Living in New York City Looking for Love Among a Whole Lot of Hate

Foto by tgw, "looking out over sixth avenue," new york city, 2006.
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[A The Daily Growler Bulletin: Regarding a statement in this post that banks will start failing within the next six months, Bank of America just announced it lost 2.24 billion dollars on loans this quarter because people aren't paying them back--the economy isn't recovering, it's diving further down into the briny deep. Whoaaaaa....!]
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Another Study of a Distinguishing Between Lust and Love
After reading the Gore Vidal interview in Barrabus Munn-Dayne's latest (Monday, Oct.12th--Indigenous People's Day) piece of Lake Flaccid flotsam from our Jots & Tittles man, I have to agree with Brother Gore. His insights continue to floor me. This man of all seasons--I found him parallel-lined with me when it comes to distinguishing Lust from Love. He says he lusted after Jimmy Tremble, the kid who uncovered Gore's homosexuality, but that he loved Howard Austen (his real name was Auster) his lifemate of 50 years who just recently died. Vidal said he never had sex with Howard, saying there was no lust in that relationship. Quoted in a Guardian interview in 2007, Vidal said, "'It is very easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part,' says Vidal, 'and impossible when it does.' In his memoir Palimpsest, he wrote, 'This satisfies no one of course but there, as Henry James would say, it is.'" [read the rest of it at www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jun/17/culture.features]

Gore never called himself gay. One time I heard him say he was a homosexualist. In the Independent interview, Gore says there is no such thing as either heterosexuals or homosexuals only the sex acts associated with the terms. We are all just simply sexual in terms of looking for pleasure--LUST. Love is something totally different. Just as Gore is confused about what is love and lust so was I for years. I've written about it often. Maybe I obsess literally over it. Yes, I've thought I was in love many times only to be disappointed. I've admitted that 5 times I've sworn it was love while it was happening and yet in retrospect even those "loves" might more truly have been lusts.

But now I'm pretty much convincing myself that I've found a true love, a tingling love of the kind Vidal talks about, the kind that goes above sex. A love that excites me just in itself being what it is. A love I've had for many years now though I wasn't sure of it or that it was mutual--and there were years of separation--years of poems and years of "seductive" emails. This is the L-O-V-E kind of love, I've been looking for ("in all the wrong places," as the song says)--that artistic kind of love; that iron-red-strong love like that expressed by my old contemporary, Robert Indiana.


Robert Indiana with LOVE just over his shoulder.

It's the kind of love that INSPIRES! It's the kind of love that breeds poets and novelists and painters and sculptors and freethinkers; it's the kind of love that inspires creation. It's the kind of love that might lead to procreation, ethereal sex beyond the commongrounds 0f lust!

I'm still such a neophyte when it comes to this emotion, but, dammit, when I told this person I loved her it was so easy and natural and it sounded even to me like I really felt it and meant it. And to look at her; and to look her straight in her eyes and say the words; and then for her to look me back straight into my eyes and to hear her, to see her lips letting the words flow out sensually just above a whisper, say the words, too--WOW, and that starts romantic fireworks going off in my overdramatic romantic brain and not in my loins! In this instance, love has preceded lust! Though that is not to say lust for this woman isn't in me. She's too much a woman for me not to--in a loving way, comprende Vd?

OK, I'm getting sloppy romantic here; reality isn't conducive to LOVE. Reality is so full of hate. Sometimes it's hard to separate hate from love. I've always said hate is the reverse of love. Rejected love is painful like when you're a writer and you write something you think is classic, a right-cross to Shakespeare's jaw, and you submit it for publication and you get back a cold standard-form rejection notice.

Rejection. It's really hard for me to take rejection. It's hard for anybody to take rejection. That's a most painful event. Self-destruction could follow rejection. And, yes, suicide. Rejected love has to be a cause of a lot of suicides. That and being unable to love anymore. To me taking a Viagra in order to get an erection on for a woman you are supposed to lustfully desire is artificial, acted out, and not driven out.

