The Daily Growler Saturday Evening Post

photo by tgw
What a Wonderful Word "Crackpot" Is
Today, I am lazy. I am addlepated. Puddin'headed. Ah, Puddin'head Jones! Muddleheaded. I am corrupted by wanton thoughts. I am climbing ladders going to the heights of nowhere. Crack. Pot.

I remember this chick who I met at a party at CBS Records. She introduced me to crack. I did one vial and found it vile. Later after the party when I tried to make out with this woman, I had no penis! It had done a "turtle" on me and had withdrawn into its carapace. No matter had devoutly I prayed to it, it stayed in its cave meditating. NEVER AGAIN! I hollered, my body and thoughts left numb by this shit that smelled like gasoline.

Pot on the other hand. I remember that first time, too. An entirely different result.
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Why am I addlepated? Because I was accused of not believing in geometry! No, I don't! There is no solid plane. There is no level playing field on this curvatured earth! Circumference, circumference, circumference.

And after 40 days and 40 nights of pouring rains here in New York City, the Sun, our true God, has made a shady appearance. God all the fucking smog, you can hear the Sun screaming! And then, as in atheism, the Sun disappears and it is raining again.

Thursday (June 18th) was the twentieth anniversary of Izzie Stone's death. I.F. Stone, the natural journalist. At one time in the late 1940s, Izzie was a star on the radio version of "Meet the Press"--with Lawrence Spivak, an awful little rightwing prick, as the moderator. And Izzie was the communist agitator on the show. He asked the jabbing questions to the others's puff. He did this until the show had Morris Fishbein on. At that time, Morris Fishbein was head of the American Medical Association and editor the AMA Journal and he was the most famous doctor (along with Doctor Spock) in the US. The reason Morris was on the show was because President Harry Truman had proposed a National Healthcare system for Congress to vote on. Fishbein is given credit at this time for inventing the scare-phrase "socialized medicine." So when Fishbein appeared on "Meet the Press" he immediately started spouting how National Healthcare was communist and then he started talking about it as socialized medicine. Socialism and Communism were the big scares in those days--We the People after WWII were purposely saturated with "Commie," "Red," "Pinko," fears and told that thanks to those awful fucking Jews, the Rosenbergs, the Soviet Union now had nuclear capabilities same as us. Why they had nuclear missiles that could easily reach New York City! Norman Mailer in his Advertisements for Myself (he was running for president) asked the question, "Why are all Soviet missiles aimed at New York City? Why New York City?" ICBMs those scary missiles were called, InterContinental Ballistic Missiles. Did you know that the Soviet Union offered to allow the USA to monitor its nuclear testing program in its infant stages but Edward Teller, that mad scientist asshole who gave us the hydrogen bomb--the H Bomb (one of the big r and b stars of that era was H-Bomb Ferguson), crapped in his rightwing pants when he heard about this cooperation and he blasted it saying we didn't have the devices that could detect anything further than 200 miles and besides we couldn't trust the Soviet Union, a government built on lies--"The Big Lie" it was called by the propaganda boys. It was I.F. Stone who broke the scoop on that story by finding out by simply calling the government seismograph agency that measured nuclear explosions around the world and finding out that their Alaskan sensors had picked up the Soviet tests and they were 1700 miles from the site. Stone proved we could have monitored their testing and thus maybe have cured the Cold War--but the government lied to us and that opportunity was squashed. I.F. Stone's idea was that yes the government lied like dogs but that the job of the reporter was to squeeze out what little truth there was nestled among those lies and present it to the public. Stone said that while the government purposely lied it still in its guilt did put actual truths in among its lies so you could figure out what it was covering up.

After old Morris Fishbein had finished his harangue on National Healthcare being "Socialized medicine" and anyone who was for it was a commie, I.F. Stone asked him, "Well, since this National Healthcare is being proposed by the President of the US, does your statement mean President Truman is a Communist sympathizer?" That would be Stone's last appearance on "Meet the Press." In fact, the networks further blacklisted him from radio and television and he would not make another appearance on those media until 15 years later.

I.F. Stone

Stone out of work then started, in 1953, his I.F. Stone Weekly, going from a circulation of 4,000 up to 70,000 near its end. There is a new biography of Izzie out these days--by a guy named D.D. Guttenplan--I heard him promoting the book on Amy Goodman's good D-Now show and he's a wonderful storyteller--writes for The Nation--and Izzie ended up writing for The Nation. The latest mud being slung at muckraking Izzie Stone is that he was a Soviet spy.
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I'm still addlepated and it's yet another morning already. No sleep for the thinking. No sleep these days. There's no such thing as a deep sleep in New York City. My nextdoor neighbor's construction site is now working obnoxiously on Saturdays. I knew it was coming but you're never braced for the inevitable even when you've lived with this city's claws for 30 years. Hemingway said New York City was the worst place in the world for a writer to work.

I'm back under my stereo headphones again. Night and day, drenching my brain in music. And it's sad, too, because the music I so know and love and promote is coldly being coopted into the world of obscurity--USA music now dominated by gasoline-head mentalities, punctured, tattooed and pierced Baby Boomer kids whose only musical training happened in their Long Island garages--with all white friends in their garage bands--and now all bands I see on commercial teevee are white boy led or white girl led--the white girls do like to pack their white bands with some token blacks--usually a Dee Jay or a black bass player--and, yes, black back-up singers. The white boy bands--occasionally you'll see a token black or two, like the monotonous Black Eyed Peas, an insult to the old Southern lucky pea--the cowpea! There used to be nothing better than a pot of black-eyed peas cooked with onions, tomatoes, peppers, and tons of fatback or maybe a couple of smoked ham hocks--that was some eating, folks. Crumble up some Mexican-style cornbread in there and, Jesus, such sweet lucky eating. In fact, in the South, the Lucky brand of canned black-eyes was the most popular brand--with or without snaps.

There are wildly popular bands that I just don't get. Bare Naked Ladies for one. Boring Canadian squares. A lot of Canadian musicians go to the big time fast in this country. (The best of all times was Oscar Peterson!) Green Day. Tell me the reason Green Day is able to make teenage girls wet their panties? Boring. Drab. I wipe my musical ass on their nonexistent sheet music! Or we have the Mickey Mouse synthetic bands like the asswipe-looking Jonas Brothers--Hansen clones--with all the Pro-Tooled equalized vocalizing and their 3-change guitar playing--and that's what they're doing, "Playing," nothing serious in their music except this "young love"--those "I want to fuck you tonight" songs boy bands love to sing to their dripping teeny BB girls--hollow-headed girls for the most part. "'Scuse me, Muffy, wouldn't you love to fuck all three of the Jonases tonight!" "At least give them BJs," Muffy replies.

How careless are parents? Parents hate their kids. My parents hated me. I knew it. I fucked up so many of their hopes. I pissed them off so many times. I did as I pleased hollering back at them, "I didn't ask to be born," without thinking that maybe I did ask to be born--down in my father's loins one night--so powerful an urge that my mother submitted and milked all those seeds out of my lunging, panting, sweating father as he shot deep, down where the boy sperms make it over the finish line first--and then there was me. An idea first? My father's lust? My mother's aching for a replacement child to the one she had lost just a couple of years earlier? And then there was me. Another "I" in the household.

thegrowlingwolf,inanaddlepatedmood
for The Daily Growler Saturday Evening Post