Friday, November 14, 2008

There Once Was Weather Underground

The Doctor in Wolf's Clothing Is In
I reveled in the throes of medical school for one brief moment in my young misdirected life. I was trying to become interested in the field of Medical Sociology--which led me into Social Psychology--I meandered through these fields looking for research. For Social Psychology I was required to take some neurological courses and attend classes in hypnosis and suggestion, conditioned responses, even a course in ESP using Dr. Rhine's Duke U. studies of extrasensory perceiving to try and prove that man does have psychic powers, of which I was never convinced. I perhaps am forced into playing the role of soothsayer in a lot of my writings and hot-air balloon rides up into the upper atmospheres of my "logical" imagination, but otherwise I'm a coincidentalist. I learned a lot in my medical school meanderings about fantasy and hallucinations--yes, especially sexual fantasies and listening to hippy broads high on LSD out in California one night in Los Gatos, in the shade of the Paul Masson Winery, talk about having sex while tripping. This all seems so long ago and now totally foreign to "modern" ways of thinking. I never hear anyone talking about ESP anymore. My good friend the psychiatrist says he quit holding consultations many years ago. Now he just writes out scripts for Zoloft, Geodon, Prosac--all those antipsychotic drugs that work...or do they? "Did you take your Zoloft today, Little Johnnie?" "Ah, Ma, I haven't taken that crap in a month now. I mean, check me out, Ma, I feel fine, look great...YOU DO THINK I LOOK GREAT, DON'T YOU, MA?...you bitch, you slut, you...." "Hey, Ma, you better grab dad's shotgun out of the linen closet--the boy's fixing to have a psychotic moment!"

I remember interviewing for a job at a Texas State mental hospital in Austin when I was first married, young, bitter at the world, and not in any mood to deal with nutjobs. On the first interview, holy crap, they liked me. While they went over my paper work and talked about the interview they threw me in a room with a bunch of screwball girls, teenagers, a gaggle of goof girls, and these girls immediately started flooding me with love and anticipations turning into beggings of hugs and hard-grabbing hugs at that. I hedonistically declared them starved for attention and love. God-damn I was squirrelly I was so bothered by the presence of these humans who were reverting back to monkey ways and monkey antics. One girl grabbed me around the neck and held on for dear life like a frightened jungle-floor-living monkey [the meanest monkeys, the baboons, really evil motherfuckers who even lions respect, are landlubbers--jungle-floor monkeys who have to walk erect, up on their hindlegs, so they can see not only their prey better (they are mainly vegetarians though chimps eat other monkeys and baboons will eat whatever they can get their enormously vicious-looking teeth into, grass or ass--on a teevee monkey show I saw a baboon dive into a pond and swim underwater up to a swan--it grabbed the big swan by the neck, whipped the bird in its mouth to quickly break the neck, then swam back to shore dragging the big bird along with beaucoup effort back to shore to then begin devouring the bird belly first, the way most carnivorous animals eat their captured prey--the best meats are in the belly on up to the backbone--haunches are broken off and taken off for later eating) but their predators better, too--which is why "snakes in the grass" are so evil in the legends of the human monkeys--why snakes became the very DEVIL himself in a lot of our desert-religions's tales (legends)--snakes were the sneaky hard-to-see predators who could easily take out baby monkeys--even baby baboons, or, as in the case of pythons, adults, too. Whereas a lion they could see easily standing erect on their hindlegs. Why do you think the lion became the king of the jungle (the Monarch) in all our monkey legends? Do you see what I'm doing wandering off on this tangent? Like I'm creating an order to my original introductory point?].

I couldn't shake this big lummox of a jungle-floor monkey-reversion insane girl off my neck (we're back off that tangent--back to our story). I had to walk around with her locked around my neck--like the Ancient Mariner wearing his albatross.

Another goof girl butted into my space dislodging the lummox girl then just hunkering down in front of me and looking up at me from her haunches and just staring at me. She said nothing. Her face was expressionless. But in her eyes was her sanity and she stared at me and was asking me if I could somehow with my sane eyes coax her sanity back out of her brain through her eyes and into the open. "What's that one done?" I asked the ward woman. "She killed her parents. Set them on fire while they were sleeping. Christmas it was, too. She hates Santa Claus when he comes here on Christmas. Last Santa she spit on him and without a word made this poor volunteer from downtown scared out of his gourd." She laughed about it. "But she's no trouble at all. Just sits and stares like she's doing now." I looked deeply into her eyes. I was too young and naive and struggling with my own insanities to help her. Fuck this side of Sociology, I thought to myself, as a girl with lipstick all over every place on her face but her lips tried to impress upon me the fact that she was the living ghost of Sarah Bernhard, the old French actress. "Men with large bottoms disgust me, missssewer." Yes, and ever so often she'd throw what she thought was a French word into her act. "Men with chicken-feet hands are too saw-vage for me, too. Give me a man with a hammer. I'll take a man with a hammer anytime over a cock-a-doodle-do with a cock-a-doodle-do or two, don't you agree, misssewer?"

Then the personnel committee dissolved and the head assistant psychiatrist came out and told me I'd been accepted for the job. It was Friday morning. Dr. Decision told me I could start work Monday.

I got in my car and drove like a bat out of hell back to my stone cottage on my rich brother's ranch and my younger-than-springtime wife. "Pack the grips, toots, we're headin' for the Wild West."

In medical school, I briefly had an affair with this nutritionist. Me own mother was a nutritionist, but of the old school, you know the one that said the hamburger had all the food sources you needed for a healthy life: protein, roughage, lycopine, solid fats, and bread, of course, the staff of life. It was while studying nutrition with this nutritionist intern that I came to very many conclusions that I still hold dear to this day. Like exercise. This girl and her friend the gymnast taught me several very simple but I think truly beneficial exercises. Like leg exercises. I ran track in high school where exercising was an essential part of our practice and training. And then I spent a stretch in the U.S. Army and physical training (P.T.) was very important to the army in disciplining troops. During P.T. we did push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, the Russell shuffle, chin-ups--I mean, when I came out of the army I was a god-damn Apollo-like god--a privileged pretty white boy with brilliant blond hair--though I was too Texan to look Nazi now, don't get me wrong--I ain't Aryan! While running track of course I did leg exercises, stretches, loosening up stuff. So I had exercised before, but not like these hippy nutritionist girls taught me--like the 36-move central body exercise--starting by reaching up and swinging as far back as you can reach while reaching up--then coming on down the reaching steps until the last 6 moves are twisting around and bending down and touching your toes or the putting your palms flat on the floor. I've since incorporated into this exercising a stretching set of moves I learned from Karen Voight, who I think is the actor John Voight's sister--their brother wrote "Wild Thing." These are leg and back stretches--they're tough but they're good. But it's all so simple. See what I mean? I never saw much beauty in the overdeveloped, like Arnie "Steroids" Schwartzennazison--pumped up--that looks vulgar to me. Forget pumped up babes. You notice Arnie "Tit Groper" Schwartzennazidaddy didn't marry a pumped up babe. It's so embedded in my thinking that I've never been able to enjoy opera--because the voices are overdeveloped--that's why the babe opera singers used to end up with bodies like howler monkeys--all chest, all bellows--breasts like a pair of Bose speakers.

All of this to introduce myself as a "Doctor." A physician. Here, let me give you some life-saving advice. You wanna live a long and thinking-wildly life, then here ya go:

How to Lower Your Blood Pressure Without Taking Dangerous Pharmaceuticals Like Lipitor!
First of all--every morning get some potassium in your system: bananas, green beans, potatoes.
Then get you a sack of good pistachio nuts. Eat 1 1/2 ozs. of pistachios a day. There are clinical studies out there that show eating 1 1/2 oz. of pistachios a day will lower your blood pressure significantly in three to six weeks. Along with these essentials, you need Vitamin D, Vitamin B3, calcium, magnesium, zinc (especially you ladies need this mixture)--and here's a little hip secret I learned from a beautiful black dream woman half-witchy woman, too--learn to slow your breathing down--it's tougher than you think--yes, slow your breathing down to as slow as you can get it for 10 minutes a day--at night while in bed waiting for sleep. Just slow your breathing down to almost drag-ass nada--

Hey, you have to trust a dude who claims he's a Great Physician. Medicine is simple. Everything in life is simple. Only humans make things difficult--mainly through their dreams.
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I heard Bill Ayres this morning on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now. You know, Bill, the American terrorist Sarah Palin is so wildly off-her-rocker concerned about since Barack Obama is, according to Sarah (she's still around), Bill's best and dearest friend. In fact, according to Sarah, Bill Ayres launched Obama's political career. I don't remember Bill Ayres but I remember the Weather Underground. Ironically they got their name from a Bob Dylan song, a good Bob Dylan song, too, though look at Bob Dylan today. Nobody can accuse him of being an American terrorist--only of being an American folk singer, which is all Bob is and ever was, who thinks he's both poet, novelist, and classical musician--though in fact, Bobby boy, you're just a Jewish folk singer from Duluth, Minnesota, or Gallop, New Mexico, or somewhere. And you started off listening to early American black r & b and blues on late-night radio--a white boy who wanted so badly to sound black and be a travelin' blues singer (same as Elvis originally wanted to be) but found it was easier to copycat Woody Guthrie, the original Okie and a Dust Bowl refugee.

And you know what I did not know about Bill Ayres? That he is married to Bernadette Dorn! I mean, I know Bernadette Dorn--one of the great Weather Underground babes! Tough rather rich white girls in a couple of cases. Oh those good ole days when the hippies and the yippies forced Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson to pull his pants up and slowly drawl-and-drag his big ole Texas ass out of the oval office and off to an early retirement on his ranch down on the Perdinales River jest a one-hitch ride by Johnson City, Texas.

Remember, Fred Hampton, a 19-year-old Black Panther was murdered by the FBI early one morning in Chicago? Bernadette Dorn and the WU took the Black Panther tour of that tiny Chicago apartment in which Fred and his roommate (Mark I think his name was) were sliced to pieces by the FBI automatic weapons. Bernadette saw the bloody bed in which Fred had been sleeping when he was assassinated. The FBI shot Fred's door down at 4 am--Bernadette said Fred had been riddled with bullets while he was still asleep--in his jockey shorts. And about this same time, a couple of this violent country's demons murdered Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy--both by nutjob loonies who many of us in those dire days knew were funded by J. Edgar "Wearin' Women's Dresses" Hoover and given FBI approval to "whack" these "commie-leaning" sons of bitches.

Then Bernadette and Bill Ayres were in Grant Park in '68 when all the world watched as the Chicago cops billy-clubbed and brutalized the Anti-War protesters--and there were thousands there on that night. I saw it on television out in New Mexico where my wife and I were planning on going up to Tierra Amarilla and fightin' the Feds with Reies Tijerina and his La Alianza revolt--the Chicano Revolt. And we like the whole world watched the cops beat the living hell out of the PROTESTERS in Chicago that day--and cops have always hated and wanted to kill protesters in this country--go back and read about the Haymarket Riots--riots started by the cops! Cops were PIGS in 1968--and they still are. New York Citians, for instance, still no better than to look directly at a cop; to ask a cop anything--directions or what not.
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Reies López Tijerina (born September 21, 1926) was a leader in the 1960s struggle to restore New Mexican land grants to the descendants of their Spanish colonial and Mexican owners. As a vocal claimant to the rights of Hispanics and Mexican Americans, he became a major figure of the early Chicano Movement. As an activist, he was involved in community education and organization, media relations, and land reclamations. He is most famed for his 1967 raid on the Tierra Amarilla courthouse.
_______________________From Wikipedia________________________________

Silly Sarah keeps prattling her biased opinions of Barack Obama. She'd love to come right out and call him an N-worder--but then her future rube son in law's already done that, hasn't he?
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A young dude who lives in my building's penthouse told me on the elevator Friday he'd just been fired ("let go") from his bank job that morning. I asked him what he was going to do and he said he got three months's severance pay and was going on unemployment, then he was going to enjoy life for a while. He started tonight--he and his pals are partying heartily up on the penthouse balcony--I can hear 'em jivin' up there. It's a beautiful night--in the 60s--it's downright hot outside--tomorrow the soothsayers--the Weather Aboveground--are saying it's gonna git bitter cold here around noon.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Subterranean Homesick Blues

Johnny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It's somethin' you did
God knows when
But you're doin' it again
You better duck down the alleyway
Lookin' for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap
In the pig pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin' that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
Phone's tapped anyway
Maggie says the men they say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the D. A.
Look out kid
Don't matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don’t try No-Doz
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows

Get sick, get well
Hang around a ink well
Hangin' bell, hard to tell
If anything is gonna sell
Try hard, get barred
Get back, ride rail
Get jailed, jump bail
Join the army if you fail
Look out kid
You're gonna get hit
By losers, cheaters
Six-time users
Hangin' 'round the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin' for a new fool
Don't follow leaders
Watch the parkin' meters

Oh get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance
Learn to dance, get dressed
Get blessed, try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don't steal, don't lift
Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift
Look out kid
They keep it all hid
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don't wear sandals
Ya can't afford the scandal
Don't wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don't work
'Cause the vandals took the handle

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