That's what poor old Mondays are considered in this country. Day after the Christian day of rest; two days after the Muslim and Jewish days of rest; Monday belongs to the moon. Dia Luna. Crazy day. Day of the Lunatics. A wolf's worship day.
It is early on a New York City Monday morning. New York City was alive all weekend with hope and good humor and a mixing of races in celebration of, really: getting rid of G.W. Bush and the Bush Family Empire and the Saudi Royal Family and Pappy and Mammy Bush and all the parasitical Bush sons and never-heard-of daughter, though I'm sure she's as crooked and worthless as her brothers, Neil, Marvin, and G.W. And, yes, definitely yes, Obama was the one that we hope had flushed the Neo-Cons down the toilet with his amazing victory--his MANDATE, baby, though it's ashame Obama has this nonpartisan attitude toward bringing us all together! What about the damage to this nation the Repugnicans arrogantly foisted on us? They don't have to pay for that? Keeping Bernecke at the Federal Reserve for instance; keeping the FBI head, Mullin, is that his name; keeping Richard Hatch; keeping Georgie Porgie Bush's military bigshots; and the worst of all, keeping talking about Colon's Pal, that lying son of a bitch, being in his administration! I can't believe that one. Please, tell this old growlingwolf it ain't true!
Other than those objections, Obama has made people more free already--especially here in New York City--I mean, everybody I know is so satisfied with Obama it's amazing the things he could do if he'd just get out from under the wings of the Clintonistas--I mean this guy has the majority of the population on his side, backing him up now. Will he blow it? Probably, but at least there's hope for awhile.
So we New York Citians woke up this morning feeling anew until we heard the bad news from our pompous little pissant billionaire mayor who is pissed because New Yorkers are pissed at him and his pompous rather Napoleonic way he's insisting he's our permanent mayor. He's willing to shell out 30 million of his own money (he's always pompously bragging about how he only takes a dollar-a-year salary as mayor--why that, you pompous bastard? Why not work for free?) to keep being our lord and mayor. He says we need his business acumen because he says Wall Street's failure has put our fair city in debt to the tune of billions when just a few months ago he was bragging how we had a big surplus, which he now says he's had to blow trying to make up for the loss of revenue from Wall Street. So, the solution, why you guessed it, We the People of New York City are gonna have to bail these worthless bastards out of the mess they put us in. Our little-man, creepy, billionaire mayor says he's gonna have to raise our taxes, raise business taxes, raise property taxes--never let a billionaire run your affairs!
On top of this, the Manhattan Transit Authority is again crying poverty. This multimillion-dollar-salaried-CEO-easy-life organization is ruled over by a bunch of parasitical bigshots who've been milking New York Citians every since I came to NYC over 30 years ago by every four years or so claiming they're broke and that they have to raise subway and bus fares and commuter fares--and they always get their way. When I came to NYC, subway fares were 10 cents. Then they went to 15 cents. Then upwards every year or so, to 35 cents, to 75 cents, to $1, to $1.50, to $1.75, then $2. Now the MTA says they need to raise fares to $2.50 or maybe even $3.00. Why not $100? They're gonna be broke again soon no matter how high they raise fares. Plus, these crooked and crafty bigshots are saying they are going to have to put tolls on our only free bridges left, the 59th Street Bridge (the Bridge Over Troubled Waters), the Manhattan Bridge, and the Williamsburg Bridge--the East River Bridges, except the Brooklyn Bridge, which they'll leave free--maybe because it's a national landmark, you think? Plus, the MTA is bringing up the billionaire mayor's very antipoor and workingclass traffic congestion pricing plan again--threatening us with that nonsense way of milking us for more bucks.
New York City has had heavy traffic in its streets since the horse-and-buggy and dead-animals-in-the-gutters and garbage-in-the-gutters and sewage-in-the-gutters days. Mayor Ed Crotch (read: Koch) added bicycle lanes to our streets--he also added fire and bus lanes--plus he put traffic cops at dangerous intersections. You seldom see traffic cops directing traffic anymore--in the old days the horse cops directed traffic--instead all traffic cops seem to do now is make their ticket-writing quotas and then go home. Traffic seemed to be running fairly smoothly when our billionaire mayor came to power in the footsteps of his hero Rudi "Rudeass/Mussolini" Guiliani. The first mess up this mayor caused was by installing a stupid cross-street traffic plan--some cross streets once you turn onto them, you may have to go three or four blocks out of your way before you can turn off them. This causes log jams at every corner where the cross-town through streets cross the up-and-downtown streets. Then, this son of bitch started giving away all our city lands and buildings to his developer pals, including Donald "Loose Wig" Trump (what a big phony bastard he is) and the New Jersey Nets (losers) basketball team owner who is literally tearing downtown Brooklyn a new asshole. This city-wide wild building of buildings causes traffic problems--Con-Ed first of all jackhammers up all the streets surrounding a project--then the construction companies put their office trailers in the streets, taking up a lane--and they have to put their cranes sometimes in the streets, blocking up lanes and they all block sidewalks, some of them making pedestrians walk out in the streets to get around the construction project. Our little-man billionaire mayor has rezoned the city to where now you can build 72-story buildings anywhere in NYC you want to--or you can shoot for the moon with a building like that tacky Freedom Tower that's gonna cost New York Citians billions of dollars, though our billionaire mayor fails to mention how expensive and tax-losing these developments are in terms of tax rebates and the city reevaluating properties at phony assessments--like the bullshit job George "Alzheimer's" Steinbrenner and the FAILED Yankees pulled on us New York Citians in cahoots with City Hall with his over-a-billion-dollar-cost-overruns new Yankee Stadium, which I'm sure one day he'll name Steinbrenner Stadium or some such bullshit name like that. The Mets did the same thing in building their new stadium, which looks just like the old Shea and is only a few feet away from old Shea--why did the Mets need a new stadium? This is the bullshit we have to put up with in this city. In the meantime, we're losing jobs, our rents are still going skyhigh, and the robber barons are still trying to convince us that the housing bubble hasn't burst yet in New York City.
I've growled myself hoarse. What does my yowling and screaming and scratching at eyes do--except as a cathartic experience in which I clear my head of the anger I have against the wealthy--who are ruining our lives with their haughty arrogance and global imperialism (kingdom)...
And while I'm putting the Plutocrats down, how 'bout Obama putting Warren "Junkbond" Buffett on his economy-fixing panel of experts--which includes CEOs from corporations that are ruining us, but NO UNION representation on his panel, unless Robert Reich counts as a union spokesman. I don't trust Obama, OK? I'm sorry. I'm just too cynical to trust any human being these days. Obama has a chance, but I think he's getting bad advice--he's surely smarter than these assholes so I hope he's able to counterspin them and get us back on our feet again. He could do it if he's brave enough. He could end the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan probably in a matter of days were he to diplomatically approach these people, but not with General Petraus or Lyin' Dog Colon's Pal in tow--please.
I was also thinking, the Christian fundies might start connecting Obama to their stupid theory of an AntiChrist--though according to Christian fantasy he's suppose to come from Egypt.
Aha, the jackhammers have started. They're wailing away full blast next door to me. Progress. Progress is fucking noisy, folks. There's no peace with progress. Disgusting implements of noise represent the power of progress and the Power Elite who rain it down on us.
I could be mellower, I guess. How does one mellow out, though, in noise that sounds at times like you're in a war zone? Jackhammers shout out the noise and disturbance of destruction. For all they destroy, we have to repair or rebuild or repave. There is constant jackhammer noise in New York City--the noise of one jackhammer can flood a two-block neighborhood with atrociously bothering noise.
It's 8 am and the jackhammers are blasting away--Fuck peace and contentment. This city never gets to relax and people living in New York City certainly never get a chance to relax.
There were about 3 murders that happened in the city last night. A teenage girl got her throat slashed in Brooklyn. A cop was shot. A sky-high rich kid in his dad's SUV ran over two joggers killing one. By the bye, you don't see as many joggers in the streets as you did 20 years ago--when I lived in downtown Manhattan, I saw joggers all day long--remember jogging suits. I know muggers used to pose as joggers...you know the rest of that story. Those were the days of Sony Walkmen and Aiwa (remember that Japanese company?) Walkmen and Toshiba Walkmen (I can't knock the Toshiba Company, even though they are Japanese (Asian Rim)--'cause I love my Toshiba laptop). The days of cassettes and VHS tapes!
Don't worry, Steve Jobs is already working on a new iPod that will do chores for you...
What a trendy mess we're in. Kids rule us in terms of trends and fashions. Kid designers. Celebrity designers. Like P Diddy being a fashion expert--wearing all white--yeah, P.D., you don't have to dress white now that Obama's your Prez. You can also shuck Donald Trump off as your best friend.
I love P Diddy. There was nothing street about him; raised in Mount Vernon, New York; went to private Catholic school; then went to Howard and majored in Business. Yeah, OK, his father was a "criminal" character, but then, Puffy loves his mommy--and she really did make him, too.
Bitches and gripes are circling my head! I'm snapping my growling head off. Full moons are ganged above me. I'm howling out both sides of my mouth. I need some baby elk belly meat. I need some energy.
_________________________________________________________________
From One of the Woman Trumpet Player's Comments:
from "Here Is New York"
-E.B. White
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter--- the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last--- the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York's high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.
___________________________________________________________
Old Teevee Sets
I'd still like to know what government decree told the television industry it had to stop analog transmissions and go totally high-definition (digital?) by February of 2009. Who wrote that decree? Now, as a result of this "government decree," everybody in the USA has to either lay out a thousand-plus bucks (some are $4,000) for a digital flat-panel teevee or they have to buy $150 converters and then new antennae (digital-signal-receptive ones)--another $100. Wow, what a boon for the television manufacturers--EXCEPT, as people dump their old analog teevees and old computer CRT monitors there has come into being a new industry, a teevee and computer recycling industry. You bring your old computers and teevees to these people and they in turn sell them as waste to China (it's against Chinese law) who then send in their children to take them apart and find usable parts in them or to excise the metals used in them--risking their lives due to the highly toxic aspects of the insides of teevees and computers, motherboards oozing cadmium and dioxin and mercury poisonings--it seems these child laborers who do this particular work have died by the droves. In other words, we give up our old teevees and computers to the junkman and he turns around and makes millions selling this waste to Asian Rim countries who take the old parts and put them into "new" computers and teevees--WOW, what a rip off. I either will abandon teevee or I've seen a 15"-screen job for around $249 at my nearest Hasidim electronics and camera store--B&H it's called--and it's in the old William Sloane Coffin YMCA Building on 9th Avenue and 34th--remember William Sloane Coffin?
I just love to growl. Growling clears my head for the serious shit I'm involved in. That head trip.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
From the Associated Press:
South African singer Miriam Makeba dies at 76
ROME (AP) — Miriam Makeba, the South African singer known to fans worldwide as "Mama Africa" who became an international symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle, died early Monday after performing a concert in southern Italy, a hospital said. She was 76.
An emergency room official at the Pineta Grande Clinic, a private facility in Castel Volturno, said the singer died after being brought there. Italy's ANSA news agency reported that Makeba may suffered a heart attack at the end of the concert for an Italian journalist threatened by the Naples-area Mafia.
Makeba, often called "Mama Africa" and "the Empress of African Song," left South Africa in 1959. She tried to return in 1960 for the funeral of her mother, but her passport was revoked and she was not allowed to enter the country.
She lived in exile for 31 years in the United States, France, Guinea in West Africa and Belgium before having an emotional homecoming in Johannesburg in 1990, when many long-exiled South Africans returned under reforms instituted by then-President F.W. de Klerk.
________________________________________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment