Foto by tgw, New York City, May 2011
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Say goodbye to: "Tondo": Xavier Tondó Volpini, a Spanish cyclist; we had just seen him place 5th in the Tour of the Basque Country this year. His best finish was as overall winner of the 2007 Tour of Portugal. Tondo was killed when he was pinned against his garage door and his car and crushed to death. Tondo was riding this year on the Movistar team. [See PS on bottom of post.]
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From Bro. Ray Charles:
My bills are all due and the baby needs shoes and I'm busted
Cotton is down to a quarter a pound, but I'm busted
I got a cow that went dry and a hen that won't lay
A big stack of bills that gets bigger each day
The county's gonna haul my belongings away cause I'm busted.
I went to my brother to ask for a loan cause I was busted
I hate to beg like a dog without his bone, but I'm busted
My brother said there ain't a thing I can do,
My wife and my kids are all down with the flu,
And I was just thinking about calling on you 'cause I'm busted.
Well, I am no thief, but a man can go wrong when he's busted
The food that we canned last summer is gone and I'm busted
The fields are all bare and the cotton won't grow,
Me and my family got to pack up and go,
But I'll make a living, just where I don't know cause I'm busted.
I'm broke, no bread, I mean like nothing,
Insufficient Funds
"It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety" [George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London].
Being stone broke is a hardship, but as Orwell says, once you are on the level of the pariah dog, a lot of anxiety is shed and there's a certain calming effect to it.
When I moved to New York City, the place was crammed with bums, beggars, the mentally impaired. Once sitting in a window seat at Phoebe's on the Bowery with my wife #2 and a childhood friend of hers, yes, we were checking out the people, mostly down and outers, as they slumped by Phoebe's window on their ways to somewhere, more than likely to the city shelters located just up the street--the only other people on the Bowery in those days were hippies and East Village Other readers and jazz musicians and critics (I met Stanley Crouch after he'd first come to NYC in Phoebe's). Suddenly, my wife's friend went, "Holy Cow...." and he jumped up off his stool and ran for the door..."Be back in a minute," he said tossing the words back over his shoulder as he left the building.
My wife and I watched him as once out on the sidewalk he started hollering at someone, a man, a man in a fairly nice-looking overcoat and carrying a scruffy looking NYTimes--hell, the guy was well dressed, very intelligent looking.
Soon our friend was back with us. "That guy...I went to Penn with him. He eventually graduated from Wharton and went to work for E.F. Hutton as a stock-performance analyst. I was an usher at his wedding--he married a Jewish chick whose father owned half of Philadelphia--who as a wedding present gave them an apartment on Park Avenue--up in the East 90s."
"So what's up with him now?" my wife and I both asked. "What's up with him now? He's a bum. He's living up in the men's shelter. He's worthless. Broke. Adlepated. He says silly things without much reasoning behind them--and sure he's a bit screwy now, as you can imagine--from the Philadelphia Main Line to New York City and Park Avenue to the Bowery--and all in a matter of a decade. He talks a lot of gibberish--he barely knew who I was but then he became clear as a bell and talked to me like it was only yesterday we'd been out partying together. And that's a cashmere overcoat he's wearing, too--but value has no meaning to him. Like I said, he hardly knows who he is now much less who he used to be--I'd say he hasn't a worry in the world. I mean he had a dopey grin on his face, like he was happy--at least he doesn't look as worried now as he did when he was successful. And that was the Times financial section he had with him...did you notice? I think he can still tell you good stocks to buy." "How old was that paper, though?" my wife piped up.
I began philosophizing: "You know what Henry Miller said about being busted? He said, 'I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive'."
The reason for this post? I just checked my bank account. Cripes! I've only got $30 in there. I thought I had more than that--at least a hundred bucks. I called the bank and they explained it to me--their books always come out in their favor--my books never come out in my favor. I had forgotten I spent $50 at my fav Irish pub the other night while out on a date with this blissfully beautiful woman, a new woman in my life...well, she's not new really...I've known her for many a moon (speaking American Indian)--"a heap long time." I love watching old Westerns where the Indians are played by White guys made up with cordovan shoe polish or Mexican actors like Anthony Quinn or Frank Silvera, who as Mexican mestizos really were American Indians, though as Mexicans they were, I'm sure, considered Spanish--some of Cornado's many children.
My favorite White guy playing an American Indian in a movie is Burt Lancaster's playing a starting-off-peaceful redskin who turns renegade when the White man trick bags him trying to get his ass on his proper Great-White-Father-approved reservation. This is Burt in the 1954 movie, Apache. Another civilized God-worshiping Whites vs. the savage heathen Indians plot--and, yes, even though they are more evil than Burt's renegade Apache character, the White men still end up putting him in his place. This movie is an extension of the Whites vs. Geronimo story--Geronimo was an Apache chief who said he'd rather die fighting the White devils than humble his proud self in respect of the Great White Father to a worthless life on a White man's reservation (concentration camp)--so Geronimo resisted until he was arrested and put in a Fort Sill, Oklahoma, stockade, where he remained a "savage curiostiy" on display for many years. (You can read Geronimo's own story as linked in our "My Blog" list to the right of this post.)
Obama compared Osama bin Laden to Geronimo--an insult to American Indians. Geronimo was an American Indian freedom fighter, fighting for his and his peoples's rights to the whole of the USA--the intruding invention of invading and occupying White renegades from Europe--Europe's unwanted--Europe's religious nutjobs--Roger Williams and his Anabaptists ; the weirdo stoning and burning-at-the-stake Pilgrims and Puritans; the Huguenots; Lord Calvert and his Maryland Catholics; William Penn, the power-elitist Quaker who ruled Pennsylvania like it was his private estate--all the White-makes-it-right hopped up seekers of freedom for their warped way of life thinking--a dependence on a White God, a God the American Indians always knew wasn't in the far-off heavens somewhere practicing perfect Judaism, a God who wasn't White at all; a God whose existence to Native Americanos already existed in Nature--in the Earth--heaven being the planet Earth--our mother and father combined.
We the people come from Nature--from the Jungle. All of our reasons for being revert back to the Jungle. Everything We, whether White, Black, Yellow, Red, Albino (and I just saw Edgar Winter doing quite well in L.A.), do is based on instincts we genetically experienced when living in the treetops of the jungle, where our closest relatives still live--those that haven't been exterminated or zooed.
We were never broke while living in the jungle. The jungle provided everything we needed in terms of housing, food, vistas, sounds, reactions, tribal existence. All our modern societies are are enhanced jungle tribes. And, yes, there are differences in monkeys--wide differences--internal monkey hatreds galore--why, Chimpanzees, our closest monkey relatives--they are almost 100% matches to our DNA and genetics--love going on cannibalistic meat hunts where they attack lesser monkeys, like Gibbons, and on catching them, tear them limb-from-limb while eating them raw. Animals, including humans, love raw fresh-killed bloody-drenched meats and innards--flesh. We kindly claim modern monkeys are vegetarians. Yeah sure. Are termites vegetables?
One was never broke in the jungle. Or if you were, you'd be eaten by a stronger species--like an African eagle--a bird of prey that can easily swoop down and claw up a baby monkey for their offsprings's daily sustenance. There are currently around this country eagles's nests Webcams --especially one in Iowa where recently viewers watched mom and dad eagle's three eggs hatching. Then it was bloody fun time when these human gawkers got to experience watching the parents bringing sustenance to the nest every so often around the clock--treats like whole rabbits that have to be torn limb-from-limb so the baby birds can feast delightfully, getting their white down all bloody red with their gorging of their bloody meals. Yes, eagles have poor seasons but they are seldom broke--and even if they do have a bad season--maybe they lose a couple of chicks (eaglets)--still they don't divorce or commit suicide because of a downswing.
Humans, however, in their civilized state, have discovered suicide. Only an artist can survive being down and out in any locale--being lower than a dog--Charles Mingus's "autobiography" was titled Beneath the Underdog, meaning that a Black American can find himself relegated lower than a worst-case-scenario in a dog's life.
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Obama's Speech on the Middle East
This silly goose we have as a president. Who the hell is doing his thinking for him? His out-of-nowhere speech last night on the Middle East situation sounded exactly like George W. Bush's Middle East policies and how Israel and Palestine should resolve their differences--especially almost exactly word-for-word G.W. Bush's solution to the Israeli-Palestinian bullshit situation (a religious one; Israelis see Palestinians as "lower than dogs"--same as Pure White Germans saw the Jews during Hitler's Christian-Vegetarian reign--lower than dogs).
I have said many times in this unwell-read post that President Obama said after meeting with G.W. Bush that he was a very likable and easy-to-get-along-with fellow--and now it is obvious to me that Obama is purposely extending what powers he knows he was handed over by Baby Bush, whose mechanical movements were the result of all the hands up his ass manipulating him. I think some of these same hands are up Obama's ass manipulating his mechanical movements.
As to "this unwell-read post," truth is, we here at the Growler have about 2 people (though we do get over 100 hits a day on the site--a lot of that Spam, of course) who read this blog on a regular basis--which is OK with me. Two readers is better than one or none. The Growler now has 7 followers--and, I must confess, I have no idea what this "follower" concept is all about--except that I know it has to be a data-mining scheme or a Google advertising mechanism. I don't trust "following" at all; just like I don't trust Google searching; Yahoo emailing;Facebooking and Twittering. I see them all as corporation advertising schemes--datamining--just like the Google satellites can pinpoint your ass while you're sleeping or rolling a joint or maybe communicating with al-Queda. I find it curious that the minute Obama announced it had taken his CIA goons and Navy Seal goons 10 years to locate Osama bin Laden and lay him to rest, Google had satellite images of the "mansion" compound in which the Evil One was "hiding out" up immediately after the assassination was announced. Notice, we are now coming down hard on the Pakistanis with old G.W. Bush's man, Bob Gates, saying surely these evil-nuclear-bearing Pakis knew the Devil of all Devils was residing just a few hundred yards from their West Point. Surely they did. Afterall , they are evil Muslims--when Christians terrorize, it's OK; God's behind it; but when the Muslims terrorize, it's bad wrong; it shows Muslims are truly children of the antiChrist, the horrible Christian Frankenstein invention they call Satan (isn't it odd, too, how Orthodox Jews reject any knowledge of Jesus and certainly don't respect this "fictional" character as their Messiah?--nor do Jews believe in Satan--isn't that odd?).
President Obama's plan for an Israeli-Palestine separate state bullshit is almost word-for-word exactly the same as G.W. Bush's same speech on the same matter.
As long as we allow privatization of our land and resources, we are going to have territorial conflicts, which is what WARS are essentially--the control of the land, the air, and the seas that surround us. Doesn't all of this reflect our jungle past?
I just read a blogger pundit coming up with a NEW idea: the earth as a spaceship. Come on, I've already posted that Buckminster Fuller came up with that concept back in the 30s, 40s, and 50s of the last century. He illustrated it by holding up a cottonseed tree seed ball and blowing on it. The result is that the cottonseed ball explodes and its tiny seed pods fly off out in the direction the blowing air is blowing them--off into space--until they land on earth that either accepts them or rejects them. If they land on fallow soil, they bear children and societies of forests; but, if they land on desert or on concrete, they die--though occasionally you may see a cottonwood seedling growing up through a crack in a concrete slab. I always wanted a tree planted directly over my grave so the roots could shoot down into me and eat me and make my flesh a part of the tree's growth--me in that tree--but, now I want to be cremated--so? My ex-wife #2 had herself cremated...so what did she have done with her ashes? Thinking just like me--she lived with me 10 years--got to know me pretty well--she requested a tree be planted in the yard of the house she had built with her own hands and her ashes be ingested in the soil around that tree.
Concrete does not bear living things. Buildings, for instance, aren't living things. They are merely decaying containers that are obsolete the minute they are finished--subject to be imploded and destroyed after 10 or so years of containing matters that are dead the moment they are conceived. Even our most reverentially and riskily built edifices to our bigger-than-we-are gods are eventually left in ruin with the vines and bushes and high grasses of Nature taking over after they are abandoned by humans or else destroyed by humans as they go about waging raging wars amongst themselves--killing one another in the names of their gods who force them via holy writ mandates to go ye about conquering the world in the name of your god--wars the competitions of human males trying to steal one another's power back and forth from each other--most of the tribal chieftains incestuously connected--and here I go off on a tangent again, though as a writer, I must explore all tangents when they appear just ahead of me on this road of life I was conceived and birthed to travel on.
I used to blame my parents for giving birth to me--a result of a night of hot sex probably, the story told that I was the result of my old man returning from one of his prowls at just the right time--calculations would make that right time just before Thanksgiving nine months before I stuck my head out of the safety of my mother's womb--a precious womb that bore three sons, two of which lived, and one of those living going on to fame and fortune and the other of the living, which was me, has ended up as of this moment in human-conceived time absolutely broke. Though, I must parenthetically add, not helplessly broke, though pretty damn scary broke, down and out in New York City...while all about me my fellow New York Citians seem to be living quite well--new cars all over the streets. When I first came to NYC, you seemed to see more older cars on the streets than you do today--more beat-up and obviously very used cars on the streets--cars with smoking tailpipes; cars stalled from overheating; cars with motors dying in intersections and having trouble restarting them--with the scores of cars stacked up behind them extending their rage against them by literally sitting on their loudest horns...but not these days. Most cars I see are relatively "brand" new. You see more older more-used-looking trucks than you do cars of the same state.
The restaurants, also, seem to sit empty most of the day--avoided by the workingclasses, doing most of their business during happy-hour times (4 to 7 pm) and then later in the evenings when the people come out of all these new luxury hotels looking for food they can afford.
That is unless you happen to he a pig-jowled sleaze-bag ex-IMF big shot (the IMF is actually broke and can only exist through subsidies given it by We the People of the USA--some Economists say the IMF is actually a branch of the US government) staying in a $30,000-a-night pasha suite at one of my fair city's newest chiseler-priced Chinese, Israel, or Arab private-equity-built "luxury" hotels. Come on, folks, it stands reasonable to me how any horny dude, and especially a horny Frenchman, using his privileged expense account to spend so outrageous amount a night for a suite (paid in full for him by We the People probably) could surely feel such extravagant spending (conspicuous consumption) gives him the right to a free can of macadamia nuts and the right to rape the maid when she comes in to clean his room. Especially if that maid is a good-looking little cute jutting-assed hardworking single Black mom from the Western African nation of Guinea, the poorest nation in Africa thanks to the IMF. Besides, this sleaze bag is a superman Frenchman, God's gift to women. Besides, too, this cute little woolly booger maid was once bootheeled over by a French Colonial government when her country was French Guinea--Power Elite Frenchmen who had the right to rape their sexier female subjects as members of the Master Race. I mean, couldn't this sleaze bag have been thinking in those terms when he approached this hardworking single mom whose cute jutting round ass was teasing him as she was bent over cleaning out his hotel shit can--"Hey, little mamma, check out my old gnarly cock...I fuck your people through the IMF; now I fuck you!"
Who was in doubt that this pathetic human being would get bail, which he did? But then the Power Elite males feel a part of that power is to fuck any damn woman they god-damn please, but especially babysitters, nannies, governesses, and maids--like Governor Groper--he feels the same way--not only does Arnie wave his big dick out of his pants every time he sees a sexual-assault prospect--hey, that dick-waving and all his Hollywood millions got him Maria Schriver, a Kennedy girl, who ain't that bad looking a babe--or she was before she got those Schriver wrinkles--but, Arnie, nope, this horny bastard couldn't resist the maid--and this maid! "Holy Siegheil, Arnie, she's mug-ugly--why her? Holland Tunnel vagina maybe? Also, I'd be curious to know was she legal?" And to think, at one time Repugs were touting Arnie as our first Nazi-born president.
Oh well, or should I say Orwell? The world goes on a turnin'--time keeps on spinning itself out--lives are unwinding--even digital clocks stop running when the energy disappears--and human energy is disappearing.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
From Velo News:
SIERRA NEVADA, Spain (AFP) — Spanish cyclist Xavier Tondo was killed in a freak accident on Monday in which he was crushed between his car and a garage door at a ski resort in southern Spain, a police source said.
Tondo said he enjoyed making the move to Movistar. | Andrew Hood photo
Tondo, 32, was in his car about to leave the garage of an apartment building of the Sierra Nevada resort Monday morning to continue training for the Tour de France.
For reasons that remain unclear, he got out of the vehicle and became trapped between his car and the automatic door of the garage, a police source in the nearby city of Granada said.
The source said “it appears” that Tondo died instantly.
The manager of his Movistar team, Eusebio Unzue, said another Spanish professional cyclist, Benat Intxausti of the Euskaltel team, was in the vehicle at the time.
Tondo was one of a number of cyclists who have been training at altitude in the resort.
Tondo, who turned professional in 2003, won the Vuelta a Castilla y Leon last month, succeeding his controversial compatriot Alberto Contador.
He also won the Tour of Portugal in 2007, a stage of the Paris-Nice race in 2010 and finished sixth overall in the Vuelta a España last year.
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