One could justify saying "good lovin'" may be one source of living longer. When I put it that way, man, I am suddenly jiggling around like a large bowl of Jell-O with thrills. I've got for the first time in my gloriously lustful life a "true love." Aha! That's the joy of LOVE. And oh what loving lust such love should lead to, though that's not the point of this love. How ironically thrilling is that?

Anyway, all of this blather to say, by golly, I may really finally be in love for real. And, damn, that's nice. That's the romantic paradise poets are trying to establish in their mid-airs--and I am a poet. In true love affairs you can live up on Cloud 9s and let your mind rest up there in the lap of your true love--while your body is back in reality dealing with the various forms of hate (in the form of furies--COMPETING furies), especially that hate buzzing around us and trying to sting us into submission, trying to drag us bound into the unreal, the papier-mache world that only true love can unbound and make real again. "Said it's only a paper moon/Sailing over a cardboard sea/But it wouldn't be make believe/If you believed in me." But I've quoted the lyrics to Harold Arlen and Yip Harberg's "Paper Moon" over and over again before. Our old American songwriters were so damn clever; they were the poets of show biz (in the Gore Vidal interview I love it when he puts these politicians and world leaders down as "just show biz"--and who should know show biz better than Gore Vidal, who as he said, at one time was sexually pleasured by Tennessee Williams--talk about show biz); the poets of the standards. There is so much make believe going on day-in day-out, it's very difficult to ferret out the facts from the overwhelming fictions. I write from the fictional side of reality remember. It's like I'm in Wonderland just behind the mirrors. I see reality from that point of view. That's why this will be the last outburst of this kind from me. This love I've got, I'm keeping to myself. Just see how creative I become from now on.

President Obama's Wanting Only to Deal With the Future and Not the Past
I've only heard one dude, Mark Danner, a New Yorker writer, analyze that Obaman idea correctly. Danner says the phrase makes it is impossible to prosecute any crimes committed in the past or even crimes being committed at the moment. You catch on? If we put the past behind us and dwell only in the future, there is nothing in between, in the now, just speeches and promises and rewordings and reneged-on promises. Danner says if you only consider the future without considering the past, you will accomplish nothing. And Gore Vidal says given this attitude, President Obama will not be reelected in 2012. What a shame, I say. Vidal says it's refreshing to have a truly intelligence man in the White House, but this intelligent man hasn't a clue as to how to deal with the mess he inherited from without a doubt, as Gore confirms it, the worst president in the history of this nation. By looking toward the future and ignoring this past and not coming to terms with it, is political suicide. G.W. Bush and his policies have gotten us into to this quagmire--this quick sand--to the point, as Vidal puts it, we are soon to become the new coolies under the whip and bootheel of the Communist Chinese rickshaw riders who now own our debt and thereby own us. What needs to happen is G.W. Bush and Dickless Cheney and others of their administration should be confronted with a face off of threats. They should be dealt with. Their policies should be analyzed; all their memos read out loud in Congress; they should be brought before We the People's representatives and put on trial. "Explain to We the People, you little spoiled-brat cokehead phony Texas creep, how you managed to throw us into such debt? What the hell did you do with the trillions of dollars that just disappeared out of our Treasury during your first year in office? Explain to us why you continued reading My Pet Goat to a bunch of Florida fifth graders while the nation you're supposed to be the commander and chief of was under an attack from some unidentified enemy? How come like the coward you are, rather than flying to Washington, D.C., you flew off to the safety of a SAC base in Nebraska? And while we're at it, what did your brother, Marvin, know about 9/11 (you know Marvin was head of security at the World Trade Center--conveniently giving up the job the very day of 9/11)? Why were the Bin Ladens in the US given safe passage out of the country a day before you announced that Osama bin Laden and some bunch called al-Queda were responsible for 9/11? What evidence do you have that particularly identifies Bin Laden as the mastermind behind 9/11? Is it the same kind of evidence you forced old fool Colon's Pal to give before the UN for our invading and trying to occupy Iraq? Why did you immediately try and invade and occupy Afghanistan when they had nothing to do with 9/11? Why after you had invaded Afghanistan did you give up chasing bin Ladin? Why did you then start saying you were no longer concerned about Bin Laden? Why did you execute Saddam Hussein so rapidly and so unfairly? Where did you come up with the idea of using private contractors and privateer armies in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why were you and your father so chummy with Communist China? How far up into your hand-puppet ass was your Father's arm and the arms of his cockamamie New World Order cretin friends, especially his Saudi-Arabian friends (what has happened to Prince Bandar Bush?), and his old asshole buddies in the Carlyle Group, his Halliburton connections, his KBR connections, his Houston oil empire connections?"

I'm a growler for a reason. A serious growl threatens the opposition. Dripping fangs show how serious your growl is. A growl is a warning, a don't-tread-on-me warning. I know, I always sound like a Libertarian. I'm not, trust me, though I do find Liberty, my liberty, a most important principle in continuing the continuing present on through to a full, rewarding chance to experience this truly magnificent honor called life on the Planet Earth for as long as possible and then some.

Obama hasn't the will or the power to growl against the idiocies of his opposition--even the opposition in his own party. [And notice what a fool old Unka Joe LIEberman is making of himself as an "independent," and what a foul use of that word.] As Vidal says, the Republican Party is no longer a political party, it's a god-damn hate cult. You can't reason with those assholes; you can only threaten them! Obama thinking that driving down the middle-of-the-road is going to lead us into this fictional future of a perfect coming together is putting us on a collision course with failure. When you drive down the middle of the road, you are putting yourself in a very precarious position of having to trust the oncoming traffic of respecting your middle-of-the-road attitude and swerving to let you pass at the last minute. Though the attitude of the oncoming traffic is usually based on a rage so intent (driving down highways being a part of our territorial natures) they may just go ahead and plow right straight head on into your dumb middle-of-the-road ass.

I now satirically ask, what would happen if we kicked all the backward states out of the Union and let the Republicans and Neo-Cons rule 'em? The New Confederacy. That's the divisiveness President Obama faces. The divisiveness he confronts through the protection of his classy speeches. He feels a conflict coming on, he schedules a speech somewhere. In the meantime, we keep tumbling on down the hill spilling all the water out of our pails--that hill we struggled so hard to get to the top of and worked so hard to fill those pails with our precious human and natural resources.

We the People's Healthcare Industry-controlled Senate Finance Committee has come together on a national healthcare overhaul with an intent to really put the screws to all of us. What a boon to the healthcare insurance pirates. Now not only do the sick get screwed but the healthy get screwed, too. For the sick or already covered, higher rejections of coverage and higher premiums are coming for sure--the industry just admitted such in a threatening position paper against any kind of public-option offering in this "reformed healthcare insurance" Senate Finance Committee bill. This industry premium-raising threat of a position paper was written by the famous BCCI-scandal creative bookkeepers, Price Waterhouse, now Price Waterhouse-Coopers. PW "bridged the gap" to Europe in the merger-mad 1990s by merging with Britain's Coopers & Lybrand. PW gave as its reason for needing to merge with another accounting firm as "the current recession" and hard times in the Big 8 accounting world. First PW cut raises way back. Then they did away with overtime. The term "flex time" came into the mix. Then they stopped giving Christmas bonuses (at the same time, PW stopped their annual Christmas Office parties due to a "lack of funds"). Then one day they hired a California PR firm to do a Hay Report-type study (in the old days it was called a "Time and Motion" study (see the works of Elton Mayo; today it's a main part of Quantitative Management, which we discussed a few posts back)) using little computer geeks out of Rutgers (two of whom later married a couple of PW staff babes) who went through each employee's computer and determined whether the employee was following his or her job description to the core and keeping the company's "vision" in narrow sight or was considered a wastrel, wasting the company's time and money ("Time is money") on personal pleasures, blah, blah, blah. Soon PW was reengineering the firm, restructuring it, and soon the "outplacing" started (outplacing is a Quantitative Management term that replaces "fired" in the business lexicons)--and PW cut its US staffs in half--keeping only what their Hay Report and computer workstation time reports determined to be the best and brightest, those willing to work twice as hard to keep their jobs.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Escalating War
Gordon Brown just announced this morning that Britain was sending 500 more pieces of canon fodder over to Afghanistan to help bring a destructive peace to that country. He said he had made this decision based on intensive talks with the US and the Secretary General of NATO, an obsolete organization actually--a WWII US contraption whose cap letters stand for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Afghanistan, by the way, in case you didn't know, isn't in the North Atlantic. The North Atlantic consists of the US, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, and Great Britain--and that's it, folks. But, hey, by putting NATO in control of his Afghanistan invasion and occupation mistake, G.W. Bush washed his hands of that mess. He let NATO deal with it. As he said when he left office, he was proudest of his Iraq invasion and occupation, and his hanging Saddam Hussein by his neck until 15 or 20 minutes later he was dead (G.W. Bush likes SLOW executions), and his giving Iraq a stable government and economy by bringing on his Mission-Accomplished invasion-and-occupation swiftness and his immediate guarding of those oil fields. He was proud of his commander-in-chief invention of the great military strategy designated Operation Surge, this imaginary win/win military strategy that is still-present in Obama's military tribunal in the presence of its designer, General Betrayus. Don't be surprised if our Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning President doesn't lower the age limit for joining our armed forces. President Obama is bullshitting us now by justifying HIS Afghanistan Righteous War, Obama's own "little war"--do you know the POWER present in being the commander-in-chief of the US Armed Forces?! Obama's got control of that power and, peace prize or no peace prize, that power, that ruthless power, is too much for him to resist using. You see, General Betrayus is in Afghanistan right now with his old surge-buddy General McChrystalmeth, and once again here comes this phony bullshit-laden Surge business. Obama is denying that he is fixing to authorize sending 40 THOUSAND more troops to Afghanistan, but he is--the military solution to any of its many failed wars is MORE TROOPS!--our poor old worn-out soldiers.

I just read where the Pentagon is now going to start recruiting in Middle Schools around the country. The idea is currently being experimented with in a Kansas public school. It will be called Junior ROTC. It's modeled after the Hitler Youth Program of which our current Pope was a member. When your armed forces are stretched to the limit, your overextended troops begin to go AWOL (much like our just-past President), commit suicide, go on murder sprees, they are certainly not reupping when they finally are able to break the Catch 22 trap they're caught in--extended tours of duty that seem to never end--and get discharged, dishonorably or however. The Pentagon is desperate for raw recruits. You know when Hitler and his Nazi troops--the best in the world it was trumpeted around Europe for a while--got overextended, worn out, killed off, Hitler went to his Youth Corps and soon toe-headed Aryan Middle Schoolers and upper Gymnasium brats began showing up on the battlefield in defense of Super German Germany. Obama is falling into the military trap that trains us to believe (and G.W. Bush and Dickless Cheney preached this notion at us 24/7) that if we don't KILL all al-Queda and their terrorist pals over there, they're gonna be comin' over here to KILL us! It's the army mentality of KILL OR BE KILLED (this is a police attitude as well). We are in the deepest part of the shittiest part of WAR now--as winless a situation as the VietNam War was; as the Korean War was.

Sorry, folks, the Nobel Peace Prize winner ain't thinking PEACE right now. He's ridin' on the Hate Train. The Love Train's been derailed and left in that state to sit idle and eventually be covered with vines and weeds and be lost in its neglect (just like single-payer healthcare insurance).

Stock Market Zooming Over 10,000
Another form of deceit, folks, this sudden SURGE in the trading in this gambling casino we call Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange (a profit-making organization). As I've crowed and growled many times before, the stock market rising and falling is easily manipulated by the people who control the majority of our wealth. The stock market goes up and down based on false reports of bales of profits, just like those recently turned in by the kind-hearted humanitarians at J.P. Morgan-Chase, who We the People made into this huge financial behemoth after Hank Paulson under G.W. Bush arranged for his buddies at Goldman-Sachs to let their rivals Bear-Stearns and Lehman Bros. go to hell while allowing J.P. Morgan the pleasure of merging with Chase Bank (it was going under faster than CitiBank was failing). JPM-Chase just triumphantly announced that it was making big dumpster loads of profits NOW; in fact, so fucking much money they were going to be soon handing out overabundant bonuses, bonuses that will average out to being $700,000 for every one of its employees. On that "good" news, the stock market (as though an individual) zoomed up 144 points to just barely cross the 10,000 goal line, as the financial PR boys always put it, for the first time since last year. Last year, they don't tell you, when the stock market was at 10,000 it was on its way down--down to 7800 at one time not that many months back--like just before G.W. Bush and our Nobel Peace Prize-winning President bailed out those companies they said were "to big to fail." How about We the People, President Obama, why aren't we too big to fail, too?

This healthcare package coming our way is a boondoggle for the healthcare insurance crooks --and it's courtesy this old Repugnican racist crow, Olympia Snowjob, from the low-populated backward State of Maine, another state dependent on the wealthy (the 1%), like the Bush Family and its compound at Kennebunkport, and tourism for its economy (oh, I forgot, Maine gave us L.L. Bean and that famous bottled tap water, Poland Springs (now owned by Nestle)); this Repugnican woman putting herself up for sale to the weak-kneed Dumbocrats so that the Health Insurance Industry can get this pay-or-die National Healthcare "Reform" bill through the stupid multimillionaire-membered Senate. What a fucking farce this whole road show is now! Like Gore Vidal said, it's pure show biz.

News is now out that members of Timmy Geithner's Treasury Department staff (his goons) have all made big bucks off all this financial bailing-out mischief still going on in the District of Corruption. One of Timmy's lapdogs "earned" over 2 million dollars off the Wall Street payola schemes. Larry Summers, that crooked asshole, made over 20 million dollars off Wall Street for a one-day-a-week job during which most people agreed he did absolutely nothing but sit on his ass or make a couple of hoopla speeches in front of his old Ivy League classmates and Neo-Con buttlickers. These motherfuckers are getting rich off robbing We the People's Treasury. Where's the outrage? These bastards are mugging us and they're not wearing masks; yet We the People though we can ID them can't impeach them or fire them or reengineer our own government and outplace these crooked self-centered sons of bitches--outplace them right into jail where they belong! These are proud, haughty, and rude criminals. They are men who are like what Cornell West said Larry Summers was, an inconsiderate, down-his-nose, disrespectful asshole. These pompous criminals, are a la John "The Dapper Don" Gotti. Our representatives being criminals, too, are lustily filling their fucking pockets with bales of these stolen-from-We-the-People bucks. Obama's campaign (the largest amount of money collected and spent EVER in a presidential campaign) got hundreds of millions of bucks from these same crooked bastards he's now having to repay--holding his hat in his hand in respect for his White masters as he does it.

Wall Street banks are still dealing in derivatives. Banks like J.P. Morgan-Chase are trumping up their profits, covering up their enormous losses, covering up the fact that though they may be foreclosing on fewer properties (though foreclosures are going up as I type this), they are suffering because more and more mortgage holders are not making their payments--so while banks are showing these huge profits using creative accounting (PW-Cooper's making billions of dollars a year cooking corporate books (remember in the BCCI scandal PW admitted they were keeping three sets of books on that terrorist-supporting banking organization out of Pakistan-Dubai-and-the Arab Emirates, with a branch office in Libya)). In about six months, banks should start failing again. J.P. Morgan-Chase will be suddenly too big to fail and Little Timmy Geithner will simply have his old Ivy League buddy Ben Bernanke print up a trillion or two trillon more worthless U.S. dollars--and then they'll sell more bonds to Communist China and shove more tons of IOUs into the exhausted Social Security pool. Shit. Why aren't we rebelling against these bastards! Why? [I got a lot of this information from the former Federal bank examiner who broke the Savings & Loan scandal (the Bush boys were right in the middle of this crooked and bilking scheme), William Black. He's also featured prominently in Michael Moore's Capitalism, a Love Story.]

Things are going to get worse, folks.

How do you escape this system? I'd recommend falling in love with somebody and moving on up to Cloud 9 with your lover to rest your head in his or her lap while your body's being put on the revolutionary line down here in the midst of this insulting Chaos. Those who know say prison is easier when you have a lover in there with you.

The Supreme Court of Rightwing Idiots is fixing to tear hell out of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Contribution Reform Bill and reduce it to nothing but a worthless piece of paper on which you could wipe your ass should you run out of Cottonelle; and being a Grade B asswipe is about all the paper of this Bill is worth. Corporations will be allowed to continue buying off our representatives with the billions of dollars We the People have turned over to them through our backwards-thinking political system and "dumbocratic" pretending warmongering government.

President Obama is now privileged to come in the back door of the all-White Power Elite Social Club--where members of his own race will be serving him pheasant and lobster dinners wearing their old Plantation Big House servant uniforms--white jackets, starched white shirts, black bowties, black trousers; hair coiffed perfectly; teeth shined; shoes shined; a sterile white napkin over their left arms. "Yassuh, boss, how 'bout some more of that 5-star cognac, Suh?"

Hate rules.

I'm burnt out. Dammit, J.P. Morgan, where's my quarterly dividend check? Did you know that these banks make a lot of profits off trading stocks? You get a buyer's fee and a seller's fee when you're brokering stocks. That's how that pimple-faced junior jumpshot-shootin' Wall Street floor boy from Queens is able to ride around in a BMW sports car with his model girlfriend and bump you and your true love aside when you try to go dance up and down at one of these chic party hotels, like the Ganesvoort Hotel down in the old meat packing district of downtown Manhattan that is now no longer a meat packing district but is now a Playboys, Players, Bunnies, and Foxes play area--and you've got to pay to play, and all those employees of J.P. Morgan-Chase will be down there dancing up and down like they're on pogo sticks (White dancing) as they blow some of that $700,000 bonus money they'll soon be getting their little greedy mitts on. [What better way to launder drug money than a rooftop party bar at a boutique-type Manhattan hotel. What better way to launder criminally obtain money than through owning a hotel. Or even constructing a hotel. What better way to launder drug money than to do it through a private equity investment firm? What better way to launder drug money than through a Halliburton of Dubai offshore bank account?] Yep, the wealthy and their asslicking dickboy servants are living life to the hilt--until the next era of bank failures comes around, and again the bubble bursts and here we go again. It's Chaos, folks, don't expect any of it to make sense.

Another insulting figure: Goldman-Sachs just proudly announced it has just experienced huge, huge profits; Goldman-Sachs, the home of Wall Street pirates such as Hank Paulsen, Robert Ruben, Larry Summers, and Jim Corsine (the governor of New Jersey).

These upper-eschelon millionaires and billionaires wish all poor people--anybody below what these rich clowns consider Middle Class, a couple making over $200,000 a year--would just up and fucking die--leave the planet. "Drop dead," is their message to poor people (most of us).

Even this Bill Thompson, a Dumbocrat, a Black man, Obama-approved, who is running for mayor of New York City against our billionaire mayor, Mikey Bloomberg, says he's running for mayor against Billionaire Mike in order to HELP the MIDDLE CLASS! God-dammit, just who the hell are these Middle Class New York Citians you pampered and privileged assholes keep talking about? See how full of hate all of this love-less shit leaves me?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler