniforms so he gets to buy all of that through his tax-free monies. Dig? Even the Lincoln Town Cars are also necessities of the successful preacher and are also tax-free. So are the jet airplanes, very necessary in spreading the jet-set gospel of Jehovah (of course, our old friend Yahweh, the god whose name can't be pronounced), tax-free necessities. Creflo's actual salary? Probably $400 a week; that's what he pays taxes on--$1600 a month; about $20,000 a year. Taffy, too, is on the rolls as a "preacher," so she gets her clothes, maids, jewelry, Lincoln Town Cars, and her jet plane tax-free, too. But she also probably makes the same salary as Creflo. I'm just assuming the two of these Holy Frauds rake in several hundred millions of dollars a year, all tax-free. Let's say one of Creflo's kids plays in his church's big band. Aha. That means the kid's musical instruments, mics, recording machines, soundboards, whatever he needs to do his church job are all tax-free expenses paid for by the church. I'm sure Creflo's son gets a salary, too. I'm sure Creflo's mother, if she's still alive, is also on the tax-free take--she may be official mother of the Creflo's Delaware-chartered church industry. Praise the Lard. Thar's millions in them thar hillbillies, whether they're black or white. Creflo's churches are basically black but there's some salt scattered about his huge arenas, too (the churches are all built with tax-free "God's" profits), and the very Christian Asian types--I live in a Korean neighborhood here in NYC and the Koreans are better Christians than anybody here in New York, mainly because they believe Jesus's brother moved to India or Japan or maybe even Korea and that Jesus came to visit him there and died there and not on that cross on Golgatha where he was hanged on orders from the Roman Imperial governor on the grounds he was a anti-Roman terrerist! By the bye, some Koreans believe the Reverend Sun Yung Moon is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ (Pappy Bush is, by the bye, a good friend of the Reverend in the cheap Korean suit). I suppose, like one of my distant relatives who was a famous outlaw and was hanged down near Luling, Texas, back in the late 1900s, Jesus's gang rescued him from the hanging and put a sheep in his place in the tomb and then took him off to Japan. Makes sense to me. I BELIEVE.

Let me send Creflo Dollar my last 1000 bucks. Hell, he'll send me the way to save my life for an extra $35 for his life-saving video. I've often wondered why Christian salvation, since it's necessary to save the world according to its devotees, always costs your ass at least $35 plus shipping and handling--nothing free in Jesusland. Wonder how much Camp Jesus gets to train a little hillbilly nipper to kill Muslims and heretics and shit like that--oh yeah, Abortionists! yes, those scumbags are much worse than Muslim terrerists (sic, we know, but that's the way Georgie Porgie pronounces it, OK?). "Kill 'em all, boys and girls, the long, the short, and the tall, kill the Mooslimb bastards with your holys swords in the mighty name of Joshua ben Joseph--yeah, kids, so come on, how 'bout a heart shot in the name of the Lard. Whew, Lawdy, Lawdy, killing for Jesus, the King of the Jews" (a joke put up on Jesus's cross by the Roman joking soldiers--all Jesus was to them was a stupid Jew from the slums of Nazareth who was a threat to their Roman rule in agitating the Jews to worship him instead of Caesar. Hail Caesar. "And the Jews cried 'Crucify him,' 'Give us Barabus, but nail that Joshua ben Joseph up by his heels").

"Jesus has been good to me and Taffy," Uncle Creflo chirps. Every now and then old Creflo drops back down into the Atlanta Buttermilk bottoms streets and gets sexy and witty, you know, spinning out some Ebonics to elevate the black folks in his arena and make the white people see that he ain't as uppity as he sometimes acts when he's raising high the roof beam during one of his gold-plated sermons--always concerned with "giving," "tithing," "giving God his money back," and being sure to send in $35 plus shipping and handling for another of Bro Creflo's hot money-making video tapes.

Political Vulgarities
I know better than to watch Fox News ever. I know better than to watch George Stefanopolis ever. I know better than to watch Chris Matthews ever. I know better, yet this morning I watched them all. Oh my God, I watched Fox News, some smug fop, interviewing Bill Clinton, old Slick Willie himself, and the Slick One was looking good, the grey hair slicked back like in his charming old days, looking pretty good, dressed as sharp as Creflo Dollar. The Fox News hound was pulling old Slick Willie's chain in spinning the jive spun out by the Rovian Offical Lie Production Center that hey 9/11 was SLICK WILLIE'S FAULT. Yeah, that's right. Slick Willie Clinter allowed 9/11 to happen. George Bush knew nothing about it when he took office. Son of a bitch. The Fox News dude said, "Reports are that you had a chance to kill Osama bin Laden in Somalia and you pulled up and ran like the coward you are." Man, that pissed Slick Willie off. By God, he said, bin Laden had nothing to do with our being in Somalia--that was a sick little war, too; that's the one where the reporters had to wade ashore with the troops, remember?

Slick Willie is such a liar. "I did not have sex with that woman." Why did the Slick One go into Somalia, where we were an absolute failure--Blackhawk down, remember that? Then, you can also blame Slick Willie for F-ing up in Afghanistan. Remember when he fired some missiles at what he said was OSAMA BIN LADEN'S Al Queda Training Camp? At first he wiped out bin Laden and the Al Queda heads of state; whoa, then it was reported he'd missed everything and his missiles probably fell out into the Afghan desert. Osama was safe.

Then remember, Slick Willie was involved with bombing the hell our of Iraq; remember, too, he fired some missiles into Baghdad, didn't he?, firing into a pharmaceutical labortory and also killing one of Iraq's great women artist? Didn't he?

Slick Willie is to blame for NAFTA, GAAP, the WTO. Slick Willie is also to blame for the original Patriot Act, not Georgie Porgie at all. Slick Willie took more civil rights away from We the People of the USA than any other president before him. Slick Willie set up the prison camps in Guantanamo for Cuban and then Haitian refugees. Slick Willie hated the Haitians coming here, remember; remember he circled Haiti with Naval vessels in order to shoot the Haitians trying to escape in innertube boats to keep them from coming to the US, whose original doors were supposed to be open to the world's oppressed and unwanted. That didn't include Haitians, not to Slick Willie. Slick Willie promised us a National Healthcare, remember the little cards we were going to get? Then he turned it over to Hilarious Hillary--not an elected official, remember, simply his wife--amazing how ex-president's wives can, unless they give into the alcohol like Pat Nixon and Mamie Eisenhower, network themselves into positions of authority. Look at Hillary. No experience at all in being a Senator, hell, never even lived in New York State, yet here she is the Senator from New York who the stupid Dumbocrats are shuffling about as a perhaps candidate for president in 2008--a sure loss, just in case you were wondering how I feel about Hillary.

The Dumbocrats are so dumb and just as criminal and heartless as the Repugnicans--plus these Dumbocrats are getting rich, too, off the Iraq War--don't you think the Clintons own a hell of a lot of Halliburton stock? Exxon-Mobil stock? Pfizer Pharma stock? Don't you think? I wouldn't be surprised to see Slick Willie's name on the Board of the Carlyle Group--I mean, one of his best pals is old Pappy Bush. Remember, he and Pappy saved the sunami survivors. The Tsunami! Have we forgotten that tragedy by now? Hell, only 300, 000 mostly Muslims died in that God-caused disaster. Is Jehovah coming after these wicked Muslims? Christians in Indonesia are now terrerists, too; Georgie Porgie, do we arrest Christian terrerists, too? Was Timothy McVeigh a Christian? He looked like a Christian to me. He probably could have started a church and gotten rich before the Feds needled him up with poisons and air bubbles.

Fiction or Fact: The Goliath grouper, a fish that grows to be six-feet long and weigh up to 400 lbs, starts out as a male and turns into a female as it grows. WOW.

A Bitter Sunday
This Sunday has left me bitter. I'm growling into a tremendous HOWL. I'm frustrated by the lies and the ignorant assholes who keep spreading and believing these lies. I prefer the lies of a fiction writer like Ernest Hemingway.

Osama bin Laden's death may be another false alarm. Oh no. I thought Karl had a winner this time. Repugnicans in November and all that. Well, I still think the Repugnicans will pull it out even if Rove's lies are proven lies and Osama is alive and well in Miami. Upset wins in Ohio and Florida, what do you think? Watch. I'm not watching Sunday morning teevee ever again. Solid, Jackson.

theramblingbabblinggrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Ah Shucks, Maybe


http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2483128

And More Ah Shucks--and From the Sorry Saudis


http://reuters.myway.com/article/20060924/2006-09-24T045510Z_01_L23793153_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-SECURITY-BINLADEN-DC.html


Saturday, September 23, 2006

PRAISE THE LARD, BIN LADEN'S DEAD, YOU BELIEVE IT?

Bin Laden's Body to Be Exhibited in Capitol Rotunda Just Before November Elections
A French intelligence leak is rumored to reveal that good ole Terrerist Commander and Chief and CIA Invention, Keiko-Muckity Muck Al Quaida genius, Osama "Mama" Bin Laden died of TYPHOID in those hills of ole Pakistan back in August. Well shut our mouths here at The Daily Growler, that true little weasel Karl Rove, remember he promised the Repugnicans he'd have a surprise for 'em recently--trying to pep 'em up with Georgie Porgie's ratings hangin' tough around 39% (just slightly better than his Pappy's after the Gulf War fiasco and the national debt zooming up to break Ronnie Raygun's record), has managed to come with a winner, we think. Yep, remember how Bush turned on the French? Now the French seem to be coming back into the folds--Chirac is being given the privilege of introducing this hot item to Fox News so it'll be factual. Hot damn, we can call 'em french fries again! Hey, pass them heartbusting cheese frenchies over here, please.

Well, well. How will the Dumbocrats respond to this lie?

You know why it could be another lie? Some of us here at The Daily Growler have been saying all along either he was a CIA invention or dead already or if he was real and not a CIA invention, he was at least a CIA operative still and also a really close friend of the Bush Family (a supporter of theirs--you know, hell, he got Bush "elected" in Bush Baby's spectacular "win" in 2004--some of us believe Binny Boy promised to play this role of Al Queda [we don't know how to spell it--we don't even know what it is] bogeyman for a substantial amount of money to his family and a nice comfortable life at his tiger hunting lodge deep in the Pakistani mountains--tigers do live in mountains, don't they?

But typhoid? We'd a thought his bad kidneys would have killed him. They say the typhoid got his old boney ass because he couldn't get any doctors to come to his hideout--you know giving away his hiding place to all those CIA and Paki operatives with binoculars in them thar hills [remember The Daily Growler post on "hiding places [Unka Dick's secret bunker, for instance] in both mind and actuality"?]. OK. That makes sense...or does it? Excuse us, but the original Bin Ladin was on a dialysis machine, right? Are dialysis machines eternal? Are they portable? I mean, also, we're confused because doesn't he have a personal physician? Isn't Al Queda such a well-organized organization that getting a doctor into their commander and chief to save his life would be as easy as getting old Bin's videos out in time for a Bush event or need. Well, now, dyin' for Bush may get this guy a Congressional Medal of Honor, and certainly the Nobel Peace Prize--or does Bush get that one? We're sitting around for the next editon.

Remember, we see life as a cartoon strip. thegrowlingwolf , our main Devil's Advocate, claims he's more wolf than human being and in that sense he sees characters like Daffy Duck and Porky Pig as real people, you know, human-animal hybrids like Georgie Porgie, our "president," claims will happen if he allows life-saving stem-cell research to be sanctioned. God, you know, doesn't allow sodomy, which is what a human-animal hybrid has to do to make love.

So we here in the Growler city room are waiting with bells on for the next edition of this lie. Remember, we keep insisting, everything concerning what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan is a lie--when you start with a lie, like Bin Laden being a lie in the first place, then whatever happens to these lies are just more lies, lies that if told often enough--this is what these birds believe--become reality. So, if the lie Bin Laden is dead and that's a lie, then it must be true, right?

thestaff
for The Daily Growler


Friday, September 22, 2006

A Growl From Iraq

We Give the Floor to an Iraqi Writer

BAGHDAD — On a recent Sunday, I was buying groceries in my beloved Amariya neighborhood in western Baghdad when I heard the sound of an AK-47 for about three seconds. It was close but not very close, so I continued shopping.

As I took a right turn on Munadhama Street, I saw a man lying on the ground in a small pool of blood. He wasn't dead.

The idea of stopping to help or to take him to a hospital crossed my mind, but I didn't dare. Cars passed without stopping. Pedestrians and shop owners kept doing what they were doing, pretending nothing had happened.

I was still looking at the wounded man and blaming myself for not stopping to help. Other shoppers peered at him from a distance, sorrowful and compassionate, but did nothing.

I went on to another grocery store, staying for about five minutes while shopping for tomatoes, onions and other vegetables. During that time, the man managed to sit up and wave to passing cars. No one stopped. Then, a white Volkswagen pulled up. A passenger stepped out with a gun, walked steadily to the wounded man and shot him three times. The car took off down a side road and vanished.

No one did anything. No one lifted a finger. The only reaction came from a woman in the grocery store. In a low voice, she said, "My God, bless his soul."

I went home and didn't dare tell my wife. I did not want to frighten her.




I've lived in my neighborhood for 25 years. My daughters went to kindergarten and elementary school here. I'm a Christian. My neighbors are mostly Sunni Arabs. We had always lived in harmony. Before the U.S.-led invasion, we would visit for tea and a chat. On summer afternoons, we would meet on the corner to joke and talk politics.

It used to be a nice upper-middle-class neighborhood, bustling with commerce and traffic. On the main street, ice cream parlors, hamburger stands and take-away restaurants competed for space. We would rent videos and buy household appliances.

Until 2005, we were mostly unaffected by violence. We would hear shootings and explosions now and again, but compared with other places in Baghdad, it was relatively peaceful.

Then, late in 2005, someone blew up three supermarkets in the area. Shops started closing. Most of the small number of Shiite Muslim families moved out. The commercial street became a ghost road.

On Christmas Day last year, we visited — as always — our local church, St. Thomas, in Mansour. It was half-empty. Some members of the congregation had left the country; others feared coming to church after a series of attacks against Christians.

American troops, who patrol the neighborhood in Humvees, have also become edgy. Get too close, and they'll shoot. A colleague — an interpreter and physician — was shot and killed by soldiers last year on his way home from a shopping trip. He hadn't noticed the Humvees parked on the street.

By early this year, living in my neighborhood had become a nightmare. In addition to anti-American graffiti, there were fliers telling women to wear conservative clothes and to cover their hair. Men were told not to wear shorts or jeans.

For me, as a Christian, it was unacceptable that someone would tell my wife and daughters what to wear. What's the use of freedom if someone is telling you what to wear, how to behave or what to do in your life?

But coming home one day, I saw my wife on the street. I didn't recognize her. She had covered up.




After the attack on the Shiite shrine of the Golden Dome in Samarra in February, Shiite gunmen tried to raid Sunni mosques in my neighborhood. One night, against the backdrop of heavy shooting, we heard the cleric calling for help through the mosque's loudspeakers. We stayed up all night, listening as they battled for the mosque. It made me feel unsafe. If a Muslim would shoot another Muslim, what would they do to a Christian?

Fear dictates everything we do.

I see my neighbors less and less. When I go out, I say hello and that's it. I fear someone will ask questions about my job working for Americans, which could put me in danger. Even if he had no ill will toward me, he might talk and reveal an identifying detail. We're afraid of an enemy among us. Someone we don't know. It's a cancer.

In March, assassinations started in our neighborhood. Early one evening, I was sitting in my garden with my wife when we heard several gunshots. I rushed to the gate to see what was going on, despite my wife's pleas to stay inside. My neighbors told me that gunmen had dropped three men from a car and shot them in the street before driving off. No one dared approach the victims to find out who they were.

The bodies remained there until the next morning. The police or the American military probably picked them up, but I don't know. They simply disappeared.

The sounds of shootings and explosions are now commonplace. We don't know who is shooting whom, or who has been targeted. We don't know why, and we're afraid to ask or help. We too could get shot. Bringing someone to the hospital or to the police is out of the question. Nobody trusts the police, and nobody wants to answer questions.

I feel sad, bitter and frustrated — sad because a human life is now worth nothing in this country; bitter because people no longer help each other; and frustrated because I can't help either. If I'm targeted one day, I'm sure no one will help me.




I was very happy when my eldest daughter married an American. First, because there was love between them, but also because she would be able to leave Iraq, and I wouldn't have to worry about her safety day after day. She left last year.

If you had asked me a year ago whether I would consider leaving Iraq, I would have said maybe, but without enthusiasm. Now it's a definite yes. Things are going from bad to worse, and I can't see any light at the end of the tunnel.

Four weeks ago, I came home from work. As I reached my street, I saw a man lying in a pool of blood. Someone had covered him with bits of cardboard. This was the best they could do. No one dared move him.

I drove on.


The Daily Growler borrowed this from the LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-letter20sep20,1,226790.story?track=crosspromo&coll=la-headlines-world&ctrack=1&cset=true

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Strange Things Happen Every Day

Great Videos
l hat sent me the following videos he found on metafilter, among them Sister Rosetta Tharpe singing "Down by the Riverside"--it's a hell of a revivalizing experience--what a pro Sister Rosetta was--a star with a guitar--and the good Sister doesn't boogie on that guitar here like she could though she does show some being ahead of the guitar-playing game in the second chorus of her solo when she BB King's the end of the phrase ending it on a quavering zinging squeeze out long high note. Go ahead though; this site is definitely the cat's meow when it comes to historical American music early-day music videos:

http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/54922

metafilter is a great site; I should link it, but, heck, you know how utterly all thumbs I am when it comes to taking time to fight with the many parabolic monsters happening to me everytime I enter the cyberspace of the computer Gestalt--I can swallow it whole, but I can't stand it crushed up into soluble chunks. Note: the Howlin' Wolf video on this site is what Chester (Burnett, aka The Howlin' Wolf) called "Dog shit" music--this was when the Rolling Stones or some Brit American copycat group brought the Wolfman (the Howlin' side of the Growlin' family) over to England and they made an LP with him; the Wolfman singing and playing in front of a mostly white-Brit band, and, yes, folks, it is dog shit music, just like the Wolfman said.

One Aside Before We Go to the Rose Garden
When I was seven years old, I lived in far East Dallas, as I like to call it. It was straight out east of downtown Dallas, straight over the Fair Grounds, straight over Schepps Dairy, straight over Longview Drive and right up to the front porch of 6217 Fair Vista, later changed to Belgrade--why, I don't know since the Fair Vista name fit it like a tee; standing in my front yard and looking west the whole Dallas skyline was open to you, spread wide and handsome across that wide horizon you confronted--a wonderful time when a purple and yellow red sunset would be exploding behind Big D's edificial best. Just down the hill from my house, and then about 2 miles across a bottomland, over off Second Avenue, was a large black section of Dallas, South Dallas-- the Second Avenue of South Dallas, the main street of beer joints, million-item stores, Dave's Hot Tamales stand, whorehouses, moonshine and corn liquor dealers, junk yards, used car crooks, rib joints, steaks and chops joints, hamburger stands (a lot of Lotta Burgers), voodoo doctors, and three or four dozen black churches.

My dad, a very good looking man who attracted women of all varieties, had a partiality to hanging out with black folks, especially going to black churches on Sunday nights after being faithful to his white church Sunday mornings. White Sunday morning services were boring enough, but forget about those Sunday night services. My dad loved the day-long excitement of a black church, first the music--he loved the music; then the sermons, which, really, were music, too, black preachers able to singsong their messages in an electrifying way throughout their congregations clear out the open front doors of their churches and out across the roads and and in through the homes spilling right on out onto that evil Second Avenue, where there was always a good craps game going on in a back alley, or maybe even a good cockfight, if you knew which door to knock on. Black churches, especially their Churches of God in Christ, were true religious beauty in action; even I, as a child atheist, could have fallen under the spells spun out by these black reverends, men or women, boys or girls, those mighty choirs, and swinging church bands. I've seen them all following my father around to the black churches on Sunday night. Mother? Well, my mother played the piano at our church and my mother loved being on stage and she played the piano with syncopation--her speciality in the secular world being the music of W.C. Handy, of which she knew every one of his very popular blues--so she went to our church and played the piano.

Dad even picked up a black newspaper on his way home from work once a week and pored over the church listings in it. One Sunday morning after church, while mother was cookin' up some fried chicken, my dad got his 78 rpm records out and put one on. It was Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Up Above My Head, I Hear Music in the Air." Boy, did it swing. I was dancin' around the living room like I had ants in my pants. The old man was looking in his black newspaper.

"You wanna go hear Sister Rosetta tonight, son?" Damn right I did. "Yeah, she's preachin' over at Reverend Cauliflower's church up on Dolphin." Reverend Cauliflower, her real name I think was Caldweller or something like that but everybody called her Reverend Cauliflower, wasn't a bad looking black woman and I knew, too, even as young as I was, my dad had a little "some thing" going on for this straight-haired reverend with the Lord heavy in her well-endowed bosom and slender body except for her magnificent booty that brought up her adorable rear, though I must admit to conjecturing here since at that time I wasn't into booties, though I did know that breasts were something special that men went for big and heavy.

It seems like from what I gathered about it as a kid, Sister Rosetta was on a tour with Marie Knight, I know now for sure she did tour with Marie about that time, and was stopping off in Dallas to do a favor for her friend, the Reverend Cauliflower. The notice in the black newspaper said Sister Rosetta would preach a sermon, which she occasionally did in those days since she was the daughter of a Church of God in Christ minister back home in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, the Reverend Katie Bell Nubin, who preached evangelically and used her daughter, Little Rosetta Nubin, as a singer entertaining the faithful at four years old. Then Little Rosetta married the Reverend Thomas Tharpe and became Rosetta Tharpe--so preachin' was in her blood. "You can go to college, you can go to school, but if you don't know Jesus, you're an educated fool...."

We drove in the Oldsmobile* down across the hollow and then up to Dolphin Road where he then turned down a rutted dirt drive to the white clapboard church building with the huge wooden sign lighted by four bentover spotlites, a large frame structure sitting up on four concrete block posts with a crawlspace underneath it.

Dad parked the Olds out front of the church and then asked me if I wanted to go in or just sit in the car. I was scared. Too timid to go inside so I opted for staying in the car. The Reverend Cauliflower came out to the car and called my father by his first name and then invited him to come on in, but he declined pointing at me saying I'd rather stay in the car so he'd stay with me. She impressed me as a pretty woman, with long black straight hair that hung way down her back. She was wearing a scarlet silk robe and a white collar just like the high-class white preachers I'd seen at the Episcopal church I went to sometimes with my best friend, the little boy artist of Urbandale. The woman said well alright, he was welcome to come on up front and join in the service it was going to be a "heavenly" affair she promised, then looked over at me but didn't say anything. I was shivering I was so scared. The woman handed my dad a program and then returned to the church. [To think now how I turned down a chance to sit at the feet of Sister Rosetta Tharpe that night--just because I was a scared child--yep, scared of the blacks; yes, that's right, but not afraid of them, just scared of the different environment, down deep really loving it and so happy being there no matter how scared I was. My dad, however, had no problem acting naturally at home around blacks.

We sat there not saying anything. From the car we looked right down the center aisle of the church right down to the platform and the pulpit and in one corner the band, an electric guitar, drums, and piano.

Soon four lanky black kids, teenage looking, came out and started playing the instruments. Damn, they were playing rhythm and blues--that's all. Yep, black music. Wow. Swinging. Boogie. Then just plain old-fashioned rock. One of Sister Rosetta's big hits from the 40s was "Rock Me," and that's what black music really was, rock music; the first rock and roll, whether the British tell you this or not, was black music. Robert Johnson used to sing about rocking and rolling. Rocking back and forth. Rolling toward the finish line. Sexual or not, what do you think? Damn, I was awed. I was seeing the music I loved played by a bunch of black teenagers, and they were rocking, even though the guitar amp was staticky as hell and the piano was kind of out of tune, but, man, they were rocking. Then the Reverend Cauliflower took over and she preached a bit then a woman wearing a kind of blonde wig, a fine looking healthy black woman carrying a cream-colored electric guitar came from behind the stage, from behind the baptistry. The audience of hundreds it looked to me like went wild, clapping, rocking back and forth, and shouting all over the place.

"That's Sister Rosetta," my dad said. "The woman that sings about hearing voices high up in the sky?" I asked. "That's her." Wow.

Sister Rosetta took the mic. She had a powerful speaking voice. She took her guitar and sat down in a chair one of the musicians brought out for her. He then plugged her guitar into the guitar player's half-ass amp. She hit a chord. "Turn it up, honey," she said to the musician who had plugged in her guitar. She hit another chord. It rang throughout the church and reverberated all around the trees off to the side of the parking lot.

"I was down in the East Texas piney woods last night, Praise the Lord, Hallelujah, and, my friends, I saw the Lord working in powerful ways down there, powerful beyond power, powerful beyond intelligence, powerful beyond human capability." The congregation was getting into it. "Amens" were cruising around the rafters. "Yes, friends, and as the spirit of the Lord drifted around that church and glory was ringing in the air, a man came running into the building, flailing his arms, shouting 'mercy' all over the place. 'My wife's head's been cut off!' he shouted. 'Please bring the Lord to her. She's still alive. She's still alive!' The preacher down there, and we had had quite a service, hundreds of folks were there praising the Lord and believing in miracles, asked me to come along and help him with this unusual request; he had never heard of this before; what a chance; me, too, I wasn't sure I wanted to see a woman with her head cut off but I agreed to go with the preacher and check out this whooo big problem for the Holy Spirit." She had lowered her voice as if telling a scary story. "So we went way down into the woods there to this small cabin out there. It reminded me of the cabin I was born in over in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. I've seen the Lord's spirits in those old woods. Like the foxfire, like the wood spirits, I've seen the Lord in those woods, you know, angels walking through those woods to protect the believers, and Jesus coming through the hollow there at night passing blessings over the houses of the poor, for the poor shall inherited the wealth of the Lord and live in mansions not cabins when we all get to heaven." She hit another chord on her guitar and then began singing, "When We All Get to Heaven," a tune I knew from the white church, except Sister Rosetta swung it hard, and then she played the guitar and soon she was up and dancing around the room, the congregation clapping in time to her music and some of them dancing, too, and the heavy sisters in the far Amen Corner was wailing away with praise and sanctified shouts. Then Sister Rosetta hit a big chord, sat back down, and continued, "And, folks, let me tell you, when I entered that coaloil lamp-lit cabin chills went up and down my spine; I could feel the Devil himself sitting on that well-made and clean little bed in the corner on which lay that headless woman. Oh, yes, folks, a headless woman was laying on that little bed. Lord'a mercy, the room was cold as ice; cold as frozen Hell. The preacher said for us all to bow our heads and then he asked the husband to take the woman's head and put it back on her shoulders. When the husband brought the head out from under the bed, I was suddenly filled with the Holy Spirit and started humming my song 'Strange Things Happen Every Day,' whooo, Praise the Lord, and I looked into that woman's eyes; they were open; and it was like she was looking right straight back at me, praying, praying for life, praying through her praying eyes for the Lord to make her whole again." The crowd went wild at that point. Lots of serious shouting. "Then the husband gently put his wife's head on her shoulders. The preacher went over and put his hand on the head and then he prayed a prayer that even put my head on stronger, a powerful prayer, and the power was strong in the room. Strong. And then the preacher suddenly said, 'Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah,' and he rose up dancing and singing in tongues, hopping around that tiny cabin room, 'her's head is back on, attached to her body, it's a miracle, my God, it's a miracle, my God in heaven, Praise the Lord on high." It didn't surprise me, folks, because the Lord works in mysterious ways..."

I was not very old now, but that impressed me. What a storyteller, what a woman. She was power herself, her presence just taking over the whole church and filling it with awe. Nobody could take their eyes off Sister Rosetta Tharpe that night, especially me.

Now I can't prove to you folks that that was really Sister Rosetta Tharpe. My dad said it was and later when I saw her on television it was her. I remember her wedding sometime in the fifties and 25,000 people attended it in D.C. I think, if I remember correctly, and who knows how correct their memories are? Memories are a source of great fiction. But I have never gotten that holy picture of this great woman out of my head after all these fast-passing years. Sister Rosetta died in 1973 at 55 years of age. It's too bad some believing preacher couldn't have brought her back to life. A true star this woman was, a commanding star, plus she could play the guitar, too.

*[a Daily Growler footnote--see * in above para] Remember when Accuras were good ole American Oldsmobiles? What advertising nutjob came up with that name for a Rocket 88?--and then why did going-broke General Motors accept changing the name of one of their top cars?--What will Buick become? The Emaculate? What will Cadillac become? Pontiac? The last two are names of Michigan cities so maybe when the Japanese by them out they'll become the Osaka and the Kyoto. There were men named Buick and Olds; same with Chevrolets, but who the hell in his right mind would change the name of Chevrolets--one of the popular songs in Cuba these days is about a "My Chevrolet."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A The Daily Growler BULLETIN: OVER 6,000 PEOPLE HAVE DIED IN THE PAST TWO MONTHS IN IRAQ. HOW ABOUT THAT? "FREEDOM ON THE MARCH." "A BEACON OF LIGHT AND DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST." DO YOU BELIEVE THAT? THEN GO TO THE ROSE GARDEN PRESS CONFERENCE AND HEAR SOME MORE LUNACY FROM GEORGIE PORGIE, OUR UNELECTED "PRESIDENT." FOOLS; 40% OF AMURICANS ARE FOOLS--AT LEAST 40%.

In the Rose Garden
The following is a very scary Gene Lyons column. Give it a good read; you won't believe what our "president," the defiant nutjob, is up to. He's nuts, folks. It's time to straitjacket him and carry him off the Saint Elizbeth's [but first, why not put him out in an open yard in a chicken pen like place, like the Army did Ezra Pound when they arrested him in Italy after WWII?]. Read this column, man; you've got to:

http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/167229/


And here's a scary opening paragraph to a story, too:

WASHINGTON - The House voted Wednesday to require Americans to show proof of citizenship in order to vote, and the Senate moved to build a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border as Republicans sharpened attacks on illegal immigration before the midterm elections.


How Long Do You Think Chavez Has to Live?

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took his verbal battle with the United States to the floor of the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, calling President Bush ``the devil.''

``The devil came here yesterday,'' Chavez said, referring to Bush's address Tuesday. ``He came here talking as if he were the owner of the world.''

The leftist leader, who has joined Iran in opposing U.S. influence, accused Washington of ``domination, exploitation and pillage of peoples of the world.''

``We appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our head,'' he said.


bye-bye

for The Daily Growler

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

The Art of Crime

Criminals I Have Known
One comes to mind; a half-Gypsy/half-Jewish kid I met when I was seducing his mother, who was a chef in a restaurant I used to frequent. And as his mother's seducer, it meant that I was over to his mother's apartment a lot and this kid was always there and then when I got to waking up in bed with his mother for many "next mornings," you know, he'd got to making coffee for us and then, after he got to trusting me, he began whipping up really tasty breakfasts. His scrambled eggs were gourmet and hash browns, man, the best with onions and jalepenos--I even got him making me huevos rancheros, which I had learned to love while living in Mexico City.

This kid was very nonchanlant when it came to who I was and that I was "doing" his mother as long as she permitted me that privilege, of doing what I was doing, and doing it often, being at those breakfasts for a many-moons number of days that turned into weeks that turned into months. As long as she didn't tell him to throw my ass out, which he would have done expeditiously well, too, had he been given the order, I was living the life of a spoiled duke..

The boy loved his mother; more than I did, that's for sure. I even had my wonders about their relationship. I mean she'd already confessed to me that she been letting her brother do to her what I was doing to her since they were kids--I learned that when I asked if I could come do her one weekend and she informed me that she'd have to give me a temporary "No" since her brother was in town from Katmandu or somewhere strange like that and while he was in town she would be sleeping with him, but "certainly, temporary, like I said, 'cause Sunday night after he's gone back to Katmandu you're definitely welcome to come over with bells and that other thing on." What a woman! The kind I always get mixed up with.

She had met the boy's father in 1963 while she was visiting Europe with her mother, who as a young girl had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto by running off to Budapest where she was saved by a Hungarian official who was anti-Nazi and loved her.

Her mother had revisited Warsaw but then she demanded they get over to Budapest, where they went and stayed with the family of the official who had saved her mother's life, which was in the Pest section of that old city in the center of Pest, next to a famous and wonderful Hungarian restaurant owned and operated by an ex-Hungarian prince. It was in that restaurant that the boy's father worked as a Gypsy violinist, accompanied by his brother on guitar. The minute she laid her eyes on his dark Gypsy eyes and his svelte Gypsy muscles this Jewish princess let his fiery romantic nature have its way, and since she was pretty easily seduced by such romantic flare, she ended up sleeping with this Gypsy fiddler, as she put it, "About seven times in 5 days." The result was a beautiful but very tiny baby boy who came into the world nine months later to the delight of his mother but unbeknownst to his father, as so many of his father's sons and daughters were. She said she never tried to find the Gypsy; she just wanted his kid anyway, and that she got.

The kid was 17 at the time I met him. He went to what is thought of as the best New York City high school, a school for achievers, though [I'll call him "the Climber"] the Climber had no intellectual ambitions. He did read a lot and he kept his intellect sharp, but not in order to debate with Harvard and Cambridge fops but rather to hone his wits and program his brain to all the do's and don't's of his most passionate interest: burglarizing difficult to get to NYC apartments--high floors his metier, of which he was a maestro, that I guarantee you.

First of all the Climber was solidly built though he wasn't tall at all; in fact, he was short, 5' 4" maybe, yes, that short, but damn was he built, physiquewise like an ape, all huge upper body, arms much longer than his torso, overdeveloped arms that trick-bag faux wrestlers call "pythons" slendering down to delicate hands with long fingers, though you knew he had strength in his hands once you'd shaken hands with him. One thing he prided himself on, too: nobody could beat him at arm wrestling, though he had no ambition to hit the arm wrestling circuit--as popular one time as Texas Hold 'Em poker is at the current time.

He was a nice kid, that's for sure; easy to talk to. One night I was discussing Miles Davis with him. I told him a friend of mine had seen Miles Davis in San Francisco and that Miles had given a lecture on the art of picking pockets, complete with charts, at the start of a set-- this was during Miles's run at the Blackhawk Club--yes, where those very famous Miles Davis LPs, Friday Night and Saturday Night at the Blackhawk, were made on one of the nights my friend was there--I know because I was working a piano bar in Santa Fe when he called the bar from the Blackhawk and my bass player and I shared the receiver as this guy held the phone out so we could hear Miles in the far noisy background playing what my friend said was "So What." "They say he walked off the stage," sang Eddie Jefferson to the riff of "So What," referring to Miles's being subject to disappearing from the stage while his sidemen were soloing. Miles would also turn his back on his audiences all the time and play toward the back wall of the stage--he was doing it for the effect of the sound reverberating off that wall--Sonny Rollins used to play against walls with his back to his audience for the same reason, but Miles's critics, and there were many, thought he was being an asshole, which he was, too, to be sure.

So we were talking about pickpocketing and the Climber handed me back my old Gruen watch. He'd picked me. "Damn," I hollered with glee, "you can pick pockets." "Yep, I guess I inherited it from my dad." "Hell, Climber, there are plenty of good Jewish pickpockets." He handed me a set of keys I kept deep in my back pocket that had a button-down flap over it. "Son of a bitch. That's masterful, man; slick as black ice."

Then our conversation moved to crime and I told him about some characters I had lived with in my early days of working when I was still a greenhorn right out of college. One of the characters I lived with, he was called Big Boy because of the length of his body and the length and bulk of his manhood, had a brother who hauled trailer houses, big mothers, too, from the trailer house manufacturers, a lot of them in Ohio--but he had some in North Carolina and Georgia, too, to locations all across the country, the best money coming when he hauled them to California or the Pacific Northwest. He was on the move year-in year-out, his home his tractor cab, his hobby: filling those trailers he was hauling up with merchandise--especially color teevees--he would steal while making his distant hauls following the sunsets out to La La Land, or to Vegas, where these guys had another brother who was a dealer in one of the big clubs on the strip. He was a crook, too; the brothers said he was one of the best chip palmers in the world; he could palm a chip and have it hidden safely inside one of his cheeks in the twinkling of an eye. "That mother can get a thousand bucks worth of chips in both his cheeks at once--he's amazing." Their mother had been a chorus girl in Vegas; their father--"Who the hell knows?" Big Boy used to say. "Look at my brother," he'd continue, "we're different as night and day, so his father, who the hell knows? same as mine. People ask me what my father's name was and I say, 'Who Knows,' to which they ask, 'Chinese?' Yeah, the chink in my armor, you bastards." Big Boy was six-five; his trailer-haulin' brother was like five-nine.

The Climber listened intently to my stories of criminals I had known that day and then he took me to his room and opened a closet and shit the closet was full of everything. Jesus, there was a Trinitron teevee right up front in that packed space, surrounded by video cameras, stereos, clocks, coffeemakers, toasters, boomboxes. Shit. Then we went out on the fire escape just outside his room's window and he suddenly said, "Watch this," and like a cat, he leaped up on the outside of the fire escape ironwork and off he went up...until he disappeared. I went to the edge of the fire escape and looked up. He was waving down at me from the roof seven floors above me--his mother's apartment on the 3rd floor of a 10-story apartment house down in the East Village.

I watched him monkey back down and plop himself over the fire escape railing flat on his feet right by my side. "Wow," I said, "you really impress me, Climber. What else can you do?" "I can walk wire." "What?" "Wire, like a highwire, or, hell, a gabled roof, make suction cups out of my hands, and one time I found a brick building that I was able to scale 4 stories before I chickened out and went in a window--I found this Rolex watch in that apartment." He pulled down a small box from his closet. "Here, take it." He handed it to me. I opened the case and checked it out. Hell, it was a real Rolex, a gold one, a $7,000 watch, with that bubble back, you know that one? Trouble was it was engraved, "To Chuck; Tempus fugit," except the "fugit" was worn down and looked at first glance like "To Chuck; Tempus fucks." "Shit, man, you serious?" "Yeah, man, it's yours; I've got plenty of watches." I put it on. God, it looked expensive; it was rude with its gold flashing, its sparkling gold reflections and its rich diamondy face. It was so expensive looking, I wore it that one time and couldn't wear it again; I hung on my apartment wall instead and told people it was a piece of sculpture called "Eventually Time Will Melt Me." The only person who ever bought that was a dipstick Middlebury College graduate student I picked up one night while on a Manhattan Island prowl. "Wow," she squealed in fine arts delight when she saw it, "who's the artist?" Of course I said, "Yes." She looked puzzled; she was too young to know the routine. She was supposed to say "What?" to which I would have replied, "No, Who," to which she would have said, "Who?" to which I would have replied, "That's right."

I got to where I hung with the Climber a lot one week when he pearl dived in his mother's restaurant the same week his mother got me a gig playing the piano in the joint for the lunch and supper hours. On my breaks, I'd go out back with the Climber while he smoked a Camel and I sucked on a doobie roach. One night out back there I told him I knew a trombone player who lived over in the next block and if we went over there and he was home we could score some black beauties or red jackets from him, you know, like he was a dealer. The Climber's ears perked up. "Damn, that's what I need; where's his apartment building?" I said, "Right over there; you can see it from here--see that building over there with the crooked water tank on the roof?" It was silhouetted against the moon-silvery night. "That's the building, eh? So, OK, I'll meet you over there in front of the building." And with that, away he ran. I watched him jog across the street and then make a remarkable leap up off the sidewalk, about 10 feet at least, and grab the pull-down ladder of a building's fire escape and up he went, up to the top of the fire escape. I took off walking as fast as I could, up the half block to the avenue, then up the avenue one block to the trombone player's street, then the half block over to the front of the trombone player's building. The Climber was there already; standing right in front of the trombone player's building with a grin on his face that Texans refer to as resembling "a possum eating shit."

"Which is his apartment?" he asked. "Well, let's see, he's on the fourth floor--that's it up there, the window with no shades." "Come on," he signalled. By now he had leapt up onto the top of a portico. "Here, take my hand." "Hell, man, what the hell..." "Take my hand," he insisted. I took his hand. Like a bullwhip, he snapped me up with his powerful grip off my feet and planted me on a ledge that had a hall window exiting on it-- though the window had a grill over it for protection against breaking and entering. No problem for the Climber. This little son of a bitch was able to slide his body into a crack in that grill that I swear a mouse couldn't get through, snapped the grill open some way from inside it there, then pulled it free from its lock, opened the grill, then opened the window and told me to climb in.

We then walked on up the stairs to the 4th floor and I found the trombone player's apartment--you could hear him practicin' some bone as we stood in front of the door. "Hold on a minute," he said, pushing me away from the door onto which I was about to knock. With the adroitness of a swordsman, he whipped some kind of tool out of his pants from somewhere--I couldn't imagine where he got the tool since he was simply wearing jeans and a teeshirt--amazing, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. He made one little jiggle with this tool and the trombone player's door cracked open--the dude had the chain-lock on the door--but not for long, with another whip of his wrist, the Climber snapped open the chain lock and the door sprang open to reveal the trombone player sitting back naked in a big easy chair playing his trombone with an erection, which he was managing to use the slide of the trombone to titilate quite dramatically until he looked up and saw us and in leaping to his feet, actually got his erection caught in the slide near the bell of the horn-- running cursing like a first mate on Satan's meanest four-master as he stumbled about the room, me and the Climber laughing our asses off and the trombone player threatening to kill us both.

After we settled down and made a business deal with the naked trombonist, after we had all three relaxed with a tad of crystal meth taken with some black coffee--"I just got back from Haiti, man; gig down there; this coffee's fresh from nature, man." We swigged the coffee and soon the meth was cleaning out our brains of unwanted thoughts and setting us free to imagine life to be anything but what the hell it was.

The Climber and I were zipped to the gills when we rushed back over to his mom's restaurant, him taking the long route with me this time. Back at the restaurant he went back to his dishwashing and I finished my supper hour and hit the road home.

The trombone player called me the next day. "Who the hell was that little rat bastard with you last night?" "He's the son of this chick I'm seeing." "Is he a thief?" "Why, not that I know of, Boney, why do you ask?" "Because I had 5 grand I had made in Haiti hidden where not even God-damn God could find it and I went to borrow something from it this morning and by God it's gone. I've wrecked the apartment looking for it; it's fucking gone, man. If it is that little bastard, I'll cut his nuts off, you tell 'im that." "Oh, Boney, come on, man; you must have gotten high and misplaced it." "No I didn't misplace it; besides, I saw that little rat bastard over by where I had it stashed last night, I remember now...god-damn that rat's ass bastard." "Boney, please; I'm sure it wasn't this kid; he's nice as hell; works hard, man, pearl diving at a restaurant."

I calmed the trombone player down, but I avoided him for a long time after that; in fact, I've only seen him once since that night and the son of a bitch was still harping on losing his 5 grand and asking about the rat bastard Climber.

That night I asked the Climber if he'd stolen the trombone player's money?

He looked at me and said, "No," but I knew he was lying. I knew he was lying because he had that sweet liar's look in his eyes that told me, "Hey, I'm sayin' 'no' but you know better...I'm the best, man. Besides," I imagined I heard his inner voice saying, "man, that shit was illegal drug money anyway."

The Climber. Quite a thief. I've no idea whatever happened to the Climber. His mother and I broke up and I've only seen her once since then and then when I saw her, in a subway station, she had lost a lot of her Jewish princess sexual appeal and looked rather haggard, like she'd been awake for a couple of days. I didn't have a chance to jaw with her and ask her about the Climber. You see, her brother was in town from Samarkand or some strange place like that and she didn't have time to chat.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler