Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shot by Cupid or Shots With Cupid
An arrow through the heart represents Valentine's Day. It is Valentine's Day here in New York City, right in the middle of Manhattan--right up Broadway from where the Sunday morning network teevee shows are being unreeled as I keyboard this post.
I'm drinking my French roast coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. I don't give a shit if the damn thing's carcinogenic. It fulfills its functional duty. It keeps coffee hot for hours! I bought this Styrofoam cup of Joe at 6:15 am from my Oaxacan friend over on Fifth Avenue and now it's 8:28, so that means my coffee's stayed hot for 2 hours and 13 minutes--a lie since time is flying on by as I keyboard this--I feel so out-of-touch trying to be hip and moderne using the word "keyboard" to mean "typing." Yet, you do have to learn how to type to use a computer or a cell-phone keyboard don't you? So it is still typing. Besides, to me and 20 million musicians (I know, that's a low figure--there's got to be more--there are 20 million American Idol goony contestants aren't there?) the word "keyboard" means "piano" or "organ" or "synthesizer," though, yes, it does mean "computer keyboard" to us, too, doesn't it? Did I think of a typewriter's keyboard as a keyboard when I first started typing? I don't recall. I don't think so. I remember "keys" sticking or breaking. I remember talking about my "E" sticking on my typewriter but I don't see me ever saying "My E's sticking on my typewriter keyboard." I remember my high school typing teacher telling us to put our hands on the "home keys" but I don't remember her using the word "keyboard."
But, yes, the keys on a typewriter were called keys. Same as keys on a piano. I played the piano first and then from there when I saw my first typewriter I thought that since I already could play the piano surely I could type. I pestered my grandmother so persistently that she finally broke down and taught me basic typing when I was eleven years old. Why my grandmother? Because she was a poet and novelist and had the only typewriter in my family; in fact, she may have had the first typewriter ever on her side of my family. She bought her first typewriter, an L.C. Smith, in 1922. After my grandmother's death in 1961, that typewriter became my first typewriter.
I started the first novel I ever attempted to start on that typewriter. I titled that novel: Hot Like Bread and Pepper----with a subtitle "Sweet Like Cherry Wine"--from a Howlin' Wolf (Chester Burnett) theme song, "Howlin' for My Darling." The novel attempt took place in the 1930s in Texas when a White salesman's car breaks down in Fate, Texas, which turns out to be an all Black town.
There really was a Fate, Texas. I had remembered it from once traveling through it on one of my family's yearly vacations--the year we went for a drive, as my dad called it, around the Ozark Mountains through Oklahoma, Arkansas, and lower Missouri.
I clearly remember stopping in Antlers, Oklahoma, on this trip, to visit my mother's Ozark hillbilly relatives (one of those culturally straying branches of her otherwise thinking-highly-of-itself family). I remember my mother's female cousin being a rather pretty and very shapely woman who was wearing a very flimsy dress without a slip--I was 11 and had just had my first "little piece"--so I had already started judging all women by my sexual attraction to them. She did appear much more cultured looking than my poetic nature had expected. Plus, this distant-cousin-to-me had a very sexually delicious-to-me-looking daughter my age.
This Ozark cousin was a feather healer. Which means she took certain special feathers she plucked out of the tails of whatever bird around those parts symbolized the healing power of Jesus, probably a mountain dove or mountain quail or maybe a prairie chicken or a red hawk or a barn owl or maybe some of the regular old chickens that were running loose around her house--whatever. What she did was first have you take your shoes off, sit back in a chair and put your feet up on a stool. Then she would start a process of tickling (to me it was tickling though she called it massaging) the soles (souls) of your feet with those feathers claiming while she did it that via this Ozark hillbilly-scientific treatment she could absolutely heal any blessed soul from any troubling illnesses no matter how firmly the Old Devil (Old Ned to her maybe) had planted them within it. Interesting woman--and daughter--I wish I'd a gone back to see them when I was actually pretty close by them where I went to college.
So I had remembered this Fate, Texas, from that trip. And I remembered it from that trip as an all-Black town--whether it was or not I never ventured to find out. [Mr. Ed: Yes, there still is a Fate, Texas, and, yes, it is where the Wolf Man remembers it was. At the time Wolfie and his family drove through Fate, its population would have been around 100 folks--most of them, I'm sorry to say, White folks. The area was at that time a huge cotton-growing area so what Little Wolfie saw were the Black people picking the cotton in the fields around Fate--there was a cotton gin in Fate at that time, too.]
My first novel (typed on my grandmother's old L.C. Smith typewriter) went on from there--I got about three chapters of it written--70 pages I'm guessing--pretty good for a first-time novelist--when I decided the title was the best part of the book and abandoned the effort. Later, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, one snowy winter day in front of my living room's Navajo-style fireplace, standing in front of my floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over the city of Santa Fe down the mountainside below me as well as all the way over due west to the Rio Grande River and beyond to the Jemez Mountains and the city of Los Alamos, my young, young beautiful wife handed me individual manuscripts of short stories, poems, essays, and novel attempts, which then I either deemed worthy of keeping or else sentenced to death in the literary hellfire of my pinon-log fire blazing away merrily in my Navajo-style fireplace. I burned that day what my wife and I deemed to be approx. 2 million words of these disgraced manuscripts, including Hot Like Bread and Pepper. Up in smoke they went. Afterwards, I felt like God resting after making the universe. I was so exhausted my young wife had to run get me a cold cerveza Cruz Blanca out of the fridge--"Help, baby, help, I need some firmament, quick." Was I ever her Valentine? I don't think that ever crossed our paths.
It is now 8:52 and I just threw out my Styrofoam cup of mocha Java--so that carcinogenic-packed petroleum-based-plastic cup kept that coffee hot for 2 hours and 45 minutes. That's what you can expect from a Styrofoam cup. Is drinking coffee from it more harmful to me than the coffee I'm drinking from it?
I remember the first Styrofoam I came across. I bought a case of Busch Bavarian beer (Budweiser's cheap brand) in a Dallas liquor store. After the sale, the liquor store dude said because I bought a case of BB I got six brand new-type can holders courtesy the Budweiser distributor--can holders he guaranteed me would keep my Busch Bavarian cold ones cold for at least as many minutes as it took me to drink one. The dude brought me out a plastic-wrapped set of six what proved later to be Styrofoam tumblers. Each big enough to hold pretty much entirely a can of beer. You took a cold one out of the fridge, popped its top, then slid it into one of these Styrofoam mug-like things and you headed out to poolside (all apartment buildings when I was of the beer-drinking-partying-every-day age in Dallas, Texas, were built around swimming pools). Your beer was guaranteed to stay frosty cold in these mugs while you ogled the babes or in order to get their attention made out like you were reading a great book, like Raintree County was a very large and bestselling novel at the time that especially the babes had read and further especially had read since the movie of the book had come out to big publicity since it starred Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor (yeah, the big fat cow one you see today--once one of the hottest of Hollywood babes--at the age of 15 she passed as a full-grown woman, and I'm sure was being diddled at that young age on all the Hollywood casting couches--I mean her first famous movie was with that little letch Mickey Rooney--who's still with us over in the Poconos the last time I checked the Wikipedia Death List). The success of this one-hit-wonder's (Ross Lockridge, Jr.) novel and the fact that he couldn't complete his three-book contract for his publisher drove him to commit suicide.
There he is Ross Lockridge, Jr.; he wrote the great American novel but that was it...so, like a writer who no longer can write has to do, he committed suicide. He's a hero of mine for that--but also I read and liked Raintree County. I've written about Ross in a long-past Growler post--unlike top-ranked blogs I can't link you back to that post--sorry--I'm just not into this blog shit like these site-development-minded bloggers are. Like The Daily Howler is, for competitive instance.
I recently with love Googled "the Top 50 Blogs" and first up got the Guardian's Top 50 list of the most hit on blogs. Number One was The Huffington Post...I call it the Huffing and Puffing Post--like the Big Bad Wolf huffing and puffing and trying to blow the Three Little Pigs's houses down--a job he does pretty damn well, from a wolf's point of view--he demolished 2 out of three of those little porkers's houses, which ain't bad. Why do we teach our kids that the Big Bad Wolf was bad because he was trying to get him some pork for dinner? "Shut up, Little Billy, and eat your grits and hog maw. And hand me that bucket of lard overhere while you're at it. You know how your dad likes bacon refried in bacon fat."
My question is, how the hell did this phony woman Adriana Huffington get to be the liberal beacon of pundit truth in the blogosphere? I mean come on, only a few years ago this phony strumpet was a rightwing Hapsburgian backwards thinker married to one of the most rightwing assholes in California business and political history--ranking up there with the likes of John Birch, Richard Milhouse Nix-on-us, Grade B Actor Arnie Schwartzenegger, Tapdancing George Murphy, and Grade B Actor Ronnie Raygun Reagan. And I have to stop my huffing and puffing here to remember that Good Ole Ronnie Raygun thought up our "Stars Wars" defense system to protect us from Soviet missiles (as Norman Mailer said, Soviet missiles that were always pointed directly at New York City)--a system that is still occasionally refunded unawares to We the People every 5 years or so to this day--G.W. Bush tried to trot it back out--I'm sure President G.W. Obama will be trotting it out again soon. I mean Obama's already proven he approves of George W. Bush's plan to put missiles in former Soviet Union satellites like the Czech Republic--but they protested they didn't want it--so G.W. tried Poland--and Poland said they'd think about it--but G.W. didn't get his missile-defense system approved. Obama, that crafty devil, has talked that great democracy of Romania or Rumania or Romanyvania or Transylvania into accepting this expensive missile system. Actually I knew a Romania woman--dated her one time. She was a banker and I met her opening an account and I asked her could I meet her for a drink after the bank closed and she took me down to a Romanian bar in the Village and introduced me to a host of her Romanian friends and they weren't bad sorts at all; in fact, very poetic and romantic--well, hell, they should be since they are leftover Romans!
I suppose if I were a country like Romania in need of a couple of billion bucks in good ole USA military aid I would let the US build whatever they wanted on my soil. The military certainly has enough worthless billions of US-Chinese dollars to throw a few billion at Romania as long as they get to use the money they've already gotten from We the People to build this piece of shit Star-Wars-like worthless defense system. Obama has accepted G.W. Bush's fear of Iran's Weapons of Mass Destruction--another phony charge that Obama has accepted as reality--and so here we go trying to keep World War Three alive on the backburners of our secret war rooms.
Remember: the only way the Democrats know how to end a recession is with a War. The Korean War was started during a recession in the late forties and early fifties. That recession carried on into Eisenhower's first term and it was during Ike's administration that the Vietnam War was brewed. However, it took the Democrats under JFK and Lyndon "BB" Johnson to finally get us ass-deep involved in Vietnam.
The exception to this generalization happened after Pappy Bush (G.H.W.) and his New World Order (Neo-Cons) pals and his Family Values gang and his Wall Street buddies drove our economy into a deeper hole than Raygun Reagan's Voodoo Economics had driven us. At this point in our wrecked economy, Pappy turned Democrat and started the infamous Persian Gulf War--"Glory in the Desert"--the bungled and backfiring attack on Pappy's old pal Saddam Hussein--who, by the way, Pappy and Donald Rumsfeld had made sure had enough biological and chemical warfare units in his US-military-aided arsenal that he would be able to gas as many fucking in-the-way-of-the-oilfields Kurds and borderline Iranian and Turk Kurds as he by-Allah wanted. Remember, Iraq was at war with Iran for 10 years or more with the backing and encouragement of the US of A. Of course, we'll never know what the truth is about this Iraq-Iran bullshit because G.W. "Spoiled Little Rich Brat" Bush rushed to hang-by-the-neck Saddam Hussein, when I would have thought that by giving this Eviliest Man in the World impunity in some instances he might have spilled his guts with the truth about this whole Middle East bruhaha we now find ourselves embroiled in--SACREDLY and DIVINELY--according to our President and our Congress.
Today, as I'm typing this (there, I'm back to normal), sadly, our troops are committing autrocities in a Southern Afghan city--massive U.S. troops and "Afghan soldiers," as the commercial pundits are calling these raggedy ass three or four hundred semi-loyal Afghans who rather than starve or be blown up in a car bomb join the Afghan Army--where at least they get some clothes and some food and get to hang with the U.S. (so-called NATO) troops for protection. So far, the US Army has admitted two NATO troops (read: US troops) have been killed versus 20 what they are calling "oppositional" troops! That's the old 10 enemy to one US troop formula our old forgotten-now pal Colon's Pal (you know him as Colon Powell) used in reporting Vietnam war casualties. Our foolish government is involved in another Falujah-type Surge and Destroy mission here. It will fail--and it is failing, I'm reading in Yahoo News. Remember, Obama is using the same military nutjobs as G.W. Puddin' Head Bush used in both his failed attempts at invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. [Subsequently it was revealed that a missile gone off course hit an Afghan civilian house and killed a family of 12. "Ho-hum," said our military; "It happens." "It's war. What'cha gonna do. It's we kill them or they kill us, what'cha y'all want?"]
And by golly old "Ye Are Forgiven of Thy Sins" G.W. "Spoiled Brat Middle-Aged Man" Bush is back out there doing his dumb little quirky speech on teevee. Remember now, G.W. has joined up with his dad's new best palsy-walsy, Billy Jeff Clinton, to form what they are trick-bag calling the Bush-Clinton Haitian Relief Fund. They are asking We the People to contribute $10 online to this fund. Wow. Billy Jeff Clinton is heading another relief fund--remember his and Pappy Bush's Tsunami Relief Fund?--whatever happened to all of those millions of dollars? There's never any accounting for any of these relief fund billions of dollars. Never. And remember Hillary claimed her running for the presidency broke her. Yet, don't you bet there's a Bill and Hill Foundation set up somewhere--or a Bill and Hill Fund or a Bill and Hill stock portfolio. Come on! These sorry bastards! Why doesn't that bother anybody but me? Why are thousands of goofy inane girl-brats sending Slick Willie Valentines today?
I've tried reading the pundits who palaver on the Huffington Post. It's a lot of high-flown journalistic prattle. As Grandpa Al Lewis used to say about such prattle--"All you're doin' is preachin' to the choir. That ain't gonna get nothin' accomplished...the masses have to get off their asses to get anything done." And Grandpa was right.
And back to Adriana Huffington. Remember, not that long ago, she was involved in a big-time California-Hollywood-style divorce--she and old Huffy were multimillionaires--oh so brilliantly polished and glamory but true rightwingers. UNTIL after the divorce when suddenly Adriana Huffy decided to turn leftie. Was it maybe to spite her ex? How better to fuck with him than to do a 360 on his political positions--and to somehow using this revenge ploy manage to get her blog zoomed up to such "important" proportions. Millions hit on her royal highass's blog all day long. That gives me the willies, yes, but it also is consistent with my view that most of my fellow Amuricans are Yahoos.
What is so appealing about this woman? She's from Austria. At the time of her rise in Austria, its president was an ex-Nazi, Kurt Waldheim, Jr. "Vat, nein, that's not me giving that Nazi salute in that picture. Nein! Well, OK, maybe it was me, but I'ff changed; I love Jews now, look, I'll kiss this little kike baby here."
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So this is my Valentine's Day gift to all of you dear one or two readers of The Daily Growler--I'm being sarcastic of course--looking for pity. You'd be surprised who reads The Daily Growler.
I had written a long diatribe piece ridiculing just about every son of a bitch robbing us blind in Washington, District of Corruption but I decided to be lenient on our crooked leaders on this day of love.
One of Cupid's arrows penetrated my heart today--I GOT A VALENTINE from the most beautiful mentally and physically woman in the world--so I'm joyous and loving and just down right forgiving--or am I? I can only think of the word "politician" and I start growling....
Ah, fuck it, the sun is shining brightly through my newly cleaned big bay window; I'm dreamily looking out over the southern length of Manhattan--if I climb up on a ladder and look out the window's very top, I could probably almost see the Statue of Liberty and a certain sore-thumb hi-rise office building over in Jersey City.
Remember what Karl Marx said:
Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.
Happy Valentine's Day to one and all and to all a Good Day.
theveryluckygrowlingwolf
for the Valentine's Day edition of The Daily Growler
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