A The Daily Growler 6th Anniversary Rerun: With a thegrowlingwolf Preface

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2003
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Clouds in My Heart
I find it fascinating how few of our millionaire Congress people seldom face DEATH. I mean a lot of them are meaty-beefy fat, yet they slide on through life going nightly to cocktail parties and fat-flowing banquets and state dinners but still very few of them face death. There are exceptions like Slick Willie the former McDonald's fat burger and transfat fries-eating freak who got the message via a heart attack--though boy oh boy how wonderful was his health care? How great was it that Slick Willie got the finest heart care available to mankind--thanks to We the People of the USA who are now daily being denied health care by these so-called Blue Dog (where did that bullshit term come from?) budget hackers. Why We the People of the USA are even being denied this pay-or-die Obamacare that this Wisconsin cheesehead privileged child Paul Ryan is fighting so hard to whack to death. Even that evil slop-swilling Unka Dick Cheney has benefited over and over with his multiple heart operations from We the People of the USA giving that twisted little crooked man the best health care known to man. Recently giving that sorry swine another chance at life by finding him a heart donor and paying for him a heart transplant. I wonder how many heart patients had to die being denied that heart so Unka Dick could move to the top of the waiting list? Still Unka Dick and Slick Willie are exceptions to the rule. I look at that disgusting old fart Alan Simpson from the backward state of low-populated Wyoming (Unka Dick's home state though he hasn't lived in Wyoming since when?), this man who "Yes We Can" Obama chose to head his budget reform committee. He's healthy as a horse as he enters his 80s. And even if he has a problem, he'll get the finest health care known to man. And Hillbilly Hillary (now claiming she held her breath for 35 minutes waiting to see if those Navy Seals had assassinated Osama bin Laden and then had dumped his bullet-riddled body in the ocean (I wonder why our President wouldn't have wanted to capture him alive?)), look at the world-traveling she does and all those high-fat state dinners she frequents and yet though she looks bedraggled and pooped out and a little broad in the hips, still she seems to be in great health (did you know Chelsea Clinton gets the finest health care known to man simply because she's an ex-President's daughter--now her daddy is the richest-ever ex-President--worth over a staggering 200 million dollars--from whom did he steal that money?). Even that creepy little Bush baby, Georgie Porgie, now living like an earl down in Dallas, the sorry slimebag who took us all down to the brink of economic disaster with his two lying-us-into wars (and I claim the Afghanistan war was unnecessary--Afghanistan never did a damn thing to We the People of the USA) still gets the best healthcare--he and pot-smoking Pickles. One thing that puzzles me is why President Obama has never put any blame on that little creep? Never. Doesn't even mention him when he's making a political speech. All these shams. All these privileged political dumbheads. Yet, they get the best healthcare known to man.

Little ole me, a wolf-man whose growl is evidently worse than his bite, wakes up every morning wondering if I'm going to make another day, an adventure that started two months ago when I woke up on a Sunday morning to the tune of a major heart attack. Yesterday, for instance, after taking my 7 meds, I decided I was going to try and walk around a couple of long NYC blocks to a deli on Fifth Avenue. I made it over there fine, but on the way back suddenly a truly mean and Grim-Reaper-beckoning chest pain hit me. On the corner a block away from my apartment, I had to decide did I grab a cab and head to the Bellevue Emergency Room or did I forge on to my building? I managed to forge on and got home and quickly downed an aspirin and waited for that chest pain to subside, which it finally did later in the afternoon.

I sat here the rest of the day cursing my condition. I thought of Unka Dick now recovering sweetly in the lap of luxuries from his We-the-People-of-the-USA-provided new heart. God help me if I needed a heart transplant. I'd have to go ahead and die--totally unable to afford such an expensive procedure.

And all this while this cheesehead prick, Paul Ryan, wants to cut Medicare and Social Security while he gets the best healthcare known to man simply because he's in Congress representing the backward state of Wisconsin, this same state that elected this idiot Scott Walker who they're now spending millions trying to recall. Remember, those lame-brained Republicans were swept back into a House majority by these same idiots who are sorry they elected these political freaks. Don't be surprised if Mitt "the Mormon" Romney steals this coming election. The same bozos who elected Georgie Porgie Bush to two terms are still out there--and you know they hate Blacks so much, they're liable to kick Obama out on his ass if he doesn't start mounting a fierce oppositional campaign against them--unfortunately Obama, the Great Compromiser, is totally afraid of these death-threatening morons (you can read "Mormons" for morons if you wish, I certainly do)...or is he? We shall see, shan't we.
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Sunday, May 28, 2006

Down and Out in the World

From Hunger
I woke up this morning extremely hungry. It was a growling hunger, a hunger that made me blue. Remember a few posts back I said I might be entering a zone of poverty in my life since my rent was due, my phone bill is due, my ISP bill is here, and I owe a friend $350, and I don't have a pot to piss in. I make my living off my wits and so far in the past month, my wits have only gotten promissory monies, over 500 bucks, but this is a long holiday weekend so I have no hopes of getting a sou of it until Tuesday when the mail gets delivered again, so "What Me Worry?" and my reply is hell no; right NOW in the NOW, I'm fine and dandy, and I'm having fun right now contemplating poverty.

In the meantime, I reminded myself of Eric Blair's (George Orwell) rich little book, Down and Out in Paris and London. I quickly "Googled" the book title and, Aha!, there it was, the complete book. Right off the bat I devoured 8 chapters of the well-written, fast-paced little book.

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety. [Down and Out in Paris and London, Chapter 4, last paragraph.]

Of course, that was Paris in the late 20s and early 30s (Down and Out was published in 1933) and this is the USA in the 6th year of a new century and hard times nowadays are ferociously biting and tearing at your flesh, like the weasels that ripped old Frank Zappa's prostate to pieces. Why hell, a coffee and a roll costs you $2 these days as compared to pennies in the 20s. Still poverty progresses right along with everything else in this world, so today's impoverished may be a little better off than those of the 20s. And rooms and rent? Well, here, Orwell tells you about his room:

My hotel was called the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. It was a dark, rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms. The rooms were small and inveterately dirty, for there was no maid, and Madame F., the patronne, had no time to do any sweeping. The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but homelike, for Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The rent of the rooms varied between thirty and fifty francs a week.
[Ibid. Chapter 1.]

Sounds like where I live now--"Davenport, Iowa, drinking Keokuk moonshine" remember? Except for the marching troops of bugs. I got rid of cockroaches many years ago. First of all, I quit cooking in my room. Second, I live amongst Asians and they know how to get rid of cockroaches. At one time, when I first moved int0 this two-bit room, both regular-old cockroaches and those frightening Palmetto bugs (the huge cockroaches that used to rule the roost in Key West, Florida, when I lived there) came and went as they pleased, settling down for the night maybe in my laundry basket or perhaps in the stack of newspapers, magazines, and books that usually surround me as I hack away at my writing in my loft bed. These atomic pests are mostly gone now though an occasional Palmetto giant gets loose and goes about nest searching in my bathroom in the hot months of the year. Storms approaching also sometimes set the Palmetto bugs to doing rather psychopathic things, like running about in circles or suddenly buzzing and then flying like a maniac for a few wing flaps and then falling as though dead to the floor. Touch them with your healing shoe and they miraculously come back to life. Mice? Well that's for another "down and out" time.

One thing is for sure, after reading Down and Out in Paris and London, I will never eat in an expensive hotel again, whether in New York or Paris, and certainly not in Davenport, Iowa. Getting the food prepared and served is what is important in very large eating establishments. Cooking it is not as important as the time involved in prepping it, cooking it, and serving it. If a steak falls on the floor, so what? Wipe it off and serve it anyway. If the cook sneezes in the soup, you should consider yourself lucky he doesn't have cholera; but then, too, the cook usually spits in the soup anyway. I once met a man who told me he had run a Childs Restaurant in New York City. After he told me what went on behind the swinging doors that lead from the kitchen to the dining room, I was suspicious for years when eating in any restaurant and I actually used to demand to see the kitchen if I were eating in one of those chi-chi joints that charge an arm and a leg. Kitchens are naturally dirty, but one that seems clean is good enough for me. Whether the cook spits in the food or blows his nose in it or sweats all over your plate, that you can't predict. If you go to a restaurant during the slow times, then perhaps you'll get cleaner and better prepared food, though there's no guarantee about anything once it leaves the kitchen of a restaurant.

One good hint I learned from Down and Out in Paris and London. If you only have a crusty three-day-old roll to eat, spend a sou for a head of garlic--or steal one, as Boris the Russian in Down and Out would advise you--and rub garlic all over the roll. Orwell says it leaves an aftertaste in your mouth that fools your stomach into believing you have just had a huge meal.

Another thing about this book, it's called a novel by a lot of people, but I've never read it as a novel but as a reality book. Burmese Days, that Orwell book I read as a novel because that's how it was presented to me. By the time of Animal Farm (need I tell you it kind'a shows you how a totalitarian regime rules), I was a semi-intellectual, so everything I read was turned factual in my novelistic way of intellectualizing.

thegrowlingliteratiwolf
for The Daily Growler

Another The Daily Growler 6th Anniversary Rerun: What the Hell Is a Poet?

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2003
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Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Poetic Justice

What the Hell Is a Poet?
I grew up with a poet. She wrote poetry in her bed. She had had two books of poetry published by the time I was born. I didn't like poetry. To me it was something school forced me to memorize and stand like a fool and attempt to recite. An episodic adventure in my case that inevitably ended up with me choking due to stage fright and then feigning insanity as I hub-doubled my way up the miserable hill of whatever dainty verse it was I was supposed to be reciting until the angered teacher rushed me back into my seat with a public scolding and then with a real bitch flourish added an F by my dishonored name in her grade book.

I liked limericks, yes I did, and the more popular ones of the day I could spout back at you in perfect remembrance on stage out behind the proverbial woodshed. Truth is, I didn't really know limericks were poetry at that time, but I knew instinctively how to memorize them. I wasn't interested enough in poetry to want to study it or even wonder what it really was and where it came from.

There once was a plumber named Lee
While plumbing a girl by the sea
Said she, "Stop your plumbing...
"There's somebody coming...."
Said our plumber still plumbing...
"It's...ah...ME!"

And, like I say, I grew up with a poet. She lived with my family, my mother's mother, in her own apartment attached to the back of our house. She planted gardens, too. She had been a florist at one time in her hardtack life and she envisioned huge doses of mythic beauty and thrills in her flowers or others's flowers or wild flowers. She especially adored peonies, large mummish-headed flowers that come on quiet palettes of pastel colors. Her favorite color for peonies was white. But for irises, it was cobalt blue. My mother told me her mother's flowers grew bigger than ordinary flowers because she talked to them. "She recites her poems to the flowers. As a poet, she is very close to her flowers and she says they whisper poetry in her ears." Those colossal flowers were symbols of miraculous expression to her, growing as they do from seeds you shoot into a tight deep hole in a moistened earth where they meet in that earth's womb and begin to grow into those flowers I could see out there in my grandmother's garden as I peered at her from behind my honeysuckle-vine fortress and hide out just outside my bedroom window that honeysuckle growing thick and entwined on a trellis of white holding-hand crosses those literally python-wrapped around by the strong and lustrously growing up honeysuckle vine.

My grandmother would take her little stool, sit on it, then take her hand-held gardening tool, dig a small hole, scrape the dark earth up into a tiny hill, then suddenly poke her middle finger of her right hand deep into that little mound, and as soon as that finger slid out, her left hand shot the seeds deep into the mound's wide-open hole, which she then quickly with a two-hand movement closed and patted slightly down, to hop up and then sprinkle that mound, as if a god, with water from her watering can. Sometimes she would stop in the middle of gardening and take a dirty notebook from her gardening apron pocket and write, for what seemed to a kid like me a dragging-on-and-on of minute after minute. Everytime I looked up she was still writing madly in that dirty little notebook. Then later in the afternoons I would hear her typing away as she sat at her L.C. Smith typewriter that sat gothically on her old mahogany desk she had facing abruptly to her picture window so she could look straight into her passionate garden with its cheering bed of flowers and its guestlist of hummingbirds, bottle flies, dragonflies, butterflies, sparrows, chicadees...my grandmother even knew and loved the bugs in her garden.

One day I learned in school about an alexandrine--and even today I still remember that an alexandrine was a type of poem some oldtimer wrote honoring Alexander the Great--and how an alexandrine fit a certain pattern based on syllabic time counted by iambs and I'll be damned if I learned where the caesuras go. Too many marching alexandrine feet for me, pieds, like the pied in the Pied Piper or the Piedmont, but not impediment, though I once saw a man wearing a pedometer the Lone Ranger had sent him. No lie. I believed him. The gadget had a picture of the Lone Ranger and Tonto on it. That's how young of a kid I was when I watched my grandmother writing poetry.

Once I tried to read one of my grandmother's poetry books but I couldn't finish it. The Christian Bible I could read at a very early age thanks to my insistent father who was insistent that I learn to read at an early age and what better book to learn to read he insisted than the Christian holy book? Though now I confess, even risking being dubbed a heretic, I really only liked to read the Bible for the nasty parts, where they talked about pomegranates and does and things like pomegranates and does, things like my mother had, though my mother wasn't blessed with pomegranates and does, more like lemons and cellos.

I didn't start writing poetry until I was in college and in love and drinking too much and gallivanting when I should have been studying. I hated my college classes but I loved my college library. I loved books. I had grown up surrounded by books. Poets have a lot of books. They have a lot of reference books, too, especially a rhyming dictionary or a synonym dictionary or a dictionary of fables or a dictionary of pied a tiers, or a dictionary of dictionaries, and always large volumes of Shakespeare's sonnets, and the Brownings, in fact all the British Poets, the New World Poets, Leaves of Grass, and my grandmother's favorite of them all, Lord Byron's works. I tried to read Childe Harold back then, and that got me nowhere fast. I may have gotten to Portugal with the good Lord B, except sleep, extreme sleep, attacked me once during that reading to the point I never attempted that work again until I was anciently older.

What exile from himself can flee?
To zones, though more and more remote,
Still, still pursues, where'er I be,
The blight of life--the demon, Thought

Oscar Wilde's Reading Gaol , however, I read with gleeful joy and surprise. Now ain't that strange?

Yet others rapt in pleasure seem,
And taste of all that I forsake;
O, may they still of transport dream,
And ne'er, at least like me, awake!

I once came rushing into my grandmother's room to trick her. "What's an iamb, grandmother?" "It's like 'ah-CHOO,'" she softly murmured, " or it's like 'ahh-loftt.'" Poets must be eccentric. I mean, come on, a poet who isn't eccentric? Where you livin'? Out around those cowboy poets in Montana and Nevada?

I rode Old Paint till he stumbled through his gait/
...ah his fate, I'll now relate/
Old Paint did faint and we thought him near dead/
so we just up and shot him through his god-damn head.

Yee-haw, I'm the cowboy poet of the year, the year of the steer, and I'm steering away from the meaning of my play on finding just "What in the Hell Is a Poet."

Through many a clime 't is mine to go,
With many a retrospection cursed;
And all my solace is to know,
Whate'er betides, I've known the worst.

My grandmother lived to be 84. I thought she would never die. I was in college writing poems during her approach to death. I wrote a poem about a telephone pole and a flying red horse and it was accepted for publication by the Piggott, Arkansas, newspaper's poetry section. Actually a pretty good one run by a woman who herself was a poet. She was addicted to quail hunting, too, she once wrote in her column.

What is that worst? Nay, do not ask--
In pity from the search forbear;
Smile on -- nor venture to unmask
Man's heart, and view the hell that's there.

I wrote poetry at my makeshift desk in my garrish room off campus at college. My desk had an empty Cherry Kijafa bottle sitting on it; that's what I drank in those days, a Percy Dovetonsils twuth. I used to put a fresh flower or just a budding stem in the winter in that bottle and use it for my inspiration to write my poems.

I got another one published in the next semester, in the spring, and it was about a baby being eaten by a Persian rug. Later I found out Mark Twain had written about a man grabbed by a carpet-making machine and woven into a carpet. I'd never read Mark Twain at the time I wrote my poem. I was in love though with a high school girl who read T.S. Eliot. Damn she would read T.S. Eliot to me while I was undressing her and wanting to have sex with her. Damn, I've had sex with a girl reading away at T.S. Eliot while my refrains were yowlings of extreme young pleasure...oh well, but oh how I loved that girl. Every time I read T.S. Eliot now I think so lovingly and wantingly of her, with the short hair, the glasses, and the tight torredor pants that were poetry in motion, if you would pardon my crass exaltation. She was smart as a damn whip and cute as a bug in a rug, a phrase that reminds me of my father who wasn't a poet but a fine tenor; he sang poems very well, thank you.

And late in the spring just as spring sprang over into summer, I went home one weekend to see my girl and when I got there I found that my grandmother had suffered a mild stroke and she didn't recognize anybody and was acting strangely, goofy, discombobulated, raising up and asking what time it was, with a smile on her face, even though she didn't know you from a dog and no matter who you were she called you her dog's name, and he was there, too, always laying by her bed looking up at you dog-eyed sadly.

And one fine afternoon, I was just sitting digging on her, watching her in her rented hospital bed set up in her room, facing that window that faced her flower bed. The room full of flowers, her pot plants, and then the "Get well soon" flowers and plants in all sorts of enfoiled and baby's breath-laced states that had come pouring in from her many friends and admirers. She was still surrounded by her books, her paintings, her life's work. A really great setting for her approaching death. As I was poetically eying her, the doorbell rang far up in the front of the main house. My grandmother's eyes opened wide as pies and peonies and she looked over straight at me and said, "Wolfie, you had better hasten to that front door, that doorbell's being rung by your friend Tee Moore, and your friend Tee Moore is here to say that he's here to see you on this a lovely day."

My friend Moore was amazed by the story as I told it to him as he looked down at my now sleeping grandmother. He had always believed my grandmother was haunted. Nope, we all said, she's just a poet. She died later that night.

Note: the red-fonted italicized verses above are from Childe Harold, by simply "Lord Byron"--and his was a weird Lordship, yere Lordship, from "Canto I, "To Inez," verses VI-IX. Voila! Lord Byron. What a life! Oh the loves!! And he limped.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

From the Unpoetic Babbling of Mr. Met
Ha-ha-ha, whoopty do, screw all of you who didn't think my Mets weren't going to sweep the National League this year and probably, you doubters, win the World Series...FOUR in a row! FOUR in a row! I'm itching inside but full of huzzahs on the outside...let me shoot you a tee shirt...shoot yeah. GO METS!

mr met
for The Daily Growler

A The Daily Growler 6th Anniversary Rerun--a Revisit to the Late Kenny Boy Lay

Foto by tgw, "That Old Pagan Full Moon Among the Stars," New York City, Easter 2012
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NOTE: A previous post announced we had been upgraded almost out of existence by blogger.com--HOWEVER, we have retracted that post--we were able to get our old interface back, so we're back in rapscallion business!
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Friday, May 26, 2006

Hall of Crooked Fame

"Kenny Boy" Lay Going to Prison for 45 Years
I can't believe that. Kenny Boy Lay's lawyers are talking appeal. Trying to hang his conviction up in court for years; the federal judges may have been bought with some of Kenny Boy's dirty money over the Pappy and Georgie Porgie Bush presidential years. Unka Dick chimes in: "You want me to take some of those judges hunting, Kenny Boy?" Kenny Boy replies: "Wow, yeah, Unka Dick. Would you do that for me? I can't believe that judge apologized to you for shooting him in the face. That's cool, man. You're the best, Unka Dick." Unka Dick: "Kenny Boy, let me tell you. I'm more powerful than that squeamish little asshole 'president' ole Pappy Bush himself forced on our asskissing asses, me and Don Rumsfeld; why, what we've done for Pappy Bush, Jesus, there's one man I can't shoot in the face, but judges, now, son, that's another story. By the way, Kenny Boy, I may just have to take you hunting one of these days." Kenny Boy:"Oh, no, Unka Dick. I'll take the Fifth all the way, don't worry. I'd never reveal how many hot bucks I threw your way and vice versa, Unka Dick. That's safe with me. And, too, tell Pappy [George H.W. Bush] I'm going to act like I don't even know who his worthless little rat son is." Unka Dick: "Good, boy, Kenny." Kenny Boy: "Thank you, Unka Dick. Can I take my nose out of your filthy old hemorrhoidal ass now, please, sir?" Unka Dick: "No, Kenny Boy, I like it there. Unless you want to move your face around to the front here and practice what you're going to be doing in prison." Kenny Boy: "Don't tease me like that, Unka Dick. You made me think I was invincible." Unka Dick: "Deeper with that nose, Kenny Boy."

It's wonderful to see these Republicans stepping all over themselves as they are beginning to wallow in the shit of their own legislations and power giveaways and tax deductions and openly flaunting their outlaw attitudes, their total flim-flam. A flim-flammer eventually gets revealed. A liar is always easily cornered. Lie after lie after lie eventually get so entangled even the liar can no longer remember the sequence of them so he'll F up and step all over his tongue, finally, like Georgie Porgie was trying to do yesterday [May of 2006] with that prissy little asshole Tony "You're Out on Your Ass Soon" Blair (Don't worry, Tony will get a job with the Carlyle Group as soon as he stands down next election in Britain--or else maybe a professorship here in the American Colony).

Like global warming. If you deny global warming consistently and have phony scientific papers written up by your many think tanks (full of rich-boy foundation monies) proving not only is global warming not a problem, but just the opposite is true: fossil fuel emissions are actually good for the atmosphere. Trees thrive on carbon monoxide, so burning fossil fuels is helping preserve the forests of the world! What I'm saying is, there comes a time in all liars's lives when they're caught naked; the liar (or liars) has no idea what reality is so he makes his own reality up and with such power as being president of the United States commands, then suddenly the liar feels like everything he says or thinks is reality and that's that. To deny he is a liar would crumble him into a wimp, just like what happened in the case of Georgie Porgie Bush's lyin' old President Pappy Bush after his lying ass got us into the Persian Gulf War, a war we'll never be told the truth about like how devastating it was on that generation of hired soldiers, those troops who were trumpeted as having overcome the embarrassment of losing the Viet Nam War (their spin was that the Peaceniks wouldn't let Tricky Dick Nixon, then commander and chief of the US Armed Forcers, bomb the bejesus out all the Holy Hell of North and South Viet Nam, all of Cambodia and Laos, and hell, just like McArthur wanted to do to win the Korean War by going across the Yalu River and into China and bomb the Chinese back to the Stone Age. Hairy Ass Truman, the man who blew away over 300,000 Japs (that's what they were officially called in the US in those days) with two ATOM BOMBS, fired McArthur's honest ass for disobeying his holy commander-in-chief orders.

They are all tripped up on all their lies to the point any grain of truth that accidentally slips into the cogs of their insane works can bring them to a halt, drive them to wimpy witherings away into their fortified rubber rooms or to the mail room of the Carlyle Group. These creeps will eventually ruin themselves (a la Newt Gingrich--that big clumsy ox fool; a la Tricky Dick Nixon; a la Pappy Bush the Wimp--isn't a son of a wimp probably a wimp, too?). The problem before us citizens is, will these lying bastards who live in the reality of their lies drag all of us down with them like Kenny Boy Lay's honest lies did to the 5,600 Enron employees and to Enron's many, many shareholders, too. Aren't all of us citizens of the good ole United Snakes now owed reparations after this government takes us under?

Kenny Boy Lay Facts
-- Son of a jake-leg (moonshine-caused physical defect) Baptist preacher, after ol' Pappy Lay went bankrupt in the farm machinery business. Failed business runs in the family.

--Kenny Boy has a PhD in Economics from the University of Houston (1965)
--_______ worked for Humble Oil while getting his PhD. Humble was a Standard Oil creation (Esso Extra gasoline--S. O. standing for Standard Oil) that went on to become Exxon, now merged with Standard Oil's Mobil, which originally was Magnolia Oil and Refinery Co., "at the sign of the Flying Red Horse"--therefore, these are simply Standard Oil's Texas operations coming back together once again into the gas and oil monopolies they've always been.

--in 1971, at 29 years of age, Kenny Boy became Undersecretary of Energy under Nixon's Sec'y of Interior Rogers CB Morton, a political toady from Kentucky (brother of Thurston Morton), who became Nixon's Sec'y of Commerce first, then replaced Walter Hickel as Sec'y of the Interior, when Kenny Boy Lay became his Undersecretary of Energy. Morton went on to be Gerald Ford's campaign manager in his unsuccessful run against Jimmy Carter, the cracker Navy nuclear physicist/peanut farmer and brother of Billy Beer founder Billy Carter, long gone and now famous for taking a piss on the tarmac at the Libya International Airport while meeting Kadafi for some kind of shady deal we'll probably never know about. Jimmy has since his removal from office gone on to have himself portrayed as a great peacemaker and humanitarian--remember, when he was commander and chief he flubbed up his "brilliant" rescue of the hostages in Tehran from the Iranians who had already been paid off by Ronnie Raygun's goons (wasn't Don Rumsfeld around in those days, too?) to keep holding the hostages until after Raygun was elected president over the ineffectual Mr. Peanut, though he only beat the Jimmy man by 3% of the vote (you think Raygun stole that election?)?

--3 years after becoming Undersecretary of Energy, Kenny Boy got a job as an executive of Florida Gas (natural gas) (both Texas and Wyoming are big natural gas states (see: Pappy Bush and Georgie Porgie of Texas; Unka Dick Cheney of Wyoming)). In just 7 years as a VP, Kenny Boy became president of Florida Gas in 1981 at 39 years of age (pretty damn good networking for a PhD in Economics).

--In 1982 Kenny Boy moved back to Houston to head Transco Energy Co.

--2 years later, KB became president of Houston Natural Gas, which after it merged with Omaha, Nebraska, corpsemaker, InterNorth, became Enron, with Kenny Boy as the CEO.

--In 1982, the Vice President of the United States hired Kenny Boy to set up an energy conference in Houston, Texas. Guess who that vice president was? I'll give you a hint: I call him Pappy Bush.

Please, though, don't worry about Kenny Boy going to prison. It won't be bad. He'll go to one of those Federal big-shot prisons where they have golf courses and tennis courts and workout rooms. He'll maybe have to do two years and probably become a born-again Christian, too--maybe even Brother Jerry Fallintohellwell [dropped dead later over a plate of fried chicken] could ordain Kenny Boy's ass while he's bent over in his prison cell, Praise the Lard!--so that by midnight, December 31st, 2008, Kenny Boy will get a free pass out of prison. Why?, you ask. He'll be pardoned by our "president." "You've done a heck of a job, Kenny Boy. Besides, you're my buddy and you know what happens to my buddy's." [Kenny Boy Lay died in prison of a heart attack.]

One of Kenny Boy's Schemes (You, Too, Could Do It If You Ever Get Rich)
In 2000, Kenny Boy took 14 million buckeroos and started the Linda and Ken Lay Foundation. Of those 14 million tax-free dollars, Kenny Boy and Linda Girl gave $2.1 million to charities and museums, mostly in Texas. The other 12 mil? Who the hell knows? Maybe it's in a Cayman Island British bank offshore account with Georgie Porgie Bush's 49 billion he stole when it disappeared from the government books shortly after he stole his first election.

Kenny Boy and Baseball
Georgie Porgie Bush our "president" screwed the city of Arlington, Texas, by forcing them through eminent domain schemes and cost-matching schemes to build that grand new Texas Ranger stadium, and it is a grand stadium (I don't know its corporate moniker), I'll admit that, for the consistently losing Texas Rangers [they finally made it to the World Series in 2011], who, by the way, are managed by Buck Showalter, who has constantly had his suitcase packed since George Steinbrenner fired him as Yankee manager prior to Joe Torre. Following in his hero's footsteps, Kenny Boy helped save the Houston Astros from leaving Houston in 1999 by getting the Houston business community to bail them out. Then he pledged 100 million bucks over 30 years to the Astros in exchange for them naming their new stadium (aha, how much did that cost the kind'a poor mostly black and Latino city of Houston?) Enron Field and plastering the Enron "crooked" E logo all over the walls of the joint, just like he spent 100 million bucks to plaster the Enron crap all over their headquarters building in Houston. Kenny Boy threw out the first pitch at the inaugural game played in the new Enron Field. What a great night that was for an old hillbilly hickass economist from Missouri, the home of the mule. He-haw.

Addendum: Yes, Kenny Boy Lay was over the years the largest contributor to Pappy Bush's and the Bush boys's, Georgie Porgie and Jeb, political campaigns, over $737 million dollars, most of which he bilked out of Enron employees and clients. You are crazy if you think Georgie Porgie ain't gonna pardon this worthless rascal. Check it out here.

thedailygrowleranarchangel [thegrowlingwolf]
for The Daily Growler
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A Daily Growler Award for Motherhood
We give our first motherhood award to Britney Spears. Yes, poor lil' ole white trash honey from by God low-white-life Lawsbanana, Kentwood, honey chile, to be exact, is our ideal mother. I mean, hell, she's been programmed to be a great mother by the Big Daddy recording industry. In other words, this poor little dipstick is manufactured, as is true of most of our cultural stars these days, especially our popular music stars, which are for teeny boppers, who are the basic idiots who buy these billions of dollars worth of CDs and downloads and who use cell phones the most--this is the money crowd the recording industry has hypnotized. Britney is a teenage girl's envy and every goofy pimple-face teenage boy's masturbational ideal--"Wow, look at her ass! I gotta whip it, boy howdy, do I."

Mother Britney was born Britney Jeau (that's hillbilly for Jo to you dumb f-ers) Spears in 1981. Holy shit, I remember 1981 like it was yesterday, but I'm an old F now so I'm supposed to hate young people, except I don't. The ones who have honest talent amaze me; the youth who are responsible for innovation; us old F-ers are into progression and evolution--they are the virgins, we are the jaded.

At eight years old, Mammy Spears took little Britney down to Walt Disney's Frozen-in-Time Glory World and tried to get her a spot on the Mickey Mouse Club. Mammy Spears was a smart old trailer-house trash woman, because though Britney was too young to make the cartoon mouse's tits and ass and boy banger teeny bopper masturbation club, a New York City agent liked her little ass enough to take her to Gotham and put her in something called the Professional Performing Arts School Center--I never heard of it, but it must exist among New York City agents.

In 1991, Britney appeared as a child actress in the Off-Broadway play "Ruthless."

In 1993, Britney's mom's dream came true and Britty landed alas a spot on the Mickey Mouse Club, shaking her cute little ass for old bug-eyed Mike Eisner. She gigged at Mickey's place for 2 years.

In 1995, she sent a demo tape to Jeff Fenster at Jive Records (I'm sure they recorded a whole lot of jive, too)(don't confuse this with The Daily Growler's Jiveass label). Jeff was hooked by Brit's cute ass. He fell. He turned her over to Eric Foster White, the genius who produced and wrote for Boyzone (?) and Whitney Houston (when she was really good--before Bobby Brown and drugs crapped her out--though those two are still living a better life than most of us will ever see, no matter our addiction and bad marriage situation [and Whitney would die in 2012 of a drug overdose]), and Max Martin of the Backstreet Boys (ohh, what happened to that very talented Menudo-copy-cat group?--whatever happened to Ricky Martin, speaking of the little Menudo boy bangers put together by the PR pervert who introduced the boys to sodomy, or at least those are the charges he was brought up on when he was busted down in Puerto Rico-- you never hear any follow up on any of this shit, do ya?). These dudes produced Brit's first single, "Baby, One More Time," and her first album of the same name. She was 17.

In 1998, Britney toured sponsored by Teen magazines; then she joined the NSync tour. Whatever happened to NSync? They've got to be living in great fun sin somewhere in a fabulous part of the world. Did they marry each other?

1999, Britney went to the top of the American Charts.

Britney claims she was a virgin until she met little flip-a-coin Justin Timberlake. It was love at first time with the double-backed beast for both of these starry-eyed self-amused stars, so Justin's pimples busted and blended with Britney's busted pimples, but no baby came from this exchange of liquid fluids. They broke up when tearful Justin said Brit was cheating on him with every damn hustling son of a bitch that came in contact with her, especially her back-up dancer, Kevin Federline. Since Britney's dream was to follow in her idol Madonna's barefoot steps, she married her back-up dancer, too, and had her first little legit celebrity baby--was Madonna's back-up dancer-produced baby legitimate? I can't remember. There are a hell of a lot of little bastards running around the entertainment world. After dumping the good but a little odd Kevin, Brit married, she claims she was drunk and pilled out, her childhood hump, Jason Alexander. Poor dupe. He got to bang her one night and that was it. Brit was claiming annulment the next day, and that was that for that marriage.

By now, Brit is rich and to flaunt her wealth, she bought her brother a 4 million dollar apartment in New York City, now Brit's legal address; we wonder if she had her brother's Manhattan apartment decorated so it looks like the inside of a 50-footer, four-bedroom, two-bath trailer house?

Now Brit's pregnant again; still drinking; she's Louisiana white trash, think about what that means: drinking moonshine, hating black folks (called the "n" word by Britney's clan, that I'll guarantee), and keeping that humpin' image out there naked and shakin'--keeping an eye out for that next "toy boy" a la Mad-Donna, the Holy Mother of the entertainment biz.

By the way, what the hell has happened to Cher? Britney has taken Cher's ass-fame away from her.

Three Daily Growler cheers for our sacred mother, Britney Spears! Huzzah.

theentertaininggrowler
for The Daily Growler
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The Daily Growler Quote of the Day
"What this man ['a luxurious idler'] inherited from his father, and on which we say he lives, is not actually wealth at all, but only the power of commanding wealth as others produce it." Henry George, Progress and Poverty, The Robert Schalkenbach Foundation 100th Anniversary edition, 1979.

3 comments:

Horatio Parker said...

You're just jealous of Kenny Boy cuz he's got more money than you

5/27/2006 8:45 AM

The Daily Growler said...

Please, Horatio, keep that hidden in the IVEyS.

A The Daily Growler 6th Anniversary Rerun

Foto by tgw, "Oh, That Beautiful Pagan Moon," New York City, April 7, 2012
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Mr. Met Has His Say
Hey me hail and hearties, yes, again this year I stoop so low as to drag my sexy little self into the nonreadable blog slog to write this bit of Mets pep talk--it's the only blog that will let me write--and yes I can write, I have hands you know--I wear white gloves like that little jerk Mickey Mouse--and look how you people love him. So anyway, a Whoopty Do for my Mets--God is blessing them--2 wins over those stinking Atlanta Braves--what's so brave about them?--and the Mets have started off the season Whizz Bang-like--with David Wright and this Duda dude leading the team--we're knocking that old horsehide out o'the park--OK, so we're tied with the Washington Nationals--yes, that's embarrassing, but what the hey, we're still in first place. We've reduced the Latino players on the club this year--Reyes is gone and I'm happy--I never liked his showboat attitude--he's on the Miami Marlins now where he belongs. Que paso? So pull up you're bootstraps Mets fans, looks like a glory year for us--hot damn, and I'm ready to shoot you a tee shirt once we open at CitiCorp (OK, so they're a bunch of crooks; the Mets need money so we take money from anybody even that Madoff dude) and if you boo me and my Mets, you know where I'll shoot one of those tee shirts, right up your ___________, come on, there's no kids read this blog...nobody reads this blog--but anyway--or should I say "Butt" anyway--the Mets are on the march and thank the Good Lord--good luck in hunting your Easter eggs tomorrow--I pray the Good Lord lets his bunnies lay you a lot of eggs--'cause our Big Daddy is letting my Mets take over first place before we have to face those God-awful Phillies...or the Saint Louis Deadbirds...I like being a punster. So it's GO METS--and who'd'a thought Ralph Kiner could still be alive?--I'll admit he sounds half-dead when he tries to talk, but, hey, he's an original Met so GO RALPH, GO METS. Boys and Girls, yeah, I am one happy smelly wool-headed baseball--God, the guy inside me stinks to high hell sometimes.

GO METS,

mrmet
for The 6th Anniversary Daily Growler

Thursday, April 20, 2006

I Was Going to Write About War, but....

Lead Story on All Networks Yesterday, April 19th
I was going to write about war today, but yesterday when I woke up, my teevee is running all the time, the first thing I heard being preciously reported on the early show newscasts, sugarized by the toehead repetitive clowns both women and men--oh those guys! and oh those hot babes! It's all sex, folks, even teevee chowder heads who read the wire reports to you as actual investigative reporting--and the first thing they reported was: that Katie (airhead, always screwable) Holmes and Tom (the Scientologist) Cruise had had a baby! Oh my piles of cow shit! Then, by God, they went on: Brooke "Posing Nude When She Was 11" Shields had also had a baby. Oh my Goodness Gracious, how precious is that? I didn't even know that Brooke had screwed yet. Who's the father? They didn't say! It really could have been the any number of men who have ravaged Brooke--she lost her virginity (of course, I was goofing on her when I said I didn't know she had screwed yet) to Dean "Superboy" Cain while attending Princeton. Then Brookie married Andre "Aggravatingly Boring" Agassiz (the only star besides this Michelle Wie (pure-dee sex promotion in her sweet case) to ever be lauded as a great champion before he had ever won a major tournament in his sport)--I suppose Andre screwed Miss Shields, but I guess the jism in his "risen" one wasn't shooting enough willing-to-struggle little dudes to win her hot-item egg. So Andre lost 40-Love to Brookie and they finally met at the net and divorced (a very common happening in Hollywood Heaven). Andre, bless his Christian heart, went on to find good-old, ja vol, horny Stefi "Fine Ass" Graff out there (Sieg Heil) laying half naked on some pump-up beach and, shit, it was a marriage made in Tennis Heaven.

I feel unclean writing about these people. They are dunces, yet we give them huge chunks of air time to let them spew their advertisements for themselves and we soak up their total bullshit as inspiration for us all to become millionaire tiptoers through the phony tulips [I need an ode to Tiny Tim here, but I can't find one in poetry literature], an achievement most of us will never experience. There are tons of bimbos and peterheads out there lining up to be discovered. Pick an actor or an actress...all you have to do in New York City or Los Angeles is spit out a window and more than likely your spit will land on the head of a budding actress or actor. That goofy broad that serves you your overpriced coffee every morning is probably an actress or an actor, either blooming or fading, depending on how long they've been in the rose garden.

I once dated an actress. She was on The Guiding Light. She played a nurse. She was a damn fine looking female and "Yikes Zabees!" [a Bugs Bunny chisto] could she perform in bed. And she would take me to these soap opera star parties and shit, I was like a mudcat out of water at those things, usually held in fabulous West Side apartments in NYC or out in Brentwood or Malibu in L.A., mostly given by an associate producer or the head writer or perhaps just the actors themselves. What a silly bunch of phony shit those parties were. First of all, the men all hung together in one corner. The women all hung together in another corner. The music was loud and current and popular, though no one there really understood or appreciated music as music, just as background noise. There was dancing, but mostly it was women dancing with women and some of the boys actually danced with each other, too. The drift I caught there was that most of the men preferred men--with the exception of one guy who I came to know and rather like though he was killed a few months later when his motorcycle skidded out of control and crashed through a guard railing on a high looping freeway cluster in L.A.; and he and his bike fell 30 feet onto another level and a truck hit both he and the motorcycle and that wasn't a play he was performing but it was great drama, though it never made the obits in the Los Angeles papers, nor was he even worthy of an obit in the trade papers. It's understandable, he was a nobody who they had killed on a soap right before he died. I guess like Lawrence of Arabia, he got angry and went out on his motorcycle and challenged death and lost.

Most of the women at those soap parties, I had already been told this by my actress girlfriend, were bisexual. At one party, I met this actress from New York City whose father was a famous jazz person I totally dug (and still dig), and she was the most intelligent of all the actresses I met at those clambakes, so we left this party and went out to a bar around the corner and I ended up staying in her hotel room with her for a day and a half and didn't return back to my actress girlfriend for 2 days and when I did, I caught her in bed with a 72-year-old cello player, who I later found out was a member of one of the biggest and greatest US symphony orchestras. What a life though. All you need in acting is one kind a hit show, then get a pilot, and whether the pilot hits or not, you'll make damn good money, and, besides, you can always make another pilot just on the merits of you're having already made a pilot and being under maybe a two-pilot contract...blah, blah, blah, what the hell do I know; I'm out of that world now.

Oh, my Gott in Himmel, the rejection in the acting game is vicious. I chortled a bit over another actress friend who went to 5 auditions a week for way over a year and all she got during that stretch was a job in a summer theater in Warren, Ohio, of all places, and in the chorus line of a slipshod production of that old tirebiter favorite Auntie Mamed. She got so pissed after one rejection, she flew into her apartment, bawling like a 2-year-old in a well-practiced tantrum, and threw her headshots and postcard heads in the garbage and screamed she was going down and signing up to study for a new career in speech therapy, the union paying for her college if she signed an agreement that she would never try to be an actress ever again. I talked her out of doing that. I gave her a pep talk and did a little Freudian analysis on her. I pried out of her deepest repressions the fact that she was crazy in love with a pretty boy who as long as he was just as unsuccessful as she was, he loved her to the bone, would have died for her, the love of his life, his babe, his woman, his squeeze, his guaranteed fuck. So while they were together, she worshiped him and believed in his love, but the second his luck changed and he got the biggest break of his life, a role in an upcoming Fran Dreischer sitcom (oh crap, don't get me started on that whiny insult to acting), he slipped out quietly early one morning and moved to Los Angeles. He left without even a "Hey, nonny-nonny" to this dear sweet girl [it was wonderful lovin' I got during her time of heartbreak, I might viciously add], and with not even a forwarding address. That was her problem; she was competing with this chump, but when he left, the competitiveness went out of her. So Herr Doktor Me talked her into going to L.A., which she did, and once there, she became a fairly successful bit part player--yeah, I saw her on several series back in the late '80s.

That's my experience with actresses. They are great lovers; hell, they're actresses; and they don't really care who they're loving as long as the play is written well and the direction is enticing and they've studied their lines well. Sadly, all the actresses I have known acted more in bed than they ever did on a stage (though I can't vouch for "ever in front of a camera"--a palmcorder I viciously mean).

So I woke up to Katie and Tom having a baby and Brooke Shields and her latest husband having a baby and there was not one damn lick about a huge explosion in Afghanistan that had wiped out 30 or so souls; not a damn thing about that illegal war in Iraq that was still going stupidly down the toilet of war at a humongous expense in both human life and moulah; not one newsworthy iota about the police in Nepal who guard the precious king--wasn't he accused of murdering his whole royal-ass family?--killed 10 protesters (those god-damn silly ass bastards who think by protesting they'll get their wishes and get rid of their sorry-ass worthless pissant king)--well, I was beginning to poke a little fun at protesters, but then I remembered that the Paris students had made it work--proving politicians are idiots, and those students forced those French politicians to back down and get their noses out of the asses of the corporations.

I had tons of angry diatribe I wanted to hurl at Tom and Katie and Brooke and her unknown husband, but then I decided, why waste my time? So this is all I wrote about it.

A Quickie from theapeman
So these birds (Christians, Scientologists, Mormons, Holy Rollers, Catholics, actors/actresses/poor cornfed winners of that awfully Britishy dumbass American Idol (making Rupert Murdoch even richer than ever now, the bastard ("He killed Kenny!)), have gullible minds that are unsatisfied with real-time explanations of this universal collaboration of mathmatical formulae we call the cosmos. There ain't nothing mysterious about it. There is nothing mysterious about life if you understand evolution. Yes, life is mysterious if you're sensitive and gullible at the same time. Gullible people seldom read books or if they do, they don't really read them. It's like you reread a book you read a decade or so ago and how, son of a bitch, you see whole new things about it now; in fact, what you remembered before about the book isn't at all what you get out of it the second time around (the same with marriage).

I could go on and on about the idiocy of celebrity worship. Look what happened when the Amurican fools elected Ronald "Raygun" Reagan, once a lefty sort of Democrat when he was head of the actors union back in the McCarthy days. I think ole Joe "Give Me a Drink" McCarthy scared Ronnie right out of his Democratic cowboy clothes and right into the ordinary garb of the anticommie, right wing, John Birch-John Wayne school of "this is re-god-damn-diculus" way of kissing the Republican big old fat Conservative elephant ass.

Ronnie tried and tried to disrupt the Republican Party since before he was governor of California (remember the stories about Reagan's governor's staff boys and their trips to Bare (Bear) Mountain?). He lost most of the time, but then Tricky Dick got the Repugs in such a quagmire of bullshit with the Watergate nonsense, they had to turn their backs on his stupid ass (a Duke graduate, by the way) and finally, after ballot after ballot, they got behind the 20-mule-team Borax faux cowboy and he got eight years to sit in the Oval Office eating jelly beans, wanting to push the red button and end life as we knew it, except Nancy kept bringing Jeanne Dixon (oh what a cow!) up there and she would predict Armegeddon and that some such shit would be likely to become so much other shit, to the point Ronnie finally went into his Alzheimer's state of his unjion and kind'a dropped out of the picture his second term in the White House, though he to this day is known as the "Great Communicator." I defy you to listen to a whole Reagan speech and tell me what he's communicating. How about the fact we can fly to Tokyo in 3 hours? Yeah, that's a great one. Pappy Bush was there during those roaring boring Raygun years--remember "voodoo economics"? Pappy Bush knew what was going on; oh how he and Babs (George Washington in drag) hated Nancy and Raygun. Pappy had his Neo-Con Texas buddies showing him how to ride into office on old Raygun's coattails. "You may have to take a bullet like Ronnie did, Pappy." "Bullshit on that. How 'bout I just start a war with Saddam Hussein? Afterall, he and I are asshole buddies; he'll cooperate by attacking Kuwait; he has our approval you know. Remember, it was me who had Noriega, my old coke cartel buddy, hide out in the Vatican embassy in Panama so I could send my Air Force down there and bomb-kill 450 or so innocent Panamanians. " Such sordidness. It is so sordid I feel sordid writing about it.

theapeman
for The Daily Growler
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Quote of the Day: Freud wrote Einstein about War. In it, he wrote, "It is a general principle, then, that conflicts of interest between men are settled by the use of violence. This is true of the whole animal kingdom, from which men have no business to exclude themselves. In the case of men, no doubt, conflicts of opinion occur as well which may reach the highest pitch of abstraction and which seem to demand some other technique for their settlement." [from Warum Krieg? (Why War?) first published in Paris in 1933. See: Sigmund Freud, Character and Culture, published by Macmillan in 1963.]
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The Growler wishes to thank all of those few who have commented.
Check out this site: http://languagehat.com Exquisite thinking written down very well.

Also, check out this blog: http://lazyonebeen.blogspot.com I looked at the Snake Hunter's blog and really didn't understand what snakes he was hunting, though we Growlers will give anybody who comments on our blog a chance to have other Growlers look their blog over. Maybe some of the snakes The Snake Hunter is hunting are poisonous, who the hell knows.

The Growler has no politics; we only have opinions. We are not Democrats; we are definitely not Republicans; nor are we Naderites, Greens, Libertarians, Fascists, Neo-Nazis, John Birchers, Timothy McVeigh fan clubbers, Neo-Cons, or Federalists; we are simply American citizens, not by our own wills, but because we were born and raised in this "land of the free damnation" and we think of the world as the only Paradise we will ever see and thus our bitter rant against wars, profitmaking, job layoffs, sending jobs overseas, lying politicians, dumbass entertainers, selling off our industries (especially our factories), poverty, taxes, inheritance, corporations as human beings (such bullshit);against a government that is not providing much of anything for us except war, debt, profiteering (piracy), and the ruining of our armed forces who are simply meant to protect our borders from invasion, thank you. We also rant against the overall hypocrisies we Amurikans treasure--religious hypocrisy is the one that will bring us to our knees before the Capitalist conversion of commie China is completed, that which will definitely send mankind to an early grave if the religious hypocrites fail to annihilate us at Armegeddon--sorry all you folks waitin' around for that train to Glory; it ain't comin', folks. Why? 'Cause there ain't no trains 'cause there ain't no Glory, only the reality of the good ole sweet planet Earth.

The Daily Growler editor-in-chief (he looks like Perry White, we swear!)
for The Daily Growler

A The Daily Growler 6th Anniversary Rerun

Foto by tgw, New York City, December 2009
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Say goodbye to: Gil Noble, a New York City ABC-TV host and former reporter; host of "Like It Is" an innovative Black teevee program in which Gil featured controversial shows on the murder of Malcolm X, on the Congressional harassment of Adam Clayton Powell; many interviews with Harry Bellefonte; and Gil was a jazz enthusiast and pianist and did shows on Errol Garner, Fatha Hines, Dr. Billy Taylor, Sarah Vaughn, et al.; in some of his last shows he featured in-depth Black commentary from leading Black newspaper men, like Les Payne, and leading Black women from the world of education. Really sorry to hear Gil has left us--he leaves a big gap in innovative Black television news and Black historical evaluation. Gil Noble, 80, American television reporter and host (Like It Is).
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Say goodbye to: Jim Marshall, inventor of the Marshall amp, which the Brit rockers used to stack 20-feet high with the volumes turned up to the 10 level--this is the Brit amp that put the American amps like Peavey and Ampeg out of business. Jim Marshall, 88, English businessman, founder of Marshall Amplification.
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to hear a wolf growl: www.searchingwolf.com/nkgrowl1.wav

Monday, May 15, 2006

Growling Is Bad on the Throat

I Need to Bite Something
I was up all night trying to edit yesterday's Daily Growler post; what a mess. That's the same guy [it really was thegrowlingwolf in actuality] who wrote the Texas piece that got a lot attention a few moons back [the "Dust to Dust" posted as 1st 6th Anniversary rerun]; but just trying to write straight out like an essayist ain't his forte. Editing is not my forte but I was forced into editing by poverty; young poverty; $400 in my pocket and a young wife on my arm.

I have a photographic remembrance of the first time this flatlander kid ever saw Manhattan Island. I was in my brother-in-law's big nice Caddy heading to the Lincoln Tunnel from his bungalow in Morris Plains, New Jersey, where my wife and I had gone after our plane from Chicago landed at Newark Airport after dark the evening before. The Boeing 747 jumbo-job we came in on had its cabins light on full glare after we hit a bad storm over the Alleghenies just south of Pittsburgh and they kept the lights on to comfort us packed-in-like-sardines coach-class passengers. From that point on, that big-ass jet ice-skated over a slim sheet of clouds on into Newark. As we landed, drifting in over the northern New Jersey hills and woods, my eager wife and I strained out our left-side window trying to see the big city skyline, but no could we do. We could see its billions of watts of light shimmering coquettishly from under that sheath of veiling clouds that hid the megacity's edificial forest. "Let there be a gorgeously lit-up skyline!" we pled with the gods of a clear sky, but all we got was the veiled spirit of this, to me, holy city of my dreams, staying dreamy since I couldn't see its corporeality.

The day was overcast and chilly as that Caddy was swooped along by the concrete swipes of pretzel twisted thruways, interchanges, off ramps, and approaches so flooded with traffic it was choking, literally, like when back in the flatlands you worked around filling stations where you breathed automobile smells all day, gasoline smells, tire smells, oil and grease smells, urine smells, crap smells, spoiled air smells, though soon the traffic was funneled down to four lanes that climbed suddenly and we rose up to the top of the New Jersey bluffs that jut up high out of the Hudson River basin at Wehawken and as we then looped out into a single lane and began descending into the Lincoln Tunnel, BOOM! there in an opening in the rockwall of the tunnel approach IT WAS, Holy Mother of the Madhouse, yes, there the whole son of a bitchin' thing was unfolded before me. Just at that moment, the sun burned a hole right straight down out of that overcast and spotlighted the skyline of my holy city, HOLY F-ing New York City. I'd never seen a skyline like that, and I had lived in Mexico City, San Francisco, Dallas, and Chicago before coming to NYC. But never that awesome a panorama of buildings; a virtual field of buildings that waved like brick and stone grain from way up on my left to wash far on down to my right to end at what at that time were the two tallest buildings ever built, the World Trade Center twin towers, just finished, still under controversy, a bland clustering of rather "tacky" buildings forced on taxpayers by haughty, aristocratic, sleasebag, pompous, know-it-all Nelson Rockefeller as one of his many construction follies using state funds to play with as governor of the State of New York, one of the many huge monuments this smug grandson-of-an-old-asshole-bastard built to honor his Holiest of Holy Family names, including the very unnecessary and oddball-looking Empire Plaza up in ugly Albany, New York.

Holy shit, I thought, both excited and scared after that panorama was rolled up and the Caddy had entered the guts of the Lincoln Tunnel, how the hell am I going to survive in this city I'm fixing to become a make-it-or-break-it participant in, and I wanted to do my surviving smack-dab in the deepest bloodiest part of its heart, as high up as possible, with the ability to step myself right on up the ladders of Manhattan success, my sword and my pistol by my side, ah-ha, ah-ha? The only work I was qualified to get was SOCIAL WORK!!! [Scott Fitzgerald said using exclamation points was like laughing at your own jokes. "Sorry, Scott, but I think I'll add another couple'a exclams!] SOCIAL WORK!!!!!!!!!! I'm dyin' of laughter.]

And that's why I became an editor.

I was a natural-born writer; besides my grandmother was a writer; my brother was a writer; and my dad had taught me grammar and my multiplication tables before I went to first grade. Plus, my dad was a penmanship freak. He loved fountain pens; the bigger the better; the more expensive the better; the more gold on it the better. He used to could take his favorite pen, his 22-carat gold-pointed black-lacquered Schaeffer, in one hand and his next favorite pen, a black and orange celluloid, gold-tipped Parker, in his other hand, and kissing them together in the middle of a piece of paper he could write his name backwards with his left hand and forwards with his right hand simultaneously. He could also sign his name upsidedown and whip it around and sign it rightsideup all in one very fancy motion. My dad forced me to write my name so perfectly before I learned to write that when I did begin to learn to write, I printed everything, and I got to where I could print faster than the other kids could script. I would print all of my papers all the way through high school, and the only thing I could script that wasn't scribble was my name and I could sign my name, just as my father taught me, "fancier and prouder than John Hancock's on the Bill of Rights, the best damn document our forefathers ever came up with, so help me Hannah."

And that's why I found editing easy.

I graduated college finally with a Masters of Arts in Sociological and Economic Theory. I had a B.A. in Sociology with my focus on Urban Sociology, especially the Urban Planning aspects of it. I carried Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre book, Wright's utopian city that had a huge farm in center city, around with me every where I went, and I thought like a futurist and not like a conservative. My first quest for a job in Urban Planning got me nowhere. I sent my transcript and introductory letter to cities all over the southwest and midwest from Houston up to Champagne-Urbana, Illinois, where my favorite teacher in college, an Urban Sociology genius, had gone to teach at the U. of Illinois. Nada. Not even a jot or a tittle of hope; only totally rejection. I skidded almost into a coma trying to get a job in city planning, futuristic invention, or as a social psychiatrist, which was my big dream. I went to an employment agency. The woman who looked like a crazed cat dressed as a human looked over my transcript then looked me up and down, went hmmmmmmmmm, and said she was sorry but she had nothing that would fit what I was looking for. As she was fixing to shoo my ass out the door, her phone rang and she began taking notes and speaking them out before writing them down: "OK. You need a receptionist? Uh-huh. College degree. OK? Chance to advance to caseworker. OK. College should be what education? Child psychology..." My ears perked up; I knew a little something about child psychology. "...Sociology...OK, let me see what I can do. What's the pay? $127 every two weeks; benefits; OK. Thanks." She slammed down the phone. "I'll take it," I said, so eagerly I was drooling. "What?" she said, her claws out and her eyes night-wide-open. "That job; I'll take it." "That's a receptionist job at the Blank Country Juvenile Home. You're qualified for a better position than this." "Nope. I'm serious; I want that job." "You got it," she said, and immediately called and set me up with an interview.

I got the job and thus began my career as a social worker. God, how I hate social work now. But I do respect and love social workers. I know them intimately, though I shunned ever calling myself a social worker even though that's what I became after I started that job as a receptionist in the Blank [fill in the blank, these homes are all the same] Country Juvenile Home. After I became the office manager/caseworker at the juvenile home, I got married to a Baptist preacher's daughter and moved to New Orleans, where I went to work for the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court as a court intake worker. Why soon I was associating with some of the greatest dudes I'd ever met and soon I was going up to Baton Rouge and attending classes in Social Psychology aiming at becoming eventually a medical sociologist or at best a social psychiatrist, a guy that handles "sociopaths" and "passive aggressives" and autistic kids, Tourette's syndrome kids, stutterers, kids regular old psychiatrists have no time for nor interest in. I was suddenly working toward an MSW, for me, a joke degree in terms of my Urban Sociology speciality, a Masters of Social Work, and a need to join the National Association of Social Workers and start a New World Order of social miracles. Oh hell I hated those years; I had over 300 cases my first year in New Orleans, everything from runaways, incorrigibles, to serious sociopathic psychopaths, on up to cold-blooded little bastard murderers. F that work. I couldn't wait to get out of it. [I'm really not putting social workers down here; just my trying to endure it.] I began drinking too much; leaving work early to go to my favorite restaurant in the Vieux Carre, Ruggiero's on Decatur just off Dumaine, and once there settled in at the bar and order a dozen raw oysters from the Yugoslavian oyster shucker and a Dixie beer and then I ate oysters and drank beer until my hard-working, money-making wife would join me and we'd eat antipasto, spaghetti in green sauce, king crab legs served with a huge bowl of drawn butter spiced up with scallions and garlic, and tumblers of cold, cold draught Dixie, fuck all those needy bastards (the worst kids in New Orleans) who were being hauled into kiddy court with no representation for their rights but me; the lives of babies up to full-fledged adolescents in my stupid hands--Jesus, I was absorbing these crazy kids's quirks and neuroses, and their wild, jungly headaches, after one kid told me he had headaches that "grow like vines around my forehead." Hoo-boy, I one day drunkenly confessed to myself, it was high time we motivated on damn out of heah, I did declare. If I hadn't'a left New Orleans, I would still be a social worker; one of my best buddies in New Orleans went on with it and is now living grandly in retirement out in California. But, I got a lucky break--and don't read this if you have a weak stomach--my parents were killed in an awful car wreck and I inherited a little bundle of money, bundle enough that I walked in one afternoon after I had a truly shitty day of work (a little asshole rich boy arsonist; a beautiful young Italian-octoroon mix who was fucking for money out at a junior high; and a cop's knucklehead half-wit son who spent most of our interview threatening to cut a hole in my throat and reach in and jerk out my heart "while it's still beatin'")-- and I QUIT.

That same week, I moved to Mexico City.

When I came to New York City, I gave up; the only credentials I had were in social work. I went downtown to the Manhattan juvenile court, called the Youth Council Bureau in those days. The day I went for the interview, it was in May, the temperature climbed to 97 and when I walked into the Youth Council Bureau offices, they had no air conditioning and everyone, all men that I could see, were in their shirtsleeves and one dude, I swear, had stripped down to his guinea tee shirt--he was hairy as hell and carried a piece in a holster that fit under his arm, just like I imagined what a mobster goombah type would look like. I was interviewed by the head of the department, a creepy little gnome of a man who looked like some Goliath had stepped on him like he was a beer can and had smashed down on him head first--he looked like a smashed beer can. And he started talking, not about me or my qualifications or the job itself, but about himself. He'd been in 'Nam, he said, and he'd seen it all; there wasn't nuthin' scared his ass or bothered him anymore. Suddenly he jumped up and waddled around his desk to face me. "You ever heard of 'fragging'? That's where a non-com shoots one of his own officers usually in the back, though the most hateful of the fraggers were the ones who went out in front of their charging officers and shot 'em head-on, as though the enemy had whacked 'em. Shit, you fragged to get out of duty, to have a little space of peace and gettin' high until the next officers came or they made you an officer, and boy was that hell if they made you an officer. You had to walk backwards from then on. You take a guy who's fragged a couple of officers and then they make him an officer, now that's shit, man, pure shit." His eyes were on fire and his nostrils were flaring; Jesus, I thought, this son of a bitch is a maniac. Just as I thought that, this crazy bastard said, "OK, what's your name, come with me and I'll take you to meet the guy you're gonna work with in Brooklyn." Whoa, Chief, whoa. "You mean I'm hired?" "Yeah, give me six days, no, make that six weeks and then call me and I'll tell you when to come to work. Hey, Art, you lazy motherfucker, you sorry bastard, heh-heh, I love this guy, Art, here's the greenhorn who's gonna be workin' with you out in Hell out there." I was saved when Mayor Lindsay sent word down it was so hot, all city offices were closing. The gnome and Art went their merry ways down the halls and left me standing there like a chicken without its head. What the hell was I supposed to do? All around me people were packing out of that office. Soon I was alone. I left. I never went back. I never called. Nope. Thus ended my career as a social worker.

That's why I became an editor.

I don't hate editing worse than social work, but after decades of being an editor, I truly hate editing now [that's not actually true]. That's why I was up all night last night editing yesterday's post by the growlingoldTexian about his MOM, which, I've been told, was a well-written piece. Thanks to me, the supereditor. Selah.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Note: this is the NOW the official edited version; edited, of course, by thegrowlingoldTexian.

3 comments:

Horatio Parker said...

Maybe you hate editing, but I'm glad you like writing.

I was a bit confused, though, by the flashback from entering New York to your early social working days.

5/16/2006 7:32 AM

The Daily Growler said...

Writers are confusing and editors think they think like writers except they don't. Flashbacks are flashes in the pan. Thanks for your comment.

5/17/2006 3:54 AM

Anonymous said...

As a practicing social worker, I can proudly say that we are all happy to be without your services. Many a child will benefit now that you are editing. So long.

The Daily Growler 6th Anniversary Reruns

Foto by tgw, New York City 2009
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Say goodbye to: Chief Jay Strongbow (Joe Scarpa): I had to return in order to write a little goodbye to Chief Jay Strongbow. One of my best pals in high school's father was my hometown's wrestling (the phony type) promoter and I hung many an afternoon at the Sportatorium, where the wrestling events took place. I learned all the tricks of the trade from my friend and another kid who worked there--many an afternoon we staged wrestling matches up in the big ring, "real" ones even to the point of learning how to smash a metal folding chair over your opponent's head to where it didn't hurt one bit. My brother at the time was a sports reporter on our hometown newspaper and I often accompanied him to various sporting events around the town and was especially known by my peers for sitting with him at the reporters table (we were the only reporters who covered the matches) at ringside at the wrestling matches--my brother actually had the hammer and rang the bell at the end of the rounds, a job he later let me attend to. I saw and met many a night Chief Jay Strongbow at those matches and many a night I've had the Chief thrown over the ropes and come smashing down on the reporters table always sending my brother and me scooting off out of harm's way. It was kind'a dangerous since the Chief or his opponents weighed way over 250 pounds. The Chief's gimmick was he came into the ring wearing a full Native American chief's costume with the war bonnet and everything. He also had long black hair which he kept held up with a Native American sweat band. When his opponent would piss him off, he would go into a fairly impressive war dance before grabbing his opponent and applying his patented sleeper hold on him. My brother knew the Chief wasn't a real Native American at all but was one Joseph Scarpa from Philadelphia, PA, though in a deal with my friend's promoter father he agreed to never spill the beans in his coverage of the matches. Later the Chief acquired a Native American brother called Jules Strongbow and they fought on the West Texas Wrestling Circuit as a tag team. I remember Chief Jay Strongbow in the late fifties and early sixties representing in teevee commercials the weight-loss pill called Tafon, which is No Fat spelled backwards, a weight pill just as phony as the Chief. I was very surprised to see that the Chief had just died; I hadn't thought of him in many a moon. So I come out of my den to give the old Chief a hearty good-bye--he brought me much pleasure and fame as a high school kid--I knew the whole game was faked, but I always pretended around rasslin' fans that it was real.
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What Black Folks Face Daily in Billionaire Mike Bloomberg's New York City Police State--Mike Bloomberg Hates Blacks, Latinos, and Poor People in General
Check out this report from Mike Taibbi:
www.sott.net/articles/show/243704-Mike-Bloomberg-s-New-York-Cops-in-Your-Hallways
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On April 14, 2006, The Daily Growler Started Publishing
In honor of the beginning of our 7th year of being and nothingness and since our main character, thegrowlingwolf, has out of rage, wrath, and need of inactivity fled off into the Wild Blue Yonder (off to wolf country) telling us who remain behind as he fled to sail the Growler ship into any waters we dare sail her, we've decided to rerun some posts from the past, beginning with today's from April 19, 2006, a Growler episode about Dirt and Texas entitled "From Dust to Dust," complete with a poem from thewomantrumpetplayer, a visitor/character who has been on board since this bitch of a ship started sailing. We hope you enjoy these trips from out of our past and we give you a long list of cheers from the Growler staff: Franny & Zoey, our two-headed girl reporter; Mr. Ed., the Editing Horse; thedailygrowlerhousepianist who is still tickling the ivories in various prestigious dives in the NY-NJ area; Walter Crackpipe, our venerable old muckraking editorialist; Austin Highchew, our managing editor; Colonel Singh the Singing Sikh, our expert on nothing and everything; barabbasmunn-dayne, thedailygrowlerjots&tittlesman; Marvin Backbiter, our sports reporter; Helen Klein-LaCloos, our poetry editor; and Elmer Snowedin, our poet laureate.

From Out of Our Past Come the Thundering Hoofbeats (this is the kind of headlines you get when you have a horse for your editor)("Nay," Mr Ed. says from his stall):
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Wednesday, April 19, 2006

From Dust to Dust

TEXAS
The first thing I think of when I think of Texas is earth. Is that really the first thing I should think of when I think of Texas? Maybe I should have said dirt instead of earth. Or maybe I should say dust instead of dirt. The most important book in Texas has a character in it who says that man simply exists from dust to dust. That's a horrible statement to me, especially if I reminisce on it for any stretch of time.

Like how once upon a time I stood in the middle of a certain part of Texas, the part of the state that faces square into the face of the sun during the day and is absorbed into the face of the moon at night, in a certain early season on into summer's flames.

And I've been standing there facing into that sun's sparkling heatwaves and I have been standing there just watching...daydreaming...inwardly thinking, when all of a sudden I was cold. Yes. Cold. In the middle of a certain part of Texas, standing there in the direct stare of the sun and feeling cold.

Then the extremely dry air that was frozen in stillness by the essence of its own heat around me started moving. Slightly at first, little wisps whipping at me with cold small licks. Then those licks turned to bitings. I know it immediately. I know what those bitings mean. Those bitings that precede it...and then I look up and there IT is.

First, I see a low bluish line on the flat horizon, the shimmering of the remaining dangling glass slivers of the full-faced sun's heat still boldly dancing in gestures of defiance at what is coming.

The wind is now just flat-dab cold. And now the wind throws grains of what's coming in my face and I breathe in and taste the first of what's coming in my face and what's coming in my face tastes like earth, or should I say dirt? or should I say dust?

I turn and face that rising bluish line and look it directly in its billions of eyes. I watch it rising and becoming a dark deep blue hulk raising up before me, coming at me as if coming straight up out of that earth just in front of me a few miles, though in actuality it really had started a hundred miles out to the west, out on the flattest of the flattest prairie plains, crunchy with hot sands and scraggly with low brush, suddenly spanked by a swooping down of a huge hand of wind.

Then my eyes widened as this dark blue bald hulk with the billion eyes hooded up, rising up like a thunderheaded cobra slowly straight up before me, its hood flaring wide, its body arched, its purpose to strike right at me, to come at me, to overwhelm me, to bite me.

Up, up, up, building up, rising darker and more blue, licking out with now stiff tongues of hard dirty bites, gradually coming up, its hood flaring wider and coming higher, now roiling and rolling up. As it rolls toward me, as it dances toward me, it turns from blue to red as it flares up square into the staring face of the sun.

And THEN! just like that, the face of the sun was gone. Blotted out.

There is a pain I suffer as I stand there in the middle of that certain part of Texas, in that certain early season on into summer's flames, in the middle of what once faced into the shimmering heat caused by that sun that had disappeared into those acres and acres of dust scooped up and set aroll a hundred miles west in front of me by a swooping down huge hand of wind. The pain is in the dry bath given me by those rolling, boiling rifled grains of that borne aloft sandy desert loam hurting as they shower me.

We exist from dust to dust. How many of those who had already turned to dust, from the ancient days until a recent time, had overwhelmed me that day in the middle of that particular part of Texas, in that part of Texas that faces into the face of the sun during the day...until another huge hand of wind swoops down to stir the earth a hundred miles west of where I stood there once upon a time. Had I breathed back within me the remains of my ancestors?...or other ancestors, like the ancient Clovis people, the ancient Aztecs, or the other nomadic tribes of Native Americans who once roamed these flatter than flat prairies once lush with grass and bison, with people living on the sandstone mesas, along the rivers and the creeks, following the herds of bison, across those now barren prairies to make their beds for another night under that high, high sky in the middle of that certain part of Texas, that part of Texas that faces straight into the face of the sun during the day and is absorbed by the face of that beautiful silver crying moon during the night and to wake up the next morning to face the rising sun, to cook their buffalo meat over buffalo chip coals, to eat their prairie wheat breads and mushes, then while the women struck the camp, the men sharpened their flint arrowheads as they prepared to head out across those lush grasslands to go after another buffalo, to go after another day in the face of that sun in that time when there were no dust storms. Not in that particular part of Texas, not in those certain oh-so primitive days when man did not attempt to conquer the earth but rather to go along with its moods, living within the will of this planet that spins away day by day, swirling its face dead into the face the sun during its many days and being absorbed into the silver face of the silvery moon during its many nights.


NEW YORK, NEW YORK
I was raising up out of my bed one morning not so many years ago in New York City. I had overslept and was very late for work. It was a little after nine in the morning. I sleep in a loft bed in a room on the 11th floor of a lower midtown Manhattan apartment building, a tall window that stretches up from the floor of my room up alongside and on above my lofty bed. From that window, I could look down south down Manhattan Island, far down to where I could easily see two monumentally tall twin box-like skyscrapers.

On this morning, being late for work, I awoke already startled, a little scatterbrained, facing that window that faced south down the island of Manhattan directly at those two monumentally tall twin box-like skyscrapers, and what I then saw didn't hit me as true at first. I just looked at it and didn't know whether to believe it or whether to figure it was a colossal stunt of some kind, an illusion, maybe a remaining vision from a dream I had just survived. If it were a stunt or an illusion, it was a huge one, yes, an amazing one, yes, but no, no, no, no...and I came fully awake.

What I was seeing, yes, really was what I was seeing. What I saw was a sudden explosion of clouds of boiling, roiling smoke and flames flying out from the monumentally tall box-like skyscraper closest to me. I stared unable to do anything but stare. The smoke gathered in dimension streaming out from the building eerily oily black, an ugly puffing up black sticking out fiery red tongues as if panting for air as it shot out from the now obviously knifed through structure, oily black, grimy black, littered black to cool down gradually though billowing up majestically from a burnt dark dirty gray up, high up, into a rather angelic white spread-winged cloud making its way toward the heavens.

Later in the day, after all the buildings were down that were coming down, that place down south down the island of Manhattan that used to hold within its view those two monumentally tall twin box-like skyscrapers now simply smoked. The buildings had disappeared and were now only ghostly smoke rising high in that clear and beautifully luxuriously clean sky that framed that smoking pit the rest of that gloriously beautiful day. Even the smoke in such a sky was visually striking allowing you to forget the human horror and destruction it represented. That smoke was coming from smoldering liquid steels and other metals, the ashes of enormous trashes, the grains and bits and chips and fragmentations of human remains, the powdered bloods and guts and hearts and genitals of over three thousand human beings smoking up a horrible crackling dies irae.

And all through that first night after this had happened, I was unable to sleep because of a certain bitter smell and TASTE that was suddenly in the southern breezes blowing up from downtown Manhattan from that smoldering place of death and destruction and revenge right through my window and right straight into my nostrils, into my lungs, and into my bloodstream, where they made themselves at home.

thenycgrowler [thegrowlingwolf using a pseudonym]
for The Daily Growler
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1 comments:

Marybeth said...

I wrote a little poem when I visited later that autumn:

Autumn In New York

Dust motes dance
In a shaft of sunlight
In lower Manhattan.
Bodies of people I love.

MbR, 2001