Johnny Damon and the Sensational Human Zoo

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010
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For Jill Johnston
When I moved to New York City in 1969, the Village Voice was the choice reading of anyone with any interest in New York City culture, the writing, the filmmaking, the music, the drama, the dance, the life. I used to hang out at the Riviera that sat like a wedge of pie on the far north side of Sheridan Square on Seventh Avenue. At that time the Village Voice offices were directly across Seventh Avenue from the Riviera. Everybody who was anybody at the Voice could be found at the Riviera bar or at one of the outdoor tables. Norman Mailer still owned an interest in the Voice in those days. I read the damn Voice faithfully, every week, and there was one writer in the Voice I made sure I read when they ran her pieces. She reported on dance but her columns took her views on dance out into the street, into the primordial slime of the emerging new methods and modes and politics and leanings and outings. The only thing I had in common with Jill was her writing. I loved the way she wrote. She was funny, wacky, very hip, certainly and proudly Lesbian; yet she was sexy, too, in that Patty Smith kind of sexiness...it's hard to explain unless you were there. New York City was vibrant in those days--I mean this is before the real estate industry took this city over--this was the days of rentals--you looked for that perfect little village apartment--perhaps tucked back in a courtyard you got to going through and iron gate and down a long narrow corridor to come to a tiny courtyard balconied, cool Village apartments stacked up to 5 walk-up floors. These were the days when you could hear live jazz all over the Village; you could hear folkies and beginning rockers and free-verse poets and abstract painters and minimalists and jazz dancers and street dancers and the place was buzzing with local talent of which Jill was one of the best. Here's what Jill said about writing: "Writing is employing the chief tool of culture to add to the global chatter as stylishly as possible with the moral imperative of underscoring the absurdity of culture." How's that for luring you into her existential world? The Theater of the Absurd was at its peak when Jill worked at the Voice. The Voice died when Mailer and his associate sold out to Clay Felder, the founder of New York Magazine, who then sold the Voice to the archenemy of good journalism, Rupert Murdoch, a true jiveass turkey. Now the Voice is best for wrapping waste in, like fish guts or perhaps a dead pet or whatever. And now I was sorry to read that Jill Johnston had passed off the mortal coil. She died after suffering a stroke a couple of weeks ago. She was 81. Goodbye, Jill Johnston, one of the ones who helped me get into Living in New York City the true way--except that New York City is dead now. The Village has become high stakes real estate now. Why even the Saint Vincent's Hospital Emergency Room, the Village emergency room, is gone--out of business due to bankruptcy. Only in America do we let our hospitals go bankrupt. RIP, Jill Johnston.
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Blog Bog
It started Thursday when I went in my Blog List and saw something I wanted to check out on Sign of the Times, SOTT, and when I clicked on it, a pop up window came up and said the site was unavailable and it gave me a list of reasons it could be down. I clicked on it a second time and once again the same old pop up came up. I went into Google and put Sign of the Times in the search window. The SOTT site was first in the list but when I clicked on it, I got the same window saying this time the server wasn't responding. I went back to my Blog List and clicked on it there once again and again I got the same old-same old response. Then I just happened to notice just under my SOTT listing in my Blog List was a new Sign of the Times link. I was puzzled. Had I accidentally listed SOTT twice and was just now noticing it? That couldn't be. I clicked on the link and son of a bitch, I got a Sign of the Times site alright, but this one was a Christian Sign of the Times site. How the hell had these F-ing Christians managed to link into the original SOTT site and that way fuck up their site and also hack their way onto my Blog List and I assume millions of others. Friday afternoon I tried SOTT again and it was back on line but since then Blogspot has somehow taken away my tool to edit my Blog List so I can't put SOTT back up. I like SOTT because they have interesting news items--yes, they're up my alley in terms of side-of-the-aisle, but occasionally I read something on there I'd not noticed before--like some Repugnican jerk from a sticks state throwing a monkey wrench into a bill that would benefit some needy human beings--like this damn hick sister Blanche Lincoln from the lowly state of hillbilly Arkansas, which has been ruled by White hick despots from way back in its checkered history--sorry Arkies, but I will throw the same muck at my home state of Texas, which used to look down their Longhorn noses on anything Arkansas, even though there were Arkies and Okies and Texans hitting the trail together for La-La Land during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl days. And Sister Blanche Lincoln threw her monkey wrench into the works by voting with the retard Repugnicans against putting an end to the very stupid--sounds like a Bill Clinton invention--Don't Ask-Don't Tell military policy for Gay and Lesbian soldiers, which they have to pledge to observe. Of course, it's very manly for heteros to constantly talk about their sexual preferences and to ridicule sexual deviances--they're just following the old adage that "boys will be boys." Hey, so they get into rape while in the military--that's OK, as long as they're raping enemy women or enemy young boys. There's a big problem in Afghanistan right now with Afghan soldiers raping young boys--but, that's OK, at least they are on our side and raping Aghan boys and not our sweet little Apple pie American boys--those who the Catholic padres haven't already bespoiled.

Of course there have been Gays in the military since ancient times. My God, when I was in the military, which is now many moons ago, I was constantly on my guard and on the look out for Gay sergeants and officers. My first experience with a Gay sergeant was in Basic. It was simply a gesture the guy made and a strange comment that made me suspicious and on my guard and sure enough a trooper later told me he'd taken the guy up on having a drink in his barracks room and when they had a few drinks the sergeant started talking about relaxing and maybe how he'd like Old Sarge to give him a massage--how 'bout he lay down on Old Sarge's bed, maybe take the shirt off, blah, blah, blah. I avoided any contact with the dude after that. Then later when I was at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, doing my specialty training, my supply sergeant and one of my company's first sergeants were Gay--and I thought rather openly so--all the guys in my company knew they were Gay. All the straight sergeants were drunks. And when they got drunk enough, hell, they couldn't tell a man from a woman they got so lovey-dovy--the Army is very hard on the young men and women entering the horniest stages of their lives--like packing a bunch of manly women into dorms and expecting them to stay out of each other's beds at night, or expecting poor young men horribly horny, filled with the macho killer instinct, to rein in their abnormal lusts when they have a subjecting power over young enemy women--and Iraqi and Afghanistan women are sometimes hauntingly beautiful.

What's Johnny Damon and the Sensational Human Zoo Got to Do With Anything?

I was contemplating heading off to Davenport, Iowa, and my cheap hotel on the waterfront for a sabbatical when I looked at the The Daily Growler blog statistics and was shocked to find during the month of September we got 10,000 hits. PREPOSTEROUS, I screamed into the ether. Then I dove further into the deepest end of this pool of stats, crunched the numbers using what I'd learned in Statistics 101 to come up with the more reasonable figures of the The Daily Growler, those that show per day we're getting an average of 7-12 serious hits.

I went into the blogosphere and out of curiosity visited a niche that informed me on how to get more hits on the The Daily Growler. One guy informed me back telling me to check out the "Key Word" section in my stats. That that would show me the Key Words used in searches that landed viewers on the The Daily Growler. In my Key Word section in my stats, the Key Word that got us the most hits was "Johnny Damon." Next was "Sensational." So, I thought, why not give it a try--I'll title this post, "Johnny Damon and the Sensational Human Zoo." The Human Zoo? Well, look around you, folks. Look at your neighbors. Look at your associates. Look at the people in the street. Watch teevee. Look at our politicians. Look at the world's wealthiest men. I once had a rocker friend, a guitar player, and he put out a cassette tape that had a tune called "The Alien Zoo" on it. Written by my friend, a wonderful young enthusiastic rocker who played an awesome thunderstorming kind of American-boy guitar. Chick from India, a god-damn idol-like beauty, fucked him up big time. Teased his poor old love-songed ass into a binding relationship, ripped him off of all his worldly possessions, and left him flat lost and drifting out in the rock world somewhere. Last I heard from him he was talkin' about toddlin' off to L.A. in pursuit of this exceedingly worth-pursuing vixen of an Indian babe. His song was all about humans in outer space being captured by an alien force out looking for specimens for their zoos.

Fascinating, as Spock would say. I'd certainly give Blanche Lincoln up to aliens for their zoo. Add to her her Arkansas hick male counterpart, too,--he voted with Blanche to make Gays keep hiding the fact that they're Gay while they're in the military with all those macho heteros. I wonder if Blanche ever sucked a boy friend's dick when she was young? Surely she sucked her husband's dick, don't you think? I mean, why can't a Gay man suck his lover's dick same as a hetero woman sucks her lover's dick or her mate's dick? That's a good part of sex, the prelims, accompanied by some cunnilingus, the warming up, the heating up, the hot moments before the action begins. And surely a lot of heave-ho, macho American males have punked their girlfriends and wives and lovers in the ass at least once. Down in Texas when I was a kid, if the Powers That Be caught you buggering your wife, they could send you up the river on sodomy and beastiality charges. Hell, I went to high school with gangly always-older farm boys several of whom bragged about preferring female farm animals to girls. "I got my favorite little gal sheep out thar on the farm. When I need a piece of ass, I don't have to beg my damn human girlfriend...go through that dog and pony shit, I just goes out to the barn, goes into my honey's stall, mounts her, gets me some, cum, get a good long baaaaaaaaa of female delight from my girl, shoulder up my load, and walk away a happy satisfied man, a real man. You know, a female sheep's pussy is as sweet as a young girl's--it's pink, too...and it gets wet." This particular dude who related that expose on farm sex life to me also bragged about breakfast for him and his dad being a big piece of chocolate cake with red kidney beans piled on top of it. This is the same dude who could keep chewing his chaw of tobacky and eat a moon pie or a peanut pattie and drink an RC Cola at the same time. And speaking of who once owned RC Cola, old Art Linkletter, that old codger, just died earlier this year--he was in his 90s. What a life. A Canadian. A lot of Canadians get into our (yes, I'm an ethnocentric) television.

Newt Gingrich, a very strange human-animal hybrid, certainly belongs in the odd-ball section of the alien zoo. Oh my God, these idiots are so scary--they are dividing our country into Idiots versus Idiots--the Teabaggers being showmen--being shock jock imitator people of great ignorant gall. I mean, how can any human being with a little better than a 7th-grade education actually take people like this Christine O'Connell (sic for the moment) woman from Joe Biden's precious Delaware (ruled by the Duponts for the past 100 years) who is campaigning against masturbation? Oh come on! You know my guess? She's a masturbater herself. Oh yeah. She masturbated like a maniac as a young girl and later as a full-hormonally-active adult.

Or, in Connecticut, why in the holiest of unanswerable hells would the wackiest citizens of that weird mixed-bag state (the wealthiest in Greenwich; the poorest in Norfolk and Bridgeport), I mean the lowest end of the intelligence continuum, vote for Linda McMahon? I mean that's Vince McMahon's wife. Vince McMahon has never had to work a fucking day in his life. And look how he's made his millions. Through deceit; through illusions that are fabricated, staged, all pretended--I mean only a small sort-of-retard kid could get panicky and heavy breathing over a rasslin' match. Plus Vince McMahon not that many years ago pretended to have tied his wife up in his Stamford, Connecticut, mansion's basement, drugged her, humiliated her, so he could prance around his little hybrid human-animal zoo empire with some slutty rasslin' babes with whore-like qualities and intentions of sweet romance for the oversteroided Vince.

Ironically, the World Wildlife Federation made Vince change the name of his rasslin' show from World Wrestling Federation to the World Wrestling Entertainment--WWF belonged to the wildlife and not to Vince McMahon. Vince's father, Vince Sr., was once the king of New York City rasslin' fraud, staging his phony bouts in the old Madison Square Garden. I've already written how one of my best high school friend's father was the rasslin' promoter in my hometown and how I used to go to the Sportatorium with my friend and we would get up in the ring and he'd show me the tricks of the trade--like how to pull your punches; how to stomp your foot hard on the canvas when you delivered a phony pulled punch so the dumbass fans would think that was the punch hitting the other oversteroided geek in the puss or the gut. He taught me too where to find where they hid the blood capsules, the various forms of goofer dusts, or razor blades, or metal bars--or where they kept the metal folding chairs under the ring. I even met the rasslers that were working the Texas rasslin' circuit in those days and fought at the Sportatorium: Danny McShane, Bob Geiger, Ivan Kalnikoff the Russian Bear, Terry Funk, Cry Baby Bob Corby (one of my favorites as a kid), Wild Red Berry, Gorgeous George (I once had one of the Gorgeous One's golden bobbie pins he threw into the audience when he'd take them out of his golden locks--let his hair down--before a match), Danny Savage, Chief Jules Strongbow, World Champion Lou Thez, Timmy Geohagen, Man Mountain Dean, the Swedish Angel.... I knew they were all buddies down in the locker room of the Sportatorium where they could be found playing cards together and drinking beer and who knows what else and smoking cigarettes before the matches.

But, hey, good luck to Linda McMahon--she says the government is overtaxing us and is out to crush the middle-class. I wonder who the middle-class is to Linda McMahon? This is a woman who tolerated her husband humiliating not only her in his rasslin' dramas but also his daughter and son, turning them against each other by having them fight over their cut in the World Rasslin' Federation millions to be turned over to them by Daddy Vince on his retirement. Vince McMahon also steroided up into a truly freaky looking man--I mean the steroids flowed like water in the WWF--check out the death lists--every day you see a young rassler having died at 50 or 55 of a heart attack. Several of the very big gigantism dude star rasslers of the past are now dead due to heart attacks and cancers--like Big John Studd, remember him? Dumb, dumb, dumb; yet, Linda McMahon easily won the Repugnican primary with the help of Connecticut teabaggers. Yep, Linda McMahon goes into the alien zoo--hell, throw old Vince and the rest of the family in there, too.

Or how about John Boner--throw him and that DeMinted dude from South Carolina in the freak section of the alien zoo, too. I'd love to capture the whole Bush Family and slap them into that alien zoo under "Defiled Human Monkeys."

How about instead of the alien zoo, we put old Newtie Gingrich in with the monkeys going to the Cancer Research Institute. Yeah, they should use Newt for cancer research while he's in there with all those other research specimen--yeah, infect him with cancer and then see how long his latest wife stays with him--that's the contest. Newt just can't love women who get cancer; let's see if women can love him when he has cancer. I wonder if Newtie's ever had a Gay experience? His sweet lips look as though they could have been wrapped around a...oh, hell, I'm sure Newtie is a quite a man--he doesn't need Viagra, does he?

By the way, speaking of SEX, Doctor Oz, Oprah's Yahoo doctor (she's also responsible for giving us Dr. Phil) says Vitamin D's an aphrodisiac. I once heard Dr. Joyce Brothers, surely no one remembers her (she's currently doing Life Alert commercials on teevee with old Doc Koop), say that coffee was an aphrodisiac. Let's see, say I gulp down 10 Vitamin D tabs and wash 'em all the way down with several slugs of Seattle's Best's strongest bean--then, WOW, holy cats, what to do when the priapus sets in...take on Paris Hilton for a night of double-back beast dancing?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler