Wolf Man in the Fog on the Observation Deck

Liars
I find it extremely fun to watch the talk in Congress going on over Roger Clemens, a stupid baseball player who married a trophy blonde who's heavily into working out just like all babes in the USA who think they're hot and potential "millionaire" grabbers and as everybody "knows," steroids and growth hormones are easily obtainable in the thousands of workout salons around the country--ask the Governor of California about steroid use in bodybuilding. Check out the male and female bodies on the phony wrestling shows--and especially check out the body of the owner of the World Wrestling (Federation) Entertainment, Vince McMahon; he was originally a skinny runt like most of the men in his family (a Rasslin' family that goes way way back), now he's a puffed up looking hulk of a man with muscles even in his forehead. These guys gobble steroids like salted peanuts--come on; yet these big jerks go on making millions off their diaper-wearing google-eyed fans unhindered by the Acts of Congress. But poor old Roger Clemens. They're out to get his ass; they want to wipe this poor bastard's records off the books (he won over 300 games and 7 Cy Young Awards and helped Boston, Toronto, and New York American League teams attain both World Series championships and yearly playoff chances thanks to his winning over 20 games a year for a lovely number of years). When he came to the Yankees the first time, he starred and helped Joe Torre, the greatest living baseball manager, by the way, take the Yankees to a record number of playoff chances and World Series championships. He then LIED to the Yankee fans and George Steinbrenner by saying he was retiring for good only to turn up a while later in Houston saying he wasn't retiring after all and instead was signing with the Astros--and not only that, but since the Yankees weren't willing to deal fairly with their winningest pitcher that year, Andy Pettite, touted by the way as almost a brother to Roger, Andy was following Roger to Houston and there was joy in Houston and the families were doing a lot of home time together, Houston was home for both of them, and the Astros were setting Enron (yep, named after Kenny Boy Lay's crooked energy company) Field up for the coming World Series they would surely be in with two great Yankee pitchers joining the team. Of course that move proved kind'a wrong for both Roger and Andy. Andy injured himself down there and Roger wasn't really that brilliant, though he was still able to pitch brilliant games every now and then. Finally, year before last, Roger again said he was retired for good and Andy decided he wanted to be a Yankee again and that's how it turned out, with Andy coming back to the Yankees after being away for several years and a couple of injuries.

Now here's what all New York Yankees true fans know about George Steinbrenner--he loves hiring old has-been pitchers--Doc Gooden for example--going on the legend that you put a dwindling star in a Yankee uniform and it rebuilds his confidence and he debuts and he's really shit though Steinbrenner has PR'd him to where he's smelling like roses--and in his Steinbrenner-rejuvenation-process, Doc Gooden did pitch a no-hitter as a Yankee but that was about it. Soon Doc was back doing cocaine in Tampa.

Steinbrenner tried his same rejuvenation scheme 4 years ago with Randy Johnson, once the greatest pitcher in both leagues--why he had just led Arizona to a World Series, the desert rattlers once a low-life worthless team that came in dead last with the Colorado Rockies every year until they got Johnson and Curt Simmons; yet, Arizona was willing to let both these guys go for big bucks, which Steinbrenner gave them for Johnson and the Red Sox gave them for Simmons. Johnson was an embarrassing failure as a Yankee though he still pitched the Yankees into the World Series and he did win 19 games his worse season, but it was obvious he was becoming a bum and ready for the old pitcher's home.

And last year, right in the middle of a season that was getting back on track thanks to the solid managing of Joe Torre, Steinbrenner out of nowhere, without discussing it with Torre, brings Roger Clemens out of retirement with a huge big bonus wad of George's "free" money he makes off Yankees television rights and concession rights, much more monies than ticket sales rake in, though George has managed to raise ticket prices every year he's owned the Yanks and now with the new corporate-named Yankee Stadium there will be even fewer general admission tickets and, of course, their prices will be astronomical, like $55 a game (I'm exaggerating on purpose). [George recently changed the name of Legends Field, the Yankees long-time spring training camp ball field in Tampa-Saint Petersburg (George lives in Tampa by the way and not New York), to Steinbrenner Field. It originally was Al Lang Field.]

So Roger comes out of retirement and joins the Yankees staff--burdening Joe with yet another unreliable pitcher--I mean Joe had a whole staff of totally unreliable pitchers all last year including their best winner, Ching Ming Wang (sic), who pitches an almost no-hitter one game and then gives up 7 runs in the 1st inning in his next game--I mean Joe Torre last year put together a miraculous year for the Yankees, bringing them back from the lowest start ever for a Yankees team, while the team was hitting offensively way over .300, leading the league in hits and home runs; yet, the pitching staff was so full of bush league minor leaguers and bad-armed old pros this powerful hitting team struggled in the win column, though eventually through absolutely wondrous win streaks and heart-stopping close games, the Yankees were able to actually at one time TIE the Boston Red Sox for first place after sweeping the BoSox 5 games only to go to Tampa and lose 4 in a row; then to Baltimore to lose 3 in a row--the pitchers totally crashing suddenly near the end of August, Wang and Mussina the worst. Still the Yankees made the playoffs--and then Steinbrenner suddenly drunkenly announces Joe either wins the playoffs and the World Series or he's FIRED. Joe was devastated. You could see it in his frustrated face, that puzzling look, a look of defeat, since he knew he was having to depend on a true second-rate pitching staff that I think Joe knew down deep was going to let him down. The team by the playoffs was depending on the tons of bush league all-star pitchers who were totally unproven, especially the naive Jabo Chamberlain , a bumbling big lout who can throw a ball 100 mph and started off like a whirlwind, winning 3 in a row without giving up a hit, etc., but who eventually cost the Yankees any chance of winning the playoffs when he stupidly kept ptiching while fighting off a bunch of silly Cleveland gnats and kept pitching when he should have called time and refused to pitch anymore--yeah, OK, Joe fucked up, too; he could have stopped the game, but, no, the Yanks were winning and on a streak and then, BOOM, they pounded the "overblown" Jabo, and then pounded Mariano Rivera, and that was it for the Joe Torre Yankees.

Suddenly then after the winds had blown over and Joe Torre signed with the (god-damn) Los Angeles Dodgers (who are leaving Los Angeles--have you heard that one!--and look out Mets wherever the Dodgers end up--Joe manages just like Willie!)--there was formed this Mitchell Study of Steroid Use in Major League Baseball and Mitchell's big catch was Roger Clemens and his little dick buddy Andy Pettite--"These two players used steroids like motherfuckers for their final has-been careers and we think that is just awful, such a smear on pure, honest Major League Baseball, an entity declared by Congress to be a US citizen just like you and me"--you see, MLB can't be accused of being a monopoly! Anyway, they went after Roger like piranhas after a strong-current-swept-away cow--and Roger, being the dumb-ass ballplayer he is, denied, denied, denied--and on one charge, he laid it off on his wife--she was taking growth hormones not him! Then Steinbrenner got to Pettite and told him you wanna continue as a Yankee then you'd better turn on that asshole Clemens, which Coward Andy did. Coward Andy turned on the pitcher who worked with him like a big brother and taught him how to be a champion pitcher and their families became close, and Andy and Roger got close enough to maybe one night while drinking beers in Roger's fabulous basement pleasure room Roger gets a little loose you know and he says maybe, "Hell, Andy, why you worried about taking those growth hormone pills of your dying daddy; hell, I did some with my trophy wife--shit, man, you can get all you want of that shit from my personal trainer (another salon-type workout trainer)--shit, you can even get steroids from that bastard. You ever done 'roids, Andy?" "No, man, have you?" "Maybe! Who the fuck knows." So Andy, with his purest and most honest baby face on, turned on his pal and called him a fucking liar and Andy came out of it clean as a whistle, back on the Yankee squad (he's a bum and won't have a good year, but what the fuck, he's still pitching MLB ball and he can have a big retirement game this year and get a new car and the Steinbrenner son (what a hillbilly goofball Hank is) will talk about what a great Yankee Andy is and soon there'll be one of those tacky plaques to Andy in the New Yankee Stadium of Overpriced Luxury Boxes ("Welcome Asian Rim Businessmen")--and Matsui should be a bum this year--and Johnny Damon--and I'm afraid those prime-meat amateur pitchers they're gonna depend on may not turn out so swell--I don't see any of those minor-league wonders making it--I mean, come on, three of these bums never even had to pitch in Double A ball, coming to the Yankees straight from Single A ball--so amateur, the Yankees hired these bums's minor league pitching coach as the new Yankee pitching coach (the Yankees have always hired controversial pitching coaches). Also, Carl Pavanno is back working out with the team. What a waste of money Pavanno was. And Mariano Rivera--OK, he's a wonder, but last year he showed more flaws than ever--and Joe Gerardi? It's a lot different managing the Yankees than it is the Florida Marlins--ask Lou Pinella about that--hell, ask Joe Torre about that--Joe Torre is the guy who put his faith in Joe Gerardi as a back-up catcher, his claim to fame as a ballplayer--and what managerial abilities he picked up he picked up from Joe Torre and Willie Randolph. My prediction, Joe Gerardi, acting tough and independent right now, will crash by mid-year; if he does succeed and make a fool out of me, then I'll concede and take back all I said about Steinbrenner and I'll hope they throw Roger in the slammer for 25 years with no chance at parole. How dare that stupid baseball player LIE to Congress.

And that's the big fun I had yesterday. I mean I listened to all the hype about Clemens and oooohh-oooooooh he LIED to Congress and that's a felony and carries with it some slammer time. Then I listened to our LYIN' DOG, professional LIAR, phony, never-elected "president"--who LIED us into the WAR WITH IRAQ--now becoming the most expensive WAR since WWII--more expensive in terms of injuries to casualties (2 to 1 in WWII; 7 to 1 in this WAR), too--and I listened to this expert lyin' son of a lyin' dog and bitch (remember Pappy's big lie, "Read my lips!") stand before Congress and first say the economy is doin' jest fine and dandy--reiterating that the War in Iraq was good for the economy--in terms of materials needed and the jobs created by having to manufacture those war materials! Then he said, "Recession? Naw, come on, you fools, there's no recession; why there's not even any evidence of a recession." [Was that a LIE?] I'm thinking, reasoning, see, "Wait a minute. Roger Clemens lied to Congress about something as stupid as to whether or not he took 'not illegal' drugs and the 'president' point-blank-out-and-out bald-face lies right in Congress's face and nobody seems concerned about that, especially those lyin' sons of bitches in Congress." And who says Roger LIED to Congress when he simply followed the principles of American law (you can't convict yourself during interrogation) and denied, denied, denied. He perhaps should have followed the Administration's way of having to testify before Congress by just refusing to testify (read: Condo-Leasing Rice, Karl Rove, Unka Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Jerk-Off (the head of Homeland Insecurity). So Roger Clemens, a much greater American in my book than G.W. Bush (look what Bush did to Arlington, Texas, citizens when he needed a new ballpark down there in order to bail himself out from under his losing-money ownership of the team--after the new stadium was built he suddenly sold the team for big bucks, a lot more than he'd paid for the team, which was practically given to him by Eddie Childs, an old friend of the Bush family), is facing some cell time while G.W. Bush goes on lyin' like a dog to Congress, to We the People--and what's the worst that's gonna happen to that worthless piece of crap? Why he's gonna get to retire with his full presidential salary, money for his own office and staff, plus money to help him build his library (with no books in it) on the campus of Southern Methodist University (though the students and alumni don't want it there--still it's big We the People's bucks for SMU, folks, and besides, Pickles is on the SMU Board), plus he gets Secret Service (SS) protection for the rest of his life, plus full-benefits healthcare, plus securing his faux ranch in Crawford--"Hey, wait a minute, how's an Olympic-size swimming pool a security measure?"--plus he'll get a 20 million dollar book contract from Judy Regan--hell, even Pickles will get a book contract--plus he'll get the big bucks on the lecture circuit, like he's already said he's gonna try. Sounds like a good life ahead for the most impeachable unimpeachable "president" in our long, crooked history of lousy presidents. Roger Clemens on the other hand? Things don't look too good for him. Look for his wife to probably divorce him, too. George Steinbrenner? Oh, he's gradually fading off into that Forest of Alzheimer like Moses, er-ah, I mean Charlton Heston.

I still love the game of baseball just not the politics of baseball. The politics of anything always ruins it--remember what Huey Newton said, "It's all politics, even our food."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Birth of the Cool

Contemplatin' the "Cool"
Recently in the Court of the One-Sided Affair I was accused through the glaring of rich chocolate eyes of being "the most uncool man" "she'd" ever known! She went on to tell the Court that this applied not only to me--you see, I'm a white wolf-man hybrid--but also to all of my kind, en todo el mundo, meaning all "white people," a term I am compelled by some innerpersonal (solar plexus) source to deny being a member of, though I am in the general use of the term--yes, I am white, and to white people that's White with a capital double "u"--but I don't want to be white, at least not white like the white people that are classified as "white people in general," those who are proud to be White people! That's classifying me and I don't want to be classified; I've never wanted to be classified--nobody outside of me knows me well enough to classify me as this or that. OK, I can't hide the fact my skin has no color--white people call my no color white, because to white people being white is so rare it's pure, and besides, God the maker of all white people is white because it sez in that big Hebrew novel some ancient Judean wrote that God made "man," dig it, in his own image! Must be one ugly morterforker that God! And that feo God made Man--that's Adam to us [Quick Aside: I just bought on eBay a sweet old Lester Young 78 rpm record--a shellack--and one side's a tune called "Up in Adam"--now that's a cool title, if you can dig on it]--but, whoaaa, I'm readin' ole Moses here and he's sayin', yeah, OK, God was just walking along one day, piddling around, and he started kicking at the dust in the road and contemplating, like how, fuck, why the hell was he all alone here on this fine plantation-like estate--you know, like, hell God got lonely, so he stopped in his tracks, bent down, picked up a handful of dirt, spit in it, and, WHAM-O, he made this creature out of dirt--Iraq dirt, right?--and he looked at it and he said, "Son of a bitch, that's the spittin' image of ME! And God only knows how I love myself--oh my God, should I give this darling little God-like man a penis? Oooo-gah!" I mean, just think if you were God and living all alone on your own artificial planet sailing off somewhere in a solar system no one's discovered yet and you got lonely and suddenly you realized you could spit in the dust and mold that into a living creature--wouldn't you make an image of yourself?--and wouldn't you love that image?--it's like cloning! Hey, God was a cloner! All alone on his own planet in his own solar system and he's lonely and lusting and so he creates a lover, a LOVER MAN! By the way, folks, do you know why OUR solar system is the Devil's solar system? 'Cause the earth goes around the sun in OUR solar system. In God's solar system, the sun goes around the earth. Check it out! Hey, maybe I've come upon something here. Hebrew is written backwards to the King's English, right? So could it be everything in this damn Hebrew novel is backwards, even all its meanings? Like the sun going around the earth bit. Turn it around backwards and it's correct. Wow, I'm a god-damn rabbi! Whoaaa...could I be the Messiah? I'd turn the job down. I don't care to be nailed spread-eagled on some old smelly railroad-tie cross just to save mankind! I ain't dying for that sorry mess I don't care how powerful I'll be one day--you know, that day when the clouds suddenly open and Big Daddy's Boy comes riding down on a big white horse (are there no Hummers in Heaven? "What. No Hummers in Heaven, then Hell, I don't wanna go there!")--and there's another problem I've got with the Hebrew novelist; is he implying that God causes clouds to form at his will?--on the other hand, if I were writing that novel I guess, hell yeah, God can cause a big huge bunch of white clouds to suddenly portal and give his Big Son's army of angels access to the spoils of the Devil's earth.

[Another totally irrelevant aside: I had a drummer named Angel one time; what a devil he was, too, especially with the ladies with the big thighs and big behinds--"big shiny stockings," Angel called them--and Count Basie did a hit called "Big Shiny Stockings" and John Lee Hooker did "Big Legged Woman" and I know a woman who has big shiny stockings and she's a very sexy lady--whoo boy is she--but let me get back on the track here.]

Besides, like I said, I don't wanna be the Jewish Messiah. I am not messianic at all; besides, too, there's no way I can trace my lineage back to lusty ole Judaic King David ("the beloved")--and what a man with the ladies old ex-sheepherder and flute player David was--I mean, his principles were, hell, go ahead and commit every god-damn sin and break every fuckin' commandment in Moses's library of stone tablets, God's gonna forgive your ass whatever--so, hell, go ahead and screw your own daughter, God don't give a damn--he'll just curse some Ethiopians into slavery to cast your sins on those poor folk who were born back in the cradle where apes turned into Lucy-like human beings (Pogo called them "human beans"), the antithesis of the "man" God made from the dust of his Heaven mixed with his spit, which must have been polluted the way men turned out. Question for God: Was the dick on Adam mainly for pissing purposes?

By the way, do you think Charlton Heston might really, really have been Moses, like he claimed when he was drunk? You know, surely you can imagine Moses returning in a holy spirit form and entering into Charlton Heston's body just so he could play himself in that movie about himself. Of course, it's too late to waterboard Charlton and get the solid truth out of him since he's definitely too lost these days among the many trees fallen or otherwise in the Forest of Alzheimer. Wonder if he still carries a loaded shotgun around with him? "Where's my shotgun, saith Moses?" "You're holding it in your hands, Mr. Heston," replies his 24/7 nurse. "Mister Heston? Who the hell is Mister Heston? I'm Moses, Daddy of the Jews, dammit." "Yessir, Moses, anything you say, Moses, just wish you wouldn't point that shotgun at me." "What shotgun, your highness?"

Enough pestering poor Charlton.

So I have suffered recently being accused of being "the most uncool white man" in the world. Wow. Does that include a total no-talent like Paulie Shore? You mean Elton John is cooler than I am? Or Carrot Top? Oh my God. "Where's my white horse, papa, I'm ready to move back to Nazareth."

I could have been cool. I was there kind'a when the modern cool was born right after WWII, a soon to be forgotten war like the Viet Nam War is now forgotten and the Persian Gulf War is pretty much forgotten and the Afghanistan War is pretty much forgotten (especially by the presidential candy-dates)--it is not, however, forgotten by the Afghanistan people who have nothing to do with the Taliban--and they had nothing to do with 9/11. No Afghan citizen had anything to do with 9/11; yet, Afghanistan must pay in human lives for the lies told by a pompous spoiled brat little rich asshole and his rotten sorry son of a bitch lyin' sidekick, Unka Dick Cheney, and the sleazebag sorry low-life cheatin' and lyin' Karl Rove (now a Fox news analyst--how is Fox (of Australia) allowed to keep broadcasting in the USA?--why does We the People's Federal Communications Commission allow them to keep their licenses?), and sorry sleazy Paul Bremmer, and outright thief Armand Chalabi, and Colon's Pal, too, that lyin' military gung-ho fool, and Her Fine Ass Condo-Leasing Rice, also a talespinning liar of the elitist kind (Condo's a true buppy)--all for the thrilling power these assholes illegally abuse and then turn their pompous noses up in the air as though they don't smell the rotting flesh of the hundreds of thousands of human beings these assholes have commanded to be slaughtered, killed at will, bombed at will, grabbed off the street and sent to foreign lands and tortured at will or imprisoned without hope of release or any kind of fair trial from the nation that claims its Justice is a woman and she's blind--or did Lyndie Englund tie that blindfold over her eyes? This nation that calls itself "the Land of the Free"--yeah sure; and Madame Clinton, too, should be held responsible for the killing of human beings her own commander in chief husband ordered during his reign--damn right he killed human beings in his intrusion into Bosnia--and now that mess is starting up again--Kosovo is Albanian and like the Kurds, everybody hates the Albanians, too)--and Slick Willie's leading military gung-ho asshole commander then was this chump Wesley Clark who once proudly admitted, "Hell yeah we'll kill civilians if they get in our way!" That's what pisses me off--why aren't Americans in the street with the hoes and rakes and ax handles and whatever, going down to the District of Corruption and citizens arresting these bastards, and, hell, let's handcuff Hillary, Obama, Ralph "Spoilsport" Nader, Mike Hucksterbee, Mitt the Mormon, Joel LIEberman, Cap'n "Shot Down" McCAIN (not Abel; unable, too), and old Snappy-Pappy Bush, Prince Bandar Bush, the whole Saudi Royal Family, the Dubai Royal Family, the Arab Emirates, them, too, while we're enforcing our Constitutional rights under the Bill of Rights (a document seldom ever if ever mentioned--I remember when a part of Dick Gregory's comedy act included reading the Preamble to the Bill of Rights--anybody here ever read it? It says if We the People find out our government is CORRUPT, we have the right to proceed to overthrow that government and kick the rascals out), and I say, throw all those Medieval motherfuckers into Guantanamo and start waterboarding their asses for the millions of Iraqis they displaced or killed, the thousands of Afghanistanis they killed or disrupted their lives possibly forever, and the thousands upon thousands of US troops that have either been killed or maimed for life or mentally impaired for life--all because of a never-honestly-elected, first-ever Supreme Court-appointed "president," little prick's revenge on our collective asses for callin' his wimpy old Pappy a Wimp when Pappy accidentally found himself president of these United Snakes! Remember that wimpy whiny voice saying, "Read my lips!" Remember when he upchucked on the Commie Chinese president that time when he had too much plum wine and got a bit wobbly? The biggest wimp of all turns out to be Pappy's little smirking prick son who's never done an honest thing in his life. The son of a bitch is a perpetual liar, except the world he was raised in and brought up in is a Gordonian knot of inextricable lies and these little snob sons and daughters of the rich and famous know it's all a farce, it's all play, how you act, your stage presence, your schtick--participating in a political farce, too, 'cause Huey Newton was right, "Everything's politics, even our food." And we weep and moan and knash our teeth when one of our wacko terrorist sons takes daddy's guns or guns he's bought from Moe the Friendly Gun Dealer (No Questions Asked) into a public place and starts blowing his fellow human drudges away--just spraying bullets towards everybody--hollering, "Yeah, come on, it's kill or be killed, you parental-guided fools!" And we cover ourselves with ashes wondering what is wrong with our youth! And we don't miss a damn beat, though, when we accidentally read or hear about 40 or 50 people being blown to bits in Baghdad or a car bomb killing one hundred mostly women and school children in Afghanistan. "When's American Idol on? I've gotta vote for that bald Asian-black girl from Iowa who sang the Barney song with so much soul." [Another aside: thedailygrowlerhousepianist sent us the Mother Jones site's listing of the Top Ten tunes our goons at Guantanamo use for sleep deprivation torture--you know, where the military torture creeps (like Colonel Flagg in the great old M.A.S.H. teevee show) play music outrageously loud in the cell blocks at night after lights out. Here's the Ma Jones link that lists this Torture Top Ten--it includes the Barney song just mentioned--check it out:

http://motherjones.com/news/featurex/2008/03/torture-playlist.html]

Whew, I've got to cool down, papa, or I'll blow my top.

I'll continue on this "cool" trip when I've cooled off a bit.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Pogo ran for president in '56.

Irony ("Feigned Ignorance")

How's This For Irony?
Self-made roofing magnate Kenneth Albert Hendricks died on Dec. 21 after falling through the roof of his garage. He was 66. [From the Blog of Death.]

"Yo, Ken, be careful up there, buddy." "Hey, I've been doin' this since I was knee-high to a grasshopper so don't go tellin' me to be care...whoaaaa! Argghhhhhhhhhh!" PLOP. SPLAT.
"Ken? Ken? You old sombitch, are you OK? [a moment goes by] Dammit, they've killed Kenny! YOU BASTARDS!"

And Talkin' 'Bout Fallin' Through the Roof
I'm sorry, folks, I try and get high minded and ignore these politicians and then I catch a glimpse of their latest skulduggeries, accusations, and slung muds and I can't resist poking a stick through the bars of their cages (they are caged in their own egos) and teasing these heathen jiveass human-trick-ponies.

Like old Hillary. Why she's so peeved she's almost going into one of those "female" moods--like maybe have such a hot flash she forgets who she is and what the hell she's doin' and goes off on a real old-fashioned Chicago wallflower girl madness remembering what her father and mother and her grandparents used to say about those blacks on the Southside of Chicago, Cottage Grove, Maxwell, all the way up to Hyde Park where the Jews lived. I've been in Chicago before when the whites were hostile--check out how the Chicago Police have traditionally treated Chicago blacks. Just recently some black men brought a lawsuit against a former Chicago police commander whose favorite way of getting an N-worder to confess was to put a Chicago phone book on top of his head and then beat on the phone book with a baseball bat--oh boy did those savages confess--and these guys who are suing this yokel who's now retired and living well in South Florida on full pension confessed to crimes they didn't commit and spent up to 18 years in prison until DNA proved they weren't guilty. That's the Chi-town Hillary comes from. And from there to the Eastern girls's college, then Yale (oh, how liberal Yale used to be--"Welcome, our knee-grow brothers..." The Elis were poor little white lambs, not black sheep. And wait a minute now, afore ye accuse me of prejudice, I wanna say some of my best friends went to Yale)--and after Yale she got hoodwinked into marriage by Slick Willie the Arkansas boy with the big brown nose (he'd just pulled it out of old Senator Fulbright's ass), the Hillbilly Rhodes Scholar--a scholarship named after that great British humanitarian and racial justice fighter, Cecil Rhodes! Cecil gave us Rhodesia, too! It's Zimbabwe today--and what a mess Cecil left to the black folks who owned it anyway--"Those little wooly boogers; I say, they're such docile buggers. They'll do anything you beat them into doing." AND WHAT A MESS THE FUCKING BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE VICTORIAN AGE AND THE EDWARDIAN AGE AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION HAVE LEFT US WITH IN NEARLY EVERY CORNER OF THIS EARTH. There is still chaos brewing in every former British colony, from this country around the world through India, Sri Lanka, Siam, Indonesia--which the Brits shared with the Dutch--remember when the Moluccans were blowing up the Dutch a few decades back--every former British colony or protectorate is in turmoil today--Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, certain parts of India--and all over Africa, again sharing the blame with the Dutch, the Belgians (what a mess the Congo still is), the Portuguese, the French (trouble in Angola and Chad), from serious economic problems in South Africa, to out-and-out craziness in Zimbabwe, dire trouble in Kenya, madness in the Sudan, Mozambique, Diego Garcia, Nigeria--pick a former British colony where there isn't some kind of conflict either brewing or in full swing. And now the Brits sit pompously feigning ignorance about what's going on in this fucked up world, a world fucked up by pompous asshole egoists, elitist fops--and I include all British musicians in that fop bag, too--how disgusting was the PBS tribute to 60-year-old Sir Elton John the other night? (PBS is the Pro-British System.) I thought Sir Elton was broke. Didn't he just have to sell off all his "Little Richard copycat" wardrobe because he was so damn broke? Yet he keeps right on copycattin' along, playin' the piano a la Jerry Lee Lewis--did y'all know that?

I'm sorry. I'm such an Anglophobe. I used to get really pissed when the hip culture referred to me as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Fuck that. First of all I'm a white-skinned native of the United Snakes of America--I hate anything Anglo and as far as I know Saxons are half-Nazis, and as for Protestantism, I'm an atheist with a lowercased "a"--I hate most things British except original Jaguars, before Ford bought them and ruined them and has now sold them to India's Tatta Motors. How ironic is that? How embarrassing is that? However, and I hope I don't hurt some Jag-nuts's feelings when I say, Jaguars were elegantly made though they weren't that good a runnin' machines--I owned two Jags and I had huge mechanic bills all the time with both of them--in fact, one time, in Santa Fe, I had a Mercedes mechanic trained in Germany, a Native American dude, who used my Jag to learn how to work on British-made automobiles it was in his garage so much. First of all Jaguars in those days were timed to run cool at high speeds--because they were meant for country driving out in the English countryside and not for city driving--and to drive them in a city you had to reset their timing gears--and to do that you had to wench your whole block up out of the engine compartment, take the timing chain loose from the timing wheel and then notch the wheel tighter or looser depending on how hot your motor was running. As a result of a hot-running motor, you burned a lot of oil. Whoooo boy. But sweet driving. I used to tool my little Jag sedan, a Mark VI, white, with cherrywood dashboard and black leather bucket seats in the front and a lush couch-like rear seat, a Lucas electrical system, and I had a Bose sound system installed in it--two speakers in the back window--and I tooled that car all up and down the USA, tooling along at easily a steady 90 mph--leaving 'em in my dust--until my young wife at the time had enough and forbade me to drive when she was with me--she drove or she didn't go. I still drove that Jag a lot and loved every minute of it. I bought it in Dallas and right off drove it to Santa Fe; then from Santa Fe I drove it to Florida eventually trying to put down stakes in Key West (I was actually in Key West to make a movie of Hemingway's home there, which I did, and while filming at will around the place, the keeper of the house said it was for sale for $80,000 and if we were interested in buying it...blah, blah, blah), then we drove to Boca Raton and lived on the beach for a while, and then it was back across the country to San Francisco, living up on Washington Street and parking the Jag on Hill Street with the car's cool nose pointed straight down at a 180 degree angle toward San Francisco Bay--I always said cars in San Francisco must have the best emergency brakes in the world--and from San Francisco we tried to live in the Big Sur, then we went up to Eureka--beautiful up there--I've walked out deep into a redwood forest just outside Eureka and it was god-damn inspiring--you should have heard the poetry bubbling through my brain's fissures out there in the belly of that redwood forest--I felt as though I was in the midst of an ancient intelligence when I was alone out in that Goliath-tall grove. From Eureka we drove the Jag up the Oregon Coast (Hi, Coos Bay!--I loved Coos Bay) into the Hood Canal area, where I'd decided we wanted to live but we couldn't find anything just right so we moved on to Port Angeles, Washington, and there we took a fabulous ferry ride over to Victoria, British Columbia, where we moved into a motel right across from the parliament buildings and facing Puget Sound and the Olympia Mountains--we were a happy couple in Victoria until one night we both said, this is the dullest place on earth except for this beautiful aesthetic view--and we're getting tired of the view--so one day, boom, we were out of there and taking a ferry over to Vancouver--we made some money at the Woodbine Race Track then we shot the Jag out over the Columbia River and into wild, wild Oregon--I was so bored in Pendleton, Oregon, one night I tried to read the Book of the Mormon that was in the nightstand by the bed. I read one or two pages and started laughing like a Hollywood-bound hyena, hollering, "Listen to this shit, honey," and then I'd read a long passage to my wife and she came out of the bathroom and listened a while and said, "Jesus, can you believe intelligent people believe that shit?" "No," I said, "Anybody who believes this drunken drivel is not intelligent at all. Not even a half-nuts, meat-crazed chimpanzee would fall for this shit?"

I really dug Burley, Idaho. We had a great little motel room there, with a wild-ass bar next door where we went every night and had steaks and drank Ranier beers and CC and Seven and sang along with the Frank Sinatra records on the jukebox and I was all for settlin' down in Burley, Idaho, but one night my wife said, "You know something ironic, Wolfie?" "No, what, Toots?" "As much as I wanted to get the hell out of Santa Fe, now after all this travelin', I'm ready to go back to Santa Fe--baby, I miss Santa Fe. Let's go back." "You wanna hear something else ironic? I've been thinkin' the same thing, Toots, so let's pack the Jag and blow this joint." And that's what we did; we drove from Burley, Idaho, straight through Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, on down the Rockies and smack-dab back into Santa Fe 24 hours later--checked into a suite at the La Fonda Hotel, and I took a shower the minute we hit that room and to this day I still recall it as the finest shower I've ever taken in my life. By midnight we were back full swing into the Santa Fe social whirl. We'd been gone close to a year and a half and had driven that Jaguar over 12,000 miles, from Santa Fe to Southernmost Florida, then from Southernmost Florida across the USA to California, traversing Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and back to sweet home New Mexico. I sold that Jaguar to a painter friend of mine for 1,000 smackers and he turned around and sold it for 2,000 smackers to the president of Walgreen's Drugstores out of Chicago--a dear old friend of mine and my wife's who used to send us a huge tins of the finest pistachio nuts every X-mas--

I used to have a 16-mm movie of my Airedale hound driving that Jaguar--Queenie, that was the dog's name--the best and gentlest dog I've ever owned--and I've owned three dogs since an adult, a Malamute Husky, a Siberian Husky, and this Airedale--we had two litters of Airedale/Husky puppies, too--cute little mask-bandit-looking tykes. The Malamute was a big dog--we brought him down to Santa Fe from Fairbanks, Alaska, along with his father, the Siberian Husky--and Malamutes don't bark, but let a full moon show itself on our mountainside and you'd hear a howl that would wake the dead. When my Malamute howled at the moon--we'd hold our breathes waiting for the hunters to come rollin' up in their 4-wheel drives ready to shoot whatever moved--"A wolf, boys, I heard a wolf up here, I swear." "Calm down, boys, it was just my Malamute." Skookum, that was the Malamute's name, was half-wolf--a very loyal dog. My wife and I rented a place in British Tortola from an old sea captain--but when we told him we had a Malamute we were bringing down there with us, he said he wouldn't bring an Alaskan dog to Tortola because of the humidity--we harkened to the old Captain's words and cancelled our rental and stayed in Santa Fe where the weather was perfect for a Malamute.

So Hillary is flipping out. She's turning on Obama worse than Slick Willie did. Obama's kicking her Dumbocratic Party machine ass--11 wins in a row over Hill--and beating her ass bad in Aryan Nation Idaho, too--and then when Hill was crowing how she would take Obama's ass in Wisconsin it ended up she even lost bad to the N-worder there, too, and Hill has now run over to Ohio, where she knows the voting machines are easily rigged, and shit-fire fuzzy, she's runnin' into Obama-ites all over the god-damn place up there, too. And Hill is getting raggedy looking--and where's Slick Willie these days?--he's been awfully quite since he called Obama a fool or whatever it was Billy Jeff called him--did I ever tell you that Hope, Arkansas, (did you know Mike "the Baptist Huckleberry" Huckabee is also from Hope? So was Ketty Lester--anybody remember her?) used to have "Welcome to Hope" signs up at all entrances to this little one-horse Arkansas burg known for its great watermelon crops? Those "Welcome to Hope" signs showed a huge head of a little "pickininny"--that in Arkansas is any black child, boy or girl--all big-eyed black with burr head and big white choppers glowing out from this kid's taking a huge bite out of a slice of red-ripe watermelon. That was where Slick Willie was born and reared by his trailer-house mammy and her second-or-third-or-fourth husband. And what ever happened to Slick Willie's half-brother, the rock star? Remember him? Wonder how Hill would like it if Roger, wasn't that his name, Clinton showed up at one of her Obama bashings--maybe he's written a hot rock song for his sister-in-law.
Here's a postcard from Hope, back about the time Slick Willie was born.

And then today, Hill lets loose the old photo of Obama doing a photo-op all dressed out in his Al Queda-Islamic extremist garb. "Damn, that thar proves Osama's, er-ah, I mean, Obama's a terrerist! When's President Bush gonna put a stop to this liberal commie terrerist bullshit and declare himself our dick-tater." He's a dick alright, but then so's Hillary.

And how 'bout we have Ralph "Spoilsport" Nader back in the race again? He's running so he can counter Hill and Obama and their backing the nuclear power industry, HMOs, pharmaceutical drug companies, and lobbyists. I suppose the NeoCons are sponsoring Ralph again this year. I don't think Ralph cost Al "Bore" Gore the election--I do think the Bushes stole both the 2000 and 2004 elections and would have no matter how many votes Ralphie Boy got. Plus, Ralphie Boy is right about a lot of the shit he wants to pile on Obama and Hill. Would you not say Ralph has got a huge set of balls! People tonight are outwardly cursing Ralph but he's stoically trudging on. The Dumbocrat doomsayers are already conceding the election to John "Half-baked" McCain and blaming their loss on Ralph "Spoilsport" Nader.

Shit, I wouldn't put it past nutjob Amuricans to elect John McCain--and then we'll go up on the mountain and wait for "De Lawd" to come back!

Idiots! Everywhere idiots! And I heard this Obama babe, this Samantha Powers, and she was doublespeaking like a full-blown tailgunner all about how Obama was this, purely this, and that, purely that, and how pure this guy is and how honorable--and I'm thinkin'--damn, there's another one of these self-determined gutsy babes boosting her MAN, her superman, and boosting him wrongly, too, I might add.

These silly political schnooks don't see the picture even though the picture is so big and huge and high-density it's screaming at them, "Wake up, you fools. We the People want Bush and his NeoCons impeached; we want 'em jailed; we want 'em ran out of town, and we want somebody to get us out of these stupid unnecessary and back-breaking wars--and get us out of this FEAR mode and into a REPAIR mode--but these mooneyed politicians don't see it that way at all--they're all still drunk on their own dizzying glorified spins--and the Dumbocrats never do see it and they are so surprised when one of their candidates actually wins--like Jimmy "Peanut Head" Cah-ter and then Billy Jeff "Pass the Gravy, Ma" Clinton--otherwise the Dumbocrats are their own worst enemies. Hillary's blowing it, but so is Obama and his high-school-debate-style retorts against Hill's wide-open, KKK-approved mudslinging--she's beatin' her feet on that Mississippi mud! "Dammit, I got'a get them damn darkies to dancin'!"

The Daily Growler predicted long ago that Hill and Bill would cave, their racist souls would blossom forth some good ole Willie Horton ads blaming the black man for his own slavery--why, hell, they'll be blaming Obama's African daddy as being a slave-tradin' terrerist back in Africa before he held that white woman, Obama's mother, hostage. Oh the shit that's gonna hit the Clinton fan. Hell, I predict Hill will have a mad moment--cry hell, she'll go berserk with Obama hatred!

In the meantime, Cap'n John McCain seems determined to shoot himself in the foot--which is hard for John to do since his foot's in his mouth most of the time. Certainly folks are seeing you don't want this flyboy at the controls of the ship of state--he'll either crash it into the deck of that wobbly ship or the Al Queda Air Force will shoot his ass down for a little extreme rendition at Osama Bin Laden's tiger hunting camp in Pakistan--wonderful democratic Pakistan--Amurica's friend. The Good Ole USA gives billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan--Pakistan turns around and aids the Taliban who are amassing troops in the Paki mountains and then are reemerging in Afghanistan, especially coming back into the Kandahar region en masse, according to Sarah Chayes who lives in Kandahar, thus allowing the Taliban to kill NATO troops--like they killed several goofball Canadian soldiers the other day. Before the USA went in and occupied Afghanistan, they didn't know what car bombings were--now they do. 150 Afghan civilians were killed in a car bombing the other day. Ain't war grand!

And how about OUR keeping track of the Kurds--you know The Daily Growler has said all along how everybody over there in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, hates the Kurds, PKK or democratic, it don't matter, if they're Kurds, they're hated. Turkey is as I type this bombing the bejesus out of the Kurdish territory around Kirkuk--now named something else--the heart of the biggest Iraqi oilfield. You see the Iraqi government hates the Kurds--come on, these same birds backed Saddam Hussein 100% when he gassed the hell out of the Kurds--and they butchered Kurds during Iraq's 10-year-war with Iran, who also hates the Kurds. So "Kill the Kurds" is now US approved--can you believe the USA (We the People) gave its approval to Turkey and allowed it to bomb the hapless Kurds at will, with airplanes and bombs and equipment We the People sold to the Turks or gave to them in a foreign aid package. Of course, ironically, we probably sold the Kurdistan PKK their weapons, too.

How corrupt is all of this! It's indigestible to me. It's so seethingly rotten and the smell gets more miasmic the longer it's allowed to rot. "Praise Jehovah I wasn't born a Kurd!"

I say, nuke the whole lot of 'em--what's that, Condo Leasing Rice, G.W. Bush wants to discuss making me his Sec'y of Defense?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Some Kurds
Some Kurds--they look pretty terrifying, don't they? They certainly look like a definite threat to US national security. They look like a big threat to the Turks, too--can't you understand the Turks wanting to decimate these savage scumbag sheepherders!
Here's where the Kurds have lived for thousands of years--right smack-dab in the middle of OUR OIL, dammit!
In the heart of Kurdistan. Check out the Website:

http://www.kurdistan.net/

Kurdistan architecture.
Kurd glam-girls.
...And here's a site that has some great photographs of Kurdistan, the country and the people.

www.osa.ceu.hu/.../highlights/04/Kurdistan.html

"Cats," a Poem by Kurdistan Poet Abbas Abdullah Yousif

What's a bakery

home garage

town

without a cat?

For, at least, a cat scares me

For, at least, a cat kills the rats for me

For, at least, a cat eats my leftovers

For, at least, a cat makes me think of darkness

For, at least, a cat awakens dead desires

A cat hides under a carriage

Watches television

Scratches its ears

Sits on a chair

Stays awake all night

And, best of all, fights

You'll see cats on mount Qaf Also

among ruins of a mill Leaf through a

woman's journal And you'll see cats

You'll see the word written all over my

neighborhood walls.

Sunday With the Master

Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright
I have been an admirer of the game of golf since the first time I went out to my hometown municipal golf course, "the muni," out south of town on several acres of a mesquite-thicketed branch-water-creek ravine and the adjoining fields, plus it was right up next to the city's keiko-muckity-muck country club with its cedar-tree-lined always solid-green fairways, lower than the country club to the point I figured even as a kid the muni was siphoning water from the country club some way--you know, draining the muckity-muck's rain barrel maybe--all golf courses in those days caught rainwater in water tanks and then ran it through their watering system, a system of hydrants around the course to which they attached huge sprinkler units, they looked like toy tractors--one I remember at the muni was painted green and yellow like a John Deere tractor--and these sprinklers tracked back and forth across the fairways and from the middle of the greens in the early mornings before they opened the course for playing. The first time I went to a golf course, to my hometown muni, I went with my brother and the man who cashiered for him during the daytime in his magazine shop--I relieved this guy every afternoon at 4, when I got out of high school, and I worked the register until 7:30 when an 80-year-old man called the Colonel came on. Turned out "Colonel" wasn't a military designation with the Colonel but his real name, his "god-given" name. He was from Toledo, Ohio, and had at one time been a railroad man, a carnival hawker, a boxing referee, a sailor on the Great Lakes, an accordion player, and several other professions no one was really interested in checking to see if he were telling the truth about or not, but he was a straight-as-an-arrow man, with a solid stiff back, an army-straightened back we figured, plus he was meticulous with his checking out his register before he put the cash drawer in, the cash drawer I'd counted and said was all square according to my registry tape and what cash I had in the drawer and god-damn sure 'nuff the old Colonel, the bastard, would come in and right off start checking my figures and also sure 'nuff, I was ready, I knew what was next, "Young Wolf?" "Yes, Colonel." "You were wrong in your calculations. I find you are off by 4 1/2 cents." "Ah come on, Colonel, you old hardheaded bastard, here..." I'd flip a nickel at his ass. "Keep the change, Colonel, you tightwad old bastard." I was the owner's brother so I could treat the Colonel any god-damn kid-mean way I wanted to. Though the Colonel got my ass every night--except occasionally--sometimes I'd be right on the cent and the Colonel, I got to admit, would be very proud acting of me at those times. The poor old bastard was coming to work one afternoon, this was after I had moved on to college, one winter's day right after an ice storm--it didn't snow much in West Texas but it "iced over" as the oldtimers called it all the time. Like it would rain while it was 1 below zero and the rain would immediately freeze as it came down and it eventually started coming down as sheets of ice and it would hit the streets and sidewalks and roofs and telephone lines, everything, the trees, the eaves of the houses, and it would form huge icicles on every thing hanging down and sheets of solid ice on the flat surfaces; even the blades of dead grass on the lawns would ice over and the lawns would sparkle with cold icy glitterings of tiny icicles and the old Colonel came out of the hotel in which he lived and as he headed up toward my brother's magazine stand, as he was high stepping off in his stiff-back upright way, he stepped one time out of whack, slipped feet forward, went a flippin' up into the air and landed right crack splat on the back of his head--and though he was alive when the hotel manager came out and found him, he was DOA by the time they got him to the hospital. My brother sent me the Colonel's obituary from my hometown newspaper and damn the Colonel's name really was Colonel and he was from Toledo and he had been all he said he'd been plus he'd been a US Army boxing champion in WWI, the War to End All Wars.

And Jesus, I've wandered off from the golf course--

The guy who worked the morning and afternoon shift in the magazine stand who went to the golf course with us that day just so happened to have been the city golf champion that very year over at the country club but on this day we had to go to muni 'cause we weren't allowed in the country club though my brother probably could have gotten in the country club since he knew all the members, so did our father and mother--hell they all went to high school together--anyway, that was my first exposure to golf and it excited me--it did. I couldn't wait to try my hand at it and when my brother handed me his putter on a hole and told me to take a shot at the hole and I stepped up there and hit the ball dead straight into the cup that did it--boy that felt so exalting...so good--I'd played miniature golf a lot so I already had experience putting, but that started my interest in golf and soon I saved my money and bought me a set of Sears and Roebuck golf clubs--JC Higgins--that was Sears's sports equipment brand name--I had no idea who the hell JC Higgins was--and I was ashamed of them because they were from Sears, but secretly I was so proud of them, and I bought me a fancy scotch plaid golf bag and a pair of spiked golf shoes and a golfer's cap and a pair of Munsingwear beltless slacks and a red golfing shirt--Wow was I sharp and I practiced every day in our big backyard using a practice golf ball, a plastic ball with holes all in it where when you hit it it would act like a golf ball though it wouldn't go nowhere near as far as a real golf ball--it went inches where a real golf ball went yards. Practicing like that for a whole winter, came spring, I got up at 5 am one Saturday morning, caught the city bus near my home and rode it all the way out as far as it went, to South 22nd and Buffalo Gap Road, and from the bus stop there I walked about a mile up that road to the gate and dirt road that led up to the muni clubhouse. I went in the clubhouse and there was only the assistant pro there. I introduced myself and told him I wanted to play a round of golf. He told me the sprinklers were on all over the course and I told him I didn't care that I still wanted to play--it was my first time playing and I wanted to go out before anybody else got there so I wouldn't interfere with their serious play. The guy was a college guy, about 5 years older than I was and he took a liking to me. He said, hell, go on out and play--I won't even charge you for it. I needed some balls and he said why didn't I grab some of the better balls out of one of the buckets full of practice balls and I picked out six balls and he said I better pick out six more since I'd never played before. I bought a package of tees, too, and a towel for my golf bag, and he took me out to the first tee and I sat my ball up, took out my JC Higgins driver, 1 wood, and I clobbered that ball. My first drive, wow, and I watched it, and it sailed along the top of the fairway dirt until just where the grass started and then it sailed upwards and started what they call fading, and it faded right and arced way high right and sailed far out over a little grove of mesquite trees and I lost it--way over to the right somewhere--and I lost the damn ball.

When I got back into the clubhouse an hour or so later, I was exhausted. I had no balls left. My last ball I lost on the last hole when I hit another slice--a fade, this one sailing, whistling actually, out at a right angle to where I had tried to hit it and it ended up merrily careening around in a farmer's cornfield across the creek that ran through the golf course. Totally out of bounds.

I didn't keep score that first time. I'm sure I shot 200 perhaps. That really wasn't it. What was it was that I loved the experience. I loved it so much, I was up that next Saturday morning and right back out there again for my second time playing and again the assistant pro was there and he became a great friend, and he began to go through the clubs that had been traded in and also clubs they put in their rental club bags with me and he'd pick out the best of those and sell them to me for 5 or 6 bucks a piece, which was a lot of money in those days--I made $3.00 a day working 6 days a week for my brother--but gradually I managed to put together a much more pro set of clubs and woods and soon, too, by the end of that summer, I felt, and this pro friend agreed with me, that I was ready to try my hand at making a go at a golf career--I got to be a great iron player and putter, though I had trouble hitting woods--my slice stayed with me so meanly I later began hitting a two-iron off the tee with great success though not much distance--still I was so good a long iron player so I could hit another 2 iron off the fairway and make most of the 4-par and 5-par greens in regulation. And the next spring, I went out for and made my high school golf team, B team for a while, and then finally going A team for 2 tournaments, one down in south Texas and the other up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the Southern Hills Golf Course, a famous pro course up there--that's where I met a young girl golfer named Betsy whose picture is in the very first Sports Illustrated magazine and fell in love with her--I was attracted first to her legs, I'd never seen such beautiful legs on a girl, and then her face, just the kind of face I liked, and damn she talked golf with me and she was a hell of a better golfer than I was and she went on to become a Ladies PGA champion and I went on to become a writer and a singer with a bar band, a failed husband, a raconteur with a dwindling audience--but oh my how I loved golf--and women golfers especially--and I've had several close associations with some famous women golfers in my day--by coincidence--like in Dallas I moved into this swank apartment building and I started going over to this big park right across from my apartment compound and hitting golf balls over there and over there one afternoon hitting golf balls I looked up and saw approaching this lady, a young lady, and noticed how cute she was in tight shorts and a tee shirt and carrying a huge golf bag full of bright diamond-shiny new pro signature golf clubs and she comes up by me and says, "Do you mind if I hit alongside you here?" "Hell no, baby, hit away...what's your name?" "Mickey." "Mickey. Hi, I'm Wolfie." "Hi, Wolfie." She hit a 7 iron. It was a perfect swing. "Wow, you swing like a pro. I was at a Hogan golf clinic one time and you swing like Hogan." "Thank you, that's very sharp of you." "Yeah, I try and swing like Lloyd Mangrum. I learned to play golf out of his book, How to Break 90 in Golf, you know it?" "I know Lloyd Mangrum." "Get out of here! You know Lloyd Mangrum?" "Sure. He's from Dallas here, but I met him out in San Diego where I'm from. I knew his brother, too; he was a pro here in Dallas back in the forties." "Wow, Mickey, you're cool. And you live at the North Park?" "Yeah, I just moved in there. You live there?" "Yeah, number 11, right by the pool." "We're by the pool, too, number 20." "You're directly across from me. Great. Maybe we can get together some time." "We're going to have a big pool party if I win the Dallas Open this weekend." "Yeah, you're playing out at Lakewood this weekend?" "Yeah." "Hey, good luck. You an amateur?" "No, no." She laughed and hit another perfect 7 iron. "No, I'm a professional." We hit a bunch of balls and talked some more and then we went and shagged our balls, mine scattered a lot more than hers, and then I walked with her toward a car, a new Oldsmobile, and she said, "Let me get something out of my car here...." and she slid into the front seat of the car and took something from the glove compartment. As she sat in the car the car door was opened facing me. I looked down and saw a small brass plaque screwed to the door--"Presented to Mickey Wright for Winning the 1963 Ladies PGA Golf Championship." Jesus. I'd been knocking balls around and jawing around with Mickey Wright, who later went on to be one of the winningest women golfers of all time--over 80 tour victories--and now a member of the Women's Golf Hall of Fame.

And I did eventually go to a pool party that Mickey was at, but, my hopes were dashed when she introduced me to her lover. Oh well. I really dug Mickey--plus I found her very sexually attractive, but then that's one of my ironies I love, Lesbians love me and are nice to me and treat me as though I were a woman--my feminine self--yes, now I know--to my Lesbian friends "desire begets love."
Mickey Wright

Right after I met Mickey Wright, I gave my golf clubs away and got married to a girl I'd originally met in Anaheim, CA, and later who showed up at my apartment--by God, that same apartment where Mickey Wright lived, too--that great apartment--we called 'em "Danish modern" apartments, split levels they were called, too, or California-style apartments--all with patios out back and fronts facing the pool. I gave my golf clubs away to a friend of mine who had just taken up the game. He borrowed my clubs to play his first game and when he brought them back to me I told him to keep them.

Due to my final performance for my high school team--I lost but played with Gibby Gilbert who later became a PGA tour pro--the crowd following Gibby included golf recruiters from colleges, and then that summer I played a few tournaments on a Texas Pro-Am tour--and my finest hour came in the Sweetwater, Texas, Pro-Am when I made it all the way through to the amateur finals and was paired with Charles Coody who was already a pro and who it turned out knew my cousin who had been on the TCU golf team and later went on to become Texas Pub Links Champion and knew Coody very well, and through these two connections, I got a golf scholarship my first semester in college. It paid my tuition and my books and I could have lived in the athletic dorm, too, but I chose not to. I went out and played my college's course and did pretty good but when I went to the first try out, shit, I knew I was outclassed. The returning team had gone all the way to the NCAA finals where they almost upset the University of Houston--I mean, hell, there I was hitting balls amidst some of the best college players in the US. I soon stopped going. I got a notice in December that my scholarship had been cut off. I also got an F in Golf, my first college F. And that was it for my golf career.

I kept playing though. In the army I met this really nice guy from Oklahoma City and we hit it off big and he had aspirations to become a golf pro and he had already won some tournaments on the Pro-Am circuit in Oklahoma and Kansas, and we played golf on the Fort Sill course and then down on the Lawton, Oklahoma, muni course, and after the army I was looking at a golf tournament listing in the newspaper one day and by god there he was, there was his name, he was a pro golfer, and he was twentieth in the Western Open in Chicago, and then the next time I looked his name at the same tournament finals, his name was gone--not there--and I never saw his name again.

As a golfer I did meet some of the best in the game in those days. I did take a golf clinic with Ben Hogan, who was from Fort Worth and knew my cousin the TCU golfer, TCU being in Fort Worth, and a lot of their matches on the Colonial CC course, Hogan's course. I also met Sam Snead when they had a Pro-Am in my hometown; Tommy Bolt, too, always played in my hometown's tournament; and Don January--who had earlier gone to the same college I did--and I met a golfer named Joe Black, too--and I had a chance to become a great golfer, but, no way. My problem: concentration. I couldn't stay focused on the game and the course and the angles and the distances--I was too busy drinking beers, horsing around doing the clown thing--I could pitch a golf ball up in the air and hit it with my driver like it was a baseball--and I know Tiger Woods can do that, too. And that's what I did all day Sunday morning and afternoon. I watched Tiger Woods playing golf. Outside of Tucson, Arizona, in the desert, playing match play, and Tiger won all his matches and made it all the way to the final 36-hole match with the other finalist, Stuart Cink, a golfer who hadn't won in an embarrassing number of years though later they announced the guy had made 22 million bucks in his career, which ain't bad for a guy who only won 4 tournaments over 15 years and in the final match he was playing Tiger Woods who had won over 60 tournaments in his 10-year career--and Tiger was invincible today. And if you know golf and love it like I do, watching Tiger Woods is watching the best golfer in the history of golf, a man so god-damn confident in his successful game, a game he's been working on since he was 4 years old, he hypnotizes the other players and psyches them out and makes them make errors, and this trick-jobbing works on the best of the other pros, like Phil Mickelson, who is the closest to Tiger in skills on the tour this year. Like in his match today with Cink, Tiger came right out hitting 360-yard drives and making birdies to the point that by the end of the morning 18, Tiger was 4 holes up on Cink. And Cink was rattled. Tiger hit a wild drive on one hole, a wide hook, which Tiger hates--and Tiger went through one of his childish tantrums--and then Cink got up and hit his drive in exactly the same wild place--and from then on Cink was psyched--in fact, he was psyched out--psyched totally out of the game.

But Tiger Woods can't be psyched out unless he has personal problems--like when his precious daddy died and left Tiger alone against the competitive world. But he overcame that trauma by marrying a totally gorgeous blonde Swede model or something--you know, one of those blonde Aryan beauties these privileged rich celebrities manage to nail down--these young blonde babes give all these celebs whether they're black or white beautiful sunshine babies. But Tiger is now back to being a piece of art with a golf stick. Totally synchronized. A perfect golf swing. The left arm stiff as a board. The grip firm and steady. The knees slightly bent. Left eye firmly focused on the ball and nothing else. Everything is timed exactly, like a piece of music is timed out exactly. And then his swing, his long backswing, then his body dropping noticeably and then unwinding upwardly as he uses his hips to give force to his swing, to his clubhead, to put the punch and power in it, the perfect swing that swings around so smoothly and clock-like and then his follow through, wow, the club swinging up high up over his head, swinging up and back to eventually end up with the clubhead way below his ass in the back. What a swing. And Tiger can hit a driver 360 yards easy. And Tiger can putt.

So I had a fun day; watching the perfect golf player playing a perfect game of golf, defeating Stuart Cink 8 and 7, meaning Tiger was 8 holes up on Cink with 7 holes to play and Cink conceded defeat and Tiger won his 7th straight tournament; only the second PGA tour tournament this year but he's won them both and has gone into first place in both the Fed-Ex Cup standings and the money winning list. Tiger has now won over 77 million bucks simply from golf tournaments he's won.

I've seen the greatest from the past, I've seen Lloyd Mangrum play; I've seen Sam Snead, Jimmy Demeret, Jackie Burke, Tommy Bolt, Gene Littler, Ken Venturi, Arnie Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Byron Nelson play--my hometown's own Maxwell Brothers, Billy and Bobby, who also attended the same college as I did--much earlier than me--and whose father was the founder and first pro at my hometown's muni course--and I had watched and learned from playing with my own cousin, the TCU collegiate golf champion, still living out in California, by the way, in his 80s--and, too, I've actually socialized with the likes of Mickey Wright, and one time with Marlene Bauer at a party I gave in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1967, but that's a story for another day, though I end by trumpeting: Tiger is the greatest golfer I've ever seen--ever.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Some Great Women Golfers From the Past
Babe Didriksen Zaharias; she was also an Olympic track & field champion. She, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, was from Port Arthur, Texas, originally. She married George Zaharias, a pro-fake kind of rassler; it proved to be a fairly happy marriage. Babe later died of cancer while still fairly young. In 1950, she was voted the Woman Athlete of the Century.
Patty Berg. One of the earliest women golfers to turn pro--in 1940. She helped found the Ladies PGA. She won over 80 tournaments during her career. She announced late in life, in her late eighties, she had Alzheimer's, the disease from which she died.
Althea Gibson, from Midland, Texas, same as Little Georgie Porgie Bush Baby. After she became a champion tennis star she turned to golf and became a champion player on the Ladies PGA tour. First black tennis pro; and first black golf tour pro.
Kathy Whitworth, another Texan, and some say the greatest woman golfer ever. Kathy along with Mickey Wright and Patty Berg was one of the leading winners of all time on the Ladies PGA.
It's the Bauer Sisters, Marlene on the left and Alice on the right. Born on a golf course in South Dakota, their dad was the club pro, then taken to California by dad in the 1940s where the girls dominated California's women amateur golf. They became the youngest women ever to turn pro--and were among the women golfers who founded the LPGA. Both girls became lady golfer sex objects, especially Marlene. Later, Marlene married Bob Hagge--and then later, the girls caused a big scandal when they switched husbands--and Alice ended up with Bob Hagge. They went by Bauer Hagge, both of them, for a while. Both were natural beauties. They eventually played out of Midland-and-Odessa, Texas. Alice is the one who attended my famous pig roast in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1967. It's a great story I may write one day--me and sweet little Alice in the rose bushes--oh what memories!

Alice wasn't as successful as Marlene. Alice never won an LPGA tournament though she was runner-up quite a few times. Marlene, however, was a big winner, breaking the money winnings record at $22,000 one season. Marlene also held the ladies's nine-hole record of 29, too, for many years. Marlene played golf up into the late nineties and was elected to the Women's Golf Hall of Fame in 2002. Alice died in 2002 at 74 of colon cancer. Marlene, as far as I know, is still kicking out in Palm Desert, California. She made over $220,000 in her career--pretty good for an 20-year-old girl back in those wild 50s.

Here's Marlene at her sexy best:

Alice, believe me, was smaller, cutely petite, and I think better looking than Marlene--though it's hard to imagine this looking at Marlene up there in that great photo.

Adios, Alice. I knew you a little better than Marlene.

thegrowlinggolfingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Gutsy Babes

Strong Women
I grew up around strong women. A couple of the older ones namely my grandmother and my great-grandmother on my mother's side were true pioneer white women--and I mean by that that they struggled in and survived through what was a rather jungly, barbaric, transitional time in the raw center of Texas--my great-grandmother coming up from the swampy lands around Lampasas, Texas, married when she was 13 to a man 75 years old whose two sons turned on her, tied her up and beat her occasionally (whether they raped her or not I never heard; people didn't mention such a thing in those days and certainly my great-grandmother wouldn't have admitted she been raped), then one night they pistol whipped her and threatened her, accusing her of marrying their father for his land and money. When she was 14 years old and pregnant (she admitted the pregnancy but never who the father was), "Those cruel evil brothers were preparing to take my life. Their brother, Bill, was an outlaw; they said Bill had killed 20 people over in Ar-kan-zez and East Texas, and these boys were just as evil as any outlaw. I could hear 'em talkin' through the thin walls of Mr. Campbell's house; they were in the parlor at the front of the house and I was in the back darkness of my tiny room but I heared 'em talkin' all the way in that room, their dark-hooded gutt'ral voices talkin' 'bout cuttin' me into chunks of meat and tossin' me into the swamps where the gators, the snakes, the coons, and the fish would eat the flesh from my bones--so I said to myself, if'n those evil men are gonna kill me and throw my remains into the swamp if I stay here, so why then, I decided, don't I throw my own self into the swamps afore they had a chance to kill me--at least I'd be alive and at least I could with life try to fend off the gators, snakes, coons, and fish, which didn't scare me a'tall, no sir, no critter or varmint ever scared me 'cept an evil man," she said, in a weak whiny voice, an old leathered voice, rasping yet clear in its tales, tales spun to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, especially if you were a naively fearful little kid to whom this old wizened tree-trunk of a woman was a witchy woman, too shadowy and curse-laden looking for me and I thought up wild stories about her, though now that I've turned into the home stretch and am galloping for the finish line of my own life, her true stories have evolved into much more fantastic stories than any I ever dream up about this woman. And in the pitch blackness of a sullen frog-choraled night, this 14-year-old pregnant girl had put on her best white dress, her high-top shoes, and had wrapped a beautiful wool shawl around her body and then she'd slipped out her tiny room's window, "it was high up," she rasped, "and I sprained my ankle when I landed on the ground 'neath the winder there." Then she half-ran and half-hobbled into the swamp down at the back edge of the old man's property that backed up to the brackish Lampasas River and the live oak and thicket swamps that ran along that river. "I figgered out which'a way was south by lookin' at the stars. Daddy had taught me all the stars and on clear nights I could easily tell the southern sky from the northern sky, like find the Big Dipper and go down its handle and turn around and you're facing south." She had tramped about 20 miles down the Lampasas River--it took her "might near" a week to go that twenty miles--she'd hide during the day and travel at night. She ate roots and raw crawfish and berries and she drank the river water and she finally made it down into Young County where she had a distant relative, "One of the Poe boys who survived that hunt up the Colorado River--did I ever tell you all that one? 'bout Old Man Poe and his sons goin' deer huntin' up the Colorado and Old Man Poe gettin' sick and the sons left him in a cave while they followed the deer on up the river--and when they came back by the cave, Old Man Poe's facial extremities had been eaten off by skunks, oh yes, yes they did, ate off his nose, his lips, his ears, even his cheeks. He wore a mask after that, though he didn't live all that much longer. Skunks carry the madness real bad, they do. Foam at the mouth just like a mad dog, they do." This woman later married my great-grandfather, a Scottish tenor, violinist, poet, school teacher, and a lover of several bottles of the Highland's best every day or so, and she had 7 children by this man only one of whom lived to maturity, my grandmother. One of my great-grandmother's scariest stories was about the birth of her daughter, Little Leeta; I still remember her name. Little Leeta's birth was so surreal. Little Leeta was born on the front porch of my great-grandmother's house; she'd crawled out onto the porch trying to call her husband in from the fields. She got just out onto the porch when she said her water broke and she splatted back flat on her back, screamed to high heaven, and gave birth to Little Leeta, and Little Leeta was born totally blue and gasping for air, trying madly to breath, crying in spits, then gasping and gulping for air, looking doomed to this frightened mother. "I knew she was'a dyin', the little dear. Even blue she was a tender little soul and I told her point blank lookin' her in her dyin' eyes that I loved her." She said she then bit the umbilical cord--severed it--with her teeth, wiped off as much of the amniotic muck as possible, then getting to her feet, and she was in pain and bleeding, "like a stuck pig," she took Little Leeta's dying blue body over to a ditch in front of the house that had a small stream of clear water running down it, and she went down into that ditch and began to baptize Little Leeta, you know, like giving her the last rites and then this old lady would break down and cry so hard she'd have to leave the room. Then followed hushed conversations too low for me to hear. Later my brother wrote an article about this woman in a Western Americana history magazine and after telling the "Little Leeta story" he ended it by saying he imagined our great-grandmother had laid Little Leeta deep enough in that ditch water to drown her--that's the finished story as my brother finished it. I like his version and I, too, can find it probably true. It makes sense--those were tough women--and there were other birth stories, because she had 5 other children who were either born dead, like stillborn, or didn't live any extended period of time--one of her boys died of scarlet fever, I remember that--and you could see all of that life posted there in my great-grandmother's old eyes--my great-grandmother's eyes were set deep back in her skull and they were Gerard Manly Hopkins lanterns as they lit a trail of hard lookin' out at you--it seems to me strong women have strong deeply penetrating eyes--wild eyes that resist taming. My grandmother had them, too; and so did my mother.

I was raised by these women; so was my brother; we were taught life by pioneer white women who'd seen Comanches ride around their houses, usually begging for things, the elder women said, and then they'd ride off, or once my great-grandmother and my young grandmother shivered in the cold dark of their dugout left alone there as my great-grandfather was taking his cattle to market 15 miles away, and they shivered in fear and cold there as Nightriders circled the dugout on horseback hollering for them to open up if there was anybody in there--and one of the Nightriders rode right up to the door and forced his horse against it but it held and they held their breathes and then the Nightriders rode on--Nightriders were ex-Confederate soldiers from Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, who formed raiding units that raided farms and homes where they thought runaway slaves were hiding out--meaner than the KKK if you can believe that--they were wild true savage hateful killers riding around the wide Texas prairies and down into the river country of Central Texas looking for runaways or white people hiding runaways, especially white women hiding runaways--and the elder women in my mother's family loved to sit around a fireplace, tons of them, all of them old leathernecked, rednecked women who raised families without men or made their livings without men or when they did have men those men died young on them, my grandmother's husband, my grandfather, dying in the flu epidemic of 1918, leaving her a single mom to raise three frisky and too-bright kids, which she did to, I think, great success. And these old women would dip snuff and pass a coffee tin around and spit in it as they dipped and spat and they spoke the many tales and horrors and excitements and fears of being a single woman alone in a hostile land full of hostile men--I could write several volumes of "tough" women stories just from my family alone.

So I was raised by strong women. My feminine side is meaner than my masculine side. I'm a nice, jolly, rather benevolent man, but let my feminine side get a hold of me and I turn pragmatic, deliberate, checking things twice or three times just to make sure, or not trusting advice or directions and deliberately having to make do with what I got.

I was watching Uncle Bill Moyer's PBS show this past Friday night and, yes, and L Hat then emailed me a copy of it, I did see the Seattle Time's story about "earmarks" and just another way these crooked-as-snakes-at-night politicians we keep putting into office are robbing us totally blind--12,000 earmarks on the Defense Department appropriations bill worth over 12 billion dollars--and what are earmarks, you ask?

Here, check it out, courtesy languagehat:

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/favorfactory/

Some of these crooked shenanigans knock your sox off, like selling polyester teeshirts to the Marines--shirts that are highly inflammable and catch fire when a soldier is in an explosion say. The polyester teeshirt on fire is like melting plastic and it will burn into a soldier's flesh and harden into plastic melting into the pores of their skin--one Marine died burning up in one of these shirts so the Marines and then the Defense Department banned polyester tee shirts in all the armed forces but the Washington State politician who got the tee shirt company its original earmarked millions went ahead and after polyester tee shirts were banned in the military got this tee shirt company another earmarked millions for more polyester tee shirts that the Marines bought and stored in a warehouse since it was against the law to issue them to troops.

Life is easy when you're a politician--they get away with shit actors and actresses can't get away with. One California Congressman if you remember had to resign because the young female page he was bangin' on the side was found murdered in Rock Creek Park in the District of Corruption, the same park Vince Foster was found in with a bullethole in his head that was said to be probably self-inflicted though there were some questions about that--remember when Vince Foster (big Arkie pal of the Clintons and a member of the Slick One's administration) was said to be bangin' Hillary? My Internet pal J. Orlin Grabbe will tell you all about the Vince Foster story on his weirdly informative site.

And into the picture comes another STRONG woman who showed up on Uncle Bill's Journal last night, too. Sarah Chayes. Ever heard of her? I hadn't. She's an ex-NPR reporter, the daughter of a former law professor and member of the Kennedy Administration. Rather than continue on as an NPR reporter while working in Afghanistan, she chose to quit her job and live in Kandahar, the original capital of Afghanistan in the south, near the world's largest poppy fields, and help Afghanistan women support themselves through a natural herbs cosmetic company.
There she is, Sarah Chayes. Below is her Wikipedia entry:

Sarah Chayes (b. Washington, D.C., 5 March 1962) is a former reporter for National Public Radio.

Sarah Chayes is the daughter of law professor and Kennedy administration member Abram Chayes. She graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1980, and Harvard University in 1984, with a degree in history. She later served in the Peace Corps in Morocco, returning to Harvard to earn a master's degree in history and Middle Eastern studies, specializing in the medieval Islamic period.

Chayes began her reporting career free-lancing from Paris for The Christian Science Monitor and other outlets. From 1996 to 2002, she served as Paris reporter for National Public Radio, earning 1999 Foreign Press Club and Sigma Delta Chi awards (together with other members of the NPR team) for her reporting on the Kosovo War. She has also reported from other nations.

She has lived in Kandahar, Afghanistan since 2002. Having learned to speak the Pashto language, she has helped rebuild homes, set up a dairy cooperative. In May 2005, she established the Arghand Cooperative, a venture that encourages local Afghan farmers to produce flowers, fruits, and herbs instead of opium poppies, by buying their products and producing soaps and other scented products from them for export.

She is the author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, published in August 2006.

Of course, I'm cynical about girls like this, privileged, high energy, Phillips and Harvard, Master's degrees, connections--spoiled brat who woke up one morning guilty about being so privileged while most of the people in the world were total nobodies with no privileges at all, except the privilege of either killing or being killed--what better way for "poor little" Sarah to do her penance--but I know women who aren't from privileged backgrounds who love danger like this woman, too--I have a very good friend who has traveled to world hotspots, like Sarajevo, Haiti, Nicaragua, all by herself, with her camera and the gall to butt her way into the middle of dangerous actions, like she shot photos of a Haitian politician getting dragged out of his car and shot to death in the streets of Sun City one summer in Haiti--and this woman never has any money--though when she gets some, she's off on another adventure--I sit back and admire her for that--and she is a strong hard-to-move woman like this Sarah Chayes, so full of energy, and with those burning eyes I was talking about earlier in this post.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

SEX, SEX, and More SEX! Hot Damn!!

John "Navy Flyboy" McCain's Sex Life Knocks Britney Spears and Her Mom Off the National Headlines
Oh no! Puritan military geek and a man his sidekicks say has never told a lie (yeah, sure, and Madonna was once a virgin) got the covers pulled off his extracurricular bed and son of a bitch, there's a babe in bed with him. "Johnny boy, are ye messin' with the whores again?" But, oh no, though John did like the whores when he was at Annapolis once he'd divorced his first wife--she couldn't help his political career--and married the Mariposa County beer distributor's daughter, the blonde dear he trots around with him on the old campaign trail, he settled down and became a faithful and true-blue husband (yeah, sure, just like Slick Willie Clinton did not have sex with that woman). John will deny, deny, deny; he's used to that unless you torture the truth out of him then he'll sing like a intoxicated canary. Put John on the waterboard and see if he'll admit to "fuckin'" around on his go-go boot-wearing Bud distributor's daughter. Hey, John was once in bed with Charles Keating, too, but that's not scandalous at all, even though Charles Keating was one of the biggest crooks to ever come out of Arizona, a right-wing state, with his savings & loan schemes that not only made Charlie filthy rich but thanks to Charlie's generous donations and political string pulling made John the Flyboy an Arizona politician.

And John's diddling a lobbyist whore! I mean, come on. I thought We the People provided all our male Congressmen with prostitutes--good times girls--whatever you care to call them--to keep those highly sexual men sexually gratified so they can do a better job of robbing us blind. I can't imagine hopping into the sack with Cap'n Johnny the Flyboy! Wonder if the Cong did anything to Cap'n John's genitals while they were torturing the shit out of him for 5 years? I can't imagine so perverse torturers not, can you?

When I was married I cheated on my wife--and she caught me several times--her punishment, to stay with me. But it didn't work; I couldn't resist other women, especially her best friends. Women love affairs as much as men do, I think, though I'm currently reading Rachel Duplessis on women writer's sexuality and I'm learning some interesting things about female sexuality--something most males are certainly dumb as oxen about. Like HD's concept of "desire begetting love."

Duplessis writes: "In a significant passage in 'Professions for Women', Virginia Woolf traces the repetitive struggle of the woman writer for the authority to write, that is, to transcend (and to mend the damage of) the feminine. One part of this struggle involves 'killing the angel in the house', a provocatively blasphemous conjuncture. The angel's maternal conservatism restricts boldness, judgement, and outspokenness. The repression of any desire want or need and the repression of sexualities are mutually buttressing substructures in the larger issues of female authority. As is well known, Woolf confesses that despite Orlando, she has had the most trouble achieving permission to depict sexuality in art." [p 102, H.D., 1986, Indiana U. Press.]

I never thought of women writing about sex--yes, I've read Anais Nin's sex book and found it if anything too feminine for me--and hell, that's it, that's what Duplessis is saying in the above paragraph. Women write about sex differently than men; yet, men demand women open up, "Come on, mamma, write it dirty," though women don't think "dirty" like men think dirty. Sex for women is oppositionally different to sex for men. Men love seduction and I assume women like being seduced--that's the "desire" H.D.'s talking about when she says "desire begets love"--while men would say, "desire begets sex." There's quite a difference there.

I try to think like a woman having sex sometimes but I can't; I always come back to the feelings in my male genitalia, the urges for spreading open the vestibule, comforting the woman to ready her for the moment of penetration, a big moment for a man, like being welcomed aboard a fine yacht--how gross of me, malely comparing a woman to a yacht. Very male, don't you think?

I'm getting into this. I'm very dumb to women's sensitivities. I find it very difficult to pick up their signals and codes and such. I think I know them then I bust a move and in return get my ass busted and rejected--wha' happened?, I'm asking as I'm like an full beer can thrown from a car going 70 mph to be left spinning totally out of control in the middle of a six-lane highway.

Don't worry too much, though. By the 5 o'clock news Britney and her Mother will be making a come back, fixing to throw John McCain's lightweight cheating on his wife off the top banners of our newspapers and teevee with more mother-daughter shenanigans--well, hell, you'll hear about Brit and her White Trash Mom on the 11 o'clock news, though I'll bet Johnny Boy's still up there battling for the headline of the day by then, still denying, denying, denying--at least the Staten Island wine-producing story has faded into a forgotten past now. Like thewomantrumpetplayer commented, her grandfather made wine on Staten Island decades ago--isn't Staten Island mostly Italian immigrants! Hell yeah they've been making wine on Staten Island since the Statue of Liberty was put up to welcome all these little old winemakers into this country. Before the Italians and French winemakers got to California, New York State was the largest wine-producing state. I used to love Taylor New York State champagne. New York's concord grapes used to be the finest in the world; Welch's grape juices and jellies were made with NY concord grapes at one time.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

HD Wrote

why must I write?
you would not care for this,
but She draws the veil aside,

unbinds my eyes,
commands,
write, write or die.

And Here's a Great Column by a Man Who If He Doesn't Read The Daily Growler Sure Does Write Like He Does. Here's Mark Morford's Column for Today:

You know what we don't really get enough of in American culture? Change.

No, not the bland politicalspeak Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton brand of broad sloganeering bumper-sticker change, the kind where part of your naive perky innocent unicorns-in-the-sky self really wants to believe it's all going to be hopeful and good and radically different, but yet you kind of know, deep down, when you peel back the masks and the rhetoric and the spin, that when all is said and done, pretty much the exact same jackals and demons and CEOs will run the bleak global circus, same as it ever was.

No, I mean the kind of deep, cathartic change that can only come through, say, death, or explosive upheaval, or mind-shattering discovery (Jesus was a woman!), or, you know, "the end of an era."

Fidel Castro retired. That was, apparently, a big one, albeit a bit anticlimactic, given how Castro's end didn't come as everyone expected, by way of him suddenly keeling over and dying in a crumpled heap of smoky rage with a cigar in one hand and a bottle of Havana Club in the other, wearing a bright red Adidas tracksuit and stabbing his finger at the sky as he called for a people's revolution as not a single one of his handlers had the nerve to tell him it was no longer 1968 and the revolution had already passed by and oh, by the way, the revolution actually was televised, but the ratings stunk and hence it quickly replaced by all-new episodes of "The Bachelorette."

No, Castro merely stepped (gingerly) down, at 81, to enjoy his final doddering years writing political editorials from the hammock, reveling in how he outlived them all, from Eisenhower to Nixon to Reagan, never backed down and stood the test of time and survived assassination attempts and CIA coup attempts and was an icon of rebellion and socialism and radical politics and you have to admit, it was quite a run. Quite a record. Quite a man. Quite a legacy and quite a ... oh, to hell with it. Get out, would you please, Fidel? I mean, basta already.

Yes, the headlines were right. Castro's retirement really was "the end of an era." And let's just say it outright: It's about goddamn time. If Castro indeed represented the last, wretched dog of the Cold War period, with all its saber-rattling and warmongering and pseudo-macho preening, its clenched old white men stroking each other's egos behind closed doors and its flagrant misogyny and the giant disastrous myth of the nuclear family, well, that particular era could not end soon enough.

No, not because it's all bad. Not because there is nothing of beauty to be mined from all those years and nothing to be learned from the plentiful mistakes therein, but because the era in question hung around well past its expiration date, started reeking up the fridge of the culture about, oh, two decades ago.

See, this seems to be the problem with most noteworthy eras: They go on far too damn long. From the Cold War to the petroleum economy to jungle-themed restaurants, they just refuse to see the signs. The internal combustion engine? That era should've died years ago, replaced by technology we've already developed. Smoking? Oh my God. Really? Still? Should've passed with hula hoops and '70s disaster flicks. And then there's Christianity. Talk about your interminable eras. A good 1,500 years too long, at least.

Ah, but does the moment not seem ripe for a good, raucous round of real change? Does it not feel like we are on the verge of finally letting go of a whole slew of pointless, hoary old eras we no longer need, eras that we've been reading and hearing about for just about ever and that have seemed to define us and hold us bound up in their limited worldviews? You bet it does.

Here's one: It's approaching the end of an era for analog televisions. Does that count? Is there anything noteworthy there? Because you have exactly one year to switch to a television that can handle the new, government-mandated all-digital signal, or you're stuck staring at the radio, which I'm not even sure they make anymore. But fear not, because the U.S. government is offering $40 vouchers to help millions of unprepared Americans rush out and buy a converter box so as not to miss a single episode of "Two and a Half Men." This is important. This is mandatory. They can't have you, you know, reading books or something.

Not good enough? Fine. Then how about this: It's fast approaching the end of the Bush era, 12 combined years of miserable, silver-spoon governorship by one of the lumpiest, dorkiest, least appealing clans of desperately shrill powermongers in the world, Barb and Jeb and George and George Jr., Laura and Barb Jr. and Jenna and beer bongs and fake IDs and old coke habits and running AWOL from the Air National Guard and it's all felt like a particularly insufferable episode of "The Beverly Hillbillies," wherein the Clampetts go to Washington and screw three generations out of any sense of hope or environmental protections while getting the world to despise us for everything we used to stand for. Wacky!

The Bush era cannot end soon enough. Hell, I have politically conscious, attuned friends in their 20s and early 30s who have never known a president other than a Bush or, to a lesser degree, a Clinton, in their adult lives, have never known any leadership other than these two very lukewarm, mealy political families. (Which, by the way, very much explains the desperate appeal of Obama.)

Eras like these need to end. And when they refuse, we often need to shove them out the door like a 35-year-old stoner computer geek who still lives at home with his mom. Because people need to feel a part of a change, the shift, to say we were once there and now we're here and oh my God what a difference an era makes. Hell, I think the only eras my friends have lived through were the end of cassette tapes and tolerable Tom Cruise movies and lame sex on 'The O.C.' ("Tyler finally hooked up with Brianna in the hot tub? Wow, that's the end of an era!")

Good news is, there are plenty of other eras slated for death in the next decade or so, perhaps more eras than in the past 50 years combined. Print newspapers (ahem). Full-sized SUVs. Fox News. Music CDs. Record labels. Megachurches. Ann Coulter. Pennies. Pat Roberston, who will finally join Jerry Falwell scrubbing toilets in Hell. Won't that be refreshing? Even if it all now feels deeply unstable, unpredictable, just a little too warm up around the ice caps for our own good? You bet it does.

Truth is, for far too long we believed we had it all figured out, how the planet worked, that we could stomp and rule and abuse and suck the place dry, forever and ever, and get away with it, with zero consequences or future implications. Our arrogance knew no bounds. How very wrong we were. Is it not long past time to say farewell — and good riddance — to that disastrous mind-set? End of an era, really.

Mark Morford Writes a Column for the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/