Today
99 °F Chance of T-storms
30% chance of precipitation
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Say Goodbye to: Nils-Bertil Dahlander, 83, Swedish jazz drummer. Nils was a fine drummer. I saw him working with the Terry Gibbs-Terry Pollard Quartet on the West Coast in the 1960s. He's on the Terry Gibbs Emarcy (Mercury Records) LP Seven Come Eleven on which Bert Dahl holds his own. A gentleman of jazz has left us. Those Swedes, they took to jazz--and also hosted some of the great jazz events of the 50s and 60s.
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As We Rot in Hell
During a heat wave only the poor, the homeless, the outcast elderly suffer. The rich live in total air-conditioned comfort--from temperature-computer-controlled penthouse to air-conditioned limo or air-conditioned helicopter to air-conditioned Caribbean getaway or out to the air-conditioned Hamptons and their air-conditioned mansion getaway.
Right now in Mid-town Manhattan it's 93 and said to be climbing to almost 100 before the sun does its dirty work and the evening Eve cools us all back down to a bearable state of rather coolish-breeze existence--the weather girls say it's backing back down to the mid-70s tonight and will stay mediocre cool for a few more days at least.
My wife and I moved to New York City from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where if it got 80 in the summer people were ready to uproot and move to a cooler climate. We moved to NYC in March when it was windy as hell and still cool enough you had to wear at least a lined rain coat. By May we had settled in our Manhattan apartment and one day in that May I went out looking for a job. I've told this tale many a time, so the short end of it is, by the end of that day in May, the temperature had shot up to 92 and was rising. While I was being accepted for a job with the New York City Youth Council Bureau, the boss came in wearing only a guinea teeshirt over his suit pants, sweating like a sandhog, and announced that Mayor Lindsay had shut down city offices because the temperature was 93--blah, blah, blah, "Everybody get the hell out of here...." And everyone fled that office, which by the way, was the last time I ever saw that office. I never heard back from this bunch who had hired me that day and when six weeks later I called them and asked them about the job they said, "What job? and who did you say you were?" Good. I didn't want that stupid job anyway. By then I was a writer--in my mind at least if not on the publishing rolls--and fuck social work and youth in trouble and mental patients and runaways and murderers and sociopaths and psychopaths--holy Jesus, I'd had experience enough with that crowd by then to never again want to see one of these patients or dependents or wards or hear of or deal with their problems ever again. I'd write about them now--I'd make millions off their insanities (of course I've never made millions off my writing--chicken feed, yes; millions...get serious).
It soon didn't take me long to find out New York City during a bad summer can imitate the deepest dungeons of the allegorical hell. Lower than anything Dante imagined. Lower than William Burroughs sank after experiencing one of his pure-adrenalin-shot-into-his-spinal-cord highs, as portrayed in Naked Lunch.
It's approaching high noon. The temperature is hovering a little over 93. I'm sure down on the streets it's hotter than any level of Hades--the concrete and the asphalt shooting that heat back up and into your panting sweat-struggling face.
I remember once a new-on-the-scene salesman dude came in my brother's bookstore one hot summer trying to sell us little battery operated fans you could clip on your shirt or coat lapel and they would blow fanned air up toward your face. Nobody I knew bought one. I also remember a water-cooled pith helmet you could buy out of the back of one of the magazines I read as a kid and how I wanted one so badly but I never got one. Fact is, I never wore a hat as a kid. Most grown men when I was a kid wore "men's hats." I don't know what else to call them. Baseball players and Air Force pilots wore baseball hats. Painters wore painter's hats. Though those hats were really called caps. You think of straw hats when you think of heat...or do you? Out on the lone prairie where I'm from the straw "cowboy" hat was the hat of hot weather popularity. The looser woven and more horse hay the straw the cheaper the hat; the cheapest straw hats being those tacky loose-end straw hats they sold in Mexico and the Caribbean islands.
It is now 1 pm. The sun is majestically sitting with its big fat fiery ass squared-down right over us, shitting radiant heat onto our broiling heads. It's still a good day to be alive. A whole brace of days of this heat and I'll be writing poetry again.
Sarah "Paleface" Palin, My Pick for Our Next President (I'm Serious, Folks)
Sarah has her true believer followers...like this bright soul whose comment I'm ripped off Sarah Palin's Facebook page:
I mean the idiocy of Sarah and Mary Macias deciding our lives for us. Deciding how they want to spend our tax moneys. Make hunting our national sport! Make Guantanamo larger? Put illegal Mexican immigrants in Guantanamo? Make Sarah's bonehead daughter Secretary of State? Oh, damn, wouldn't that be so cool, Paleface gets elected president and she appoints her dumbass daughter as her Secretary of State. "Jest like I kin dance, Mommy, so can I be a secretary--unless I have to learn shorthand, and you know I'm no good in math stuff. In terms of figurin', I figure one thing for sure, the boys think I'm sexy like you, Mommy."
It's too ridiculous not to happen.
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Say Goodbye to: Nils-Bertil Dahlander, 83, Swedish jazz drummer. Nils was a fine drummer. I saw him working with the Terry Gibbs-Terry Pollard Quartet on the West Coast in the 1960s. He's on the Terry Gibbs Emarcy (Mercury Records) LP Seven Come Eleven on which Bert Dahl holds his own. A gentleman of jazz has left us. Those Swedes, they took to jazz--and also hosted some of the great jazz events of the 50s and 60s.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
As We Rot in Hell
During a heat wave only the poor, the homeless, the outcast elderly suffer. The rich live in total air-conditioned comfort--from temperature-computer-controlled penthouse to air-conditioned limo or air-conditioned helicopter to air-conditioned Caribbean getaway or out to the air-conditioned Hamptons and their air-conditioned mansion getaway.
Right now in Mid-town Manhattan it's 93 and said to be climbing to almost 100 before the sun does its dirty work and the evening Eve cools us all back down to a bearable state of rather coolish-breeze existence--the weather girls say it's backing back down to the mid-70s tonight and will stay mediocre cool for a few more days at least.
My wife and I moved to New York City from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where if it got 80 in the summer people were ready to uproot and move to a cooler climate. We moved to NYC in March when it was windy as hell and still cool enough you had to wear at least a lined rain coat. By May we had settled in our Manhattan apartment and one day in that May I went out looking for a job. I've told this tale many a time, so the short end of it is, by the end of that day in May, the temperature had shot up to 92 and was rising. While I was being accepted for a job with the New York City Youth Council Bureau, the boss came in wearing only a guinea teeshirt over his suit pants, sweating like a sandhog, and announced that Mayor Lindsay had shut down city offices because the temperature was 93--blah, blah, blah, "Everybody get the hell out of here...." And everyone fled that office, which by the way, was the last time I ever saw that office. I never heard back from this bunch who had hired me that day and when six weeks later I called them and asked them about the job they said, "What job? and who did you say you were?" Good. I didn't want that stupid job anyway. By then I was a writer--in my mind at least if not on the publishing rolls--and fuck social work and youth in trouble and mental patients and runaways and murderers and sociopaths and psychopaths--holy Jesus, I'd had experience enough with that crowd by then to never again want to see one of these patients or dependents or wards or hear of or deal with their problems ever again. I'd write about them now--I'd make millions off their insanities (of course I've never made millions off my writing--chicken feed, yes; millions...get serious).
It soon didn't take me long to find out New York City during a bad summer can imitate the deepest dungeons of the allegorical hell. Lower than anything Dante imagined. Lower than William Burroughs sank after experiencing one of his pure-adrenalin-shot-into-his-spinal-cord highs, as portrayed in Naked Lunch.
It's approaching high noon. The temperature is hovering a little over 93. I'm sure down on the streets it's hotter than any level of Hades--the concrete and the asphalt shooting that heat back up and into your panting sweat-struggling face.
I remember once a new-on-the-scene salesman dude came in my brother's bookstore one hot summer trying to sell us little battery operated fans you could clip on your shirt or coat lapel and they would blow fanned air up toward your face. Nobody I knew bought one. I also remember a water-cooled pith helmet you could buy out of the back of one of the magazines I read as a kid and how I wanted one so badly but I never got one. Fact is, I never wore a hat as a kid. Most grown men when I was a kid wore "men's hats." I don't know what else to call them. Baseball players and Air Force pilots wore baseball hats. Painters wore painter's hats. Though those hats were really called caps. You think of straw hats when you think of heat...or do you? Out on the lone prairie where I'm from the straw "cowboy" hat was the hat of hot weather popularity. The looser woven and more horse hay the straw the cheaper the hat; the cheapest straw hats being those tacky loose-end straw hats they sold in Mexico and the Caribbean islands.
It is now 1 pm. The sun is majestically sitting with its big fat fiery ass squared-down right over us, shitting radiant heat onto our broiling heads. It's still a good day to be alive. A whole brace of days of this heat and I'll be writing poetry again.
Sarah "Paleface" Palin, My Pick for Our Next President (I'm Serious, Folks)
Sarah has her true believer followers...like this bright soul whose comment I'm ripped off Sarah Palin's Facebook page:
Now isn't that an encouraging comment? That tickles Sarah pink I'm sure to read such. "Why, Gaaah-oll-lee! That's such a sweet comment. My constituents...and she's right, I'm not going to let those establishment republicans and the liberal, and Communist, I might add, media get my moose...such a disgrace to this great nation of righteous media, like my dear friend Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and all the righteous comments on that channel that stands for freedom."
I mean the idiocy of Sarah and Mary Macias deciding our lives for us. Deciding how they want to spend our tax moneys. Make hunting our national sport! Make Guantanamo larger? Put illegal Mexican immigrants in Guantanamo? Make Sarah's bonehead daughter Secretary of State? Oh, damn, wouldn't that be so cool, Paleface gets elected president and she appoints her dumbass daughter as her Secretary of State. "Jest like I kin dance, Mommy, so can I be a secretary--unless I have to learn shorthand, and you know I'm no good in math stuff. In terms of figurin', I figure one thing for sure, the boys think I'm sexy like you, Mommy."
It's too ridiculous not to happen.
thetruebelievinggrowlingwolf
for the "Huffing-and-Puffing" Post-like The Daily Growler
YESTERDAY'S GROWLER ALL NICE AND BROILED AND PRESERVED:
Now
Clear
Temperature
96.1 °F-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Day 1
It's Still Cooler Than Iraq
I'm sitting here cool as the proverbial cucumber (wow, I haven't used that literary cliche in decades) in what is the grilling heat of what is going to be the hottest June 8th since 1933. "Heat don't bother me" has been my motto since I was a daring kid full of bravado growing up in the normal summertime 100-degree heats of the flat prairie lands of Texas. When I was a kid--in both Dallas and Abilene--every summer it got over 90 easy and I certainly do remember 100-degree days and days when the sun was so mean your skin burned blistery red in a matter of an hour--the sun's burn a slow burn, a sneak-up-on-you burn--and my dad was ultra-sensitive to sunburn--a day in a blistering sun would leave my dad wobbly and his head spinning and his feeling like he was passing out of existence. "After all," he'd moan, "the Old General died from the sunstroke so it's a family curse"--the Old General being the famous Revolutionary War general in whom my father's family had claimed major kin--to the point where my father's mother's last words on her death bed, in a raspy death-rattlin' voice, advised her family gathered around her waiting for her to pass to "Find the Old General...Find the Old General...."
When I was a kid in Dallas, living high atop a hilltop under one huge cedar tree on the property, a huge opened-umbrella-like tree whose umbrella-like shape arced it high up over this two-story tudor sitting atop this otherwise barren hilltop that in the dead center of those Dallas dry summers the everyday temperatures were consistently in the high nineties. And even though kids in my summertime days risked polio playing in the highest and hottest suns of those fiery Texas summer days (my very best friend during my Dallas growing-up days had been crippled by polio), that didn't stop us kids from playing--riding our bikes, playing baseball, running all over the place--so full of testosterone--why, hell, I interrupt myself, I've seen 86 in my West Texas prairie town of my birth (and then my hometown during my teenage years) on many a Christmas day. Plus, I was born on one of the hottest-ever August days in my hometown's weather history--I was born atop one of the sun's many earth-bound anvils.
Maybe I kid myself by telling myself I'm acclimated by birth to heat waves. I can't take 'em, dammit, especially these New York City heatwaves.
Right now sirens are screaming outside my sun-facing bay window...
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Now
Clear
Temperature
96.1 °F
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The first time I pulled into Phoenix, Arizona--it was June--the temperature was 110. It got up to 118 that day. The hottest I had ever seen it get out in West Texas was 110, though 100 miles north of my hometown in the town of Seymour, Texas, one summer while I was youthfully tooling about out in the middle of this sun's anvil-area's huge Lake Kemp, I saw a thermometer reading 118--and, wow, did I blister to a Red Devillish hell color that day--out in the middle of that massive lake driving the motor boat towing the water ski line--I don't swim so I got to drive the motor boat--though I have water skiied one summer on another West Texas lake--wearing a life jacket--I wasn't a bad water skiier really--and never was afraid of water. When I was 5, I fell out of my uncle's hydroplane racing boat and into the Guadalupe River in Central Texas behind my uncle's house one steamy summer day. I fell off the back of that boat and into that snaky wild river laughing like a hyena just after a blood feast. My father, a powerful swimmer, rescued me that day--my uncle kept on merrily hydroplaning his Hollywood ass on down that river with my mother screaming curses out across the water after him, curses only a mad sister could come up with against her irresponsible brother--and him planing on full-speed ahead down the river till he did a wheely and headed back toward where I was being rescued before he recognized what had happened. He became so dear, sweet, and serious when he realized I'd fallen out of his hydroplane and he'd never consciously known it-- though my mother all the rest of that day accused him of hating children since she was a child and that he had hated her as a child and still treated her as a child--and they had a cursing match to beat sixty...and, Jeez, I'm so old, I remember when "to beat sixty" was a hip cliche.
So far I'm staying cool. In fact, at the moment it's very pleasant in my room. I have two big Lasko fans blowing on me--the sun's heading off southwesterly toward the hills of Pennsylvania--the temperature feels as though it's dropping and soon it'll be night and hopefully pleasant--oh no, the weather site says it's only going down to 80 tonight--up to 97 tomorrow (which is now today).
I begin wondering where Sarah Palin's motor home or whatever it is she's traveling around the country in is. Where's she getting her money from, I'm suddenly concerned (as in concerned citizen)? Did she write a bestseller yet? Her daughter, did she win a million on "Dancing With the Idiot Stars"? I suppose Sarah is a millionaire several times over. Isn't that amazing to anybody? Did you see where Rupert Jerkoff's Fox News ran a clip of Tina Fey imitating Sarah "Paleface" Palin as actually Paleface herself?
I wonder if Anthony Weiner has ever masturbated to pictures of Sarah Palin? I wonder if Bill "Big Dog" Clinton has fantasized about banging her? She looks to me like the kind of common ordinary half-farm-gal-city-gal old Rakish Bill likes to wank off to.
Little Anthony's Weiner is clinging to his right to send photos of his erections to college gals's Facebook pages as long as he's wearing his shorts--I mean, come on, girls, he's not really exposing himself--he's proud of his underwear maybe. That's like Slick Willie claiming he DID NOT have sex with Monica Lewdwinsky--"So she sucked my speckled dick...that ain't sex. Where I come from that's sodomy--same as if I'd'a shafted her in the brown hole, dig, Popeye?"
thesunstrokinggrowlingwolf
(in the 80-degree cool of the night) for The Daily Growler
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The first time I pulled into Phoenix, Arizona--it was June--the temperature was 110. It got up to 118 that day. The hottest I had ever seen it get out in West Texas was 110, though 100 miles north of my hometown in the town of Seymour, Texas, one summer while I was youthfully tooling about out in the middle of this sun's anvil-area's huge Lake Kemp, I saw a thermometer reading 118--and, wow, did I blister to a Red Devillish hell color that day--out in the middle of that massive lake driving the motor boat towing the water ski line--I don't swim so I got to drive the motor boat--though I have water skiied one summer on another West Texas lake--wearing a life jacket--I wasn't a bad water skiier really--and never was afraid of water. When I was 5, I fell out of my uncle's hydroplane racing boat and into the Guadalupe River in Central Texas behind my uncle's house one steamy summer day. I fell off the back of that boat and into that snaky wild river laughing like a hyena just after a blood feast. My father, a powerful swimmer, rescued me that day--my uncle kept on merrily hydroplaning his Hollywood ass on down that river with my mother screaming curses out across the water after him, curses only a mad sister could come up with against her irresponsible brother--and him planing on full-speed ahead down the river till he did a wheely and headed back toward where I was being rescued before he recognized what had happened. He became so dear, sweet, and serious when he realized I'd fallen out of his hydroplane and he'd never consciously known it-- though my mother all the rest of that day accused him of hating children since she was a child and that he had hated her as a child and still treated her as a child--and they had a cursing match to beat sixty...and, Jeez, I'm so old, I remember when "to beat sixty" was a hip cliche.
So far I'm staying cool. In fact, at the moment it's very pleasant in my room. I have two big Lasko fans blowing on me--the sun's heading off southwesterly toward the hills of Pennsylvania--the temperature feels as though it's dropping and soon it'll be night and hopefully pleasant--oh no, the weather site says it's only going down to 80 tonight--up to 97 tomorrow (which is now today).
I begin wondering where Sarah Palin's motor home or whatever it is she's traveling around the country in is. Where's she getting her money from, I'm suddenly concerned (as in concerned citizen)? Did she write a bestseller yet? Her daughter, did she win a million on "Dancing With the Idiot Stars"? I suppose Sarah is a millionaire several times over. Isn't that amazing to anybody? Did you see where Rupert Jerkoff's Fox News ran a clip of Tina Fey imitating Sarah "Paleface" Palin as actually Paleface herself?
I wonder if Anthony Weiner has ever masturbated to pictures of Sarah Palin? I wonder if Bill "Big Dog" Clinton has fantasized about banging her? She looks to me like the kind of common ordinary half-farm-gal-city-gal old Rakish Bill likes to wank off to.
Little Anthony's Weiner is clinging to his right to send photos of his erections to college gals's Facebook pages as long as he's wearing his shorts--I mean, come on, girls, he's not really exposing himself--he's proud of his underwear maybe. That's like Slick Willie claiming he DID NOT have sex with Monica Lewdwinsky--"So she sucked my speckled dick...that ain't sex. Where I come from that's sodomy--same as if I'd'a shafted her in the brown hole, dig, Popeye?"
thesunstrokinggrowlingwolf
(in the 80-degree cool of the night) for The Daily Growler
Say Goodbye to: Jazz great RAY BRYANT. Ray was a blues-backgrounded pianist from Philadelphia--his brother Tommy Bryant was a early bop bassist--he died young--Kevin Eubanks, the guitarist, is his nephew. Ray was a great gospel player as well as blues and jazz performer. Ray had two big pop hits back in the 60s, "Little Susie" and "The Madison Time." "Do the Madison...." For a good session with Ray, take a look at the 1977 Montreux Jazz Festival DVD of Ray playing solo--issued by Norman Granz's Verve folks.
Say Goodbye to: Baseball greats: Jim Northrup and Jose Pagan; and football great John Henry Johnson.
We've all got to die. That's the final word on anyone's life.
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