Holy Hell Arrives Today

Another Judgment Day
It ain't the Apocalypse--no god would shew himself on a day like this here in NYC; today, in the fabulous sense, this town is gonna belong to Old Ned himself, spiked hooves and all, freshly cleaned red body suit, pitchfork all nicely sharpened, ready to bring the party of Hell to my town...the teevee weather babes and grinning idiot teevee weather dudes--are predicting temps of right at 100 today in Central Park. Trouble is, the temp is gonna freeze around a 100 for the next unshuffling of Doppler knows how many days, enough that it's causing all the teevee celebrity heads to squench their faces all serious and start warning us about the dangers of hot weather. It's always the same old shit advice, like, drink plenty of liquids and stay cool, especially you horribly old people, who as far as we Accu-Weather folks are concerned can just flat fry--"We are really more concerned about people's pets." Their attitude is "We got air-conditioners, baby, so we give a shit about the rest of you poor slobs, you ditchdiggers, roofers, homeless, old F-ers, pearl divers, flim-flammers, ConEd workmen. Besides, if our air-conditioners go out, we can helicopter to the Hamptons where we have back-up generators, baby"...except I saw where it's gonna get up in the mid-nineties all the way out Long Island to Montauk. I have never been all the way out to Montauk--the rich have always hogged the Montauk area. I've been as far as Southampton; played a gig there once with a Long Island blues band. I didn't particularly care for the crowd; mostly Lizzie Grubman types, you know, run your ass down in a split second should you piss them off by getting in their self-important ways. Hey, Lizzie almost killed fourteen people and I think she served a couple'a days in a private room in some women's facility. I see today, they have Boy George out picking up garbage because Boy has a heroin habit and just can't seem to keep from getting caught with a hay bale of heroin on him, but he usually gets off pretty lightly and certainly is never subjected to the harsh Rockefeller Drug Laws in New York, which are there to round up tons of black guys and throw them by the gaggles into the state slammers for 25 to life. Guys like Boy George and and babes like Lizzie Grubman don't have to worry about the Rockefeller Drug Laws when they're caught doped up--not that Lizzie was doped up the night she almost killed 14 swingers out on the Hamptons party circuit. Billy Joel drives drunk and wrecks his Corvette in the process and nothing happens to him. Russell Crowe throws his cell phone and cracks a bellboy's head open and nothing happens to him--he's given an extra Academy Award for being a good citizen. Halle Berry runs her Beamer over a person and leaves the scene but nothing ever happened to her. Matthew Broderick killed two people in Ireland while tooling his Beamer wildly fast around the lovely Irish countryside looped a little to the gills--he had his hot Hollywood babe-of-the-moment with him, I think. They were excused and left to go on with their "marvelous" lives while the two slobs he killed are buried and long forgotten.

How about old Mel Gibson? that fop--with the passions of Christ boiling up in him (that's Christ spelled "b-o-u-r-b-o-n") he got caught trying to sneak his Beamer back home while under the influence of alcohol and who knows what else. Seems Mel got a little hostile and anti-Semetic when the friendly L.A. cops were hauling his ass in. However, unlike Rodney King, Mel did not get the normal nightstick beating other drunken fools usually get.

Mel's kissing heavy ass as I type this, apologizing in his best little-boy voice, sounding a little like the good Reverend Jimmy Swaggart apologizing tearfully sincerely after he got caught whacking off to ho's in a seedy New Orleans motel. [Praise the Lard, by the way, Jimmy's doin' just fine down there in superintellectual Baton Rouge, Lawsbanana; he's not raking in as many tax-free dollars as he used to, but, hell, he's still got his mansion, his town cars, his Rolex watch collection, and his seedy little homey wife, who I one time saw in person and kinds got the hots for. God, I hate confessing that. ]

I've worked in Hollywood; the dope flows expensively free out there, just as it does in NYC; just as it does in the District of Corrupton where the solons make merryment every night coming home looped to the gills and needing one of those "little red pills" to get to sleep and then a shot of B-12 the next morning along with their wake-up tumblers of breakfast bourbon or cognac. Recall recently when Congressman Patrick Kennedy drove his Beamer into a wall, staggering doped or drunk and saying he couldn't remember what happened that led up to his crashing into a wall. Nothing happened to Patrick; same as nothing happened to his famous drinking Uncle Teddy who accidentally, yes, killed a girl--both drunk as skunks; and nothing happened to his cousin William who in an Uncle-Teddy-like fun drunk raped that celebrity-hounding woman down at the Kennedy playground in West Palm. Ah what a life to be privileged.

In the meantime, Death rules all around the world, but it's especially thriving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and plus the considerate Israelis got some more revenge for those two stupid soldiers of theirs who got themselves kidnapped by the Hezbollah. Israel loves picking on the Hezbollah with one of the world's most well-equipped armies thanks to "you know who"--YOU, ME. One of their U.S.-made missiles, it is reported as I type this, blew apart 40 Palestinian women and their babies yesterday when there was supposed to be that famous truce that Condo-leasing Rice mangled while she was on a junket to that part of the world. Way to go, Israel; humanitarian mission accomplished. Jewish humans defended. Arab dogs DEAD. Oh don't you know how both the U.S. and Israel would love to use old Adolph's final solution on all Islamics? It's our god is bigger than your god bullshit and it will never end--ever. Such bullshit; when peace is so damn simple. Just turn your weapons into ploughshares and rebuild your nations on the Garden of Eden model. F money. Let's use unity as wealth--as in commonwealth.

thegrowlingwolf Sits Comfy but Panting in His Ovennish Digs
The temperature right now in the cool old city of New York is in the raging nineties; stuffy air, but F it, "bring it on," I've four fans blasting away and doing great jobs, man. I'm cool as a slightly soggy cucumber and think I could take it if it goes up to 105, which the gleeful excited teevee weather jocks are having a ball with by exclaiming "Temperatures COULD climb to 105 tomorrow in certain parts of the tri-state area"-- and they are warning about death from the heat every second or so; still trumpeting concern for the elderly and pets. Not much concern over any other class of folks. The best they can come up with statistically with their threatening "deaths from the heat wave" is around 150 and that includes so far over the whole damn country which is experiencing 100+ temperatures from the Pacific Coast all the way over to HERE and has been for several weeks now. No special reports about global warming, oh no. No explanations why gas prices just rose again at the pump, to over $3 a gallon steady now. I have seen the SUV drivers staying home; New York City streets are clogged as the normally are with SUVs and taxicabs. More people died from war TODAY than have died from the total extent of this current heat wave. They are still counting the DEAD in New Orleans from Katrina--do you remember New Orleans? A city in southern Louisiana, I think...wasn't it?

Flipped around the ordinary teevee dial and caught Geraldo; now there's a great specimen of mankind--he screwed Mrs. Jacob Javitts while poor old Jake was hidebound bolted into a wheelchair and being kept droolingly alive on a respirator--still Geraldo's one of our "top leading newsmen," at least according to him he is. Fox is still giving old Geraldo a chance. Remember when Geraldo was bragging about being addicted to sex? That's after his big "tell-all" book came out and made him enough money to gloat comfortably for another few years, this F-ing Puerto Rican boy from the Upper East Side of NYC who at one time, along with current teevee fat boys, Felipe Luciano (he found the Young Lords) and Pablo Guzman, were marching up and down First Avenue as the Young Lords back in the last days of the Vietnam protesting, late sixties. Hell, I think Felipe saw his brother shotgunned down. It's hard to believe those three gung-ho for freedom are now babbling the phony bullshit of network teevee as the way they make their fine livings--OFF THE MAN, baby, the MAN who continues to rule us no matter how heavy we protest.

Geraldo today started off by being pretty damn rough on the Hezbollah for "hiding behind the skirts of women," which would thereby justify Israel's blowing to pieces 40 women and children yesterday in an unprovoked missile attack on a southern Lebanon area; Hell, according to Geraldo, those women and children had Hezbollah terrorists hiding behind their skirts and soiled diapers and the Israelis weren't fooled by it, same as our gyrenes blew away grandmas, young girls, babies, and the crippled elderly in VietNam using the same excuse, "Hey, they got Cong grenades hidden in their pussies, even the baby girls."

Geraldo, you poor punky old publicitiy-seeking fool, the Palestinians are simply rebelling the same way you rebelled when you were a Young Lardass; they are rebelling against the oppressive nature of to them an occupying force that intruded into their homelands in 1947 under a UN charter put together by mostly the US and Britain, two countries that refused Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany during and at the end of WWII. Hypocrites! All F-ing hypocrites of the worst Machiavellian kind. "If taking power means killing your grandmother, then granny dies." That's their attitudes. When you possess so many weapons of mass destruction as Israel and the US, your desire to KILL is heightened to a pompous pious point, enhancing your thirst for blood and guts and scattered limbs and scattered eyeballs and brains soaring you way up and with boiling hate in your eyes allows you to aim your weapons of mass destruction at any target you deem a target, like right into the midst of a hospital, a school, a family neighborhood, directly on target and then BLOOOEY, 20-times the destruction of a Baghdad-style car bomb--one of them just took out another 20 or so in Baghdad as I type this. [Have you ever seen the actual figures of the number of Israelis over the years who have been killed by Arab terrorists [remember the Japanese terrorists that blew up Tel-Aviv Airport one year a long time ago?]. Horrible images of threatening Apocalypsical creatures dangle like lures in front of these warmongers's revengeful minds; justification for the eradication of a people builds in their war-hardened hypocritical hearts, and the fiendish urge to KILL MASSIVELY boils up in their fetid souls just like some mens's dicks get hard as rocks when they go over the top in a hopeless battle. Yep, folks, we am nat'rell-born KILLERS, just like all the other animals, and even some plants. NATURAL-BORN KILLERS UNITE TO KILL OR BE KILLED.

The killing of our youth in armies is ceremonial, don't you see?

How about some lines from Rimbaud's A Night in Hell--the last few lines:

I ought to have a special hell for my anger, a hell for my pride-- and
a hell for sex; a whole symphony of hells!

I am weary, I die. This is the grave and I'm turning into worms,
horror of horrors! Satan, you clown, you want to dissolve me with your
charms. Well, I want it. I want it! Stab me with a pitchfork, sprinkle
me with fire!

Ah! To return to life! To stare at our deformities. And this poison,
this eternally accursèd embrace! My weakness, and the world's cruelty!
My God, have pity, hide me, I can't control myself at all! I am
hidden, and I am not.

And as the Damned soul rises, so does the fire.

Seems like a hell of a great verse for an Ivesian-type song.

thegrowlingwolf
For The Daily Growler

Books Again

Burning Books
I know right off the bat Alexander burned libraries straight down to the sorry ground during his ripping through the known world being led by the hardness of his dick. All you had to do was convince Alex he was the handsomest man next to Big Daddy himself and he'd let his mind do his prick's bidding.

Hitler burned books; oh yeah, especially tons of important books on important subjects especially those books that were written by brilliant Jewish men and women, scientists, educators, philosophers, psychologists, etc. I've heard Hitler had a prick problem with women--you know, hint-hint--he had no problem with underage girls, I've heard--nor did he have the problem with certain men. Obviously, Hitler couldn't read very well. Trying to read Hitler from a writing point of view for me was the same as trying to read Danielle Steele from the same angle--their writing so bad I saw no point in continuing reading what they were so badly writing past a paragraph or so. I must confess, as a bright-eyed college lad, I did read Hitler, most of his shit-stupid My Life and for the life of me could not see how anybody but a fool could make sense from such poor narrative--maybe it makes more sense in German, I'll give old Adolph that; you know, Der Fuhrer might explain that it was Jewish translators who translated most of his bestseller into English. Could be; I'll give him that, though surely there was an official Nazi English version of the book. I'm gonna go on my literary intuitions and say I'll bet the book is just as much bullshit in that official English version as it is translated by Jewish translators for the American market. Jesus, how stupid does that sound reading it now after it's been over for 61 years? Of course, you've gotta read a book to find out about those times--start with Theodore White's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

When I first went to work for Time-Life back in the funky seventies, Theo White was treated like a darling by old nutjob Henry Luce, who was still alive and coming to work every morning, when I went to work there. White had his own bigshot office--you know, walnut panelling, heavy real furniture, lush carpeting, new IBM Selectric typewriter, and a telephone with a WATS line--way up on the fortieth floor, up in Time Heaven just below the seat of Henry God Luce's digs--ooh, you should have seen the Time-Life Executive Club when I worked there; I never did, but I worked on a company publication that showed photos of it and one of my friends there rose high enough to get invited up there for lunch a lot, until he got stoney drunk on Beefeater martinis during a power lunch one day and told the big boys they were crazy as hell for wanting to go Hollywood--I was on a promotional team that was pushing a teevee sitcom produced by Time-Life starring that loveable old slow-drag Jimmy Stewart, you know, as a dad with a family--it was called, boringly, though they thought it would get them publicity since Jimmy was so loved by his public, The Jimmy Stewart Show. This was the sitcom my friend told the T-L bigshots they were stupid about.

I swear to God, and I only saw the pilot of The Jimmy Stewart Show--I think it did run on NBC for half a season before it tanked--but I swear Bill Cosby took the same concept and turned it into one of the most successful sitcoms on television, The Bill Cosby Show. Same plot--a same-old, same-old sitcom plot--there aren't that many stock plots in the sitcom library that have worked in the past. The ones with famous male actor fathers with level-headed wives and superbright, big-smiley children seem to work, that sort of situation--all of those kind started with, I'll go out on a limb, The Bob Cummings Show way back in the early B/W days of boring Amurican television. The twin stock plot that worked were those where famous female stars were in the same situation. You know these shows: certainly the famous I Love Lucy was one; The Donna Reed Show; I Married Joan; all starring Hollywood actresses and using their own names to draw viewers. The subplots out of that one stock plot would involve the single-male and -female sitcoms where the little budding actors and actresses start off on their own in their own apartments at their first jobs of their careers. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one of those shows; and they had to hit with that while Mary was still young enough looking at 30 to play a woman in her early twenties just starting a career. Danny Thomas's lucky untalented daughter had a show based on that subplot. The ultimate subplot of this sitcom staple was The Brady Bunch, where a father with 3 boys married a woman with 3 girls. God, it's perfect. All sitcoms are based on the same library of stock plots.

God, don't get me started talking television. I was in the creative service departments of several television networks for many moons. Television from the get-go, same as radio, is a slushpit for the viewing of commercials, made digestible by being surrounded by puerile entertaining pros doing these "ideal" situational comedies to hold your attention until they can slip the next commercial in on your ass. Nobody ever, that I ever saw, liked staying watching television when the commercials came on. Radio sitcoms were different; those shows used to work their commercials into the show story lines. Like The Jack Benny Radio Show: always Don Wilson, his announcer, was a member of the cast and written into the show, usually making his appearance just as they were due to go into a commercial. Suddenly, Don Wilson would come on mic, jive with Jack a while, and then gradually work into the commercial selling you cigarettes. Later, when Jack Benny moved to teevee with The Jack Benny Show he kept the same concept in it--Don Wilson was still his announcer; and cigarettes were still his sponsor.

I got started on television though I started off on books. Books are so much more intelligently entertaining than teevee; even Danielle Steele is more intelligently entertaining than a soap opera, isn't she?; I don't know, I've never been able to read past the first paragraph of any of her books I've meant to fully read. Her books were in every office lending library in every NYC office I've ever worked in--you know, the office goons read their paperbacks on the subway, finish them at work then they put them in the office lending library--they always have the complete works of Danielle Steele--her books and the books of that awful writer Stephen King--another whose books I have never been able to read past the first opening paragraphs. Pet Semetary was so badly written in the lead paragraphs I threw it unconsciously in my garbage at work after giving up trying to figure it out. That heretical action almost got me kicked out of using the lending library at my last job; how dare I throw so precious a book as a Stephen King book in the garbage. Who the hell did I think I was, Alexander the Great? Hitler? Ohh, that last one hurt. Alex. I might could have filled Alex's shoes at 18. But Hitler. Hell no; his father was a drunken maniac; Alex's father was an emperor.

Dealing With Margaret Atwood
I'm trying to like her as I watch her raconteuring on Uncle Bill Moyers's new big-buck vehicle he's got running on PBS--and I thought he was so pissed off at and revolted by their new right-wing asskissing policies at PBS he would never appear on their stages again. But, here he is. With one of his specials. In this one, Bill is searching for wisdom in understanding true believers who believe firmly in unbelieveable fables by faith. "I guess God has a reason." Still hung up in his Baptist background--Texans have a very difficult time giving up their pasts, Bill worries most about whether God exists or not; is the Christian Bible, in which Bill has to believe in since it's part of his culture and beliefs from back when he was a little boy and scared to death though cynical enough to make a career out of something which to me is total bullshit. Wipe it out now, like we must wipe our asses after we take an earthquaking dump.

Margaret Atwood, who I must admit if I had heard of her I surely didn't realize I'd heard of her, is a very popular, evidently, Canadian writer from Ottawa and who as is hoped is a highly smart, logical, Protestant thinker who though she challenges the Christian religion she will not just flat say there are no gods and all the books their supernaturality is based on are big piles of bullshit fiction--books of fables, just like your books, dear Margaret, or should we believe you are getting your info from a god?--no, she won't say that god and gods are nonexistent so let's find another way to collectively save mankind; instead, she makes her career attacking Christianity from an agnostic stance.

I'm sort of put off by people who make their livings--and I'm beginning to sound like my ancient mentor of the moment, Charles Ives--off of fiction and then claim to be reality philosophers and therefore the only observers able to fairly understand why multitudes of world folk follow the foolish and deadly biases and fears, off-the-wall platitudes, and alchemistic sciences of ancient imagination, an uneducated imagination. This woman says we must understand that man has to have a god in order for him to understand this world from a human point of view. Wha? This is too thick for me to dissect in the minute time I have to blabber on a blog. A lot of it is above my head, too, as I try and stay being a realist, and a realist sees Christianity as a deadly bite from a antihuman mosquito that needs to be eradicated not understood. People should cleanse their minds of these traditional favors. Get rid of their pasts. Just shuck 'em off; shake 'em off like a dog shakes water off its back. Shake it! Shake it, baby, shake it! We got to shake it up. Forget about your past; what about a future god, an up-to-date god, one with some logic, one with a collection of the best human thought-out solutions? I thought universities were going to provide us with reality thinkers and planmakers, mapmakers of the future, but no, the best we have is a bunch of agnostics who are basing their careers on keeping so ruinous an organized crime outfit as the Christian religion going on because it's traditional and to destroy it would be to cause some poor souls to commit suicide--plus it might ruin dear Margaret's book sales. I would like to tell all Christians, I don't care your level of librality, here's the rope, you suckers. Or, hell, here's a single-edge razor blade. Or, hell, here, here's a revolver, be my guest. Or, hey, that Kool Aid over there is free; drink all you want.

Oh if these religious zealots and that includes Muslims, Islamics, Islamisists, Jews, Mormons, Catholics, Protestants, Cargo Cultists...if all of them would just disappear...go away already...go to your paradises and leave me to mine. That's why I'm an atheist, Miss Atwood, not an agnostic. An agnostic gives Christianity a chance; an atheist says all of that just flat doesn't exist; we are empiricists; that's why I write; I'm a natural born empiricist. I can't tell you how to change the world; that's what thinking is for; but I have the sense to see clear through the bullshit covering up the foul doings of the hoaxes of this world.

Martin Amis came on Uncle Bill's show next, and though he's a Brit who's in love with the U.S., I liked what he told old Uncle Bill, but still this poor soul couldn't flat out say "No, there is no god; there is only you and me; that's all we have, so let's sit down and map out a exploration of how we can recreate our societies into One World-thinking units." Martin couldn't do that; he had to tip his hat to believing in at least an idea of God. Fool. Why should I want to read your books?

It's hot as six Hadean summers but I can take it now; I'm insulated; I have four fans whirring around me now, even though, I the atheist, am totally dependent on the benevolence of a metro god who calls himself ConEd, our customer-bilking public utility here in NYC, the god of electricity, the god who really can cut the power off some brimy summer day with the temperature 110 and literally bake us all to death, same as the Christians love punishing heretics by burning them at the stake.

Just like our "president" used to love executing men and one woman back in his day when he was goobernor of Texas. What wonderful god-like power it is to hold a person's life in your hands. "Please, Mr. Bush, forgive me; let me keep my wife; I'm innocent, honest I am." "Shoot the juice to him, Bruce," shouted Goobernor Bush, "don't worry, boy, if you are innocent you'll get to go to Heaven, brother, so I'm doin' you a favor." Much laughter was heard after the goobernor was back in his comfortable mansion in his comfortable bed, sipping on his tumbler of Jack Daniels and snorting a couple'a lines'a coke "Pleasant dreams, Pickles." "Don't worry. You're my only nightmare."

I am still convinced we are natural born killers and can't help ourselves.

thegrowlingwolf
the Daily Growler

Death Never Life Is Reported

The News This Morning
Pedestrian run down and killed over on the Manhattan West Side, at 57th and 9th Avenue. Teevee showed cops handcuffing a young black man, owner of the car.

A young girl's body was found in Jersey after she'd been murdered by a big, shaved head drug dealer and his prostitute girl friend in a sleaze bag Jersey hotel, both who looked way demented to me.

Death. All death.

Then the news from the Middle East and more death. Still fresh death everyday in Baghdad. Death in Afghanistan. Dirty death in Lebanon. Death in Israel. Death. More death.

KILL. KILL. KILL.

Then comes a warning that the East Coast is fixing to come under a 6-day heat wave with temperatures soaring up toward 100 for each of those glorious days--then the talking heads start looking serious and start talking about how easy it is to die during a heat wave, especially for old people and pets. I kid you not; their final concern was for pets being left in Beamers while their owners are shopping for luxuries. One channel had a woman on giving advice to mothers on how to not forget and leave their young children in cars during the summer heat spells. One suggestion she made was for a mother to put her purse in the backseat with her child, that way when she parks to go shopping, she'll remember she put her purse by the baby and at the same time, she'll remember the baby, too. You believe that crap? Amazing.

Death is everywhere. The world is dying, folks. Should we start the funeral already?

Books
I'm avoiding death by reading books these days. I love reading books while it's hotter than hell. Currently, I'm reading H.D.'s fine little book, Tribute to Freud, discussing her relationship with Sigmund Freud in the thirties in Vienna and then later in London right before he DIED.

Then in the mail yesterday came a book I'd been looking forward to for a couple of years, Memos, by Charles Ives, edited by pianist John Kirkpatrick. And gee-willikers, what an awesome job of editing and compiling. There are 142 pages of these "memos" that Ives dictated to a private secretary in the 1930s as he sat down and started going over everything he'd written, which led to discussing music in general, boldly taking the stance that by God he is America's greatest composer, plus, he's also convinced himself he is definitely taking music into a different world for the first time, like atonality and quartertones, a music that would precedent both Stravinsky and Schoenberg, the darlings of the European avant garde. Ives is firm in his confidence that he is the most innovative composer in the world at the time he's dictating these memos. He understands improvisation better than Bach. Beethoven he hollers doesn't use enough chords. Critics are "ladies." [Jazz great Lester Young called nearly everybody "Lady."] Gullible people are called "Rollos," after a popular book character of Ives's youth featuring a wide-eyed conformist named Rollo. It's a marvelous book for someone like me who has been immersed in old Charles's innovations since I first heard them as a teenager.

I even went down a composed a song today based on something I learned from Ives--first it started with me playing a D-minor triad over a C-minor triad and follow a 3/4 time but using a 1 played with 3 eighth notes, then an eighth note, a 1, two eighth notes, then 3 eighth notes, a 1, then 3 eighth notes--that's the measure. It makes sense to me and I read it the same as Ives wrote it; I put my own words to it and called it "Heat Wave Warning." Meaning: how can I complain about this heat when there are people in the world as I type this running for their F-ing lives in temperatures over 100, across burning sands, barefoot on burning concrete or burning asphalt, their homes and businesses being exploded into rubble behind them--they cannot look back; you notice, people excaping such horrors of war never look back?

When Thelonious Monk was told by drummer Arthur Taylor that he felt he was lucky to have survived growing up in New York City, Monk replied, "Sure you're lucky to have survived, you're lucky to survive every second. You're facing death at all times. You don't know where it's going to come from."

When asked the question, "Do you think musicians would be interested in your music?" Monk replied, "It's vague to me how I was thinking."

It's vague to me how I'm thinking tonight. I'm going out and have a party by myself; maybe eat a freshly killed young elk doe steak: "How do you want it, Mr. thegrowlingwolf?" "Raw as a Tartar, please," will be my answer.

I'm checking out of Hotel Death and checking into Hotel Living.

It's too hot to blog.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Books

Realization
What would I do without books? Yes, I can find instant information on the Internet and I like that, but it's not the kind of information you get from books. Yes, you can open up and download a hell of a lot of books off the Internet, but like the King of all Bloggers once said, there is nothing like holding ahard-bound, typeset, referenced, indexed, illustrated BOOK and reading from it. So much better than reading off a screen. I find reading off a screen very difficult because of the distractions that surround me on the screen as I read. Like a temptation to check my email; I especially like people saying they're paying me money and an occasional love note, which my ego craves, so I'm constantly checking my email. 'Nuff said.

"'Nuff" reminded me: remember the "snuff film" scare of the eighties? The only snuff films I've ever seen are those horrible homemade videos coming out of Baghdad these days--yeah, young girls getting blown away, but, yeah some of them get raped first--even little baby girls could be subject to having their lives snuffed out on video, since, haven't you noticed from the cop shows on teevee, the video camera is one of the most popular-ever popular toys ever invented and everybody and his damn dog and that dog's fleas have one-- and now they come within cell phones--and you know especially Middle Easterners love video cameras. Plus, I'm pretty certain the US Army videos all its actions. I'm pretty sure the US Army, too, watches Arab television. I heard a journalist-type on a teevee show say he had just been living in Cairo and he said Cairo got over 300 television channels, the same television we see here (Fox Fool News, CNoNews, NBC, MSGNBC, Rupert Murdoch's Sky--you get the picture) but more importantly, he emphasized, they get what we can't get, all of the Arab channels (Al Jareez, etc.--I don't know them all; there's at least five or six Arab television networks) and he said the Arab world sees videos on those channels that are taken while autrocities are happening. He said Arab television shows bodies blown apart; close ups of heads blown off people; blood, body parts, brains blown out; families massacred; and of course the famous beheadings. And he's right, that's something we Amuricans are too precious to see. Our Amurican soldiers see it full in the face and that's why they come back so F-ed up and suicidal, or in need of strong fixes to wipe the onsite snuff films that keep showing in the theaters of their young developing minds out. Can you imagine seeing those movies night after night? Can you imagine being the subjects of those movies? It's not acting.

We're spoiled in that everything is acted out for us. And as a result, we tsk-tsk and boo hoo a little bit about it, but down deep we know it's acted out and therefore really ain't real. Like to me a still photo isn't real--as in those photos from Abu Ghraib. Though I know they're real and depict what really happened to these poor buggers, they don't move so they have no life. I mean with videos, when you see and hear a dude or woman or child getting tortured you feel it; you know it's real. See what I mean? You don't have to use your imagination in a real on-the-spot video of an autrocity.

A recent movie on the horrors the innocent poor souls are suffering in that U.S. embarrassment hellhole now called Gitmo didn't show the actual films that must exist of the many tortures that go on down there but instead had actors act out the mean stuff. It's not the same. Watching actors blow each other the hell away, have sex, then blow another several dozen human beings away is thrilling but we know it isn't real so as soon as the show is over we move on to our next favorite program. Just like this sudden popularity (they're fading now because they are getting all the same and based on a lot of "scientific coincidence") of endless numbers of CSI-type shows, where the forensics people are the most important people there are at a crime scene--oh yeah--and they all carry guns and get to shoot and kill perpetrators and, oh yeah, they get shot at and sometimes hit themselves--oh yeah, sure--but anyway, all of these shows now show grumpy old half-baked coroners, though one or two have women coroners, cutting into dead bodies, you've seen them, they show the saw cutting through flesh to expose internal organs, blood and guts, but, oh, yeah, somebody may gag at it, but you know really, it ain't real--and I don't want'a know a man or woman who's not a doctor who gets their kicks watching live operations like they show on some cable channels.

Oh we Amuricans love watching killing, but only acted-out killing. We are protected by our moral overseers from having to have our vision spoiled and our stomachs turned by real videos from real autrocities in Baghdad (27 died today after a car bomb went off in the middle of the city). If we saw what real killing was like we'd either become psychopathic maniacs or we'd come to our senses and demand an end to all war and the love of killing, though, watch out, killing may be instinctual in us; we are carnivorous; at least I admit I'm a wolf in human clothing, which means I go for fresh, raw, hot-bloody meats, though, now that I'm older, I do love 'em barbecued and maybe served with some grilled onions, with maybe some garlic bread on the side--some really good barbecue sauce; I love steamed veggies, too, so you can throw some of them in the stew, but instinctually, I can't wait to sink my carnivorous teeth into some juicy fresh caught and KILLED meat. Hell, at one time, most of us ate each other, way back in the good-old-ancient times when man didn't know he wasn't supposed to eat his own kind, just like now he doesn't seem to know he's not supposed to kill his own kind.

What I'm driving at, it's about time, is that if you wanna learn about war in a serious manner, read about it in books, and I'll give you one great one to start with. It's Paul Fussell's masterpiece called The Great War. Fussell has meticulously gathered together descriptions of the war especially by poets (Wilfred Owens; Sigfried Sassoon; Rupert Brooke, et al) and literary people a lot of whom were killed in the war. Here's a wonderful site that has all the poets who died in WWI along with examples of their work. Great site:

http://www.sonnets.org/wwi.htm

And why not a little sample of some writing about real war from a guy who wrote these in the trenches as he fought for the Brits in those scarred and seared fields of France, eventually, yes, to be buried in those fields once called battlefields then called Elysian Fields, his notebook of poems flapping in the bloody winds from his bloodsoaked jacket pocket--Wilfred Owens--he's a winner; a poet in the midst of war:

On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought into Action

Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,

Great gun towering towards Heaven, about to curse;

Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse

Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!

Reach at that Arrogance which needs thy harm,

And beat it down before its sins grow worse;

Spend our resentment, cannon,--yea, disburse

Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.

Yet, for men's sakes whom thy vast malison

Must wither innocent of enmity,

Be not withdrawn, dark arm, thy spoilure done,

Safe to the bosom of our prosperity.

But when thy spell be cast complete and whole,

May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!

Wilfred Owens was killed by machine gun fire in France in 1918, one week before the armistice.

The Great War by Paul Fussell. A very scary book if you can live through it; it's war showing directly in your narrative eyes.

Second Looey thegrowlingwolf
My basic training in the U.S. Army ended at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Artillery School, in the merry month of March, which was already steamy hot in those western hills of Oklahoma's Washita Mountains. Since my hometown Guard unit was a highly decorated artillery unit from WWII, I was destined for the artillery when I signed up--I avoided conscription. My Guard unit had battle flags from several Philippine campaigns, Corregidor, and eventually Japan-- a lot of my hometown older brothers from the same artillery unit were on the Bataan Death March, one, a son of a redheaded plumber in my hometown who drove a red Terraplane truck he'd made to look like a fire engine and with whom my family was very close to his family and when this son came back home after surviving the Bataan Death March, I was there at this big dinner they gave for him, and he had married an Australian girl on his way back home, he was a handsome man, and they met at a dance one night and married the next day and my brother, a Marine in that war, told me confidentially--he was already an adult talking to his kid brother--she married this poor bastard to get to America and have American kids by a war hero, looking for money. "I saw those Australian women when I was in Melbourne; they practically sucked your nuts off they were so anxious to get to the U.S." "War brides" these women were called.

Anyway, at that dinner, me, a little wiseass irritating kid, shut the hell up around this haunting guy. Wow, he was scary gaunt and had huge black circles around his eyes, was thin as a rail, and pale as a white ghost, and suddenly he made one thing quite clear, he did not want to talk about the war. You know some gossipy types, they can't hold their tongues, and it happened, one of his aunts ask him boldy after the food had been served. He suddenly got some blood in his face, and the blackness lessened around his eyes, and his eyes were dialated wide-open like a cat's at night, and then he shot fire out his nostrils and started shouting, "Fuck this, fuck this food," and then pointing his finger at each guest, he hollered, "And fuck you, and you, and you," and then turning to his wife, he said "and fuck all of you...." looking down his nose at her. Then came the finale, the maddest outburst, and he turned his blazing eyes right at me, a little kid, and he bellowed "And fuck you, too"--I'm serious he said it looking directly at me, a little F-ing kid who thought of war as something to play--"You're a Jap...you're a Kraut...and I'm a Marine....BLOOEY, you're dead, Jap...ack-ack-ack-ack, I blasted ya, ya Kraut SOB!" That was the war to me, but not to this guy. I shivered me timbers for minutes after that look. I didn't at that time really know to use the word "fuck" that way and thought about it sexually though I couldn't figure out if he was going to have sex with all of us, though it logically dawned on me how he used the word when he slammed over his plate full of food, started crying like a baby, and then literally exploded from the room. Then I knew he'd put a curse on us all by saying "fuck all of you." It wasn't sexual at all, I deduced. He'd fucking cursed us, that's what he'd done.

Mustering Out
So that day at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, when I ended my basic training in artillery, that morning at reveille, the old man (the captain, Captain Black, a blackman, who I'll never forget), congratulated us on finishing basic training and then he blah-blahed on for a hunk of minutes--I wasn't listening, I was anticipating my muster pay and then hitting the highway home--if the old man hurried, I could be home by midnight and back in my own bed for the first time in 7 months.

Finally, he dismissed the troopers except he called out all the OCS officers, of which I was one. An OCS officer was a dude who was an officer candidate not a real officer. Several of us volunteered to be shipped down to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, where we went through two weeks of holy ridiculous Mickey Mouse hell, which didn't bother me since I knew I would have great privileges over my peers when I got back to Fort Sill and started the serious artillery training. I would be an OCS officer with an insignia and gold looey bars (first looeys wear silver bars--it's army logic) but phony anyway, and certainly treated that way by the real 2nd looeys of my outfit.

After OCS training, my first assignment was as an officer in charge of an eight-inch howitzer that was one of 4 in my training battery set up out on the long-range firing range at Cache, Oklahoma, in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the Washita Mountains, under orders from a battery command post.

I sat behind Company B howitzer with a radio operator and with a radio receiver in my ear. When the orders were called down, they first call the azimuth settings (the angle of the howitzer barrel to the ground), which I shout out to the gunnery sergeant who operates the barrel control wheel that raises the barrel up to the proper azimuth and is then locked, locking the barrel in place so the breech can be opened and a shell shoved in and the damn thing fired and the shell sent flying toward the target area. My gunnery sergeant was a crackerjack with the azimuth and sitings readings but one day during a drill he missed locking the wheel with the barrel at a fairly high angle. The barrel may have weighed a couple a thousand pounds--it was a long gun, and when that wheel didn't lock, that barrel came ramming straight down unchecked, causing the wheel to spin and the knob on the wheel, a solid metal bar grip, came up and caught him right under the chin. The blow knocked his steel pot off his head and raised him up, tossed him out, and splatted him down on his ass right in the middle of a fine old Oklahoma mud puddle. The wheel broke his jaw.

We fired in sequences, so it went, "Gun #1 ready," and the #1 gun officer would called back, "#1 gun ready, sir," and then you get "Fire #1 gun," and the officer than hollered, "FIRE," and a corporel would pull the lanyard and the huge old veteran piece would burp in a billowing of crap-smelly powdery smoke and then explode a shell hellfire fast out that long barrel and it was capable, with the right settings, of whistle-sailing 25 miles at a target, plus capable of making direct hits at that target if the gunnery sergeant is fast and adjusts the azimuth as the forward observer (the poor second looey whose up ahead with a radio operator, up a tree probably with binoculars observing the target just in front of him over in enemy territory) calls back the adjustments to be made, maybe 4 or 5 until finally you get a direct hit. Then would follow as rapidly as possible #2 gun, then #3 gun, then #4 gun, boom, boom, boom, boom. What a rhythmic firing pattern we could get going with those old guns.

We'd go out in the early morning and fire ordered missions all day, sometimes waiting 2 hours between firings, when we'd either read or sleep. Me, I was reading Hemingway at that time; A Farewell to Arms, a really haunting love story going on during WWI--another side of the sadness of war.

So when I graduated artillery school, I was qualified to be commissioned a second looey, an artillery operations expert, with the possibility I could be assigned to the regular army as an officer and off I'd go to....

By the time we got our muster pay, the company clerk would have tacked all our orders up on the area bulletin board--no one was ever told where they were going, except home for a furlough if you were regular army and home for Guard duty if you were not a commissioned lieutenant. And that's why the captain had called out us OCS looeys. He was hustling us.

"Boys," he said, "I'm putting your orders up on the board after muster; we need officers in IndoChina...."--they weren't using "VietNam" in the army yet, at least in my company, but we all knew when they said, "Laos, Cambodia, IndoChina, Saigon, Cam Rahn Bay, DaNang," they meant VietNam.

I had never thought about having to go to Nam when I first got to basic training, not even after learning how to shoot rifles and machine guns and Browning automatics and going through the various physical tests, like crawling under barb-wire fences while some old vets were shooting machine gun fire over your head, or jumping over logs, swinging on ropes, climbing up rope ladders, all kinds of physical shit like that, and learning how to bayonette an enemy, you know, use the bayonette attached on the end of your rifle a certain way that you would gut your enemy in hand-to-hand combat, which is when you get close enough to the enemy to use your bayonette. In hand-to-hand, you'd cock your rifle back on your hip with your bayonette pointed directly at the oncoming enemy. Then when the enemy was close enough you raised your rifle out slightly and then with a downward lunge you drive the point of the bayonette deep into the enemy's belly, and then you simply raise the bayonette with an upward motion and then quickly extract it from the now ripped open gut and cock it ready for the next enemy soldier attacking.

The enemy was called a "gook" when I was in the army, which refers to the slanted eyes of IndoChinese people--they were all gooks, men, women, and children. You never heard an army guy say, "Oh, I'm going to shoot that VietNamese gentleman right between the eyes" or "Hell, I hand grenaded that charming old VietNamese grandmother--lobbed it right in her lap."

So, the old man hustled us OCSers with a bonus join-up offer--"Hell, boys, you'll only be used in training; you'll probably see no action; this war'll be over by Christmas anyway, boys, so what'a ya say?" Nope. I turned him down.

After muster I ran out to the bulletin board to check my orders. The list was crammed all over that board; there were hundreds of names on it some poor clerk typist had had to type out like a racehorse all night, getting the orders cut, numbered, and issued. The first name I saw was our company drummer, a black teenager from Philadelphia--Jeez, he was headed for Fort Ord, California; he was a Specialist now, a corporel, which meant at Fort Ord they'd get him ready for the Big Picture--"Next stop," as Country Joe sang, "VietNam." God, there were a lot of my army friends headed for Ord; I'd never realized they were regular army, the Toothless Pollock from Milwaukee, still a recruit, was headed for Ord. Damn, even the psyche major from the University of Wisconsin grad school was heading for Ord. God-damn, there was one of my homeys, a guy I'd played golf with in high school, going to Ord.

And then there was me. My orders: report to National Guard in my hometown to await transfer to US Army Reserves and to be subject to call to duty as a commissioned 2nd lieutenant at any given moment and until then follow normal routine of Reserve meetings 3 times a month at a National Guard unit wherever I lived and to be assigned for two-weeks of active duty starting in the immediate summer of that year.

Whew. I was being sent home. I did not know how lucky I was. To this day I don't. I never went to Nam, I'll tell you that. Nope. I never went to one god-damn Guard meeting either, though that summer I did go to summer camp at Fort Hood, Texas, with my hometown unit, though by then I was carrying a US Army Reserve serial number, ID, and designated a 2nd looey, I might add, and therefore I didn't have to participate in the Guard's stuff if I didn't want to; I could kibbitz around the Provost Marshall's quarters and drink PM whiskey, shoot the breeze with the real officers, go to the Officer's Club at the main post, have access to a jeep--except what I did was ride with the tech sergeant who made the ice and beer run everyday outside the post over into Waco where while they were filling the truck with blocks of ice and bags of crushed ice--it was summer in the middle of Texas--110 in the shade, so they needed a hell of a lot of ice, me and the sarge would go over to the Circle Tavern and drink cold ones, then lumber back to the loaded truck and then cowboy on back to the fort, drunk as Lords, plus a hell of a lot of pints and half pints of booze for the troopers who paid this guy 3 bucks a half pint and 5 bucks a pint for what he was paying a buck and a buck-fifty for. Oh the army is full of rackets.

All the while, the majority of the guys I went through basic training with were doing time out at Fort Ord, though by the end of the summer some of them were surely already over in Nam, and by the time I got married and moved to New Orleans and got reassigned to a Control Group, which meant I didn't have to do dick shit unless they needed me, I'm sure a large number of those guys were dead.

I remember reading the paper one night in front of pinon log fire in my artist studio fireplace, my wife showering just off the kitchen in the makeshift shower the artist who owned the studio had put in, an inobtrusive metal box with a plastic curtain that kept the water from splashing into the kitchen, me glancing over at her marvelous shaped body I could see through the clear plastic curtain every now and then, I was smoking a pipe, my Malamute was sleeping at my feet, I was sipping on a glass of Ezra Brooks, and I started reading the newspaper and then I saw an article that said the day before in Nam, an American artillery unit had been hit by friendly fire killing 40 U.S. soldiers. That word "artillery" hit me between the eyes. That would have been me. Except, as a second looey, I would have been a forward observer. There's an old saying in the artillery, "The first to see the enemy is the forward observer and the first the enemy sees is the forward observer." Another joke around artillerymen is that a second looey's lifespan in the army is about one day after combat starts.

I like most Americans alive today haven't ever tasted of battle. I have rubbed shoulders however with a lot of young peers who I'm sure tasted of battle deeply. I'm afraid to go down to Washington and check out that Nam Memorial down there. I've saved all these years a list of names and addresses of the guys I came to hang with the most during my 7 months in the regular army--they're listed on army stationary I got at Fort Leonard Wood and they show a trooper slamming a shell into the breech of a 1o4mm howitzer out in a war zone--there is a smile on his face. I look at those names and I see them as they were when they wrote their names on that paper and there on that paper those names I see are of guys who, as far as I'm concerned, are still alive. The bright Tom from Wisconsin. The chemist, Dick [yes, we teased him about his name and especially since his surname fit it like a glove, if you catch my drift], from Indiana. The tall handsome guy who wanted to be pro golfer from Oklahoma. The trumpet player from Fond du Lac. Or big tall Richard who wanted to be a Chicago politician. Or a guy I really got along with, a future surgeon then from East Lansing. Or little Johnny Hank (that's hillbilly for John Henry) the Arkansas traveller. Or big smilin' Jerry who made Marlboro cigarettes back in Richmond.

I, unlike most Americans, don't care to know whether these guys were killed in Nam or not. A couple of them on there, too, a couple of brilliant brilliant Jewish lawyers from Chicago, I called 'em Leopold and Loeb, I hope to never find out especially if those great sons of bitches got killed overthere as much as they hated and cursed the army and tried so hard to get out of it, even refusing to go to inspections on Saturday mornings on religious grounds. Such a shame if the army got them killed. And that drummer. The happiest man I ever met in spite of his color, his having grown up having to fight some other boy every day since he was 5, having been cut, having been shot once, having been falsely accused of robbery and being thrown in the Philly hoosegow for adults when he was 13. What a shame if he went to Nam and had to play his drum with the flag bearer as they led a charge up over a hill and into the face of glory and never came back.

I don't wanna know; would you?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The 101 Ranch

Jive From The Daily Growler Abyss
This is post #101. Time flies when you are blogging. What have we learned after 100 posts?

1) There are a hell of a lot of bloggers.
2) Blogging is definitely therapeutic.
3) Blogging can be harmful to your health.
4) Blogging can be irritating.
5) Blogging can be frustrating.
6) Blogging can be empowering, especially to the powerless.
7) Most blogs, sorry folks, are piddlings of pissy drivel or piles of unmitigated ego crapping.
8) Every now and then you do find a blog that is brilliant (like our own The Daily Growler).
9) Every now and then you do find some truly exciting writing on a blog.
10) Most blogs are very liberal and anti-the current "president." (Three cheers for that.)
11) There are some bloggers who are willing to bend over and let the "president" F them good.
12) We're sure the CIA runs 1000s of blogs with a bunch of recent college grads writing them.
13) We're sure the FBI runs 1000s of blogs with a bunch of recent college grads writing them.
14) We're sure there are thousands of corporate-run blogs promoting garbage products.
15) We're sure scammers run 1000s of blogs; charity scams, sales scams, get rich quick scams.
16) We're sure spammers run 1000s of blogs; they clog The Daily Growler mailbox daily.
17) We are confused by spammers; what does their irritating presence mean to these people?
18) Like do spammers make millions of dollars; if so, how?
19) Spammers amuse us, obviously; we are amused by how easy it is to trick folks.
20) We like how hard it is to get an ion of truth over but how easy it is to get a lie believed.
21) Blogs have to be controlled by the bloggers. And that includes The Daily Growler.
22) We mean by that, Jesus, put a mean edit on most of your content.
23) Best blogs we've seen to date: languagehat and wood s lot. The blog binoculars are still out.
24) Sometimes we spend so much time on The Daily Growler we don't have time to blog surf.
25) Blogging can be a pain in the ass.
26) You can be told your blog gets a lot of hits and still receive no comments.
27) Some comments on some blogs are silly; mostly chit-chat; and then boom a serious one.
28) Blogging is a nasty but beautiful habit. We at The Daily Growler are hooked.
29) The Daily Growler medical staff highly recommends blogging...that or psychoanalysis.
30) "Know thyself," saith some Lard and Master, and that's what blogs help Thou doeth.

The 101 Ranch
There really is such a place. We mention it because a certain Daily Growler writer lived at one time in Enid, Oklahoma, and once talked incessantly about a childhood experience he had at the Miller Bros. 101 Ranch and the Ponca Native American dancers he saw there. Check it out; they've only had 12,000 hits, but it's a cool site for a north central Oklahoma project.

http://www.kaycounty.info/101_ranch/101_frame.htm

Word Up
-- You no longer have to worry about your underage daughters--birth to 18 in US; birth to 12 in heathen countries; birth to 3 or 4 in royal families--sneaking across a state line and getting an abortion anymore. We know that has been utmost on the minds of the parents of most underage daughters--there are millions of them at any given time, aren't there? Like it or not, and what parent couldn't like this, the U.S. Congress has passed a law that makes it illegal for your underage daughter to sneak across a state line and get an abortion...and we think that's period, no exceptions, though maybe it's OK with parental consent.

So, imagine this, your underage daughter (let's say age 16 for a sort of age you'd expect an underage daughter to start seriously screwing often) comes to you and informs you, "Daddy, mommy, I'm preggers as hell with Little Stevie's baby, or so says Dr. Nick Riviera, you know him, the doctor on teevee? But anyway, Dr. Nick says I can go from Birmingham here up there to New York City and get an abortion, which is what I want, daddy, mommy, please. You don't want that creep Stevie's little lumox for your grandchild, do you? God, what was wrong with me when I let that jerk have me; I got so naively horny. Oh, by the way, daddy, mommy, thanks for all that great sexual advice you gave me. Here's the result...Little Icky's bastard."

That's the proper scenario set down by this Dark Ages Congress we have overseeing us; so if your underage daughter sneaks off and gets an abortion across a state line without you knowing it, the Feds will be kicking in your door late one night to handcuff her and haul her off to Federal jail for breaking a Federal law; off they'll take her eventually to Federal prison as a felon, maybe the same Fed babe prison Martha Stewart paid her dues in [isn't it wonderful how felon Martha is still respected by the television networks--though, we thought as a felon she couldn't run anykind of business anymore? Maybe being an actress with a network teevee contract isn't a business. It's none of our business, that's for sure].

So sit back, relax, take a puff or two. If your underage daughter is showing, all your responsibility is to her is to remind her that if she crosses a state line and gets an abortion, she's in big doodoo. "So here, honey, take a jacket here for that ejaculator, 'cause we can't afford an abortion, you got that? And if you pay us no mind, then the Feds come and haul you off and don't start screamin' we didn't warn you when they do."

Isn't amazing how our Congress is concerned about underage daughters crossing state lines to get abortions (how many are there every year anyway?) at the same time the U.S. Army, and now the Israeli Army, is aborting the lives of thousands upon thousands of good innocent struggling people throughout the Middle East under orders from a dude who was never honestly elected president of this country--he was the first and only ever president appointed by the Supreme Court, and he now cockily rules in Washington, District of Corruption, as though failure and the ultimate disasters that emerge from failure is his mission in life for himself (remember "Fools dare to go where angels fear to tread") and for We the People of the U.S., and also the people of the rest of the whole god-damn world. Todo el Mundo! It's that New World Order of his old Pappy's design this little prick son is determined to shove down our throats whether it chokes us all to death or not.

Congress is also arrogantly trying to punish us for burning an F-ing U.S. flag while thousands of U.S. soldiers are coming home with their coffins defiled by that same flag; that flag that is flown out in front of them as they go over the hills of battle for the centuries of war we have participated in since our founding warmongering Great White Fathers ruled it the proper way to fight wars, the drummer boy and flag bearer being the first to die for stupid nationalistic beliefs. All of the current soldiers fighting those stupid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (don't ever think we're not still losing soldiers every day in that country, too) are now drummer boys and flag bearers going over the hills of battle in their clumsy Humvies or their even more clumsy and deadly Bradleys (made by the Carlyle Group, I'll bet ya; what'a ya bet?) to face an enemy that was never our enemy, to face insurgents who weren't insurgents until we started these wars, to face new Al Queda forces now, to face a Taliban re-emerging with power in Afghanistan, to face suddenly now in Iraq warring Islamic factions that Saddam had controlled with his Bathist movement both of which are shooting now at the liberating Amurican fool soldiers as they come out from their luxurious Green Zone in their big overblown army toys to attack them--Shiites shooting at them; Sunis shooting at them, to face now a threat of a Kurd Army forming in northern Iraq, to face the threat of those fanatically crazed car bombers and suicide bombers, to expose the rest of the world to the same sort of attacks--WE STUPIDLY HAVE STIRRED UP RELIGIOUS WARS ALL OVER THE MIDDLE EAST.

GOD-DAMN WAR IS THE ONLY THING THIS KILLER "PRESIDENT" (CHECK OUT HIS EXECUTION SCHEDULE WHILE HE WAS GOOBERNOR OF TEJAS) KNOWS WORKS FOR HIS GREEDY FAMILY AND THEIR GREEDY OIL-DRIPPING FRIENDS IN THE MIDDLE EAST. saudi arabia. SEE IT'S IN LC TYPE. oman. dubai. the arab emirates. israel, to the US (us) a holy land to be protected to the point of the end of mankind as we know it--and it is also a holy land for both Jews and Arabs--we guess we call them "Islamics" now; I don't see the word "Arab" used much anymore. Well, OK, the Iranians are Persians, where the rather smart religion of the worship of Mazda (the Light) began with Zoroaster. Here's a Website temple devoted to the worship of Mazda via Zoro. Check it out; if you have Unicode perhaps you can read the Persian.

http://www.crystalinks.com/z.html

Daimler-Chrysler Commercial
Is anyone else bothered by the Nazi emphasis of the current Daimler-Chrysler commercial running on television these days, at what seems like every other commercial, sometimes running simultaneously across the broadband dial of the television universe? The commercial shows a bumbling nerd, he looks like a neophyte actor from Brooklyn, obviously Amurican, reporter type interrupting Daimler-Chrysler fuhrer Dieter Zetsche as he's leaving the Daimler-Benz headquarters--yeah sure--anyway, this Amurican idiot asks Dieter, "What makes the merger of Chrysler and Daimler worthwhile...." To which Dieter says, "Get in," inviting the stupid Amurican nerd to get into his Daimler SUV. He's gonna personally demonstrate his answer for this dumbass goofball Amurican lad. It's like a superior person would treat a dumkoft.

First Dieter shows the nerd how fast this piece of junk will go by taking the monotonous SUV out onto a monotonous test track--you know German carmakers love their test tracks and have them all over Germany--plus they love to drive fast, the way Hitler taught them with his fabby Robert Moses-like autobahn system. Then Dieter starts bragging about German engineering; the quality of the production; and finally the luxurious style.

They tag the commercial, you can tell it was made by an Amurican advertising agency, at least we can, with the nerd suddenly burping out, "Are you a real doktor?" to which Dieter responds by crashing the SUV, it doesn't look like the SUV they started out in, head first into a crash-test wall. "There, does that answer your question?" says the arrogant Dieter.

For some reason that commercial chills our asses.

First of all, Hitler's very favorite car company and military equipment maker was Daimler-Benz. Yep, they make Mercedes-Benzes, Hitler's very favorite cars. They also made Daimler aircraft and I'm sure they helped in V2 rocket production and set up many manufacturing facilities in those benevolent conscentration camps.

Hitler rode around siegheil-ing all the German dupes in his very favorite big half-military/half luxury limo convertible Daimler-Benz, though for trips outside his Berlin headquarters he preferred his big Mercedes-Benz SL.

Mercedes have always been cars for big shots you had to siegheil. Big Daddy Hitler created the Volkswagen--yep, the bug was his own design--remember, he was an artist--for the common ordinary stupid people.

Trot over to this site for a prejudiced look at the Daimler-Chrysler's attempt at hornswaggling stupid Amuricans (including Amurican stockholders).

http://www.daimlerchryslervehicleproblems.com/

We Amuricans always trust the quality of anything foreign, even crap from China, over goods made in the USA--I think it's due to the fact that the big corporations blame Amurican workers expecting high wages and huge benefits as the reason we lost our automobile industry, even though the American people warned Detroit for years we were tired of their big gas guzzling designs--we called it "Detroit iron." We remember when Renault, makers of truly worthless pieces of French crap cars, came out with a new designed Renault in the early sixties--the original design was an ugly contraption used as war taxis/ambulances in WWI and redesigned for WWII. This new Renault, imported to America, got 35 miles to a gallon of gas, which in those days cost around 25 cents a gallon--and the oil companies were richer than Jehovah's tax-free coffers back then the same as they are today. This Renault and the Volkswagen beetle got Detroit to making compact cars finally, though most of them, remember the ill-designed and deadly Corvair, were pieces of crap in terms of quality.

We found out later, Detroit had sent its compact car building knowledge over to General MacArthur's New World Order in Japan after WWII--that old military son of a bitch took over Japan like a dictator after the war--it's due to this old egomaniacal general's insistence that we took all our industries over there, including our banking industry and our automobile industry [both Germany and Japan after WWII adopted the American banking system]--we tooled up Toyota and Nissan (who originally called their cars "Datsuns" because Nissan sounded too Japanese for Amurican ears--especially to Japanese-Americans put in the Great White Father's own concentration camps in WWII) to make compact cars for the compact Japanese, but also, since American car companies were involved in the tooling of this industry, they took half-interest roles in these new companies, like allowing Japanese and German carmakers to actually build and sell their cars in the US, which didn't bother U.S. carmakers because they had a vested interest in the Japanese car industry from the git-go. The Amurican car companies were involved in a global automobile industry long before the global marketplace was declared in the nineties. The computer age, by the bye, led to the global marketplace.

We Are Tired Growlers
We are back from our fabulous vacations, but we aren't anxious to start grinding our axes again yet. thegrowlingwolf has retreated to one of his unknown hideouts--like Heaven exists in an invisible outerspace, so do thegrowlingwolf's hideouts, though we know where the one is in Davenport, Iowa; it's an old hotel down near the waterfront. Go find the bastard and give him a kiss for us. Watch that breath, though; he's probably been drinking that Keokuk moonshine he swears by when he's in corn-fed Iowa.

We'll see if we see you tomorrow.

thestaff
for The Daily Growler

This World Is NOW HELL

This is the 100th Posting of The Daily Growler this year.
Ah, Ye Disbelievers
Did you consider Hell a figment of the religious nutjobs's fanatic imagination? Well, think again; the nutjobs have always contended that this world belongs to a guy they call The Devil, and now I think they're right and I think I know who the Devil is and I think you do too--I believe in hoodoo, remember. Some of nutties call him Satan. I to this day don't understand the Devil. According to the professors of biblical fiction, he was originally named Lucifer (yep, he was named after the phospherous match) and boy howdy, he was the cat's meow up in Heaven, especially with Heaven's East Coast Greenwich Village crowd, or its West Coast Castro crowd. He was, according to the old Hebrew talespinners, such a handsome devil some stupid angels started worshipping him and turning their winged backs on the real Big Daddy. The Devil was so handsome and he was getting such great worshipping that he got the big head (he was an "angel" then--and people who believe in angels can certainly believe an angel can turn into a devil but not vice versa) and formed an army--yep, they do have wars in Heaven--and he and his soldiers of Heavenly fortune went up against Big Daddy and his Swiss Guard, dressed a la Richard M. Nixon. I am assuming that all heavenly beings in the original Heaven were males since when the Christian God made Man he made first a male only; the female came later at the request of the first-made MAN, the alpha man, or Adam.

So they had this big war in Heaven. Big Daddy's troops were led by an archangel named Michaelangelo--I'm not joking--and Big Mike and Big Daddy's Swiss Guard kicked the Devil and his renegade angels's asses, whipped 'em good, and as a result, Lucifer lost his wings and as further humiliating punishment, Big Pappy suited him up in a red suit with a pointed red arrow-tipped tail, a head piece fitted out with the horns of Moses coming out of his forehead, and forced him to carry a pitchfork [I never thought about it, but according to the old Hebrew talespinners, Big Daddy must have invented the pitchfork]. And in Big Daddy's Supreme Court, Big Daddy judge and jury, Lucifer was branded the Devil and sentenced to the pits of a place Big Daddy said he was building especially for the Devil's eternity called Gehenna, or, in plain ole English, Hell, where the Devil and his crowd would burn in Hell's infamous Lake of Fire--except, Big Daddy did respect Lucifer's faithful angelic servitude prior to his "falling," and he allowed Lucy, as the boys called him, to keep his ability to transform himself into beasts and reptiles, scary creatures Big Daddy had already cursed before Lucifer's excommunication; oh, and how could I have forgotten having already mentioned living on a goat ranch, he could also take the form of the male goat, then legendary in Heaven for its extreme randiness.

Since Big Daddy hadn't finished building Hell yet, the Devil got another break. Big Daddy said before he sent him to Hell, he was going to banish him to Earth, the planet where Big Daddy's Garden of Eden would be some day. It's very confusing, folks. It's sort of like I can't understand how Gitmo is on Cuban soil, leased from Castro. That's weird to me same as this Garden of Eden being on earth yet the earth being the Devil's possession. Why doesn't Castro kick us off the island? Doesn't that make you wonder about Castro? Since when does Castro respect long-term leases?

Big Daddy said the Devil could have the Earth for his own and he could challenge the mission of Big Daddy's only son when he sent him to Earth for his predicted death on the cross--even though Big Daddy didn't have a son then, though one assumes he must have been planning on having a son--the Messiah, come on, though that would make no sense to me either. Since God already had Heaven, an immense place we assume, why the Hell did he give a shit about this pimple-on-the-ass-of-the-universe planet called Earth? I mean unless you believe this is the only planet in the universe--well, hell, it is the only planet human beings, whether human-animal hybrids or normal humans and all the creatures of the field and jungle, can survive--I mean, I'm really confused now. Since this is the only place human beings can survive in the universe, why isn't the earth Heaven? Why isn't it Paradise? Shangra La. Nirvana. Oh, I forgot, Heaven is an invisible planet in an invisible universe--in one of those biblically hidden star systems--where humans can survive, since, I suppose, Big Daddy is a human, right? No? You say he's a superbeing beyond human comprehension? Yet, we're the best this dude could come up with, us pitiful bunch of scared-to-death warring sorry bastards, except for a number of us who are superhuman beings--I know several superhuman beings and I'm glad to have them as friends.

So the Devil gets the earth and he gets us with the earth since Big Daddy sentenced the Devil to a time on earth, giving him princely power of it, before he's shipped to the Lake of Fire for the rest of eternity (which we're all living in at the moment, you see). Our only salvation from going en masse with the Devil to Hades is simply believe that a Nazarene Jew named Joshua ben Joseph is the only "living" son of Big Daddy's, which you show after you're 12-years-old by letting one of Big Daddy's messengers dunk you under water, and when you come up out of the water you are given a free ticket (on the Glory Train--or on the Old Ship of Zion, depending on your take on it; I've never heard mention of a Jetliner to Glory, which I assume would be supersonic--or maybe it's one of our Columbia space shuttles) to Heaven. Otherwise, you are in trouble. No ticket; no Heaven. You will be branded one day with trip sixes on your forehead--"the mark of the beast"--see, hot-ironed on your forehead by the Devil himself posing as a beast again. This will all happen at a thing called the Judgment when Moses, I think, is going to start reading names out of this huge Book of Life, "when the roll is called up yonder"--yes, Heaven is "up yonder," invisible, but it's up there. That's why Holy Rollers put a weird grimace on their faces and raise their arms trembling toward the heavens (up yonder) when they get the Holy Spirit. They're anticipatin' being "called Home." Which is also confusing. How come Heaven is a Christian's home? I suppose you could say Big Daddy is the original Christian since he came up with this stupid shit. Can you believe your fellow human beings, most of them, believe this? And my ridiculing it is not really distorting it that much; I'm sticking to the story pretty strictly.

If your name ain't in the Book of Life. Whewwww boy! Pack your bags, you are Hellbound on the Greyhounds of Hell bus--look at 'em all cockily laughing on that bus. "Have a good time now, you sons'a bitches, you'll soon enough be roasting in Holy Hell."

An atheist like myself has no choice according to Christians, even though we don't believe in gods of any kind and especially the sons or daughters of these mostly wacky gods, which means we neither believe in Jesus H. Christ or the Devil--maybe I can use my imagination and imagine Jesus H. being a real man who lived a couple'a thousand years ago, but the Devil? Sorry. I can't believe in the Devil no way you picture him to me. I say, "Bring him on." I'll fight a dude who is threatening to take me with him to serve his time with him in a F-ing Lake of Fire for something I can't believe not matter how many lobotomies I give myself. Only a truly insane person can believe this shit. Hey, look at 'em fighting likes dogs over in the Middle East, a battles now of my god is bigger than your god with Amurica saying, F all you all's gods, WE ARE GOD, you dumb bastards.

What gives Israel a right to defend its right to be where it is today? I hear that as an excuse for Israel invading Lebanon and conquering parts of it just because some fanatic Islamics who call themselves Hezbollah do not recognize Israel as a sovereign state and go extreme and say they want to destroy it. Hell yeah they want to destroy it. If you're a Palestinian, you haven't had a decent life at all since Israel was given its right to exist by the U.S.-dominated UN in 1947--and those of us who were alive back in those long-ago days remember that Israel was set up because no other country wanted to take the Jews in, even after WWII. Check it out. Britain turned them away. The U.S. turned them away. As a result, the Palestinians had to give up the cream of their land and then forced to live in a Hell on earth that was once the deserted lands surrounding their Paradise, their Palestine.

So when Jehovah kicked old horny Adam out of the Garden, what happened to the Garden? Did Jehovah abandon it? Baghdad sits there now; maybe Jehovah is pissed off at the Iraqis for claiming land that formerly belonged to him, the same as the Palestians are pissed off at Israel for claiming land that formerly belonged to them and want it harmed.

Is the tomato plant really the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? It certainly won't hurt you to eat tomatoes. They're full of a good stuff called lycopene, what makes tomatoes red, with the exception of man's refined hot house tomatoes of today, which are very seldom full red, mostly effete yellowish, washed out red because they are picked before they're ripe. Today's store-sold tomatoes are pieces of fruit crap. You need to find what they now call heirloom tomatoes, full rich red organic tomatoes, to get all that thick rich red lycopene into your system. It protects you against a lot of attackers, like the normally invincible CANCER. It could also perhaps offer you more eternal life than God and his foolish Christianity can. Why not then worship the tomato?

So, speaking of cancer, and this Tropic of Cancer situation the cosmococcic world is now wallowing in, the Christian crusaders, led by the bungling master of failure, Georgie Porgie, our "president," are going to turn this fucking world into an actual Hell; they're turning our Paradise into, one big Lake of Fire, a Gitmo for the Christian Devil.

The Fools Who Represent Us Are Omniscient
Senator Inhofe (it rhymes with Cretin) is from that great progressive state of Oklahoma, a state whose whole economy is based on energy resources and was stolen lock, stock, and barrels from the Native Americans that were forced marched to it when it was designated Indian Territory by the then Great White Father, which was fine until the Great White Father discovered that Oklahoma was sitting on a whole bunch'a pools of his favorite product, good ole Earl, I mean OIL. [I've already given comment on the great state of Oklahoma and Tulsa in a previous post--WOW, back in April maybe--one of the early ones.]

Inhofe is a true human-animal hybrid nutjob. He babbles that those who believe in global warming are falling for the "big lie"--the same as the lie propagated by Hitler and the Hitlerians during those Dark Ages that said the Jews were the reason for Germany's economic and social failures; kill the Jews, problem solved. Old Senator Inhoof-and-mouth, he's one of those old porky jowled clean-cut Christian hornswagglers, same as Okie-Homa's pride and joy, Brother Oral Roberts, the healing hypocrite over in oil-blessed Tulsa, believes that everything Old "I Give Up" Al Gore says in his currently buck-making lectures, book, and movie, about what's coming due to global warming can be refuted by "scientists." Yep, that's what he said. Yeah, the alchemists over at Oral's failed, bankrupt 50-story eyesore healing horsespital have refuted global warming based on the "science" of Holy Bible prophecies. It ain't global warming, it's the Lard himself coming back on that big white horse [where did Jesus learn to ride a horse? The best he can afford in the Good Book is a god-damn donkey. Anybody can ride a donkey; they're like riding a Shetland pony when you're a curtainclimber. But riding a big white horse; that's another matter].

So global warming is just a natural occurrence when you believe all the hogwash in the Christian Bible or hell, in the Book of the Moron Mormons, or hell, in the Koran...you name one of those holy books, they all say the same thing: the world will end one day because it will burn up, as George Gamov explained in his book The Death of the Sun, because right before the Sun goes dark, it expands to a tremendous heat, so hot it finallys blows to all Hell and the heat emitted by the blow up will certainly "scorch" the earth, as predicted by the Christian bible--you even heard of "the scorched earth" policy? Check out VietNam.

Hell on Earth
I think it's here. L.A. has just gone through two straight weeks of temperatures over 100 degrees, one or two days getting over 115. This has nothing to do with L.A. sitting in the middle of a waterless desert.

I heard a talking head on teevee blaming the current heat problem on "the grid system in California that was built in the 1930s." Hell, you idiot, the heat is because the sun is having no trouble blowing UV rays in through that hole in our ozone that doesn't exist according to idiot Christians, and besides, all grid systems in the Far West come from the Rural Electrification Agency of Roosevelt's administration which wired the USA from Tennessee all the way out to California in the 1930s. Your question should be, "Why hasn't the grid system been improved in all those years?"--and you notice I didn't ask why hasn't it been refined.

Water or the lack of it, not land, will be the cause of future wars. People having children these days should consider this shit. I know they won't because man is not going to plan his parenthood just like he's not going to quit going to wars or killing himself and every other living thing on the earth before he's satisfied. Parents should think about what their kids's future will be like in the future good ole US of A. First off, future kids will be conscripted for military service one day soon, that I guarantee, since the US of A is now fixed in a war economy. Perpetual war is now an economic necessity (WAR (We Are Republicans), what the NeoCons are praying diligently for--praying for those "wars and rumors of wars" prophesied in the Christian's Word of God. If you think war isn't profitable, check out British Petroleum's current profits--they're through the roof; and then check out the recent profits of the "president's" personal spies, AT&T--80% over last year. If you want to get rich, sell all you possess and invest in Halliburton, Exxon Mobil, the Carlyle Group--any company profiting from the war--and that's all of them, folks, every god-damn one of them. Even the toilet paper industry. The U.S. Army doesn't make its own toilet paper. Oh yeah, it's rough as a cob because you know the Army gets shoddy products, which they pay 3 or 4 times over market value for. It's called foolish waste when you do it; it's called corporate profits when the government does it.

The US military of the future will be going around capturing energy sources, including water reserves--the biggest aquifer is under Brasil and Argentina, so look for a war in South America soon. Currently our military is securing oil deposits, but more and more, it looks like those deposits aren't as rich as we thought--Iraq oil cannot pay for the cost of Bush's Iraq Folly afterall. Bush needs yet another war to fix this war (the fool thought he could like his old Pappy paid for his little Gulf War adventure--the only war we've won, according to Pappy, since WWII--get all his coalition dupes to foot the bill for, like Pappy got Japan and those poor fools to pay for his Gulf War folly).

Notice how Bush is promoting nuclear power again now; aha, why?, you ask--or should ask. The first nuclear power plant construction in something like thirty years was just approved by the Bush administration. Today, as a matter of fact, the Congress will vote on trading India nuclear secrets for mangoes ("We will enjoy eating Indian mangoes"). At one time in our past it looked as though the nuclear power industry was going off-line totally; but, nope, it's coming back with an explosive roar now. You need oil to power up the nuclear plants, but you also need a hell of a lot of water--to cool them down so they don't blow sky high and take out a couple'a million of us as she blows (ConEd says it will be more like only 200,000 of us have to be sacrificed in case Indian Point blows sky high. Like New York City sits only 25 miles down wind from two of the oldest reactors online, the Indian Point reactors, owned and operated by ConEd (I think under a set-up management company now). You want to be scared, check out this site:

http://www.comicbookradioshow.com/chernobyl.html

Hell, though, don't worry, as Edward Teller said (and more of these insane quotes are on the above Website), "Radiation speeds up evolution," and this kook invented the hydrogen bomb (a mother we don't mention much, most of us still wrapped up in conventional nuclear weapons--but one of these hydrogen babies will blow holy hell out of even the #1 sinniest terrorist nation in the world (Iran at the moment) and all the world surrounding it, too, which includes Israel).

Refining. That's the answer to the nuclear crisis, according to professional refiners like ConEd--oh yeah, and I might add, like all corporations, ConEd never lies and never makes mistakes. Their spins are always for our benefit; even their constant rate increases. Still we have massive power outages--the big city of Queens, New York, is still going without electrical power after 9 straight days--and still is as I type this. Modern industry; making life better for us? You wanna bet. And NYC's billionaire wimp mayor defends ConEd and tells us we should go up to the lollygagging ConEd workers and thank them for the tremendous job they're doing. [In digging up the street, ConEd has one guy, usually a black man, sorry, but it's the truth, using the jackhammer as they tear hell out of a street that is already scarred by their previous jackhammerings (ConEd digs up my street at least 10 times a year). Then there are two white guys who stand over the deepening ditch and watch the black man jackhammering. Standing off to the side on the sidewalk are three or four more white guys, older guys with big bellies, who just stand there watching the black guy and the two white guys. Wherever their work truck is parked you'll find another ConEd worker usually asleep in the cab of the truck or else talking on his cell phone (I've never seen a female ConEd worker in the street, though I suppose there is one somewhere in the system). In the back of the truck are two or three guys, usually white men, who seem to be busy, doing what you can't tell, but they have a radio going and are surrounded by the trash of food cartons, paper sacks, pop cans, signs that the boys are eating junk food often, which means they take a lot of breaks, though the longer you watch them, taking breaks seems to be their main job. Sometimes you see civilian cars parked around a ConEd site. You soon notice all these cars have out-of-state license plates, a lot of them from southern states, like South Carolina (home of the Savannah River Hell-on-Earth nuclear reactor) or Virginia.

By the way, how easy would it be for a terrorist to get into Indian Point (2 nuclear reactors 30 miles north of NYC and a metropolitan population of around 20 million) and say blow one of the reactors up? Pretty easy? The answer is yes. A couple of years ago a drunk ran his car through the Indian Point gate and rammed it right up against one of the reactors before his progress was halted, he passed out, and was busted. "Not a problem," crowed the motherly old-broad ConEd sends out as a spinner, "at no time was the reactor itself in any jeopardy." Right. But what if that drunk had been Timothy McVeigh and his car had been loaded with a few hundred pounds of amonia fertilizer? Yep, that could have done quite a job on the Metro New York City area. One New York congressman, one of those out-of-sync Upstate New Yorkers who are constantly jealous of NYC--some literally hate NYC and can't wait to see it blown to smithereens-- says not to worry. New York City can be totally evacuated in two days using odd and even license plate numbers. Wow, dude, you're a genius. I could go on but that last reference ought to flush the shit out of your brain so the picture becomes clearer. Odd and even license plates? What about us jerky NYC residents who don't own a car? Oh, I forgot, every Amurican has two cars in the garage and pot in every chicken...sorry, pot in every Phillies Blunt...or is it a chicken in every pot? One day, we won't have a pot to even piss in.

I'd hate to be an Amurican kid coming up in this day and age. And I have a wonderful, beautiful, smart-as-a-whip niece who is currently waiting to bingo a beautiful new growling wolf boy into this world as I type this. She has a 3-year-old daughter who I've deemed a future star just going on the image she leaves you with now. But I don't envy these kids. I'm gonna be checking off this mortal coil before they have to face the music they're going to have to face. I hope it's the music of the culture I came out of and not the music of nuclear explosions going off all around them given under the orders of a Jewish god riding a big white horse out of the clouds--those clouds, of course, will be nuclear clouds.

theoptimisticgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Refinements on My Mind

Coltrane vs. Refinement
Is where John Coltrane took jazz a level of refinement or reformation? I got this "refinement" shit on my mind the other day and I can't shake it. Who's a refiner and who's a redefiner or a recreationist? Recreation sounds like too much fun but then I read an article where a guy says refinement should lead to things being pleasurable for the participant; like a refinement of your job, for instance; you "fine tune" yourself to the point you become the commander of your job, you become the possessor of the refinement process that makes your job worthy of you and soon you find yourself gaining pleasure from your job. To this guy, refinement gives us more than just ordinary pleasure, it gives us luxurious pleasure. Since we now find our jobs pleasurable after refinement, we apply ourselves more to our jobs, produce more, make more money, and then we enable ourselves to move into the pleasure of these luxuries that only refinement can bring. This guy believes you are pretty damn refined if you're tooling around town in a Beamer sports job. It would naturally add up to me that if you are tooling around town in a Beamer sports job, plush with luxuries, then, too, you probably have a luxurious sex life. You catch? Refinement brings cultivation--or that disgusting word "civilization." Refinement takes the rawness (wildness/savagery/uncleanliness) out of you.

Take the wolf out of me and what have you got? awhimperingpuppydog--I refuse to become refined. Put that little awhimperingpuppydog in a burlap bag and give him quick passage to the Atlantic Ocean via the toilet-flushing East River just down the street from where I'm hacking out these daily blogs, flushing its shit out to sea just behind the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Ward. The garbage and the nuts have a lovely caged in balcony hanging over the brown-slimy waters of the old East River, which is directly west and opposite to NOT the West River--no, but the North River, whose name has been refined over the years to the Hudson River--they had to name it that because of the Hudson River Valley--I jest, of course; it's a tribute to old Hank Hudson, one of those snooty old English rascal adventurers those who brought us the British Empire, I say, and the mess we have in the world today. Henry got a river and an automobile named after him.

Hudson automobiles were my brother's favorite cars. My brother lived during those great days when Robert Johnson sang about his Terraplane, a Hudson Motor Company car; and young folks today sing their little asses off about Robert Johnson's Terraplane and they've never even seen one--never been in one--never flown in a Terraplane. I love that art deco name. The Land Plane.
[I don't know if you can find it on his site, but this artist, one of my favs, painted a hell of a Terraplane coming out of a lightning storm created by a radio tower, if my memory serves me correctly. I have a postcard of this painting so I hope Nick still shows it on his site. Even if he doesn't, being acquainted with the goodly talented Nick's site won't do you a bit of harm. Catch the weavings of this super mind--ya can't help but love the guy.

http://www.nickjainschigg.org/

Or here's a shot of a really cool restored (not refined) Terraplane pick-up truck.

http://www.carnut.com/cgi-bin/02/image.pl?/show/02/het/het060.jp

A famous plumber back in my hometown drove a Terraplane truck. He was a friend of the family, my brother went with the redheaded daughter--the whole family were redheads and with fiery tempers to boot, and his Terraplane truck was fixed up to look like a fire engine, painted fiery red like their tempers and their hair, with a big gold fire engine bell mounted on the hood that had a pull chain that went through the roof of the truck inside the cab so the old man could whiz down the street in that fire engine Terraplane donging the hell out of that bell. He put a siren on it one time, but the sheriff made him take it off the truck; he said the red-headed plumber with a siren would be impersonating somebody serious.

A refined Terraplane, which is what a rodded up Terraplane is, not a restored one, but a hopped up one, customized, you see, a refinement on what I think was a more refined looking car in its original state than any modernizing that took place 70 years later. I like that restored pick-up truck though.

You might as well have a look at Robert Johnson's original lyrics.

Terraplane Blues

(Robert Johnson)

And I feel so lonesome, you hear me when I moan.
And I feel so lonesome, you hear me when I moan.
Who been drivin' my Terraplane, for you since I been gone?

I said I flash your lights, your horn won't even blow.
(Somebody's been running my batteries down here...)
I even flash my lights, mama---this horn won't even blow.
Got a short in this connection, hoo-well, way down below.

I'm gon' hoist your hood, mama--I'm bound to check your oil.
I'm gon' hoist your hood, mama--I'm bound to check your oil.
I got a woman that I'm lovin'---way down in Arkansas.

BRIDGE:
Now you know, the coils ain't even buzzin'
Little generator won't get that spark.
All's in a bad condition, you gotta have
These batt'ries charged, I'm cryin'
Please--please don't do me wrong.
Who been drivin' my Terraplane now,
For you since I been gone.

Mr. Highway man, please don't block the road.
Mr. Highway man, please don't block the road.
She's regist'rin' a cold one hundred
and I'm booked and I got to go.

Mmmmm---Mmmmmmmmmm.
Mmmmm------You hear me weep and moan.
Who been drivin' my Terraplane
For you since I been gone.

I'm 'on' get deep down in this connection
Keep on tanglin' with yo' wires.
I'm 'on' get deep down in this connection
Keep on tanglin' with yo' wires.
And when I mash down on your little starter
Then your spark plug will give me fire.

You've gotta hear it done by Robert himself. That's the only version worth a shit; those covers done by Foghat and some other creepy Long Island band or sucky Brit bands sucked truly all the way; Robert has rolled in his grave to the point he's plum' tuckered out over some white boys missing the whole meaning of his song because goddammit, they ain't never been in a Terraplane. How many of these dudes ever checked the spark on a car? Or used an emergency brake? Or even "flashed" the lights of a car?

I'm currently working on a song called "The Tucker Blues."]

Now back to our story...
Reconstitution sounds too damn concrete to me. Except concrete is a bad example since concrete is an abstract way of mixing sands, clays, gravels, lime, and water.

I deduced when I was a kid that all cement came from Portland, Oregon, a place I visited a lot as a kid since my dad's sister lived there and I liked her husband a hell of a lot, my favorite uncle, who was 6 foot 5 and had a "tool" on him that made a jackass cry with shame--I know because he taught me how to take a leak in a lake once--he whipped his out, said "Follow me," and trotted a few steps into the piddling lapping waves (as if gasping for breath) of that lake and let fly a stream of urine that resembled the water coming out of our garden hose when you'd put the nozzle on it. It even matched the water out of that lake, my hometown's water supply, which during the dry months of summer, July and August, had its water level so reduced the lakebottom weeds would start growing toward the sun and they gave off a rusty color and a rusty taste so that sometimes that lake water was as yellow as piss during those months. I never thought about it like I would think about it now; I mean, we pissed in the lake then went back to the lake cabin and drink water by the gallons we got so thirsty pissing in the lake. Ironic, eh? Drinking mixed pisses; except my mother had a friend whose husband ran the filteration plant for my hometown's water supply and I knew what "filtration" meant because I used to play many hours in the main filteration plant with this man's two sons and once I even made out with his daughter back in the back of the filteration plant on a big pile of sand that was used in the filteration process--a white, clearly refined sand.

Since my dad was a carpenter and used cement in his foundation work, I knew all cement came from Portland, Oregon, because it was all called "Portland" cement. Later I came to find out Portland cement had nothing to do with Portland, Oregon, but to do with Portland stone, which is found in Dorsett in good ole Great Britain. What the originator of the term called "Portland cement" wasn't that at all either but was a form of lime called "Roman cement," a type of cement patented in England earlier than "Portland cement," which ironically ended up getting its standards from Germany, Stern, Germany, to be exact. But, heck, read about it in Wikipedia; they even show you the process step-by-step.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_cement

Along Came Betty
I watched Betty Carter singing one night while she was still very much alive, with Norman Simmons on piano--whew, what a night. And Betty took jazz singing to a higher plane of involvement, but she didn't refine it, she reformed it into her way of singing, her phrasing, her passing notes of slip and slide, those risings from depths to those crescendos of flying high home, and I don't mean flying home high by that. Climbing her own ladder. Taking what she had developed and found nuances within it to step on out into her special outerspaces, as far out ["far out" is definitely jazz terminology] as she could dare go before hitting that great wall of Chaos out there and then come crashing back down to earth, exhausted a bit but very pleased and feeling full of luxurious pleasure.

Flights! That's what I'm talking about, not refinement, though I suppose one of the tools one uses to create the vehicles that take us on our flights is refinement. I can see using refinement to mean "a tightening up" of a structure...but, no, that bugs me, too.

Refinement in jazz to me is Dave Brubeck. Reformation is John Coltrane. The differences are obvious. Brubeck played for popularity; stage presence; complicated yet keeping to the blues and therefore just more staging and not really an advancement in a jazz music sense. Dave's taking jazz into other rhythms than the traditional 4/4 is very classical but constraining if it doesn't come naturally like it does in the compositions of Charles Mingus. Refinement meant nothing to an idealist like Mingus. His dreams weren't refined at all; they were raw-up-from-the-ground feelings given height and free flight by the many reformations that naturally evolve out of self experimentation--the daring of Betty Carter to take her phrasings and times and beats into another of her own outerspace (off-the-page) levels.

Refinement can be acted out--look at all the old Hollywood fop actors--but it can never be real. Like all the current male stars in Hoakywood; check 'em out; they all look alike; the pose alike; they are simply refinements of actors like Montgomery Clift, who were refinements in the James Dean image, created by Hollywood spinners and not by old country hick Midwesterner Dean; Dean was a dumbass kid; Hollywood made him James Dean.

By acting according to a taught method, the actor is constantly refining his methods; he's not reforming them; if an actor starts reforming his methods, he loses methods altogether and is left speechless and immobile on stage or in front of a camera.

A jazz musician strives to break out of too much refining. As Burton Greene said in the interview I posted here a few days ago--his spontaneity led him to once bring a garbage can lid into Town Hall in NYC and slam it down on the Town Hall grand piano's insides like it was a cymbol (and it was a symbol, too)--or, like he also confessed to putting golf balls in a piano's guts once. Think how you would perform with golf balls in your guts. I like, too, that Burton gave credit where credit was due about being the first pianist to play the insides of a piano. He gives that credit to Henry Cowell and his Aeolian Harp and Banshee pieces from the golden age of American classical music; and Henry's the first dude I ever heard do it. I learned how to do the "aeolian harp" thing from watching Henry on teevee way back yonder. You hold down the loud pedal and then run your hands over the strings--holding down the loud pedal gives you a definite harp effect when you play the strings either individually plucked or openly strummed. Makes the piano sound like a dulcimer.

Recording engineers started "fine tuning" recording sessions that left sound-engineered recordings so refined they lost their "mistakes," their moments, their thinking--you know as in graphic art so in recording music, mistakes can be "cut" and corrections "pasted" in. See, this all has to do with computerized logic (as found in ProTools, the recording engineers software of refinement).

I found a blogger who relates blogging to what he calls "stepwise refinement." It is interesting to follow the logic of these computer programmers and how they view the process of refinement. Check out William Turkle's relating blogging to computer programming. This guy's pretty smart in thegrowlingwolf's way of thinking, though I admit I resent his knowledge in a unrefined way.

http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/2006/05/blogging-andas-stepwise-refinement.html

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Singing the "Summertime Blues"-- all alone in the svelte offices of The Daily Growler in the heart of downtown Show Low, Arizona. Yep, we're showin' low ourselves.