"Hey, Kids, It's Barabas Munn-Dayne, Our Old Wiry Woodsman Pal From Over in the Placid Little Flaccid City of Lake Flaccid, the Jots & Titties...Oops, er-ah...."
Whatever harm there is in that flaccid head, don't bother me one tit, er-ah, I mean, one damn bit. And yep I'm being "Frankly, My Dear" these days, too, because I'm having to spend time in New York City, my native land, because Lake Flaccid is snowed in and the temperature is below zero most of the sunnier days these days. I turned my lake cabin over to thegrowlingwolf who swore he could make it up there on Amtrak or some way and I gave him the keys to the town's Snowcat and wished him a fond farewell. He went howling off pleased as several Punches on his wolfish ways up into the frozen flaccid forests of Lake Flaccid. He can have his way up there. Nobody in their right mind is left in town...except Cecil the Dog-faced Boy III (the Third)...he's up there; he's hidden out up there, happy all alone. He's so frightening to look at he doesn't wander out much. He especially scares hell out of the laddies and lassies, though ironically he's a powerful motivational speaker and when he does his spiels at like high school assemblies, he does wear a bag over his head. Rumor around town has it that Cecil's very rich, some say from inheriting his grandfather's carnival savings and some claim later on he had made a fortune on his own, especially when he did that big tribute to his grandfather and all the other freaks of his grandfather's time at the Smithsonian. Then in a Shakesperian sort of off-wings writing binge, Cecil III turned his tribute into a one-man show that did some said quiet very well on the summer theater circuit, especially around southern Ohio and eastern Pennsylvania. So the locals all just knew he had money, plus, as a town teenager recalled, the money Ceece had accumulated off the private sales of his book, Doomed With the Face of a God-damn Dog--so he's able to successfully stay indoors hidden away most of the time, even in the mid-stiffest of winters, like this one currently encrusting Lake Flaccid with demon ice, snow, and below-zero temperatures--and besides he's much more scarier now with his wrinkly jowls drooling down off his flat bulldog-broad nose sparked stranger yet by the long thick tufts of albino hair that stick straight up and out of both his ears--yes, he's much, much scarier now in his saging old age than when he was younger and his dog face was sort of still cute and puppyish, you know with playful eyes, like Cecil was actually wagging his ancient tail, or show soulful eyes, like when Cecil lost his mother, Cecilia, the famous Mexican Mohaired Lady from Chihuahua--famous not only for her rather hairy complexion but also for her "Pancho y Juliet" dog act--Cecilia sang while her dogs, Pancho, as Romeo, and Juliet, some said her name was really Julius, as Juliet, acted out the famous balcony scene from Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. They were a big hit one year at the Lake Flaccid Shakespeare Festival and Joust. Cecil III, I must add, is also in his retirement from show biz a highly respected (at least in the Adirondacks) published poet. Yep. Lake Flaccid attracts poets and paupers and princes and kings (of the canine variety) and ex-hoofers and ex-ice-queens and unsuccessful New York City chicken farmers--
Yes, a dude from New York City, where else, came to Lake Flaccid and started building a chicken ranch there. Claimed he was going to raise free-range chickens in the pure air and with the pure waters of Lake Flaccid. The local yokels all joshed him and railed at him, "You can't raise chickens outdoors around here. They'll freeze to death." But, you know New York City folks when they've got money to waste and are enhanced by that famous big-city self-abusing determination how they are, and this city slicker went ahead and started his chicken ranch in spite of the warnings. He was raising, he said, Rhode Island Reds along with another breed, special breed, he bragged, personally invented breed he swore was the meatiest though most expensive chicken in the world, a pheasant-chicken hybrid he, Mel Fez was his name, called a "Pheaken"--he pronounced it "Fee-kin." He was from Brooklyn I'm sure, thank you.
So that first spring Mel Fez got his property all chicken-ready, and it looked like he might luck out and do all right. We had a fairly sweet spring that year--that was about 1996--temperature hung around a sweet 69 that spring and the sun shone nice and warm and old Mel Fez had thousands of baby chicks hatch that spring. Yeah, he had a hatchery built, you see. You have got to have a hatchery to raise baby chicks whether you're in the wormiest sandy desert shinnery or in icy Lake Flaccid, so he had a hatchery, but these fresh-hatched chicks didn't reach pullet stage until late summer, and then he started fattening them up on corn and molasses and fine caliche gravel and fresh Adirondack spring water--and oh those chickens were treated like royalty, let me bear witness to that. Still the local doubters kept saying, "We'll see." Soon, at Mel's place, the fields were full of free-ranging chickens, both RI Reds and those strange Pheakens. I mean they were everywhere, thousands of chickens.
Well up about the second week that September, one morning, we all woke up around town and around the lake--it had been a bright sunny fairly warm day the day before--and we woke up that morning and I noticed right off the bat how cold it was, as cold as any holy Hell, cold like a deep freeze in my bedroom, and then I went into the bathroom and the water in my flush bucket by the wellhead was frozen solid--I jest, of course, about having to flush my toilet with a bucket of well water--I use lake water instead--hey, it's just an old hippy woodsman joking with you, give me a break--but anyway, I looked out the bathroom window that morning, and, Jesus, I had to wipe my eyes, and then I noticed there was at least two feet of fresh snow on the ground and the wind was howling like a banshee and the snowflakes were free falling thick as hops everywhere, and the wind was catapulting them into stinging bee-like ice crystals as they whipped into your bare face if you tried to go against them. It was cold as a well-digger's rear end, and I looked out at Lake Flaccid and couldn't believe my eyes. Overnight the lake had frozen over, quietly, flaccidly, unobtrusively. I snowshoed out to get the mail and Mel Fez was coming down Deer Gutting Road by my place in his Jeep Cherokee (I know the Cherokees are getting rich from Chrysler paying them rights for using their Tribal name to go on a profit-making war machine--yep, the Jeep is a war machine, the first 4-wheel drive vehicle, named after Popeye's rather marvelous dog he called The Geep).
Popeye was a strange cartoon at first--very Dada, very Surrealistic--like the Abbott and Costello teevee show was later, that sort of comic Dadaism or Surrealism. Dadaistic in their interactions and reactions; surrealistic in the sense of the city they lived in, the jobs they had, the landlord, the girlfriend, the cop on the beat, like Jean-Luc Goddard's Alphaville, starring American expatriate Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina. Beautiful b/w film--unless Ted Turner colorized it in his "ruining American film" stage of self-aggrandizement back after he married Hanoi Jane.
So Mel stopped alongside my mailbox and he hollered for me to get in his Jeep. "You have to come see this," he said as we cracked along crash-crunching down the ploughed road but with snow quickly freshly repiling up on it, deep, filling up the middle of the road, but Mel's Jeep crashed right on through the piles, his windshield wipers clicking away madly, his windshield-heater on high heat keeping the windshield from freezing over. We drove up to the entrance of "Fez Pheaken Farms," turned in, and headed up the long farm road to Mel's concrete-block office building and backroom slaughterhouse. As we made our way up between the snowy fields that the day before had been still partially verdant and lively running free with free-range pullets and roasters and baking hens and that now were a serene white expanse of bubbly fresh swishing-drifting powder snow. Every now and then when you looked long enough at those fields of snowy glare, you suddenly were surprised to realize that some of the piles of drifted snow looked, by their outlines standing up along the horizontal level of those fields, just like god-damn chickens--in fact, I soon discovered on closer inspection, they were in fact chickens. They were Mel's free-range RI Reds and Pheakens. Turns out all of Mel's outdoor free-range chickens had frozen solid in place all across his free-range fields during that freaky flash-frozen night. "I'm ruined, Barabas." "Yeah, Mel, and they probably won't thaw out on their own until spring. Why don't you sell them as fresh frozen chickens? Take them down to Chinatown in New York City--they'll find a way to use them--who knows where chopped chicken comes from in those restaurants and chop suey joints down there." "You bastard, you joke while I'm ruined."
Anyway. Let's start some jottin' and tittling:
--Barack Obama is one interesting dude. Great look at him on a PBS Frontline that was running last night on New York City's PBS channel--in digital, wide-panel, I could see all of the hairs in everybody's nostrils--maybe this new digital scam will have cameradudes and dudettes pulling back from close-up head shots--it's really annoying in baseball where cameramen and women inevitably as they are trained zoom in close to baseball players faces, especially pitchers when they're getting ready to pitch, going through their readying routines--and these trained camera goons zoom in on a pitcher's mug and inevitably that pitcher just as the camera approaches his nostrils and lips hawks up and spits out a huge loogy--they do it every time--hawking up and hurling loogies is a part of their wind-up act--why does the camera have to report that action--always, always, they do it, and with batters, too, right up into their nostrils and, of course, batters spit, too--keeps them focused. Now digital teevee is bragging about how you can see the linemen in football games right up into their faces--you can see them breathing fire, one purveyor of wide-screen digital teevees claims. Who wants to be that close to a smelly human being?--especially a bunch of bloody beef-fed and beefed up, steroid-champed up, farting and sweating and cumming in their jock straps as they street-fight using a game invented in the coalfields of Pennsylvania and first played around the factory towns of Ohio, like Canton, the Canton Bulldogs being a team of factory hands who fought bareknuckle after knocking back a couple of kegs of porter stout on their free time and who fought bareknuckle, too, when they played those first pro football games--without helmets, too--anything went, too--eyegouging, breaking limbs, kicking in the groin. In the old days, there was no passing, only running, and unless you penned a runner down to the "Uncle" stage, he could get loose, get up, and start running again without penalty. That's where the piling on came into football, same as rugby--pigheaded big brawny Germans, Italians, Scotch-Irish, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes played early pro football, even Native American Jim Thorpe, said to be the 20th-century's greatest Olympic athlete ever--and they took Jim's Olympic medals away from him because he was a fucking savage Injun--and didn't give them back to him until within recent history, long after old Jim was dead and gone and had long since quit dropkicking fieldgoals from 50 yards out, or crushing a defensive back, running right over his ass to score, stiffarming right in the face of any defensive man who got in the way (stiffarming so mean in the helmetless days it's why these modern birds wear those sissy facemasks). And Slingin' Sammy Baugh used to play in games with blood streaming down his face from his nose, mouth, and eyes--blood all over his uniform--Slingin' Sammy, one of the toughest motherfuckers to ever play sports--playing into his forties--like George Blanda later in the 70s--playing until he was 52 or three.
--this Frontline on Obama was cool as hell. Wow, the contradictions going on in this guy's life ever since he was a kid. Brilliant African father--an economist, left Mom Obama and little Barack to go to Harvard--ended up back in Africa with many women and seven new Barack step-brothers and sisters over there. And Barack's white mother was a hippy if there ever was one. A hippy girl trying to unite the world, marrying a black man in spite of the white attitudes against it--and marrying an absolutely black black man, as Obama puts it, "a man black as pitch"--and rather ugly as sin, to boot, we might add--but a brilliant thinker--and Obama's mother was a nonconformist protesting free woman, free love, free spirit, and finally Obama's mother divorced Barack Sr. and quickly traveled the world as, what else, a community organizer, one of the best, they say, settling then in Indonesia with the boy Barack Jr., and soon she remarried an Indonesian dude, who became Barack's Muslim stepfather. And when his mother died, Barack was given over to his white grandparents in Hawaii.
--And this show showed the conflict Obama has between his white self and his black self. That's the conflict that is motivating his "Yes, We Can" political attitude, a slogan he's been using since he had the defiant balls to run for the Illinois State Senate from the Southside back when he did so badly against ex-Black Panther, Southside Chicago hero, Bobby Rush--Bill Clinton, for your info, backed Bobby Rush against Obama in that campaign and Rush crushed Obama--the Chicago South Side blacks turned out in a flood against Obama, saying snidely he was a white man in black face as far as they were concerned! It was Obama's first bad defeat, a teaching defeat--teaching him how he wasn't black enough to get elected in an all-black community. They weren't ready to accept Obama's "nonChicagoan" decision to be a Man of All Seasons rather than a black freedom fighter, a uniter like Lincoln rather than a divider like G.W. Bush, a universalist and not a partisan-type guy.
--like at Harvard Law School, where Obama turned against his black backers in favor of the right-wing Conservative (Neo-Cons) Federalist Society--or some such right-wing name, the head of which eventually got Barack editorship of the Harvard Law Review. A black woman lawyer classmate of Obama's said she had depended on him to get her name on the Review editorial staff masthead--very important to her legal career--but when Obama won the election and got the editorship, thanks to the rightwingers, he gave masthead positions to three of the Neo-Cons but refused this woman a shot, only picking one black for his staff--and this woman was pissed at him. She said, that was Obama using his white-side agenda to the advantage of his obvious black-side.
--Obama as a community organizer certainly knows where the money that fuels community organizations comes from. He's an expert, and so is his wife, on who sponsors community projects. He knows who alright; he knows it's: Banks of course. Financial institutions of course. Yep. And television stations. And big corporations like Exxon-Mobil. Like Chevron-Texaco. Like Philip Morris Cigarettes--who have glossened over their evil side by promoting themselves through good ole Kraft Foods and whatever other coverup companies they own. Also, big community funders are Verizon, Intel, IBM--government monies to community organizations is very low percentage. You'll see Obama start investing government billions in community service organizations all across the country, along with whatever corporate billions he can get his hands on, too, getting money being the central part of all his plans, even his foreign plans.
--Bobby Rush, by the way, was a former Black Panther--personally involved in the Black Panther movement with his friend Fred Hampton. Obama couldn't beat a black hero like Bobby Rush, and Obama used his same tactic he's now using on McCain, Hillary, all his former advisaries--he was saying things about Bobby Rush like, "While I respect Bobby Rush's life work and his service to the black community, and do consider him a eminent black man, still I think it's time to reach beyond a black-only stage...blah, blah, blah." It didn't work with Chicago Southside blacks.
--this Frontline bio spelled it out how Obama decided in 2006 with the avid encouragement of outcasted Democratic Senator Tom Daschile and his political nut-crunching strongarm team of political organizers. For director of Obama's new political coalition and as planner and developer for what Obama started calling his "two-year plan," Obama called on his old Chicago political nutbusting white buddy David Axelrod. Axelrod immediately started promoting Barack as the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2008. Daschile and Axelrod gave Obama free reign to go for the presidency in his own way--to let his white side keep him cool and uncontroversial, to let his black side just be obviously evident in his skin color, his family, and his Chicago Southside experience and Senate constituency.
--Obama's high-as-he-could-possibly-go-given-his-mixed-cultural-heritage is something he started creating and dreaming about in Hawaii while being raised by his, even he said, racist white grandmother--his mother the one who instilled deep within him the fact that he was blessed, Barack means "blessed" in Kenyan, that he was multiculturally special, that he was a world child and not black, not white, but universal. That's what Obama stands for, a universal world, the Bob Marley "One World" concept of cooperation and organization! And Barack Obama truly believes he can pull this universal coalition idea off--though he also knows--his father was an economist--his mother was an community organizer dependent on contributions for her livelihood--he can't pull this off without bales of fresh money--and guess who has all the "fresh" money right now--why the Wall Street criminals: Goldman-Sachs, the Bank of America, J.P. Morgan-Chase, AIG Insurance (remember them?), GMAC [and just the other day, as a tittle, I noticed a new advertiser on television--The Met-Life Bank--can you believe it, Snoopy's a banker now!]--these are the people who have all the money, the wealth--access to our natural resources as well as our taxes and our wilderness lands--and Obama the community organizer, the service man, will have to get that money away from these tight-fisted crooks-in-cahoots--that's his hole card--Obama thinks he knows how to deal with these basically white scumbags because of his experience with them at Harvard Law School and with them in Chicago in his run for the Illinois Senate when he went up and socialized and organized using the University-of-Chicago-and-Hyde-Park whites and Jews up north of his Southside constituency as his white leverages, the Senate seat he won with the ballsqueezing, money-bagging expertise of nutbusters like David Axelrod and Rahm Emmanuel, who organized with him to get him the Illinois State Senator seat and the keynote address at the 2004 convention--which he was prepped for by Axelrod and the Daschile team but which they say he wrote himself.
--when Obama announced his run for the presidency from Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln's hometown, in 2006, he was in the midst of his biggest roadblock yet in terms of his plan--that roadblock came when Fox News got ahold of some televised sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama's connection to God, the pastor of the church that had backed him 100% in his community organizing efforts, Rev. Wright being a top-flight community organizer himself and so, too, his Trinity Church with its vast investments in community organizing--that's why Obama was in that church, not for his religious feelings as a black man as well as a white man. Obama was hung up and hurt badly by Wright's Fox-News-revealed anti-white sermons, especially the "God Damn America" sermon that Fox broadcasted continuously on all its newscasts for several Obama-bamming days in a row. Wright was scheduled to give the invocation in Springfield that day of Obama's presidential announcement but when it came time for the invocation, Obama appeared and gave his speech instead. Wright, they say, was pissed off big time. In anger, Wright went around on all the talk shows defending himself--and to black Americans, Wright's "God Damn America" sermon was brilliantly truthful and not at all embarrassing. Right after this, Obama went to the Dashile bunch and Axelrod and said he wanted to speak on racism and he wanted to do it in Philadelphia. He did, and that speech is now accepted as one of Obama's best so far speeches, a speech they say that saved his political ass, and in fact, it turns out that Rev. Wright was a boon to Obama's campaign, forcing him to face racism and his own blackness before the public.
--Obama is a brilliant conniver, folks. He's going to get filthy rich from this dreamed and planned success. As president of the USA, he'll have his mitts on trillions of dollars--Obama along with Larry "Backwards Thinking" Summers and Paul "I Forgot to Pay My Taxes" Thieler --forget to pay your taxes for one god-damn filing and see how understanding the IRS is about it--these privilege bastards hate taxes--Obama's biggest challenge is taxing these bastards individually to get that excess profit bonus money away from them--they stole it from us--and then taxing these huge merger-profiting corporations like Exxon-Mobil, whose last two-year record-breaking war-profiteering profits could save every family in this country from poverty, from foreclosure, for credit debts--that's the problem facing Obama--how to recover, or steal if he has to, all of We the People's wealth stolen from us by the Bush Neo-Cons, Bush's Wall Street thugs, the ruthless contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, Unka Dick Cheney and his Halliburton Pirates, the Bush Family itself--We the People of the USA are currently supporting Neil Bush--remember his school cirriculum software he was given 30 million by the No Child Left Behind bullshit; and Jeb of course we've been supporting since he and Neil lucked out of going to prison for their involvement in the savings and loan scandal (Silverado Bank, anybody remember that?); and Marvin Bush has to be living off Federal grants and boondoggles for his fabulous security firm we never hear anything about anymore--yes, the same security firm that was running security at the World Trade Center before 9/11--Marvin's contract with the WTC expiring, listen to this, the very day: 9/11/01. Ah sweet ironies!
--Obama kept Robert Gates on as Sec'y of Defense--yes, what a criminal Gates is, but Obama is a conniver and Robert Gates knows where all that Pentagon money is--a trillion dollars this year alone--Gates knows just where Barack can tap into the Defense Dept. till and rake out billions of excess monies, monies wasted of futile defense projects like that stupid Ronnie Raygun Memorial Star Wars Missile Defense System we're still pumping billions of dollars into.
--So, good people, that's what community organizers do best--hustle monies!
--Good News: Obama picks George Mitchell as his Middle East mediator. A good choice--a universalist like Obama, he is a man promoting coming together--"Come let us reason together"--why, George Mitchell is a foreign community organizer.
--Tooling around the miles and miles of blogs that surround The Daily Growler, I came across this one--from a 17-year-old schoolgirl named Shelby in Skagway, Alaska, just north of Juneau. Check this out--speaking of Popeye and John Ashbery:
shelbyap.blogspot.com/2008/09/la-sestina-de-popeye.html
Pretty damn good ruminating for a 17-year-old; ruminating, like the commenter said, in pretty high grass, a difficult poem well analyzed. Cheers, good Shelby. I liked her art, too.
barabasmunn-daynethejots&tittlesman
for The Daily Growler
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