Foto by tgw, "Brickfaces," New York City, 2011
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Feeling Too Human for My Own Human-Animal-Hybrid Good
I bang my head against the rubber room wall. Am I alone? Of course not, I'm not that nuts yet to think such a silly thing. I hear those other heads banging against their rubber room walls.
No one's ever alone, not even when you think you're alone, like right now when I'm thinking I'm alone sitting here typing these words out into the ether...but I'm not alone, there are four other human beings only several feet away from me through the walls and across the hall...and I'm in a 110-apartment building--though those under me or those above me don't count because most of the time I'm unaware of their existences. And ether is a good word for it and ether is a great high.
I've really only myriads of reasons to be finally able to jump off into the sea of insanity--and, of course, I never learned to swim, due to my insane mother. You think your mother's insane? Don't get me to telling tales on my insane mother. The bride of Jesus Christ. Given unto him; this imaginary being. "Mother," I cynically approached her in my best 4th-year-in-college pose one fall I was home on a break, "Are you having sex with Jesus? I mean, I hear you screaming at night, is that Jesus and you, you know, doin' IT...I mean, mother, let's write a book, we'll make millions...we'll kick Billy Graham's behind off the top of the bestseller list...come on, mom, be honest, what's it like to have sex with a messiah?" My mother castigated me as harshly as her kind soul would allow, first with boring-in-me deeply firmed mother eyes and then with the curse: "God is a castigating God. He'll rebuke you for asking your mother such a ridiculous question." "Come on, mom, it's a curious philosophical thing with me, nothing personal...you're a good mother, and, hey, who loves ya, mom, but come on, my brother got to enjoy you as a jazz age flapper babe, of rather hot proportions I've heard dad brag." "When did you hear Wolf say such a thing?" She loosened up when you dragged her into her frivolous and flirtatious past, when she and my Hollywood dad were the children of any Devil that could swing the beat and get them up dancing.
I drift off the path...I mean...I bang my head in wonder. What the hell is going on around me? Am I in a cretin stage? Am I fooled by mirrors into thinking I'm so rational there's no way I can go insane? And yet I'm surrounded by people with ho-hum so-what attitudes. They turn a deaf ear to reason. They turn a deaf ear to my growling!
I walk out onto the most populous sidewalks in the USA and no one seems to be worrying. Walking up my street going over to Fifth Avenue early this morning, like 7:30, here came boogie-ing up the street in a BMW sport convertible, the top down, his music blasting out, a very young man--and I looked at him and he didn't look much older than twenty-something--and there I was chugging off to get some coffee that is killing me without much of a sou in my jeans figuring in my head that I'll use my debit card for the breakfast, you know, the killing sausage and short stack with plenty of butter and maple syrup and a side of transfatty home fries, with onions and peppers laced among the potatoes, and pay cash for my killer coffee--black and strong: I'm a lover of the old-style New Orleans chicory coffees (French Market my very favorite) but I have no way of brewing my own bean so I buy deli coffee--one they call Kenyan--it's pretty good and stays hot because they use the finest in Styrofoam cups to serve it in.
I wasn't worrying, I don't worry, worrying will surely kill me way before coffee or fatty breakfasts, but what passed through my mind as I watched this young turk pass me in a car I know costs at least sixty or seventy thousand was resentment. Bitter resentment, which I calmed immediately since I consider bitter resentment the same as worrying.
And this silly wine & chocolate bar I pass every afternoon on the way to get my cheap-ass dinner from the germy serve-youself piles of food at the same place I get my breakfast is packed to the expensive gills with every one at the outdoor tables just chattering magpiely away as if..."What, the world's on fire? I don't smell any smoke so you must be loony."
I am trying like hell to avoid the farcical political dramatics going on in the District of Corruption. I'm back to reading Balzac. I'm writing poetry and song lyrics. I'm even drinking again. One of my doormen brought me back a half-mickey of mule from Mississippi. Down along the banks of the Pearl River...the river of horrors...where Emmett Till met his sad end and the river that hid the brutally battered bodies of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner.
I once many many years ago while living in New Orleans took a trip with a Cajun friend of mine over into Mississippi and down into the Pearl River bottom to buy some 'shine, corn likker, the finest, not the cheap jug kind, but the royally distilled kind that comes expensive in pint and quart fruit jars. Except this my doorman brought back to me is in a plastic bottle bearing the label of a cheap wine cooler. But, boy-oh-boy, I mean, this is the best, smooth as a baboon's backside, as one of my sleazier bottomland squeezin'-drinking uncles used to say after he took a long slug of Mr. Red Moneyhun's moonshine made just outside my hometown's city limits.
I was watching that drip-dried Charlie Rose interviewing some well-tanned and suited executive-looking geek--his teeth were polished, you know the kind--and they were talking about the debt ceiling raising that happened yesterday and Charlie was asking some question where he was answering the question he was asking...you know that phenomenon of television interviewers? And Charlie Rose is one of the best at it. And, this well-suited, well-coiffed, teeth-polished geek was responding to Charlie's answered-question-question with--you talk about gobbledygook. This guy was a master at it. He spewed out one long sentence, I swear it lasted nearly a minute, without missing a beat, you know, without taking a breath, and I tried to follow along with his reasoning but, my God, what the hell sense was he making? NONE. Nonsense. That's what he was spewing. And then I got to thinkin', these two clowns aren't affected one god-damn bit by this draconian compromise between these two nutjob factions, the overall revengeful Repugnicans, no matter Tea Party or Grand Old Party, and President Obama, the Wall Street Democrat, the fool, one of the most foolish men in terms of political power in my lifetime. And I'm off on a tangent. A raving. A growling...fuck howling...we need to be GROWLING.
I apologize but I have to say this, our President is a man who from the fucking get-go could have become the greatest-ever president in the history of this White Power Elite-ruled nation. He could have stood up facing backwards, facing George W. Bush and Unka Dick and old G.W.H. "Thousand Points of Light" "Pappy" Bush and even Big Dog Bill Clinton (now arm-and-arm with war criminal Tony Blair in some Big Dog educational scheme they've come up with), and pointing his finger at these bastards, accusing them, putting them on trial, I mean, and waterboarding their asses since he, too, doesn't seem to find anything unethical about any kind of torture. I mean, come on, Obama, you could have had your Justice Department immediately arrest G.W. Bush, our first-ever Supreme(ly dumb)-Court-appointed faux president--a man who dared to steal two elections in a row out from under two sleepy-eyed Democrat numbskulls--and who lied us into two of the most expensive wars in the world's history not just our history. The cause of this DEFICIT!
Now you tell me why can't these sons of bitches, these superCongressMEN, why can't they face that music? Why is Obama kissing their fucking WHITE ASSES! You fucking coward bastard! These clowns are telling old people to DIE or get a fucking job! But then of course I forget these are the same clowns who approve of spying on all Americans...ordering an American citizen assassinated...who approve of MURDER and fund assassination squads and who fund armament makers over peacemakers! What the hell did I expect?
Now I'm back to banging my head against the rubber room wall. I wish I could afford my own island somewhere; I'd certainly go off to spend the rest of my life being alone there. But then how foolish is that statement? I have to stay here in New York City. Manhattan. Mid-town Manhattan. I love New York City. My home for 42 years now...FORTY-TWO YEARS! I can't leave the place. I'll ride out the tidal wave when it hits. I'll perish in the earthquake when it splits Manhattan in half. I'll be burnt alive when the Indian Point nuclear facility blows. Or I'll be buried at sea when the Atlantic rises up 10 feet and turns Manhattan into Venice or more than likely Atlantis.
thenewyorkgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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