Few There Be That Find It. . .

The Eleventh Step

2011-12-24T21:44:00.001-05:00

Karl brought in a little Charlie Brown Christmas tree andset it on the center of the four folding tables that had been pushed togetherfor the weekly meeting. A cheap old artificial tree, black wire and greenbristles, missing a few *branches* from Christmases past.

He even thought to bring an extension cord.

Blinking colored lights hanging off a half-vacant fake tree.

Eighteen losers ringing the tables, staring at the blinkinglights.

Nobody talking. A couple of coughs. Peopleclearing their throats. Metalchairs squeaking.

I wonder what prompted Karl to bring the *tree?*

Looking at that tree, I remember what I think of as the*Last Christmas,* the last Christmas before things went really bad between mymother and father. I was twelveand my brother was fourteen. Ourmother had decorated the apartment for Christmas. Tree, wreaths, stockings, the whole nine yuletide yards. Nobody appreciated it. An act of preposteroussentimentality. I let her knowit.

It’s no surprise, then, that here I sit, thirty-seven yearslater, at the tables of the losers.

Why would Karl bring in that stupid little *tree?*

Most people sitting here have broken families, what is hetrying to say with his broken-down little *tree?*

“Welcome to the Wednesday night Hope and RecoveryMeeting. I’m Joe, and I’m anaddict,” Joe says.

“Hi, Joe” everybody says, automatonically.

Around the table we go, introducing ourselves asaddicts. Part of the ritual. Part of the liturgy.

Joe continues reading from the meeting script. It ought to be in Latin.

What will I confess tonight? I haven’t told the truth here in a couple of years. Not that I haven’t been sober. I have been. But I need to make up some minor incident in order to feellike I’m contributing. I have nodoubt I could stop attending meetings and remain sober. But I would miss the ritual.

"We strive to practice anonymity andconfidentiality," Joe says. "Who we meet or what is said in a meeting is treated asconfidential and is not discussed outside the meeting. Who you see here, what you hear here,when you leave here, let it stay here."

"Hear, hear," everybody says automatonically.

"Does anybody have any announcements before we splitinto our tables?"

"Hello, my name's Ira, I'm an addict," Ira says.

"Hi, Ira," everybody says automatonically.

"Joe," Ira says, "our preamble states ourfellowship does not support or endorse outside causes or issues. So why is there a Christmas tree on thetable?"

I scan the room, see a few rolled eyes, several frowns.

"That's not really an announcement," Joe says.

"We're supposed to define our Higher Power forourselves, not have it defined for us by an icon."

"That's more of a complaint than an announcement,"Joe says.

"I'm announcing a violation of the preamble. Our fellowship is supposed to beinclusive, not exclusive. And by having a symbol of a specific faith ondisplay, we are in. . ."

I stop listening.

I wonder what my ex-wife and kids are doing? I need to remember to round up a few presentsand send them off. I wonder whatthe kids are into, now? You fallout of it pretty fast.

I remember one Christmas, I took the kids into Victoria'sSecret, they were 3 1/2 and 5 1/2 years old, and I let them pick out somepajamas for the old lady—nothing too slutty, just some nice stylishsleepwear. The old lady blew herstack. "You took the kidsinto Victoria's Secret?!?!" She lectured me on how that would damage their view of women. Well, we had a good time in that store,shopping for her. I can still seethat Asian salesgirl. It remains a pleasant memory. That's out of the old lady’s reach, out of the old lady’sreach. She can't move it fivehundred miles away.

There's Karl, unplugging his little tree, taking it off thetable, rolling up the cord. Poorold bastard. He was probablyworking off some old memories of his own, and just wanted to bring in a littlecheer. And he ends up gettingkicked in the teeth.

"I know this is a Christian church," I hear Irasay. "And I am appreciative they let us use this space. Nevertheless, as a group, we bringno—"

"All right, you made your point," Joeinterrupts. "The tree isgone. Let's not waste any moretime on the issue. We need tostart the tables."

"I was not 'wasting' time," Ira says.

"We're on step eleven this week, I believe," Joesays. "Step eleven can meetin the kitchen. Topic tabledownstairs. Open discussionhere. Have a good meetingeverybody."

I stay seated for open discussion. Ray, Denard, Karl and Irastay, also. Five minutes for eachof us. I'll be out of here intwenty-five minutes. Still time tohit a store.

Nobody says anything. It's always like this. Waiting for someone to go first.

"Why is everyone looking at me?" Ira asks.

I wasn't looking at him. I was looking at a poster on the wall. A picture of a luminescent Jesus, withthe caption *The Light of the World.* Jesus was looking at him.

Nobody says anything.

"Well, I guess I'll go first," Ira says. “It was a very good week. It was an uneventful week. I was reflecting on that on the driveover here tonight. I used to seek‘events.’ I used to seeksensation. I craved it. We all craved it, didn’t we?” He stops. He looks around the table to make sure we are all nodding inagreement. I nod. What the Hell, why not? Ray and Denard nod. Karl doesn’t. “I guess what I’m trying to say, fellas, is that in recoverythere is a peace, a tranquility, if you will. And that feeling of peace or tranquility, even serenity, ifwe could borrow the phraseology of our famous prayer, that feeling was astranger to me. And it took sometime to warm up to that ‘stranger.’ It took some time for me to accept it. What I am trying to say, fellas, is that in recovery, or atleast, in my recovery, but I think also in most everyone’s recovery, is thatearly in recovery, we miss the sensation. I missed the sensation. Peace or tranquility or serenity didn’t look so good, at first. It was definitely not ‘love at firstsight,’ if I can put. . .”

Boring. That’sa big problem with these meetings. Most of what’s said will bore you to tears. I tune out. Ineed to invent my weekly anecdote, anyway. Let’s see. . .I could say I was in the checkout lane atMeijer. . .and. . .a couple of lanes away, I saw. . .Danni. . .ha!. . .Danni!.. .yeah, that’s good. . .I knew Danni way back in the day. . .when I was buriedin my addiction. . .buried alive in it. . not knowing I had a problem. . .so. ..so. . .so seeing Danni there. . .and remembering. . .and remembering what?. ..what? Ridiculous. Danni’s been dead for six years. Ha. I could say her ghost visited me. Like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

“. . .seems familiar and not strange, anymore. So what I’m trying to say, fellas, isthat it’s a different life, a different way of living. And it’s healthier. Healthier for the body and thesoul. It’s more honest. It’s more respectful, both to myselfand to others. What I used tothink was happiness was, in reality, only turmoil. Emotional and physiological turmoil. But I mistook that chaos forhappiness. All the game playing,all the secrets, all the ‘that’ behind the addiction, if that isn’t too Easterna concept, the ‘that’ behind the addiction. So I guess that’s it, fellas, that’s what it all comes downto, a new way of life. And I’mthankful to have the opportunity to share recovery with you.”

He shuts up, and we all say “thanks, Ira,”automatonically. All of us exceptKarl.

We shift in our chairs, look around. Ira takes a sip of coffee. Ray unwraps a Hershey’s Kiss. Karl’s staring at his Christmastree. It’s over by the door.

Denard goes next.

"It's like Ira was saying. You want the sensation. I still want it." He stops, sighs heavily. "Rough week." Hesighs again, shakes his head. "I done did some things. Ahhhh, fuck." He shakes his head, he chuckles. "I just can't seem to stop. I mean, I can. I can stop,you know? But then, I startagain. And then I have to startstopping again, you know?"

No, I don't know. I never really know what Denard is talking about. I don't think he knows, either.

But who really knows anything, anyway? If any of us knew anything, we wouldn'tbe here in the first place.

Man, that last Christmas. Twelve-years-old, and spitting in the old lady's eye. I was already off track. I started these meetings about thirtyyears too late.

Now I have the appearance of being on thestraight-and-narrow. Sober inbehavior. But nobody to seeit. Except these stumblebums. I lost everyone else. Sober in behavior—but for whose benefit? I have no responsibility, now. Some of these misfits believe they havea responsibility to themselves. Not me. That’sselfish. Sobriety for self is anact of vanity. And anyway, inspirit, I’m still an addict. Thesame dark desires rule the inner man.

You see? If youthink about this too much, you only end up asking: why bother?

“. . .tomorrow. Ahhhh, fuck, I have to believe tomorrow willbe different. If it’s the same,then today never ends, you know? It just goes on. It’s liketime stops. Yeah, it juststops.” He sighs heavily. “Ain’t that some fucked up shit? Time’ll just stop, and today’ll just goon forever.” He sighs. “This addiction, man, it messes witheverything. Everything. The laws of physics andeverything. Space and time justdisappear.” He throws up hishands. “What can I do? What the fuck can I do? This thing is bigger than me. How am I gonna battle black holes andall that shit? Because that’s whatthis thing is, a black hole.”

He stops talking. Even though I’ve just been told time has stopped, I can feel the secondsticking by. Is he finished? Is it time for someone else to take thestage? He must sense all of usthinking the same:

“I’m done.” Hesighs. “Nothing else to say.”

“Thanks, Denard,” we all say, automatonically.

Thanks for nothing. That’s what I feel. Nothing. It will pass, itwill pass. But right now,nothing. I’m closer to being deadthan people going through a near-death experience. I’m not out of my body, I can’t see myself. I see no welcoming light. I’m here. Breathing. Isee these other fuck-ups fidgeting, scratching. I feel no kinship. I might as well be sitting at the bottom of the moon’s deepest crater,staring at rubble.

“. . .compete with my brother. He was tall and lean, like my dad. He was good at sports. I was always chubby. So Itried to compensate. I excelled inschool. I always got perfect grades. Dad always said he was proud of my academic achievements, but he lovedgoing to all my brother’s games, it was obvious, and you could see the prideand the love. I always felt inferior. My dad and my brother had a real bond. Dad never said he loved me.” Ray stops. He’s choked himself up.

Ray says the same thing, every week. “I’m fat and my dad didn’t love me, soI forced myself to do well in school and business, to earn his love. But I put so much pressure on myself, Ibecame an addict.” It chokes himup, week after week. He’s fat inbelly and wallet, unlike most of us. He’s still got his wife and kids, unlike most of us. He seems to have one specific thingeating at him, so to speak, unlike most of us.

There’s not any one thing I can blame for my failure, exceptmyself. And I doubt it’s reallythat simple, or external, for Ray—but it seems to work for him.

And let's face it, this is only part of the problem. A lotof these guys seem to think addiction is all that stands between them and thePearly Gates. Reductio adAbsurdum. It's all rotten. The addiction just shows, like a crack in the wall.

What am I going to say? I need to think of something. I'm running out of time. Once Ray finishes mourning for himself, it'll be down to meand Karl.

". . .hugged me and said he loved me, I wonder howdifferent my life would've been? Not that I'm not grateful for what I have. My wife has stuck by me. But I have to admit, there are moments of doubt. I've always been a good provider. I've let her have whatever shewants. So does she love me, or mypaycheck? That's what this diseasecan do to you. It's awful. All the doubts. You can't trust yourself and you can'ttrust anybody else. I've had alifetime of insecurity. Thedisease worked its way into my mind, because—" Ray stops. He'schoked himself up, again. "Because there was no love. A strong mind is built on a foundation of love. And I never had that. So I wasn't equipped to resist thedisease." Ray wipes hiseyes. I don't see any tears. Phantom tears, I guess. "I feel love in this room, though. That's what keeps me coming back. That's what keeps me sober. Thank you. Thank you all for loving me."

"Thanks, Ray," we all say, automatonically.

A clean, well-lighted place, that's what this is. The Presbyterians have a nice place,here.

The others are looking at me and Karl. One of us has to talk. Karl looks like he's taken a vow ofsilence. He's staring at hisChristmas tree, unblinking. Rayunwraps another Hershey's Kiss. One of the Christmas kind, in green foil.

"I remember watching my mother," I say,"putting tinsel on the tree. I said to her, 'this Christmas stuff just makes itworse.' She says, 'makes whatworse?' I say, 'you and dadscreaming.' 'I'm just trying tobring a little cheer into all of our lives,' she says. And then I shouted, 'I SAID, IT JUSTMAKES IT WORSE.' My brotherlaughed. I don't know where theold man was. Probably in thebedroom, drinking and listening to his shortwave. Probably trying to get a Bartok symphony. The old lady still had some tinsel inher hand. She hesitated, put it onthe tree, and then that was it. Her decorating was over. Forever. That tree and allthe decorations stayed up till summer, when we had to move out. She never unpacked that stuffagain."

Karl seems interested. The others, not as much.

"I was right. It did make everything worse. Well, maybe I should say, I was being honest. All that phony Christmas cheer couldn't cover up the illwill in the household. And eventhough the decorations were cheap, the tacky Christmas junk of the poor, itstill seemed like. . ."

What did it seem like? What am I trying to say? Ican very easily go back and relive that Christmas.

Look at Karl, he's really into this story. Well, there are some of us for whom theholiday has a. . .

"I would say I was embarrassed for all that cheapChristmas junk. I felt embarrassed for all the trinkets, for them having towitness our family rancor. But,and this is the important thing, I was wrong in behavior. I shouldn't have disrespected the oldlady."

At that, Denard nods.

"It's that time of year, of course. There are reminders in the littlestthings. And Karl brought in thetree. I was twelve years old. You know, in the gospels there's onlyone account of Jesus from when He was about three until He was aboutthirty. There's an incident fromwhen He was twelve. Mary andJoseph had lost track of Him. Hewas in the temple, teaching the rabbis. And when Mary and Joseph find Him there, He says, real nonchalant, 'didyou not know I must be about My Father's business?' Now, me, when I was twelve, I was shouting at the old lady,ruining her Christmas. So you see,whatever has led me here, right here, to this table, was already in me at agetwelve. So. . ."

So? Sowhat? I lost my train of thoughtwith that little digression about the twelve-year-old Jesus. Now what?

"Look, for some of us, there is a real presence in theseason. It's like the Catholicsand their little communion wafer. They believe it is the flesh of Christ in that wafer. Well, some of us feel the real fleshand blood presence of the Lord during Christmas."

They don't know what the Hell I am saying. Except Karl.

"Look, of course He's always here. It's just at Christmas and Easter, youfocus more, you are less distracted by the world."

Look at these idiots, they don't understand. But I can tie all this together,now. It's crystal clear.

"The point is, I had already lost the way at agetwelve. And here I am,thirty-seven years later. Thirty-seven? Listen, theJews were in the wilderness. . ."

No, I don't want to get sidetracked, again.

"The point is, here I am, thirty-seven yearslater. Lost everything. Nowwhat? What's the point? Is sobriety a sacrifice? No. I don't do this as an offering. So, now what? What's the point? I don'tknow. And that is the point. I don't need to know. I no longer need to know. I've lost everything, according to theworld. Why? Why did I do the things I did, whichcaused me to lose it all? Why am Ilike the way I am? I don't needthe answer to that question. I'mat peace. I live by the faith ofJesus, the Higher Power. Godplanted His faith in me, and now I trust in that until the end, no matter whathappens next. And at the end, allwill be revealed."

Yes, I think that's it. And those may be the first true words I've spoken here in acouple of years. Look at theirfaces.

"Thanks," they say, doubtfully. Except Karl. His "thanks" seemed genuine.

The poor old lady. I never made it up to her. Yeah, I’ll hit Target after this. I’ll get some gifts for the kids. I’ll ask a clerk what the hot toys are for seven and nine year oldboys. Hell, I’ll even pick upsomething for the old lady. Theold lady ex-wife. And I’ll getmyself one of those Christmas trees-in-a-box things. The kind you just unpack and plug in. It’ll be like lightinga candle for—

Karl bangs his fist on the table.

“I wasn’t going to speak a word. I’m so disgusted. I wasn’t going to speak a God damn word. But you,” Karl says, looking right at me, “inspired me. The rest of you. . .” he shakes hishead.

“You know the protocols forbid cross talk,” Ira says.

“Cross talk?” Karl laughs in scorn. “I’mnot talking across the table to anybody. I’m just making general comments. And listen, Mr. Know-It-All, you being the great know-it-all, how is ityou don’t know you’re supposed to keep your piehole shut while somebody elsehas the table? So you shut yourpiehole and listen.”

Ira burns red. Denard tries to hide a smile. Ray plays with the foil from his Kisses.

“I’ve seen this bullshit so many times before. I was the fourth person to join thismeeting when it started here eighteen years ago. The three ahead of me, including the two founders, are longsince lost to the outer darkness of addiction. I’ve seen them all come and go. Seeds by the wayside. I’m sixty-two God damn years old. I’ve seen all of your bullshit many times before, so I know of what Ispeak. None of you are going tomake it. Not even you,” Karl says,looking straight at me, “you’re close. But close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and drive-inmovies. Unless God creates a cleanheart and a right spirit in you, you’ll end up back in the gutter with thesestiff-necked—”

“You’re way out of line with this negative cross-talk,” Irasnaps.

“I told you to shut your God damn piehole, you fuckingPharisee.”

“Pharisee? Whatare you trying to say?”

“You aren’t worthy to untie my shoelaces, yet you claim theright to be offended by my Christmas tree? I don’t think so.”

"You were wrong to bring in the tree, and now you'retalking like a lunatic," Ira says.

He and Karl lock into a stare. Look at them. Quite a contrast. Karl ismuch older, but he still looks pretty solid—he probably cuts his own grass witha push mower. There's probably noteven any grass where Ira lives.

"Guys, guys," Ray says, "maybe we should justdo the circle prayer and call it a night, huh?"

"That's all right with me," Ira says.

"I'm not done speaking," Karl says.

"Finish it up, then," Denard says, as if he wereexasperated. But what does he haveto be exasperated about?

Karl sits there, staring straight ahead. Not a word comes out of his mouth. Time seems to stop. Like in Denard’s physics. It’s peaceful, though. This quiet. A quiet moment on a winter night, though the others seem impatient.They grimace. I could sit here allnight, in the quiet. I could sithere all night in this peace and quiet, and enjoy just staring at the *Light ofthe World* poster. Peace andquiet. It’s nice. But then Ray starts shifting on hischair, and the chair creaks.

“God, I’m weary of these meetings,” Karl finally says.

He stares at the ceiling. He seems old, now. He looks around the table, giving each one of us a short scan. “Go ahead and have your circle jerkprayer. I’m through.”

“Thanks, Karl,” I say.

The anti-climax must have surprised the others, they’re ahalf-beat slow in adding their affirmation.

I’m the first to stand for the prayer. We’re supposed to close the meeting byholding hands and saying the serenity prayer as we look each other in theeye. It’s supposed to mean we’renot ashamed. I’ve never reallyenjoyed this ritual. It’s a littletoo self-validating for my taste.

Everybody’s standing, except Karl. We all look at Karl.

“You going to pray?” I ask.

“No.”

He stands up, puts on his coat, an old blue parka.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannotchange. . .” we begin, automatonically. We watch Karl, instead of looking eachother in the eye. “The courage to change the things I can. . .” He’s at thedoor. He stoops to pick up hisChristmas tree. “And the wisdom toknow the difference.” An old manin an old parka with an old fake tree. He pushes the door open, takes half a step outside, then turns around:

“Your prayer didn’t make it out this building. That HigherPower you all talk about? Youhonor Him with your lips, but your hearts are far from Him.”

He leaves. Thedoor bangs behind him. We standthere, looking at the door. I hearlaughter from the step table in the kitchen.

“Sounds like there having a better meeting than we did,” Raysays.

Ira nods. “I’ll tell you, fellas, that was one of thestrangest meetings, ever.”

Ira, Ray and Denard start rehashing everything. Changing it into something that suitsthem. I put my coat on and leavethem to it.

It’s a cold night. It’s freezing in the car. Iput the heater on high. But itwill take this old Honda several minutes to start blowing warm air. I begin to pull out of the parking lot,and I remember my plan to go to the store to buy gifts—God! How stupid! I shift into reverse and back into a parking space. I sit in the car, wondering at mystupidity.

Karl was right. Who am I kidding?

There’s nothing in me but sawdust and resentment. I don’t have what it takes tofinish. I gave up and quit. I went through the motions so badly,even the old lady could no longer ignore it—she had to leave. Everything that should have been ablessing, I treated as a curse. Afew thoughtless gifts mean nothing. Another half-assed gesture added to a life of half-assed gestures.

I sit here in this car, the motor running, the heaterblowing cold air. I search theblack December sky. Where’s theJesus star?

Part IV

2011-12-22T05:19:00.002-05:00

7 December 2011:

23 North. Out of Milan.

Ha. Pissant Milan.

A hick town they've whored up with a Taco Bell and a CVS and a half-dozen other corporate zombie iconchises.

Can anything good come out of Milan?

Headed toward a shitty address in Ypsilanti.

“What sort of music do you listen to?” as she reaches for the radio.

Music. I feel about talking about music the way some people feel about talking about sports. Or the weather.

“Uh, to be honest, I don’t really like music. Most of it gives me a headache.”

She stops fiddling with the tuner.

“But go ahead and put on something you like. It won’t bother me.”

This could be a long 15 minute drive. And I hope this address in Ypsi isn’t what I think it is.

Static. Bad music. Static. Bad music. Static. Bad music. She had the TV on in her room, too. Didn’t turn it off. People always have to have something on. It’s fear. Afraid to be alone with their thoughts.

Don’t need the heat on. The unobscured winter sun turns the car into a greenhouse.

I’m going 83. I slow it down to 80. Pass a Hostess truck.

She’s finally found a station. I don’t know what it is. It’s wimpy sounding. Like the crap they would play in an *in* store in the mall.

“Do you like Twinkies?” I ask.

“What?”

“What’s your favorite band?”

“Umm. . .there’s this guy. . .Dead Mouse. Have you ever heard of him?”

“No.”

“I also like Ratatat.”

“Oh.”

“I had a back stage pass to see them at the Electronic Music Festival.”

“That must have been exciting.”

“It was! It was! To be so close--”

As she talks about this Ratatat back stage thing, I remember the scene in A Streetcar Named Desire where Karl Malden finally gets a good look in the light at Vivien Leigh, and he sees how old she really is. It’s always dark in Lindsay’s room. She keeps the shades pulled. The only light is from the TV and computer screens. Now I see her in broad daylight. I see how young she is. Ha. That’s a thought worth being distracted from.

“Do you play any music?” I ask.

“No. I love music so much, but I’ve tried to play guitar and. . .I don’t know, I just can’t.”

“What about singing?”

“Um. . .I like to sing. I mean, I like to play Rock Band and stuff and sing on it. I’ll put on like a stage show and my friends will sit there and go ‘wow’ and just stare at me.”

“You would look great fronting a band. You have a great style, a great appearance.”

She giggles.

There’s an MSP car ahead, slowing things down a bit. I cut back to 75.

Her phone goes off. The ring tone is some hillbilly voice singing I don’t know who you think you are, but before the night is through, I wanna do bad things with you.

I hear her end of the conversation:

“Oh, OK. . .”

“I have all of it. . .”

“We’re about five minutes out. . .”

“In real time? Maybe eight minutes out. . .”

A wave of gloom rolls over me. It’s called reality. Shabby lives. We’re not twirling on top of some jeweled music box. This is 23 North to Ypsi. Ten days ago the internet created this out of nothing. No. Not nothing. Out of depression and addiction. She came out of some. . .pit of despair. Ha. Pit of despair. Another way of saying--

“What?”

She asked me something, but I don’t quite hear it all over my thoughts.

“Do you go to the movies a lot?”

“No,” I say, “I used to, though. Years ago. I used to see everything. Now I just watch DVDs. What about you?”

“Yeah, I go whenever I can. My friend took me see J. Edgar. It was so boring. It was like two hours long. More than two hours. I really wanted to see this movie called Martha Marcy Marlene or something--”

“Oh, yeah, I heard of that. About the chick who escapes from a cult?”

“Yeah, I really wanted to see that, it looked so interesting. But we ended up at J. Edgar. Nothing happened in this guy’s whole life. Nothing cool.”

“Did you ever see this movie Kick-Ass?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that was good. Yeah. So. . .is that like your favorite movie?”

“Oh, no, I liked it, but it’s not my favorite. I just mentioned it because I figured you might like it, too. My favorite movie is The Exorcist.”

She nods. “I like scary movies. Have you ever seen The Ring?”

“Oh, yeah. That was good. Wait, are you talking about the Japanese one, or the American one? I’ve only seen the American one.”

“The American one,” she says. “I mean, I’ve seen both, or all of them, there’s more than one. I like the first Ring, the American version. It’s my favorite scary movie, probably ever. Yeah, I like it a lot.”

We hit the Washtenaw exit. Now we’re in the low rent strip mall zone. Mattresses, flowers, tires, eyeglasses, phones, uniforms, auto parts stores.

“Did you ever see The Human Centipede?”

“Yeah,” she giggles. “Yeah. There’s a new one out.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. It’s supposed to be way more extreme, more graphic.”

“Really?” she giggles. “Movies like that just make me laugh. They’re like, because they’re so, like, ridiculous. They’re not scary or realistic. And some people are like ‘oh my god, how can you watch that!’ But it was so fake, I loved it.”

Chinese restaurant, liquor store, mail shoppe, nail salon. . .nail salon?

“Nail ‘salon?’ Can you believe that? A bunch of dumpy negresses getting their nails done in ghetto rococo, and they call it a ‘salon!’ Imagine Rimbaud and Verlaine walking into one of these places. . .hmmph.”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing,” I laugh. “I was just. . .just thinking out loud. To myself. Just some, uh, you know, just talking to myself, really.”

That was a real conversation killer.

Just as I start to wonder how I got into this mess, and how I can get out of it, I realize it doesn’t matter. I lose no matter what I do. It’s one mess or the other. Bitterness or delirium. You can only fail, in the world. Ten centuries ago you could flee the world. You could escape to the desert or a cave in the mountains. Now the world is everywhere. Jesus was prophesying about the apocalypse when He said he who endures to the end, the same shall be saved. In my personal apocalypse, I lose all day, everyday. But I endure. I don’t let my own sin, my own continual defeat question the faith of Christ.

“You know where Dom’s Donuts is?” she asks.

“No.”

“Well, that’s were we’re gonna turn. It’s straight ahead a little ways.”

“All right. Are we turning left or right.”

“Right.”

I don’t know who you think you are, but before the night is through, I wanna do bad things with you.

“One more minute. . .”

“One real minute. . .”

“A white Honda Civic. . .”

She pulls the money I gave her about a half-hour ago out of her jeans pockets. Stuffs a five back in, closes a fist around the rest. I don’t feel bad when I give a drunken bum a couple bucks, either.

Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more. . .

Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities. . .

What do you give those in the blackness of darkness?

A circle of infirmity and misery, that’s how I look at it. We are what we are.

Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, Why hast Thou made me thus?

Another wave of gloom rolls over me. I don’t know anything, anymore.

“Have you seen that thing online where, um, the cops spray the Occupy Wall Street people?” she asks.

“That’s America, for you.”

“Right!”

“The sad thing. . .no, it’s not sad, it’s, uh, pathetic. . .the pathetic thing is, is how many people are overjoyed, how many people are aroused, really, aroused and ecstatic that the protesters got sprayed. Pathetic robots. Mind-controlled pseudo-patriots--they think America is Heaven on Earth, and so any unwashed occupiers must be devils who deserve the cayenne wrath of god’s soldiers.”

“Right! Right! That’s it!”

A moment of bonding. Nothing like a new audience to salve the soul.

“I’m glad we agree on that,” I say. “No flag--”

“No! I mean, turn right! That’s it!” she says, pointing at the donut place. “Turn right, here!”

Oh.

I cut a nasty last second right.

“But I mean, yeah. Right on about the pepper sprayers and all that,” she says without much enthusiasm.

We’re on some slummy side street full of peeling crackerboxes.

We go down four or five blocks, and there’s an ugly apartment complex on the left.

“Turn in here,” she says, “and drive down to the fourth building, and stop in front.”

I don’t know who you think you are, but before the night is through, I wanna do bad things with you.

“We’re pulling in right now. . .”

“I know but how am I supposed to know to the exact second. . .”

“All right, well, maybe we can like just coordinate a little better so we can just. . .”

I see a gray-hoodied *black youth* on a cell up ahead.

“Well, I know, but like, uh. . .”

I pull up next to gray hoodie. She rolls down the window. Gray hoodie leans in, she opens her fist, he takes the money, palms a tiny plastic bag into her hand, rolls her fist. They continue to speak to each other over their cells while doing this.

“We’re in at the same time, so--” she says.

“You got to understand. This shit has to happen smoother.”

And with that, the artificial light flickers, then shorts out. I’m back in the blackness of darkness. A brief recess in a Fool’s Paradise is over.

Now a fifteen minute drive back to Milan to drop her off. Fifteen minutes, and then it’s her turn. She can escape, for a while.

23 South to Milan.

Pissant Milan.

All the pissant towns since Cain. Filled with unknown people. The mania to be known, in our day, to be a celebrity, is a remnant from the days of God. In the Old Times, people devoted themselves to be known of God. Architecture and ritual meant to draw God’s eye.

On That Day, Jesus will dismiss many with the simple, chilling statement:

Depart from Me, I never knew you. . .

To be known is salvation.

All the pissant towns down through the Ages. All the unknown. I try to calculate. I know, I am aware of maybe one hundred people at work. Twenty neighbors, maybe. A dozen or so of the old lady’s friends. Maybe thirty family members. A few strays, like the cashiers at the parking lot. I know what, maybe two hundred people? Out of seven billion? I know almost nobody.

“You’re so quiet,” she says.

We just passed the King Pizza’s Pizza billboard.

“I always wondered why they didn’t just call it King’s Pizza,” I say.

“I used to deliver for them.”

“You did? I bet you got great tips.”

“I wish. People are so cheap, you wouldn’t believe it. Like one time, I had to deliver all these pizzas to a party, and the guy goes like, take a shot for your tip.”

We both chuckle.

“But no,” she goes on, “the tips were shitty as hell, if you even got one. I mean, how can you order a pizza and not tip? Or they want exactly all their change. We didn’t carry any coins, and one time this lady made me go back all the way to the store to get her exact change. I don’t know, I thought it was like etiquette to tip.”

“Did anybody ever try to rob you?”

“No, no, I heard some bad stories about it, but nobody ever tried to rob me.”

A kid like her, she’d be a pushover. Maybe she has ministering angels watching over her. Maybe her day is still to come. My day is over. Now I try to hang on. To run out the clock, as they say in football.

I pull up a block from her place.

“Well. . .” I say.

She stares at me.

“Well,” I say, “it was nice to talk a little bit. It makes it a little less awkward, I guess.”

“Yeah, yeah. It was nice. Thanks for the ride.”

“Sure.”

She’s out the door, that little baggy in her fist.

Against the odds, I found this girl out of the pissant masses.

Now what do I do?

They Fuck Horses In The Ass, Don't They?

2011-11-09T11:16:00.001-05:00

What were these idiots thinking?? Provincial morons like this are admitted to a supposed *prestigiousacademic institution?* In a truly vulgar display, these imbeciles holda *pep rally,* a party, no doubt drinking beer and flirting with eachother, as they *rally* to show support for a disengaged old fossil of acoach who characterizes a grown man buttfucking a little boy as*horseplay.* Do they all fuck horses in the ass in State College, PA?

{I wrote a little more about Pederast State University over here.}

UPDATE:

Ha ha ha. . .in his retirement statement today, Paterno says:

At this moment the Board of Trustees should not spend a singleminute discussing my status. They have far more important matters toaddress. I want to make this as easy for them as I possibly can.

Hey, old man, it's not for you to tell the Board of Trustees what to do. Your status is part of this ugly situation, and it's up to the Board to decide if they want Pederast State University to suffer the embarrassing spectacle of you in the Stadium this Saturday, if they want their *prestigious university* to be ridiculed and shamed by the spectacle of 106,000 provincial boobs holding a pep rally for an old geezer who characterizes men buttfucking boys as *horseplay,* and who looked away from the obvious deviate behavior of his coaching buddy for years and years. Yes, JoePa, the Board of Trustees does need to discuss your status. Did you ever stop to consider that maybe you don't deserve one final home game surrounded by 106,000 fawning imbeciles? Is missing one last fucking game too much of a punishment for you? Can you not even bear that small atonement for enabling your buddy Sandusky to buttfuck kids with total impunity?? The truth is, JoePa, you are only interested in making this gruesome situation as easy for YOU as possible.

And look at JoePa's final self-serving statment:

This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.

With the benefit of *hindsight?* Who the fuck do you think you are shitting, JoePa? You had all the sight you needed to do more, to do a lot more. You had a grad assistant come to you and tell you he *sighted* your buddy Sandusky fucking a little boy in the *hind.* There's your hindsight, for you.

Pederast State University loses all credibility as a *prestigious academic institution* if they allow Paterno to coach in dumbly named Beaver Stadium this Saturday. . .

UPDATE II:

The Board of Trustees at Pederast State University did the right thing by firing their fossil of a coach, Joe Paterno. The Board could not allow the University to suffer the shame of having AmerICKa watch 106,000 provincial morons celebrate and congratulate and well-wish an out-of-touch old geezer who winked at years and years of serial buttfucking. You just cannot allow that to happen, if you want your precious University to be taken seriously. A couple days after it is revealed the Football Program has been a sexual House of Horrors for little boys, you stage a love-in for the man who presided over the bath house buttfuckings? No. You just cannot allow that to happen.

Tonight, once again, we see in small what would have happened in large on Saturday. Once again the fawning imbeciles who attend Pederast State University vainly inserted themselves into the story by taking to the streets, this time adding vandalism, to show their *love* for JoePa. These idiots apparently do not care or do not understand the message they send about their University:

Winking at serial buttfucking is not a sufficient reason to remove a man who has won 409 football games. You cannot compare scores of little boys being buttfucked to outscoring Illinois 10 - 7.

Uh, tonight's vulgar display of misplaced values could not be repeated a hundred-fold Saturday afternoon, or Pederast State University would be the scorn of an appalled nation. Joe had to go, it's as simple as that.

No need to feel sorry for JoePa. His punishment for winking at serial buttfucking is missing his goodbye party? Seems a terribly small price to pay. The self-centered self-appointed saint of college football showed his true selfish colors to the very end, demanding the Board of Trustees grant him his goodbye party. He lamely claimed this would make the Board's job easier. Ha ha ha. . .sure, Joe, having the University suffer the stain of 106,000 fawning imbeciles blowing goodbye kisses at a man who winked at serial buttfucking Saturday afternoon would make the Board's job easier? Uh, no.

The UNDENIABLE truth is this:

If Saint Joe had truly wanted to make the Board's job easier, he would have resigned immediately, and then implored the fawning imbeciles of Pederast State University to not make a sorry spectacle of themselves. But he did neither. Instead, he demanded his goodbye party, and encouraged the fawning imbeciles with his shockingly offensive front lawn homilies, asking drunken college students to pray for the victims of the serial buttfucking he winked at. This is the legacy of Joe Paterno. . .

Part III

2011-10-21T01:42:00.002-04:00

11 September 2011: I want to shout:

QUIT CRYING!

God, how did You ever dream up all these people?

“Would you like a tissue, Miss?” I ask.

She nods. A thin clear dot of snot drops from her nose onto the counter. I set the Kleenex box in front of her. She takes one, blows her nose. She takes another, cleans away the mess left behind from the first one. She takes a third, dries her eyes.

I buy the Kleenex with my own money. It’s worth it. Otherwise I would have to gamble there would be a spare roll of toilet paper in the shitter. It’s more than worth the expense. The tissue offering can bring a moment or two of peace.

Ninety nine-point-five percent of the crybabies are female. That’s just a fact. Whether they’re a minor in possession of alcohol, like this drunken titty-flashing college girl here, or whether they’re a full grown murdering mommy, the females are much more apt to bawl their eyes out over their criminal fate, whether great or small.

2:40 in the morning. Sunday morning. This is where I end up? I don’t want to be here. But here I am, anyway. That tells you everything. . .

“Do you have any scars, marks or tattoos?”

This is question number fourteen in the process of booking new arrests. Depending on the answers given, there can be up to ninety-two.

The drunk girl looks aghast.

“I god scars. . .on my leg.” She glances around, as if to see if anyone is looking. “I doan likeda talk aboudid.” She looks around, like she wants to make sure no one else is listening. “On my leff leg. Horr, horrbull scars. Dey starad de ankull an go aw de way up. Almose aw de way up ta my. . .ta my p-p-pussy.” She bursts into tears. Again.

2:41 in the morning. Sunday morning. I realize it is now the Great 9/11Anniversary Day. In my mind I see the famous picture of one of the Tower jumpers plummeting to his death.

Anyway, I don’t believe I’ve ever had anyone mention their pussy before.

The girl takes another tissue and blows her nose.

“I doan likeda talk aboudid.”

“That’s fine. We’ll move on to the next--”

“When I wuz yun, when I wuz veryveryveryvery yun, my dad-ad ranover my leg wiff de. . .wiff de lawnmower. Id wuz, id wuz compleadly aggs, compleadly aggsidennull.”

“Uh, OK. So the next question is: do you know your blood type?”

“I doan likeda talk aboudid.”

“You don’t like to talk about your blood type?”

“I doan likeda talkaboud de scars.”

“We’re done talking about that. Now I’m asking you about your blood type.”

“He dind dewid on purpose. De scars go aw de way ta my pussy.”

She bursts into tears. Again.

The police found her staggering between a couple friends on South University. They would have let it go, but she was flashing her titties to every stray male she passed. They wrote her up for a minor in possession of alcohol, and now she’s here until she sobers up.

“My futurezover,” she wails. “Now I haffa reggerd.”

“Try to stay calm. This isn’t that big a deal. Just a few more questions and then--”

“I applied fer a inder, indership ad de cenner fer, cenner fer eading dizorders. An now I woan gedid. I wanna be a psygollajizz.”

“I don’t believe this will have any effect on that.”

“YEZZ ID WILL!!”

Everybody in intake looks up to see what this drunk is shouting about.

Dear God, I resent the arrogance of this kid. Daring to talk about *the future.* Her future. None of us have a future. There is only the end of what You have already decided. This kid has no modesty. Assuming her bogus future was going to be glorious. At least now she momentarily assumes a humbler future. Of course, when she sobers up she’ll assume her throne, again. And, of course, she adopts worldly standards for success. Material and carnal.

And her lack of modesty is so thorough, it includes her attire. She’s dressed in a gray ultra-mini skirt with black tights and a too-small black t-shirt. Despite her pathetic drunkeness, she’s an attractive girl. In fact, with her long dark hair, green eyes and thick eyebrows, she looks remarkably similar to Jennifer Connelly. A The Hot Spot-era Jennifer Connelly. A physically attractive girl. With a chewed-up leg. With a 9/11 leg. That’s why 9/11 isn’t even a blip in the real history of the world. But now it’s America’s Christmas and Easter.

“MY FUTUREZOVER! ZOVER!”

I look at the other booking clerks and corrections officers. They’re enjoying my being stuck with this drunken wreck.

“We need to get this process moving along, Miss. There are quite a few more questions I have to ask. So, please--”

“I haff scars aw over my leg. Aw de way ta my pussy. I show ya.”

She bends downs, tries to roll up the tights on her left leg, nearly topples over.

“It’s all right. I don’t need to see. We’ve moved on to the next question.”

“Oh. . .kay,” she says, wobbling her way upright.

“Do you know your blood type?”

“I think izz, I think izz--”

Her brow furrows, then panic wrinkles the drunken stupidity of her face.

“Dijew hear dat?

“Hear what?”

“A dog.”

“A dog?”

“I heared a dog barking. I candbe aroun dogs. I’m scareda dogs.”

“There aren’t any dogs here.”

“I heared id.”

“We don’t allow inmates to keep pets.”

I don’t have the patience for this. Some nights this place is amusing. This always ice cold waiting room, this ice cold cinder block and fluorescent bulbed waiting room full of drunks, wife beaters, home invaders, bank robbers, sexual deviates and murderers. Some nights this place is amusing, in a carnival freak show kind of way. But, not this night. And not many nights, recently. I don’t have the energy to deal with these people’s essentially trivial sins. Even murder is a trivial sin. A mechanical sin. And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in Hell. I’m trying to find eternity, and these people here are only interested in time. How long until they can go back to wallowing in the mire? How long until they can go back to wallowing in the mire of oblivion, that’s their concern. Hopeless cases. They can be amusing, the way a puppy chasing its tail can be amusing. But not tonight. This girl here is nothing but vanity and vexation. And worse. I need to get her out of my face. I start filling in her booking questions with my own made-up answers. It doesn’t matter. She’ll be sober and out of here in eight or ten hours--and nobody will ever bother with her paperwork. I stand there typing in answers while she rambles on about dogs.

“I god bided bya dog. Bya dig bog--” She laughs at her drunkeness. “I mean, bya BIG DOG!”

“Let me guess: the dog bit you on your pussy.”

“Hey! Dazz nod nize!”

Now she’s crying. Again.

“I doan belawn here! My futurezover. ZOVER!”

I finish her intake questions and print her booking card.

“Just sign here, Miss.”

“Wuzz thizz?”

“Just sign it.”

“Whud izz id?”

I write ‘refused’ on the inmate signature line.

“OK, Miss, you can take a seat, now.”

“Huh?”

‘Huh?’ That’s right. It doesn’t make sense to her. She expected everything to be explained to her in some laborious bureaucratic detail. She thinks her *legal* status is important. No. I’ll explain it to her so she can understand:

“You’re just drunk. Later, I’ll take your picture and fingerprints. Then when all the liquor’s out of you, you can go home.”

She starts to say something, but I turn around and walk away. I drop her paperwork in the fingerprint basket, then go into the bathroom. I stare at myself in the mirror. Look at that dumb bastard. When I come out, the drunken The Hot Spot-era Jennifer Connelly girl is nodding off in the female seating area.

Look at all these people. Arrested. Their lives arrested. Black and white. Male and female. Mostly poor. Mostly cheap-looking. Mostly unkempt, unshaven, disheveled. Mostly fat. Their feet stink. Their lives arrested. Brought to this purgatory. Today will any of them be with Jesus in Paradise? That’s what it’s all about. But we don’t live that way. We live as if the world is it. Our energy devoted to pursuits of little profit.

Jesus went to visit His friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Martha spent her energy trying to make the event a success, preparing food, cleaning, serving the guests. She worked her ass off while Mary sat and *did nothing,* listening to Jesus. Martha complained to Jesus, asked Him to tell Mary to help her. Jesus looked at this woman, who is everybody in the world today, and said: Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things. But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.

Four more hours in this dump. And then what? Home. Sleep for six hours. Wake up. Pick up the kids at school. No, it’s Sunday. They’re at home. Dinner. Living. Back to work. Day after day after day. The darkness of the mechanical existence. Machines operate in darkness, unable to perceive light. The Light is the Life of the world. The automaton is without life.

I cannot stand another day of this.

I may have years more of it to endure.

After work, after leaving the jail, I drive to the Chase ATM at Stadium and Packard. I sit in the car in front of the machine. I watch the minutes come and go on my cell phone clock.

7:11. 7:12. 7:13. 7:14.

Sunday morning. Blue skies. Sunshine. Low sixties.

7:15. 7:16. 7:17.

Three crows pick at a pile of vomit two blocks up from Fraser’s Pub.

I drive to the Mr. Stadium laundromat on South Industrial. Two college girls and a homeless-looking man inside. I wander around, glancing a few times at the women’s restroom door. I stop at the candy machine. Drop in some quarters and get a bag of Peanut M&Ms. There’s a bulletin board on the wall, with flyers, notes, ads. Bikes for sale, carry out food coupons, tailoring service. As I pop a green Peanut M&M in my mouth, I notice one particular flyer:

THE APOSTLE SEÁN RAY
Prophet of the Eternal Light
Holding Services in the True Faith of the Messiah Jesus Christ of Nazareth
Every other Sunday at Noon PM
Fellowship Room C in the Northside Presbyterian Church
[Donations for Room Rental Encouraged by the Holy Spirit]
AND SUDDENLY! God’s Kingdom is upon You
Your Excuses will no Longer be Winked at!

Hmmn. One thing: how would I know if today is an *Every other Sunday?*

At the bottom there are little tabs with the address and phone number. Nobody’s taken any. I tear one off and stick it in my wallet.

I check the women’s restroom door one more time.

Nothing to do now except go home. . .

Part II

2011-09-13T21:44:00.001-04:00

23 August 2011: It was 6 July 2011. The day after my youngest son’s birthday, which happens to be on the 4th of July. I say the day after, because it was very early into the 6th--fifteen or thirty minutes after midnight, and as I hadn’t yet been to sleep on the 5th, to me it was still the 4th, the day after my youngest’s birthday. Some days, therefore, are longer than others. . .

6 July 2011: Right now I am in the darkness. These other people have no idea. These five other people. [Though it will turn out there were six other people. And, who knows, maybe there were still others, lurking.] They think I am here with them. No. No, that’s vanity. They don’t think of me, at all. I think I am not here with them. But, of course, in one measure, I am. I am in the same space at this point in time.

The washing machine broke down.

I don’t understand the mechanics of existence. We must accept the fact we are machines. A creation. And we break down, like washers.

I volunteered to do the laundry. Of my own *free will.* Meaning, I think it was my own decision to do the laundry. But who understands the mechanics of existence? Anyway, I told the old lady I would gladly do the laundry. I would do it late. It would be something to fill the long hours on my *day off.*

I work midnights, but I still call it my *day off.* I have a lousy job. Booking clerk on the 11 pm - 7 am shift at the county jail. But the job has nothing to do with the darkness. The darkness comes and goes throughout life--no matter the trivialities we occupy ourselves with. This time, however, I have the feeling I cannot escape the darkness. I’ve felt this way for several months, now.

So, to gather the threads together, at this point in space and time, it is 12:30 am at the Mr. Stadium laundromat on South Industrial. I am in the same space as five other people. I assume they are here merely doing laundry--not doing laundry AND wrestling the archon. But maybe I am wrong. . .

Whatever our collective condition, I dumped two plastic trash bags of dirty clothes into one of Mr. Stadium’s triple load washers. The shirts and the pants and the towels and the sheets and all the rest of it are being washed right now.

Mr. Stadium is not a particularly clean place--but it is well-lit. In the darkness of the midnight hour, it is well-lit, and there is a soothing drone about the place. Everyone quietly waiting to fold what will be their superficially clean soiled garments while the washers whirr through the spin cycles and the dryers tumble and hum and the big screen TV mumbles on low.

Every now and then, while driving, I will see an old sock or a ragged t-shirt or some piece of beat-up clothing laying in the street. How did it get there, I will wonder? Did someone finally hear God? Who told thee that thou wast naked? When we strip ourselves of our dirty rags, physical and behavioral, we see our lives have been spent on nothing more than hiding. Like roaches, we hide from the Light.

I’ve been conscious of my condition for several months, now. That I’ve been hiding in the darkness. Hence, I volunteer to do the laundry on my *day off* to fill the long midnight hours. Day off! There is no such thing.

A repairman will come to inspect the washer--hopefully a repair cannot be made. I would like to come to Mr. Stadium regularly. This is a nice place. One of the nicest places on earth, I think. A nice place for contemplation. Far better than the many churches I have visited in this city.

There are forces at work. Internal and external. Some for us. And some against us. The exact details of this process, a mechanical process (since we are created), are obscure. We call this process *living.*

There are five other people here. Oh, and the attendant. [The attendant is not the sixth other person. There are six other persons, plus the attendant. And maybe still others, lurking.]

The attendant is an interesting-looking fellow. He appears to be around sixty years old. He wears gray work trousers, a white long sleeve button shirt and an old brown plaid fedora. He empties the trash, arranges the laundry carts, changes the TV channel. I’d love to have his job. What a way to pass the time! Midnight attendant at the 24 hour laundromat. Peace and quiet. A few simple chores. In the dead of night. In the dead of night. Almost like being the last man on earth. And that’s about the only way I could come out ahead.

Right now, I’m a beaten man. Stranded in the darkness. Defeated by what Luther called *the world, the flesh and the devil.* I have no more idea how to get out of the darkness than how I got in. I need supernatural aid--which is unmerited favor.

Time to load the wet laundry in the dryers. Letterman’s on the big flat screen. He’s interviewing some young blonde with a hillbilly accent. She’s wearing a short black skirt. Is this a *moment* for her? She has very nice legs. That’s about as much as anyone can do in this life.

There are five other people here, all young except for an old Mexican guy in a faded fake football jersey. It’s so worn, I can’t tell which team it’s supposed to represent.

It’s this mechanical living. The Light is the life of the world. Without the Light, it is just a mechanical existence--functioning just to pass the time. Eating and sleeping just to live long enough to die. Robotics. Somewhere along the way, the soul is lost, life becomes just a program, the same code repeated day after day.

My function now is to trade my time for a paycheck to exchange for food and rent for the old lady and the kids. So we can all exist long enough to die. So they can exist long enough to die. This is the essence of carnality, and it has been passed down generation after generation, beginning with Cain in the Land of Nod.

If I were to drop dead here in Mr. Stadium, the old lady and the kids would get $150,000 insurance money--more than enough to get them through until the next paycheck happens along. Thus, there is no advantage in me being alive. The double curse of my existence: it’s absolutely monotonous and joyless, and absolutely unnecessary. . .I’m no advantage to anybody.

The home is a joyless cave. A government council flat where misery reigns. I prefer Mr. Stadium. I prefer a laundromat. After fifty-one fucking years, the only place of rest is a laundromat. Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. This is where I must go to meet Jesus. I don’t want to get up from this grimy plastic chair. I dread returning home. Lord, if there be any escape from drinking again from that cup of trembling. . .

“You can’t use that card two times!” The youngest’s protest still aches in my ear.

Earlier today (yesterday) he and his brother were playing *Bakugan.* Some God damned Jap toy nonsense. Little plastic balls that pop open and turn into winged freaks from the chimeric Jap subconscious.

“It’s the first time I’ve used it!” the oldest shouts.

“You used it to increase your guy’s Gs when you saw my Dice Thrower and now you’re trying to use it again!”

They argue over the absurd, arcane rules of the so-called *game* until the oldest airs the last holdout from his days of magickal thinking:

“I wish you were never born!”

This used to instantly send the youngest tattling to mom, but now he’s grown in his own wisdom:

“Yeah? Well I hope your head explodes like a Spin Dragonoid and your brain splatters on the ceiling and the spiders lay eggs in it.”

I figure at this point, I better intervene before things get out of hand.

“Fellas, why don’t we just call the game a tie, and move on to something else?”

No. Of course not. A tie is like kissing your sister who turns out really to be your brother. The argument reaches a volume sufficient for the old lady to come creeping up from the basement, where she’d no doubt been relaxing on the internet, complaining to her Facebook *friends* about her crummy husband.

“What’s all the furor about?” she asks.

*Furor.* That’s good.

The brothers then try to out-shout each other’s accusations. The old lady attempts to referee the occult fight, but she quickly loses patience, screaming:

“BE QUIEEEEEEEEEEET!

The windows rattle. The remote control, which was hanging over the edge of the old fat TV, falls to the wood floor, causing the battery cover to pop off, and sending a AAA rolling under the sofa. Anybody who tries to retrieve it will return with an arm sleeved in dust bunnies.

“Both of you, go to your rooms!” the old lady barks.

“Why do I always have to go to my room when I’m not the crybaby?” asks the oldest.

“No back talk. Get in your rooms. NOW!”

It happens every day. Once, twice, three times. Some needless loud argument over junk.

As the kids head up the stairs, the old lady scowls at me.

“You have to provide structure for their play,” she spits.

It’s my fault.

Even if I come home to a fight that is already raging, which happens often, it will still be my fault--because the kids are not used to having *structure* when I’m around, so therefore, when the old lady is the only one around and tries to provide *structure,* they cannot accept it. The old lady just can’t win--I’m too hard to overcome.

But this sound and fury signifies only the symptoms of chronic *everyday life,* the natural friction of sharing a dump. Unseen is the real misery which poisons our souls. Twenty-one years of eating shit, of each other’s selfishness and mercilessness--that’s what the old lady and I share. Ten years of increasing awareness of a crippled marriage and a dysfunctional household, and eight years of having to accommodate a brother--that’s the burden of the oldest child. Eight years of increasing awareness of a crippled marriage and a dysfunctional household, and eight years of dealing with his brother’s oppression--that’s the burden of the youngest.

Every now and then, the truth of the children’s hearts will show itself. They reach a breaking point, and have to vent their resentments. Their parents are tyrants, and dumb ones at that. They raise themselves, and our *guidance* is a millstone around their necks.

But the old lady and I have to keep it all stored away. One wrong word about competence, judgment, productivity, intention, money, sex or whatever--and it will all be over. The truth would set us free. . .of each other.

We must silently stew, for the children--but even that is a lie. It’s not for the children. It’s for our own comfort. It is fatigue that keeps us together. To end is too much of a bother. . .

Oh, well, the laundry is done. Mr. Stadium has great dryers. The clothes are burning hot, and wrinkle free. I fold them and place them in the plastic trash bags. As I’m heading out the automatic doors, I turn back and look to make sure none of the old lady’s panties have been left behind. The old lady would believe I had left them on purpose, an act of cruelty meant to humiliate her. How a pair of panties anonymous to anyone who might find them would humiliate her cannot rationally be established--yet I would still be accused, I am certain.

As I scan the laundromat looking for a pair of the old lady’s battered panties, I notice the door to women’s restroom opening. Out steps a fat young woman with long black hair partially covering her blotchy fat face. I had not previously seen her in Mr. Stadium. She stands in the doorway and stares at me. . .

23 August 2011: Yes, that is where I first saw the fat girl. At the Mr. Stadium. It came to me just now. Just now as the old lady tosses a pair of pink panties onto the laundry pile. When those panties landed on top of the heap of dirty clothes, I remembered checking to make sure I hadn’t left just such a pair of panties at my one and only trip to Mr. Stadium, and then I remembered the fat girl stepping out of the women’s shitter. . .that was the first time I saw her.

Or was that just the first time I remember seeing her?

Sixty

2011-09-07T14:06:00.001-04:00

Fuck Lady Gaga and Ke$ha and all these other Modern Pop Whores. . .they're boring Madonna retreads. . .and Madonna was tedious, to begin with. Now Chrissie Hynde was one hot piece of ass, back in the day. Naturally cool and sexy, no need for any cheap theatrics. Today Chrissie turns 60. Look at her in that video above. . .from about 8 or 9 months ago. The face is pretty worn out. . .but I'd still eat her pussy, no problem. She's real flesh and blood, blessed with a natural creative energy. . .whereas this Lady Gaga is lifeless. . .she's a fucking Transformer, folding into ten different pop robots. . .you might as well try to eat Chromia's pussy.

Here's a picture of Hynde when she was in high school. . .looks like a Manson girl. How hot is that?

Sixty years old?!?! Back On The Chain Gang was released thirty years ago?!?! Chrissie is an old lady?!?! And she's not nearly old enough to be my mother. The grave is not far off. . .

Part I

2011-08-25T20:08:00.002-04:00

11 August 2011: The air is choked with sin. Depleted uranium. The physical sin of the Satanic wars. Fukushima. The radioactive fallout of energy gluttony and vanity, vanity being the veneer which covers human incompetence. You inhale the toxic waste product of sin, and your blood is poisoned, your lungs polluted. Cancer. The sinners’ cancer.

Of course, those are merely two examples of the airborne physical sin circulating the globe. There are tens and tens of thousands of others. The electronic waste of dead computers and all the other electronic gadgets. Lead, mercury, cadmium, beryllium, all polluting the air and water. A man kills a computer with endless hours on internet porn, tosses his computer onto the scrap heap, and you ingest his e-waste. And there’s the ELF radiation cooking the air from the billions of Wall Street fractional reserve transactions. The physical sin of the bankers’ usury. These are just two more examples--as I say, there are tens and tens of thousands.

And let us not forget the psychic sins. All the deranged thoughts of all of us, creating a psychic haze of sick lusts, base envies, Cainite rages, etc., etc., etc. It creates the psychotic harmonic current we exist in. Most of us struggle against a darkness we sense, but do not understand. . .

Cancer, Disease, Death, the Blackness of Darkness. We breathe it in. We live in it. Airborne waste. This is the elemental truth of life. To breathe is to become sick and die.

Our only hope is an afterlife. . .

But if we are devoid of that hope, we must seek narcotized escape. Drink, drugs or game our way into an alternate reality. Brief moments of rest from the dark monotonous meaninglessness of existence. . .

I am at the Chase ATM at the corner of Packard and Stadium, breathing the world’s sin. I stand there, programming the machine to spit a couple of twenties at me, I stand there sinning. Hot, humid, uncomfortable with sweat. Uncomfortable in an air heavy with the ages of sin. It’s weighing down on us here, here near the End. Riots all over the world. A world out of money. The people’s skin finally starting to crawl. The first small signs of a world-wide panic, a world-wide dread the days of EZ narcotizing may be be coming to an end. The thought we will have to face life penniless, and thus sober, is now unnerving small pockets of the masses.

But anyway, I’m waiting for my twenties in this stygian atmosphere (the sun is shining, not a cloud in the blue sky) and I feel a closer, more corporeal weight pressing near me. I turn around and am nearly nose-to-nose with a fat young woman.

“Could you give me a little room, here,” I say.

She doesn’t budge. Stands there, silent and frowning. Fat and frowning. Long black hair partially covering her blotchy fat face.

I feel an angry look on my face. Sweat immediately builds under my arms and on my brow.

What’s the harm, though? She’s just a fat person, standing a little too close. I try to smile.

“I’m almost done,” I say.

A four or five second encounter. It could have gone one way or the other.

I turn back to the machine, finish the transaction. The twenties in my hand, I take the receipt, then put the money and receipt in my wallet--but there’s something, I think. Some thought is stuttering around in my brain. What is it?

The fat girl watches me as I get in my car. She doesn’t use the ATM. I fasten my seat belt, turn the key. The fat girl is still looking. Another car pulls up. An older gentleman gets out. He asks the fat girl if she is going to use the ATM. The fat girl semi-waddles away without answering. What a strange fat person, I think, as I drive off. Then I realize what it is--I’ve seen this fat girl before. . .

Hobo With A Shotgun

2011-08-18T18:36:00.003-04:00

Hollywood brought over the great Dutch actor Rutger Hauer about thirty years ago--and never knew what to do with him. He’s had more lame roles in more lames movies, well over a hundred, than just about anyone. Yet he has played two of the greatest and most charismatic villains in screen history: Roy Batty in the sci-fi classic Blade Runner and John Ryder in the cult classic The Hitcher. I was hoping Hobo With A Shotgun would offer Hauer a similar cult role to shine in, but. . .no. Hauer is good, but not even he is good enough to make this terrible, cheaply made Canadian attempt at a Grindhouse/Machete ‘70s exploitation-type homage thingy watchable. The Canadian actors are awful, a screeching, lumbering cast of Nova Scotian oafs, all about as subtle as a hundred pounds of spoiled back bacon. Hauer plays a hobo who rides into a lawless town run by a deranged crime family addicted to decapitation, mutilation and head crushing. Initially Hauer’s hobo tries to lay low and mind his own business, but his growing fondness for a prostitute (supposedly with a heart of gold, but acted by somebody named Molly Dunsworth with a heart of chocolate gold coins) inspires him to clean up the city. It’s a thin, dull vigilante script shot in garish neon hues and punctuated every couple minutes with Asian Extreme gore. Ha, Hauer’s actually TOO GOOD in this horseshit movie. He makes the hobo a real character. . .a real character interacting with a set full of blood-stained mannequins. The only passable scenes are like the one shown above. . .Hauer alone, giving a monologue. . .or looking pensive in a box car. . .or conflicted as he surveys the mayhem around him in the corrupt town. A miserable little movie, dumb minuscule plot, lifeless characters, Asian Extreme gore without the Asian attitude (it’s Tokyo Gore Police by way of the Hoser Community Players), a bizarre, anti-climatic ending featuring robots and a giant octopus (?!?!)--and yet somehow this Whoopee Cushion of a movie got generally decent reviews, with only the old school queer Rex Reed getting it right, concluding his review as follows:

Quite the most appalling piece of junk I have seen lately, Hobo With a Shotgun just lies there like an autopsy.

The Court Jester

2011-08-16T15:38:00.003-04:00

Why is Media ignoring Ron Paul, asks Media *outsider* Jon Stewart?

Simple.

Mr. Paul contradicts the validity of AmerICKa’s endless, pointless wars. . .and anybody who dissents from war must be ostracized by the Media wing of the Military Media Complex.

There is NO SUCH THING in AmerICKa as a *free press.*

Media is owned by semi-global corporate giants who profit from Western wars, and thus Media cannot question war. How can Satan cast out Satan?

Media’s obligation is to cheer war, and instruct the sheeple war is necessary.

It is nice Media *outsider* Jon Stewart exposes Media’s shunning of Mr. Paul. . .it would be nicer still if Stewart answered his own question of why Media ignores Paul. . .and it would be even nicer if Stewart then asked his brainwashed audience why they are not troubled by endless war. Finally, Stewart ought to ask his dumb audience why they would support any war candidate.

Mr. Stewart, whether witting or unwitting, plays a small but vital role in Media--the faux *alternative.* Stewart is the jester in the court of the Military Media Complex.

Until Jon Stewart points his finger squarely at the camera and asks his amoral audience if they haven’t yet had enough of the pointless killing, he serves no genuine useful function.

A *free press?*

When has ONE grieving member of a victimized family of Obama’s wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq or Libya ever been allowed onto AmerICKan television to tell the sheeple about their dead or maimed loved one, and ask what benefit the sheeple have derived?

There is no *free press.*

Only a Satanic War Media which relentlessly promotes indiscriminate killing. Night after night, week after week, month after month, year after year Media pollutes AmerICKans’ souls with war propaganda, glorifying ridiculous *SEALS* and worshipping at the altar of the Drone.

Dr. Ron Paul has diagnosed the AmerICKan sickness unto death--Media must now persecute him.

It won’t be long until we have the *Ron Paul is an anti-semite* story. We get this bogus story every time Paul campaigns. It’s the kiss of death from the Christo-Zionist Media ministers the sheeple remain faithful to, and absolves the sheeple of any guilt as they go about the ghoulish business of crowning their next war king.

Liquidate

2011-07-21T15:37:00.006-04:00

AnnArbor.com, 18 July 2011: Borders Group, Inc. plans to liquidate, marking the culmination of a years-long decline for the nation’s second largest bookstore chain, which had fallen into disrepair four decades after it opened its first store in downtown Ann Arbor. The liquidation, which Borders announced shortly after 4:10 p.m., means that the 10,700 people who still work for Borders — including about 400 at its Ann Arbor headquarters — will lose their jobs. The Ann Arbor-based chain’s 399 remaining stores will be closed quickly, with liquidation sales starting as soon as Friday

No surprise. And no mystery as to Borders demise. I worked at Borders Corporate for eleven and a half years, and watched its disintegration close-up. Borders fatal mistake was to be caught flat-footed at the beginning of the e-commerce era. The Higher-Ups on the third floor at 100 Phoenix Drive in Ann Arbor sneered at Amazon.com, only reluctantly building an inferior, penny-ante internet site, all the while continuing a remarkably dumb strategic plan of building twenty-to-forty new Superstores a year, most of them in awful locations with terrible leases. Once Borders thick-headed management finally realized online sales were the future of book retailing, they didn’t have the capital necessary to play internet catch-up, as the red ink flowed from dead weight stores and fruitless remodels. The once-haughty Borders executive team was forced to sign a humiliating chump change partnership deal with Amazon, and the once-proud book store chain began its fifteen year slide to the dustbin of AmerICKan retail history.

[Borders would get caught similarly flat-footed at the dawn of the e-book era, but by then its shortsightedness didn’t matter, the chain was already on life support, waiting for its creditors to pull the plug.]

Borders might have been able to survive for another ten-to-twenty years had the executives admitted defeat on e-commerce and e-books, and recommitted to SELLING BOOKS. . .there is a huge aging population in AmerICKa that actually enjoys browsing through bookstores, and had Borders targeted them, they could have forestalled the chain’s extinction, but one idiotic CEO after another tried to paper over Borders colossal e-commerce mistake with retarded retail gimmicks--all at the expense of BOOKS. . .book inventory shrunk year by year, with the floor space devoted to faggot British stationary, wind-up toys, snack racks and an embarrassing collection of electronic gizmos, meant to suggest to Borders was *cutting edge,* but in reality only signaled Borders’ cluelessness (for example, precious retail floor space was wasted on an asinine cd burning station where Borders’ executives thought customers would line-up to burn their own music cds--apparently the Borders’ brain trust had never heard of a little thing called the iPod). Had Borders been content to remain a BOOK STORE, and not stupidly cut book inventory in favor of garbage its core customers had no interest in, I truly believe it could have survived for at least another decade. . .and maybe by then, it could have found a CEO who would actually be ahead of whatever the next retail curve turns out to be.

The sorry lot of Borders CEOs, VPs and Directors were the dumbest, most self-deluded people I’ve ever met. Here are a few of my *favorites:*

Greg J. They hired this dumb pollack from some Chicago grocery store chain. Apparently he convinced the Board of Directors he could save the company by running book stores the same way he ran grocery stores. This dumb pollack brought over the same grocery store inventory system and tried to apply it to books. *Category Management,* he called it. He single-handedly forever ruined Borders book inventory system by insisting, despite steadily declining sales, he could sell Dostoevsky the same way he sold frozen peas in Chicago. What a dumb fucking pollack. The company wasted untold millions over the years trying, never successfully, to repair the damage done by Greg J.’s dumb pollack inventory system.

The Nameless One. His name is never recorded in any of the numerous articles that have been written documenting Borders’ decline and fall over the last fifteen years. That’s because Borders has carefully concealed his stunningly brief reign as CEO. Lured away from a Big New York Publishing House, the Nameless One spent most of his few weeks as Borders Boss by roaming the halls of the corporate office looking for free food, and leering at the pretty, young female admins. When the creepy-looking creep was caught on a parking lot security camera *violating company policy,* the Board of Directors decided it would be wiser to offer the Nameless One millions in stock options to quietly walk away than to turn the matter over to law enforcement officials. The Board of Directors made many decisions which were more harmful to the company, but none were more morally reprehensible.

George J. A plump runt who was shit-canned by Saks, but he somehow conned the Board of Directors into thinking a former tenure at Warner Bros. Stores was sufficient for him to lead a turnaround at Borders. George’s bright idea to save Borders was to sign a bunch of celebrities to write books exclusive for Borders!! What if Madonna or Jennifer Anniston wrote a novel that was only available at Borders!! Woo-hoo!! George spent most of his time in Los Angeles shamelessly star-sniffing, but all that ever came of it was this ridiculous offering, now, ironically, only available from peddlers of used books on Amazon.com. George J., however, was “blown away” by this *book,* proving you should never hire an illiterate to run a book store. George’s All-Hands meetings were an unintentional laugh riot, tawdry Hollywood choreographed abominations in which he was forever proclaiming he was working on several partnership deals that would transform Borders into the Number One Media Retailer of the future. He could never divulge any particulars of the details of these partnerships, they were always just a couple of months away from being finalized, he didn’t want to jeopardize the delicate negotiations, but he assured us we would be “blown away” once he could make the announcements official. Needless to say, nothing ever came of groupie George’s daydreams.

Ken A. George J. brought Ken along with him from the Saks unemployment line. Let’s put it this way: if George J. was Billy Martin, then Ken A. was Art Fowler. Ken spent most of his time at Borders in the third floor men’s room, relieving himself of the previous night’s libations. Bulbous red-nosed Ken was a real life Willy Loman. . .it was a painful experience to watch this broken figure struggle through his brief moments during George’s absurd All-Hands meetings.

Steve D. The quintessential yes man. This paunchy sycophant never met a new CEO’s plan he didn’t believe in “one hundred percent.” He never had an idea of his own, but he lasted as a VP or President (and made a shitload of money) for over a decade by being the consummate corporate mediocrity, always bumbling along and farting Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

Ron M. Prick. Zero personality. Zero people skills. He was the vampire who sucked the last blood from Borders, then ran off in the middle of the night to A&P (!?!?). He left behind a human turd named Skip C., a pencil neck midget who was forever boasting of his miniscule accomplishments at. . .Joanne Fabrics (!?!?!?).

This marked the end of my time at Borders, and what has gone on in the past few months, under the default CEO, Mike Edwards, I have no idea, other than it must have been pretty gruesome. . .Borders hospice.

I liked working at Borders. As stupid and offensive as the executives were, the regular Joes who worked there were a decent bunch, and I never had to labor more than three hours out of an eight hour day--which was true for almost everybody at Corporate, its bloated staff being one more sign of incompetent management.

Those soft, EZ corporate office jobs are fast disappearing in AmerICKa, and I doubt most of those who have worked at Borders will ever have it so good again. I know I haven’t. Now I have to work for a living, and it sucks.

O God, why did Borders just have to be a little bit stupider than Barnes & Noble???

Anyway, may God in particular bless the following ex-Borders employees:

Joe G. Mike S. Jerry R. Suzane the cafeteria cashier. Jessica U. (who with her skimpy wardrobe single-handedly forced Borders to change their dress policy). Nicole C. And

Jersey Shore Jill L.

This Is The True North

2011-07-13T20:49:00.003-04:00

The old lady has family in Washington, DC and California. We take 2 or 3 trips a year to these places--and nothing seems different. The same congested humanity. The same level of irritation and dissatisfaction. Everybody in a rush. Endless rush hour. People hurrying at a snail's pace from one meaningless endeavor to the next. Life wasted on pointless pursuits.

But drive two hundred miles North, and all things are made new, again. The Northern hicks have plenty of room to spread out. Space = time. You can see people clearly. Their lives are no doubt just as meaningless, but in the isolation and slower pace, you can actually see what they are.

Even the small city I live in is large enough you can't see anybody. It's all a mass of antmen stuck in traffic or anxiously trying to wring a few twenties from their Provider, ATM, or scurrying from a parking lot slurping Starbucks and babbling into cellular phones. A fraudulent existence. They think they are living--but this wasn’t what they were created for. Watching these antmen play at living would be like watching the Lakers and Celtics try to play basketball with a football.

In the Council Flats I call home, there are three hundred and eight units stitched together--the real human centipede. We live ass-to-mouth, shitting all over each other. My neighbors aren’t individual humans--they’re a pack of ever-changing strays. They bark at each other and howl at their televisions. They’re noise. You never really see anybody. You just hear them, and catch a glimpse of them on their mad scrambles. Noise and mad scrambles to secure a meaningless mechanical existence. A noisy blur of rusting robots clanking toward the scrap heap.

But the North is slow and empty. You can lock onto the individual and track him through his confused day. Humanity is just as deformed in the North as anywhere else, but you have the time and the space to take note.

Take the fat, for example. In the congested urban populations you see in the hurly-burly the burly ones, behemoths, obese-atrons--but how do they eat? How often do you see one of these creatures actually consuming their 7500 calories?

In the North, you actually see the dietary and feeding habits of human swine. Over the Fourth of July holidays, as I was touring Lake City, Falmouth and Marion, I had the opportunity to record such a feeding:

How does a person end so wrongly big? In the time and space of the North, you see the beginning. Here we have two generations of gargantuans starting a third on his way to toothlessness, obesity and diabetes:

In the time and space of the North, you see the life cycle of the neo-native AmerICKan fatass (and all other species). Now down here when I see one climbing huffing and puffing into an Explorer, I KNOW.

One other, greater advantage to the North:

In the time and space of the North, it’s far easier to find a remnant of the living church. Not our dead pew-warmers (or the North’s dead pew-warmers), but those whose names are written in the Book of Life.

It’s worth driving two hundred miles, it would be worth driving one thousand miles, to hear genuine praise of the Almighty.

This is the True North:

Family Night

2011-07-06T10:33:00.001-04:00

The double shift. Every Saturday night. Come in at 3 pm Saturday, leave 7 am Sunday. Sixteen straight hours of After COPS. You watch COPS, and at the end of every segment you see the officers driving off in the squad car, with the reprobate in the back seat. Where do they go after the camera is switched off? County jail. And that’s me. Baby-sitting the unkempt and the unwashed through the long Saturday night and Sunday morning.

I’ve worked all days and all shifts at the jail for a year, now. The Saturday double is the gauntlet. Hour after hour assaulted by the liquor fumes, body odor and sewer stinking feet of the newly arrested wretches. Ear-aching hour after ear-aching hour of listening to their retarded self-justifications and dumb protests of innocence, their insane babble, their wearying pleas and juvenile schemes for extra phone calls, sack lunches or jail jackets, all accompanied by the blare of the televisions.

I call the Saturday double *Family Night.* A slow trickle starts at 5 pm, and the floodgates open at 8 pm. Domestic Violence. Domestic Violence. Domestic Violence. Domestic Violence, one rolling in every twenty minutes until the early hours of Sunday morning.

*Families* spending time together on Saturday. . .

By dinner they’re at each other’s throat.

Central announces each arrival:

“Ann Arbor in the sally port, one new male arrest.”

“Ypsilanti in the sally port, one new male arrest.”

“County in the sally port, one new male arrest.”

“Pittsfield in the sally port, one new female arrest.”

“Northfield in the sally port, one new hillbilly arrest.”

Then, just to break the monotony:

“Ypsilanti in the sally port, three new male arrests.”

Home Invasion by three juvenile delinquents dumber than Home Alone’s Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci.

And sprinkle in a few OWIs, a couple traffic bench warrants, a possession of dangerous drugs, maybe a felonious assault, a criminal sexual conduct, and every now and then, a murder. That’s Saturday night.

But Domestic Violence is definitely the Saturday house specialty. . .even more so now the hot weather is here. And particularly for the POOR and the DIRTY. And the FAT. Pricking at each other all day, husband against wife, wife against husband, parents against children, children against parents. . .even the grandparents get into it. Snarling at each other all day long, baiting each other all day long. . .mixed with alcohol, of course, until one or more of them invariably loses control and then the brawl begins.

The blazing sun is the enemy of domestic harmony. The burning rays fry the nerves of the poor, the dirty and the fat. Their brains cooked until derangement sets in. The cops go in and pick these human weeds. The tares arrive at the jail in various states of undress. Stinking, sweating, sunburned, rolls of fat spilling from their soiled, stained, ill-fitting rags.

Human offal.

Human waste.

Human dross.

Human chaff.

Stumbling, slurring litter.

All ages. From the seventeen year old boy who threw a bowl of chocolate pudding at his mother, then taunted her by holding a mirror in front of her, telling her how stupid she looked, and then breaking the mirror over her head, to the seventy-four year old geezer who battered his seventy-two year old wife with her walker.

All day Saturday, families warring.

POOR families.

Maybe families with money tear themselves apart, too. Maybe they just have enough wealth to live far enough away from their neighbors. Out of earshot. The poor live stacked on top of each other, and the neighbors report the mayhem. Or maybe the poor are just conditioned to have the police referee their dysfunctional lives. . .whatever the reason, it’s always the POOR, dirty and fat, who are brought in on domestic violence.

The high*light* last Saturday was Brianna--five foot, four inches and three hundred and sixty pounds. At least, three sixty is what she was willing to admit to. Stringy, greasy, shit-colored hair hanging to her shoulders, sweating buckets in worn pink Wal-Mart stretch pants and a stained, soiled tent-sized originally white, now gray t-shirt. She got into a scrap with her daughter, and according to the county deputy who brought her in, ending up biting her on the right breast.

Domestic Violence.

That’s all it’s ever been since Cain and Abel.

It’s in our blood.

I look at these people. Us. I watch them every Saturday night. I listen to them. The truth eventually slips out. One of the questions I have to ask is:

Have there currently been a few weeks when you felt useless or sinful?

The NEVER feel sinful. That concept has been lost. They laugh at the idea of sin.

But it is amazing how many of them admit to feeling useless.

Broken people, not at peace with themselves, and, therefore, unable to be at peace with others.

It could be said:

These are the people Jesus loves.

Or:

In His incarnation, Jesus never laid eyes on a three hundred and sixty pounder. He would have been disgusted by the sloth, the gluttony, the degeneracy of appearance and conduct.

But Jesus came to preach the gospel to the poor and the broken in spirit.

But these people are poor only by AmerICKan standards. Compared to most, they are well-off.

And are they broken in spirit? They have the gospel all around them. AmerICKa is choked with churches and so-called *Christian* Media. The gospel lays all around them like junk mail on the kitchen table or the coupon flyers in the Sunday paper--ignored. This human corruption takes no notice of the Lord Jesus Christ.

For fifteen hours and fifty minutes every Saturday night I say:

Burn this garbage in Hell.

But in the last ten minutes, as I’m about to be free of them, I have a deathbed conversion. They are, after all, only a mirror. So I say to myself, judge them according to your measure. No match for the world, the flesh and the Devil. We get our ass kicked all day long. This stumbling, slurring litter is my blood.

7 am every Sunday morning I find comfort in Psalms 103:

The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. He will not always chide: neither will He keep His anger for ever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. . .Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear Him. For he knoweth our frame; He remembereth that we are dust.

This is my comfort. The comfort of those that fear the Lord. As for the others, those who feel useless, I leave them sitting in darkness, waiting:

Behold My servant, whom I uphold; Mine elect, in whom My soul delighteth; I have put My spirit upon Him: and will keep Thee, and give Thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.

The Industry Of The Future

2011-06-28T13:11:00.004-04:00

Floods Could Trigger Fukushima Disaster At Calhoun

Minuteman III Nuclear Missile Silos Are In Flood's Path

Wildfire Threatens Los Alamos Nuclear Lab

Aging US Reactors Were Designed To Last Only 40 Years

Al Qaeda doesn't need to smuggle in any dirty bombs. . .AmerICKa has bOOby-trapped itself with scores of them. . .the handwriting is on the wall. . .it's only a matter of time. . .or nature.

Circus sideshows are the Industry of the Future. . .a new generation of freaks is about to be born.

Christine

2011-06-15T11:20:00.002-04:00

“Oh God, is that me?”

She was looking at her mugshot. Christine.

“I look my age! I look forty-five!”

That’s enough to set her off crying, again. Seeing the picture of herself. It’s the top page of her booking paperwork, right there on the fingerprint machine, staring at her as I roll her prints. More evidence of her ruin. I have to say something to keep her reasonably calm. I need about five more minutes to finish printing her.

“You don’t look forty-five.”

She half-laughs, half-sobs.

“Thanks, sweetie,” she says, wiping snot from her nose.

I wasn’t lying. She doesn’t look forty-five. She looks fifty, at least. She’s had too many drinks over the years. Too many hours in too many bars. And then, too many beds. She looks pretty ragged.

“I can’t believe they give me domestic! ME!”

Here she goes, again. Wailing about her domestic assault charge.

“How could they of give me domestic?!?! LOOK!”

She points at the dying bruises on her upper arms.

“He’s been grabbing me and punching me for years! And I get a domestic?!?!”

4.2% tears spill out of her eyes.

I roll her right index finger over the glass. A little beep from the machine, then print flashes on the monitor.

“All I did was knock over his flat screen! And they give me domestic?!?!”

“Did you knock it over on him?”

“NO!”

I see some of the Corrections Officers watching, rolling their eyes, laughing. It’s great sport, from afar. The inmates, though, aren’t interested. Somebody’s got to really put on a show to get them to look away from the televisions, even though right now it’s only infomercials. There have been maniacs throwing fits, earning a shower of pepper spray, and the inmates will just sit there coughing, eyes still glued to the TVs.

“Well, maybe the prosecutor will drop the domestic in the morning,” I say, tossing Christine a bone to chew on.

“Think so?”

”Anything’s possible.”

“Just because he called. Over his precious flat screen. And they give me DOMESTIC?!?! I called on him a half-a-dozen times. You can look it up. I ain’t lying! He’s been here over and over. And LOOK!”

She points at the bruises, again. Some of them are yellow, like egg stains, like bits of old runny yolks on her arms.

“Well, whatever happens at court, just take care of it, and then maybe you ought to move on.”

“I ought to,” she says without much enthusiasm.

I roll her ring finger.

She starts weeping, again.

“Why can’t I meet no one good?”

I roll her little finger. Her fingers are long and slender, just like her body. She’s kept the weight off, except for a little beer belly. No doubt she drinks more than she eats. Her body is still decent, but her looks are gone. Her skin has been chewed up by liquor and worry. Imagine a more tattered Faye Dunaway in Barfly.

“I’m forty-five years old,” she says softly. “Forty-five years old. I went my whole life and never met no one good.”

It’s time to do her left hand.

“Forty-five. Forty-five. Forty-five. All those years! Gone!”

She sighs, wipes her nose.

I place her left hand on the glass.

“Yeah, the time passes,” I say. “Life is but a vapor.”

“Ain’t that a nice thought?” she huffs.

Ha. She doesn’t know the half of it. I’ve done fifty years, and I’m just realizing I need to get out of the world.

I press my left hand on top of hers, hold her wrist with my right hand, and then slowly pull her hand down the scanner glass.

Sometimes, with some of the females, the ones who cry and the sad, quiet, damaged ones, doing the palm and finger roll can be kind of an intimate thing.

“Why can’t I ever meet no one good?” she sobs.

Her twin themes: time and a good man. Too much drink in her system, and now she broods over time and men. And cries for herself.

I just have to get the individual prints of her left hand fingers, and then I’m done with her.

“They give me DOMESTIC?!?!” she wails. “ME?!?! LOOK!”

Again, the bruises. Time, shitty men and bruises. And outrage over her charge. All chasing around in her mind.

God had to put me in this jail. It’s from this jail I see the absolute worthlessness of human nature, and the absolute lack of faith.

“Just try to stay calm, ma’am. They may toss the domestic in the morning. And even if they don’t, you’ll get a PR bond and be out of here by lunchtime.”

“But I’ll still have to go through the courts! ME! A domestic!”

“It’ll be all right.”

“You really think so?”

I nod.

This empty reassurance is enough to calm her for a moment.

I roll her left thumb across the glass.

“I never have met no good man,” she sniffles.

I’ve been trying not say it, but now I do:

“A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

“You ever read it?”

“Huh?”

“A Good Man is Hard to Find. It’s a famous short story. By Flannery O’Connor.”

She shakes her head.

“I never have read a lot of stories.”

No. No, probably not.

There were certain women who were drawn to Jesus. It’s tempting to think they were like this one here, this one ironically named Christine. Women prone to poor choices and oft ill-used. Women who went through the gutter looking for a good man, trying one after another, and then Jesus appeared, and they wept, finally finding the One. They wept, and never ceased washing His feet with their tears. But all we know, say, of Mary Magdalene, is Christ drove seven demons from her. Neither Magdalene, nor any of the other *Jesus women* mentioned in the gospels, give the impression of having been drunken tramps.

But now, as I roll Christine’s left little finger, and finish with her, I wonder if maybe she has seven demons? Demons of alcohol, lust, vanity. . .anger. . .and. . .uh. . .?

Or maybe she is just a drunken tramp, by choice and *bad luck.*

Well, anyway. . .

“All right, ma’am. We’re done here. You can take your seat, again.”

“Now I just sit out here till court?”

“Yeah, that’s about it.”

“I can’t believe they give me domestic!”

She’s crying again as she walks back to her seat.

I try to imagine Christine about thirty years ago, when she was around seventeen. Before her own personal original sin. The sin that has worn her down over the years. The sin that has marked her face. I bet she could have been a Homecoming Queen--if she wasn’t a tramp, already. In any event, she must have been a very pretty girl at seventeen, whether wholesome or flat on her back. One way or the other, she would have been too popular for me.

Now look at us. Both of us in jail. Closer to the grave than to the womb. These concrete blocks walling us in. The gray paint. The fluorescent lights, always on. The artificial haze of the underground. What time is it? Fluorescent o’clock. It’s always fluorescent o’clock in here. What day is it? What season? We’re outside of time, now.

Christine sits there, showing her bruises to a fat woman (retail fraud). Look at them. Look at all of them. These inmates. They haven’t had enough of the world, yet. That’s why they’re in here. And they can’t wait to get back to the world. Can’t wait for another dose of it. The world.

I’m grateful to God to have worked a year in here. It’s now crystal clear everybody in the world is on the wrong path.

The only difference between the people in jail and the people on the outside is clumsiness. These people, the inmates, are klutzes. They stumble more, they crash into things and draw attention to themselves. Losers. But they’re just caricatures of the so-called *successful.* They view life the same as the rest, including the Sunday morning pew-warmers. They think there is something to get out of this world. . .but there’s nothing to get out of the world. . .except their souls.

Déjà Vu Iran, Black Swan, The Ghost Writer, Jim Tressel

2011-06-07T23:39:00.004-04:00

Scanning the headlines on Drudge Report today, it's déjà vu all over again:

REPORT: Iran can produce nuke within 2 MONTHS. . .

Are you SHITTING me, I thought? Not this, again!

I wondered:

How many times have I read this SAME EXACT STORY in the last five years???

How many times have the sheeple been warned/frightened the muslim bogeymen are about to go nuclear? That the islam bomb is *just around the corner?*

Then I stopped wondering, and I asked myself have I really been reading this SAME EXACT STORY for five years, or does it just seem like I have? I did a Google search--and I must admit I was wrong. I haven’t been reading the SAME EXACT STORY for five years. I’ve been reading the SAME EXACT STORY for

25 YEARS!!!

[documented here]

Ha ha ha.

Ridiculous.

The Iran/nuke bomb story is a sterling example of long-term propaganda, disinformation and brainwashing. This story has been told for nearly an entire generation, now. A psyops program of witting and unwitting conspirators, culled from so-called *think tanks,* *intelligence agencies,* *government spo(o)kespersons,* *ivory tower policy wonks,* *retired military analysts,* Media blowhards, etc., etc. All combining to craft a crescent shaped nuclear cloud which the Military Media Complex floats over USrael. . .

Listen:

Iran nuclear bomb has been *just a few months away* for twenty-five years. . .and USrael has been contemplating a *preemptive* attack for twenty-five years because Iran nuclear bomb is nearing the *point of no return.*

But Iran hasn’t built the bomb, and USrael hasn’t attacked. . .

So I wonder, what is the point of the Military Media Complex’ long-running Iran nuclear bomb propaganda campaign?

Is it possible, after twenty-five years of pushing the same feary tale, USrael doesn’t really care if Iran goes nuclear?

In fact, the only reasonable conclusion one can draw is USrael actually WANTS Iran to go nuclear. . .

The point of the Military Media Complex’ twenty-five year propaganda campaign is to terrify the sheeple with a demonized other. The Military Media Complex needs a *terrifying* enemy to justify its staggering looting of the national treasure.

For nearly a generation now, the Military Media Complex has presented the so-called *Middle East*as a monolithic muslim monster, when in reality it is a grape leaf stuffed with a bewildering mix of tribes, clans, religions and races. And the Military Media Complex has presented a nuclear Iran (as it did the *Weapons of Mass Destruction* Iraq) as the latest scare story to frighten the sheeple into accepting the Military Media Complex’ Middle East virtual reality: the so-called *Middle East* as a vast desert swarming with barbaric sand niggers desperate to beg, borrow or steal *nuclear secrets,* and in a fever to nuke God’s chosen Western people so it can restore the so-called *Caliphate.*

And if the Iranians actually manage to cobble together a nuclear bomb or two, so much the better!! Imagine the terror the Military Media Complex will conjure should the day ever arrive when Iran (or some other member of the so-called *Middle East*) announces it has the bomb.

With such a *real* threat, the Military Media Complex will validate its long demonization of the other, and will be able to perpetually justify all its military adventurism. The so-called *West* will humbly again accept the lead of USrael, and will never again be *caught with its guard down.* The Military Media Complex will never be in danger of being dismantled, for an islam bomb will throw the shadow of *holocaust* over the West. . .and the terrified sheeple will give their very last pennies for *defense.*

If the Iranian leadership possessed any wisdom, they would pull the Persian rug out from under USrael by stating their intention, in light of the Japanese nuclear catastrophe, to abandon their nuclear energy program, and then invite Western inspectors to verify the process. Thus, the Iranians could write a surprise ending to one of the Military Media Complex’ most widely read stories from its anthology of propaganda. The other repents? Hard to scare anybody with that ending. . .

But the Iranians will not do this, for they are unknowing accomplices to their own slander. . .for the sinister hand behind the New Order of the Ages controls all the governments of the world, and all are patsies, and all are in the process of being brought together to that final line in the sand. . .

A couple other totally unrelated *things:*

I finally got around to watching Black Swan. Unfortunately, it did not live up to the critics' hype. It’s a mildly entertaining amusement--and nothing more. Well-made, very watchable, but when it’s over, there’s nothing that will stay with you, nothing that will stimulate any thought, unless you want to masturbate to Natalie Portman fantasies.

Speaking of Ms. Portman, she delivers a surprisingly strong performance. Portman has been the most wooden of actresses since her enchanting debut in The Professional, but here she manages to seem human playing Nina, a sheltered, repressed, emotionally retarded adult girl. . .in other words, Natalie Portman plays herself in Black Swan (or the self she has appeared to be in all her movies since The Professional).

As for Black Swan the movie, it can be briefly and accurately described as the chick flick version of Fight Club, with Natalie Portman playing the Tyler Durden of prima ballerinas.

I also saw the critically acclaimed The Ghost Writer, made by the celebrated child molester Roman Polanski. . .and it was even more disappointing than Black Swan.

The Ghost Writer is an empty suit of a movie, with its dumb storyline pulled from the headlines of the left wing UK papers. The bland movie *star* Ewan McGregor plays a ghost writer hired to punch up the memoirs of a Tony Blair-like former Prime Minister in the middle of a war crimes inquiry. The movie’s big twist is the ghost writer discovers the Tony Blair-like character isn’t really such a bad fellow, he’s just a chump who has been manipulated by his wife, a Cherie Blair changeling in service of the CIA.

The Ghost Writer is a stupid, shallow flick, with its idiotic plot literally driven by a BMW’s GPS system. I have no idea why so many critics would praise this garbage. . .

Lastly, there is the long-anticipated demise of Jim Tressel, who needlessly and carelessly cheated during his glorious ten year run as the head football coach at Ohio State.

There were countless accusations over the years of shady dealings between Ohio State *booster* businessmen and Buckeye football players, but the NCAA always looked the other way. Mr. Tressel was finally undone by one small, dumb lie. Tressel had become so accustomed to having his dirt swept under the rug by the Ohio State administration, he no longer even bothered with appearances. . .and when his lie became public, he couldn’t even make the insincere-but-de rigeuer- half-assed apology that would have likely saved him.

The ironic thing is Tressel, I believe, would have had the exact same record without the cheating. I believe Tressel cheated for the same reason obsessive-compulsives wash their hands dozens of times--just to be sure. I don't think any of Tressel's dirty players would have left Ohio State had he asked them to refrain from all the free car deals, bogus summer jobs, autograph fees, etc. Tressel tolerated all the dirty deals, even though rationally he should have known the players wouldn't have left OSU, just to be sure he would win. . .

But that is neither here, nor there. I comment on Tressel because he is a self-proclaimed *Christian,* and I find him to be an outstanding representative of the contemporary AmerICKan church.

If Tressel is a Christian, all his works are wood, hay and stubble. Tressel himself will be saved (if he is a Christian), yet so as by fire. . .

Tressel, a Christian who practices the way of the world, is therefore a perfect proof of the Apostle Paul’s maxim:

A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. . .

Tressel, if he is a Christian, is, at best, a severely compromised Christian, a worldly Christian, and thus a fitting figurehead for the kind of Christian our Lord Jesus Christ would see two thousand years down the road when He asked:

Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?

This Is Real Democracy

2011-05-26T12:16:00.004-04:00

"This is real democracy!" the blowhard head of the zionist state thunders, after being interrupted, for seven whole seconds, by an ethnic person of conscience.

According to the head of the zionist state, such protests would not be allowed in Iran or Libya. . .and it is a sign of the greatness of AmerICKa and the zionist state that these *free states* allow such protests. . .(for seven whole seconds).

Ha ha ha. . .

Let's see what really happened to the ethnic person of conscience who exercised her *right* to *free speech* (for seven whole seconds) in the *free state* of AmerICKa:

Jerusalem Post, 24 May 2011: The protester who heckled Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu during his speech to a joint session of the US Congress was arrested by police for "disrupting Congress," a press release from the group Move Over AIPAC said. Rae Abileah was taken to the hospital by Capital Police after reportedly being assaulted and tackled in the House Gallery by AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) members. Abileah, a member of CODEPINK from California, is Jewish and of Israeli descent, according to a press release.

Ha ha ha. . .in the *free state* of AmerICKa, where political protest is *allowed,* (for seven whole seconds, in supposed contrast to Iran and Libya), the young female protestor is beaten by agents of a foreign state (and while the youg woman was being beaten, the AmerICKan congressmen and congresswomen stood and applauded the assault, cheered and applauded the violent censor of dissent), and then arrested, while still lying injured in a hospital bed, for the crime of protesting!

This could never happen in Iran or Libya, the zionist says. . .

"This is real democracy!"

Ha ha ha. . .

And yet I would wager the vast majority of AmerICKans, if informed of the beating and arrest of the protestor, would still hold to the illusion of *free speech.*

Firstly, the sheeple care nothing for the *rights* of anyone who would oppose the AmerICKan National Interest (an Interest which opposes their own interest, but which they are ignorant of, having been thoroughly brainwashed from birth into a dumb patriotism).

Secondly, the sheeple will cling to the illusion of *free speech* because they are allowed to make all the noise they want for or against faggot marriage, for or against abortion, for or against any kind of social issue that does not contradict the policies of the Military Media Complex. The rulers of AmerICKa will let the sheeple strain all they want at the gnat of faggot marriage, so long as they continue to swallow the camel of perpetual war. This is the real democracy the zionist blowhard thunders about. . .

Obama's Timid Proposal

2011-05-19T21:37:00.004-04:00

Barack Hussein Obama (Hawaii), after a laborious recitation of zionist *talking points* (the endless zionist obsession with victimization, the security paranoia, the *special relationship* with AmerICKa, etc., etc.), offered a timid proposal to bring peace between the zionist state and occupied Palestine:

The zionist state and occupied Palestine should come to an agreement to create a new Palestine based on 1967 borders.

Predictably, this modest proposal was immediately rejected by the zionists. Equally predictably, Barack Hussein Obama’s loyalty to the zionist state was questioned--and thus also his eligibility to be President of the United States of AmerICKa. For even more than a valid certificate of live birth from one of the United States, fealty to the zionist state is a requirement for the office of President.

But this tired show has been staged countless times, and will be staged countless times again--only our Lord Jesus Christ can cancel this long-running tragedy. In the meantime, there will be blood. . .

What is most interesting about this latest fruitless *peace initiative* is the contrast between the petulant reaction of the zionist state and the stony silence of Palestine, especially considering the biased words of Barack Hussein Obama (Hawaii):

For decades, the conflict between Israelis and Arabs has cast a shadow over the region. For Israelis, it has meant living with the fear that their children could get blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them. For Palestinians, it has meant suffering the humiliation of occupation, and never living in a nation of their own. For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state. Palestinian leaders will not achieve peace or prosperity if Hamas insists on a path of terror and rejection. And Palestinians will never realize their independence by denying the right of Israel to exist. As for Israel, our friendship is rooted deeply in a shared history and shared values. Our commitment to Israel’s security is unshakable. And we will stand against attempts to single it out for criticism in international forums.

Only the zionists live in fear.

Only the Palestinians are taught hate.

Only zionist children have rockets fired at their homes.

Only the Palestinians deny the right of the other to exist.

Only the zionist state is immune to criticism.

It is laughable the zionists are criticizing Barack Hussein Obama (Hawaii) for his timid peace proposal, when the evident bias of his remarks whitewashes every sin of the zionist state. Thousands and thousands and thousands more Palestinians have been killed, thousands and thousands more Palestinian homes have been bombed to rubble, it is the zionist state which is armed with the greatest death machines of AmerICKa, while the Palestinians fire toy rockets and throw stones--yet Barack Hussein Obama (Hawaii) says it is the zionist children who live in fear.

Obama paints a shamelessly dishonest picture of the conflict between the zionist state and Palestine. . .and he wonders why there cannot be peace? The zionist state will never take seriously any call to peace as long as the picture of their brutal occupation of Palestine is painted by AmerICKa to depict the zionists as the victims.

It is such an outrageous distortion of reality, and this absurd alternate reality has been amen’d so long by AmerICKa, the zionist state skin’s has become exceeding thin. . .the zionist state cannot tolerate even the mildest contradiction. . .the zionist state has become the princess who cannot stand the pea of Obama’s timid and vague reference to the 1967 border.

The zionist reaction seems even more peevish when we consider Barack Hussein Obama remarks about Syria in the same speech. Obama notes the *unrest* in Syria, and demands the Syrian leader Assad map out a route to so-called *democracy,* or be pushed aside. Obama also imposes sanctions on Syria. . .

But there are no demands or threats made to the zionist state, only a timid and toothless request to return to 1967 borders. Yet the zionist state chafes at even this most gentle of prods. . .

In contrast, the Palestinians, hardened after decades of abuse and decades of the denial of their reality, silently accept the demeaning language of Barack Hussein Obama (Hawaii). . .

They stand silent against the charge they are the terrorists, they are the haters, they are the deniers of the right of the other to exist.

After sixty years of this tired drama, the Palestinians understand the essential emptiness of AmerICKan *peace initiatives.* So while the zionist state snarls over a pat on the head, the Palestinians stand silent against yet another slandering. They have no speaking part in the great *peace* shows of AmerICKa and the zionist state. . .they stand on stage, dumb, in order to secure a few table scraps for their beleaguered people. . .

Away from the stage, both the zionists and the Palestinians believe time is on their side. . .but here they are both mistaken. . .it is only Jesus Christ, ahead.

Rape Of The Coloreds, Part IV

2011-05-19T10:15:00.003-04:00

In *high profile* incidents of violence, and when the perpetrator is a so-called *muslim* (such as the case of the Fort Hood shooting), Media will invariably debate whether or not so-called *islam* is a violent religion (though AmerICKan Media’s bias is glaringly obvious in the so-called *debates*--see example here).

So, can we not then fairly raise the question:

Does the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn’s religion condone rape of *strange* women (women of other religions or ethnicities)?

We do not ask this question arbitrarily, but based on the following texts from the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn’s religious manuals:

Given the extraordinarily callous and cavalier attitude of the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn’s religion toward *strange* women, and in light of the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn’s rape of a *strange* woman, are the Hannitys, O’Reillys, Becks and Limbaughs asking if the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn’s religion permits and condones his rape?

Are the Hannitys, O’Reillys, Becks and Limbaughs asking if the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn’s religion is a religion of RAPE?

If the Hannitys, O’Reillys, Becks and Limbaughs are not asking if the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn’s religion is a religion of RAPE, then why aren’t they asking this question?

Please feel free to comment. . .

Rape Of The Coloreds, Part III

2011-05-18T10:58:00.006-04:00

From various newspaper stories today we learn:

In an interview with a Paris publication three weeks ago, the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn said:

"Yes I like women.”

The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn’s victim may be HIV+

Supporters of the theory the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn is the victim of a conspiracy try to paint the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn as an IMF *reformer* in favor of *kinder and gentler* lending terms for *developing nations*

What do we learn from today’s accounts?

The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn supposedly *likes* women.

Ha ha ha.

The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn says:

“I like women.”

Ha ha ha.

NO.

If the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn like women, he wouldn’t have tried to force his circumcised cock into the negress hotel cleaning woman’s mouth.

No. The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn doesn’t like women. He likes to ABUSE women for the purpose of gratifying his basest desires.

Ha ha ha.

The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn says:

“I like women.”

Ha ha ha.

NO.

The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn likes women only if women are objects upon which he can freely and without conscience impose himself solely for his own psychological and carnal pleasure, and without regard to his object's privacy.

The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn likes women only if women are human property upon which he can trespass at will.

The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn likes women only if women are lesser beings to whom he owes NOT the empathy he now whimpers for at Riker’s Island. The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn presents himself as the victim (whether or not he believes this in the safety of his own mind), and asks for an empathy he has consistently denied women.

Ha ha ha.

The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn says:

“I like women.”

Ha ha ha.

NO.

If women are fully human beings, owners of will, allowed the privilege of resisting the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn’s gross sexual advances, then the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn HATES women, as the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn has a long history of serially disregarding women who say “no” to the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn’s raging prick.

Ha ha ha.

The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn says:

“I like women.”

Ha ha ha.

NO.

The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn is a liar, and is of his father, the devil, the father of lies.

Next, the poor genuine victim, the $23000-a-year negress cleaning woman, is outed as HIV+. Seeing as this poor washer woman is an immigrant from Africa, and that nearly all of Africa has HIV, there is no surprise here. Are we supposed to feel sorry for the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn because he engaged in *risky rape?* If you rape a dog, don’t cry if you get fleas. . .

Finally, this conspiracy theory nonsense about the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn *reforming* the IMF. Remember, initially we stated:

What the chief ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn did on the most personal level to the hotel maid, the colored hotel maid, is what his organization, the IMF, has done for decades on the national level to the poor colored states of the world: RAPE.

But now conspiracy theorists allege the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn is a *reformer,* and a *friend* to the colored peoples of the world.

Ha ha ha.

Utter nonsense.

JUST ASK THE GREEKS WHAT THEY THINK OF THE *KINDER, GENTLER* IMF BOSS STRAUSS-KAHN.

Before his *risky rape,* the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn was scheduled to visit Greece and meet with the Greek finance minister about the IMF’s bailout plan for bankrupt Greece.

Were working class Greeks planning on lining the streets to greet the old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn with flowers and kisses?

NO.

Unions planned to hold demonstrations in Athens in protest at his visit and the strict austerity programme the government has imposed to meet IMF and EU conditions attached to the bailout.

And last week tens of thousands took to the streets to protest the reduced standard of living demanded by the usurious IMF.

NO.

The old and flabby ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn may have Santa Claus’ body, but he wasn’t delivering toys to the colored peoples of the world, he was delivering a usury which would oppress the coloreds for decades.

We say it again:

Now the ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn has been caught acting out in his private life the same behaviors he practices in his public life as Man of the World: RAPE.

Rape Of The Coloreds, Part II

2011-05-17T13:28:00.006-04:00

From various newspaper stories today we learn:

The negress cleaning woman victim is a devout MUSLIM

She earns $23,000-a-year, with which she supports her daughter

The victim and her daughter live in The Bronx

The victim’s brother, upon hearing conspiracy theories his sister was involved in some type of *set-up,* had this to say:

"I don't think that's fair. My sister's a very nice woman and not capable of that."

The ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn who tried to force his circumcised cock into the mouth of the negress Muslim cleaning woman is now being revealed to be a serial rapist, which fits my comments yesterday the ethnic usurer Strauss-Khan obsesses over rape, and his mind is constantly fixated on RAPE, RAPE, RAPE.

One of his previous rape victims is the gorgeous white French woman pictured above, who describes the serial molester as:

"a rutting chimpanzee" who "no attractive women want to work for"

A French lawmaker claims the ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn has attacked other cleaning woman at the same Sofitel New York hotel

Meanwile, the ethnic usurer Strauss-Khan’s lawyer is saying the rutting chimpanzee engaged in *consenual sex* with the cleaning woman

What do we learn from today’s accounts?

The conspiracy theory, which we said yesterday was absurd, and there was zero chance the poor colored cleaning woman was involved in a set-up, is dead-in-the-water. The defense is that this devout MUSLIM cleaning woman willingly had sex at her work place with the old obese ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn. HA HA HA. This is as ridiculous a claim as the supposed *set-up.*

On the one hand, we have a devout MUSLIM who, to raise her daughter, has tirelessly changed the dirty sheets of the filthy rich for four years at this luxury hotel for twenty-three fucking thousand dollars-a-year (and which is probably the amount the ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn dropped on his little New York jaunt, a drop in his bucket), but when confronted by a naked old obese ethnic usurer, she drops her duster and immediately engages in *consensual sex* with said bloated old ethnic usurer, AND THEN SUDDENLY, FOR SOME REASON, CLAIMS RAPE!!

Uh, why did she claim rape? Shame? But nobody would have ever known she had fucked the fat old ethnic usurer. . .and surely she would have known she risked even greater shame by bringing the dirty business out into the open, especially with a rape claim. It makes no sense, especially for a MUSLIM, since MUSLIM rape victims are often STIGMATIZED!

Did the maid willingly fuck the fat old ethnic usurer, and then dream up a rape story in some attempt at a monetary shakedown? No. There is no claim of extortion from the ethnic usurer’s lawyer. Besides, the fat old ethnic usurer would have probably thrown her a few thousand, anyway. Who knows how many rape victims he has bought off, already?

NO.

I can think of NO rational reason why this devout MUSLIM cleaning woman would engage in *consensual sex* with an old obese ethnic usurer, and then SUDDENLY, FOR SOME REASON, CLAIM RAPE.

On the other hand, we have the old, overweight ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn, who obsesses over RAPE, who is described by a beautiful white French woman as a *rutting chimpanzee,* but this same ethnic usurer would have us believe a relatively young negress, a devout Muslim with four years of spotless service as a hotel cleaning woman, wanted to have sex with him, but then SUDDENLY, FOR SOME REASON, CLAIMED RAPE.

So, here we have a pig, an obese ethnic usurer who looks very much like a serial molester, caught with his pants down, now claiming he is the VICTIM.

NO.

And there’s something VERY WRONG with anybody who believes the rutting chimpanzee ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn. . .

Now the fat old ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn has his million dollar lawyer claiming a $23000-a-year devout MUSLIM cleaning woman wanted to fuck him, and then cried rape, FOR SOME REASON. . .

All the resources of the rich allayed against the poor and the colored. . .but the rich man is the VICTIM!! A literal Man of the World SMEARED by a $23000-a-year colored maid!!

Ah, the poor rich! Always being victimized by the poor!

The poor little rutting chimpanzee, persecuted, CRUCIFIED even, by a coal black MUSLIM washer woman!! I tell you a truth:

It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a coal black MUSLIM washer woman to enter into the Kingdom of God. . .

Rape Of The Coloreds

2011-05-16T11:03:00.007-04:00

16 May 2011, Wall Street Journal: The arrest of International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sexual-assault charges threatened to upend French politics and weaken the IMF's central role in resolving Europe's deepening debt crisis. Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62 years old, was expected to be arraigned Monday morning on charges of attempted rape, criminal sexual assault and unlawful imprisonment of a maid in the New York City hotel where he was staying, police said.

The surprising arrest came amid increasing global attention for the IMF, an organization of 187 nations that advises and lends to troubled economies.

Police said a 32-year-old cleaning woman accused Mr. Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her in the Sofitel Hotel near Times Square. The alleged victim, a native of Guinea and mother of two, said she entered room 2806, a $3,000-a-night luxury suite, around 12 p.m. on Saturday to clean it, thinking it was empty, according to a law-enforcement official with knowledge of the case. According to the narrative she gave investigators, Mr. Strauss-Kahn emerged from the bathroom nude and approached her from behind and touched her breast, then threw her on to the bed, the official said. She told police she broke free but was then pushed into a rear hallway of the suite near the bathroom. Mr. Strauss-Kahn allegedly caught up with her and sexually assaulted her, the official said, before allowing her to leave.

The accuser informed hotel security officials, who showed her a photo of the suite's occupant. After she identified Mr. Strauss-Kahn as her attacker, hotel officials then called police, the official said. The alleged victim was taken to a hospital where she was treated for trauma, tested for sexual assault and later released, the official said. The official said detectives have recovered DNA evidence at the scene. On Sunday, the woman picked the IMF chief out of a lineup at a Manhattan police station.

What the chief ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn did on the most personal level to the hotel maid, the colored hotel maid, is what his organization, the IMF, has done for decades on the national level to the poor colored states of the world:

RAPE.

I have zero sympathy for the ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn. There can be no question of this man's wickedness. Our New Testament records our Lord's beloved disciple as teaching the following:

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

When the beloved disciple speaks of the world, he is speaking of man's material system, the kingdom of man, the temporal kingdom of man, which is opposed to the eternal Kingdom of God. The world system is anti-Christ, and the same anti-Christ spirit which was operating in Babel and has continued to operate in the world down through the ages finds willing ministers in Satanic figures such as the ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn.

The ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn is thoroughly of the world, and there is nothing of the Father in him.

Thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbours by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord GOD. Behold, therefore I have smitten mine hand at thy dishonest gain which thou hast made, and at thy blood which hath been in the midst of thee. . .The people of the land have used oppression, and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy: yea, they have oppressed the stranger wrongfully.

This is the description of the world system. This is the description of the world anti-Christ system, of which the ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn is one of the king of kings, one of the great oppressors of the coloreds (here is an easy-to-understand chart explaining the wickedness of the world anti-Christ system as practiced by the ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn's IMF.)

Now the ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn has been caught acting out in his private life the same behaviors he practices in his public life as Man of the World:

RAPE.

The ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn sexually violated a colored maid. Living the high life of the world in his $3000-a-night luxury suite, he judged himself entitled to exploit the colored maid in the same fashion as he has exploited the colored maid's home continent of Africa. The ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn views himself as a god, a ruler of the world, and above the human chattel he has oppressed.

There is a vanity which is done upon the earth; that there be just men, unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked; again, there be wicked men, to whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous: I said that this also is vanity.

It is not often the great men of the world are brought low. The wicked prosper, and the poor suffer. But here we see one of the world greats fall like lightning. Doubtless he does not understand the criminal nature of his acts. Look at the ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn's defiant face in the photograph above. He broke no law in his world.

I have zero sympathy for such a creature as this ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn. . .he brought misery to millions through the IMF, he raped the nations. . .and in his monstrous megalomania, he raped a poor colored maid, a poor coal black woman trying to put food on her children's table by changing the dirty sheets of the greats of the world. And this ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn judged himself entitled to ram his cock into the mouth of the poor colored maid. Look at his defiant face! This is the face of anti-Christ, the face of the world, the face of the serpent and of the viper, of whom our Lord asked:

How can ye escape the damnation of Hell?

UPDATE:

This article, which details another of the ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn’s rapes, includes the interesting sidebar:

For some, the story of Strauss-Kahn's fall from presidential hopeful to prison cell was a combination of sordid tale and Shakespearean tragedy. For others the story was so extraordinary it smacked of a set-up. Only three weeks ago, Strauss-Kahn evoked such a possibility in an interview with French newspaper Libération when he said he thought he was under surveillance.

"Yes, I like women ... so what?" He said he could see himself becoming the victim of a honey trap: "a woman raped in a car park and who's been promised 500,000 or a million euros to invent such a story ..."

Ha ha ha. . .trapped by his own obsession with rape! The ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn is fixated on rape to such a degree, he invents alibis in advance. . .

The ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn must constantly think of rape. Rape, rape, rape. . .planning rapes and planning cover stories.

“It was a honey trap!”

AS IF A COLORED MAID WOULD TRY TO SHAKE DOWN ONE OF THE WORLD GREATS! OH, YES, IT HAPPENS ALL THE FUCKING TIME!! EVERYONE KNOWS MAIDS MAKE MILLIONS WITH FAKE RAPE STORIES!!

What a dumb alibi! A maid trying to shake down the great ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn! Or the great ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn's political enemies trying to set him up! I can hear it now:

Hello, is this the hotel where the great ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn is staying? It is? OK. Could you tell me which negress will be cleaning his room today? We need to talk to her about staging a fake rape, and we'll also need to talk to her about getting her bank routing number so we can send her the money. Could you connect me to the right negress maid, please? Thank you!

A *honey trap,* indeed! Absolutely zero fucking chance this ethnic usurer Strauss-Kahn is the VICTIM. NO FUCKING CHANCE STRAUSS-KAHN IS THE VICTIM.

Luxury Villa For Sale

2011-05-04T10:42:00.006-04:00

Ha ha ha. . .the picture above is the *$1 million mansion* Bin Laden was living in. $1 million? The place is a dump. Yet another detail from the initial story that turns out to have been a product of the *fog of war.*

Bin Laden was living in luxury in a million dollar mansion, there was a 40 minute *firefight* in which an armed Bin Laden shot at SEALS from behind a female human shield. . .

That’s the initial *tall tale*. . .a cowardly Bin Laden hiding in his luxurious mansion bedroom using a female human shield and shooting badly, not hitting a single brave SEAL from close range.

But now we are to understand Bin Laden was living in a dump, and the SEALS shot an unarmed Bin Laden and at least one unarmed woman. These are the new superheroes of the day, shooting fish in a barrel.

And now in Pakistan, Bin Laden’s daughter tells her version:

US forces captured Bin Laden alive, but shot him dead in front of family members.

I would bet this is closer to the truth than any USA Jessica Lynch/Pat Tillman-style Fairy Tale version of the *testament to the greatness of our country.*

Meanwhile, as a proof to the stunning degree to which *Christian* AmerICKa has placed its faith in violence and taken vengeance to itself, note how dismayed most are to the reaction of the football player Rashard Mendenhall:

Plenty of athletes tweeted their excitement at the news of Osama bin Laden's death. Rashard Mendenhall, however, wasn't convinced a celebration was in order. "What kind of person celebrates death?" the Pittsburgh Steelers running back tweeted. "It's amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We've only heard one side..." "For those of you who said you want to see Bin Laden burn in hell ... I ask how would God feel about your heart?" “I have not spoken with Rashard so it is hard to explain or even comprehend what he meant with his recent Twitter comments,” Steelers owner Art Rooney II said.

Regrettably, Rooney probably speaks for most AmerICKans when he says he cannot comprehend Mendenhall. . .

UPDATE : 5 May 2011

Another FAKE:

The head of the CIA admitted yesterday that there was no live video footage of the raid on Osama Bin Laden's compound as further doubts emerged about the US version of events. . .

"A Testament To The Greatness Of Our Country"

2011-05-02T01:57:00.010-04:00

Beltane, Bright Fire, 1 May 2011, Barack Hussein Obama (Hawaii):

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. . .

No Americans were harmed. . .

After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

And tonight, let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11. I know that it has, at times, frayed.

Yet today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people. . .

May God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.

It is cryptically interesting to note AmerICKa’s greatest killing comes on Beltane, the day of the bright fire, the day pagans celebrate rebirth.

The pagans believe Bel fire is a sacred fire with healing and purifying powers. The fires celebrate the return of life, fruitfulness to the earth and the burning away of winter. The ashes of the Beltane fires were smudged on faces and scattered in the fields.

One can easily imagine ashes smudged as camouflage on the faces of the AmerICKan troops as they danced their *firefight* around Bin Laden. . .

Of course, pagan AmerICKans have now inverted Beltane, and celebrate death instead of life. . .

Obama’s speech, in which he promoted himself several times as *directing* this Festival, reveals his hope the Bin Laden *firefight* will have healing and purifying powers, and will bring rebirth to AmerICKa, a country battered by wars, unemployment and a dying dollar, a country Obama admits has *frayed* since the famous *9/11.*

Obama gazes at the corpse of Bin Laden, and sees hope for AmerICKa:

Tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. . .

But we noted in our previous "Gobsmacked!" entry:

All that AmerICKa used to preen about before the world, her great freedoms, her great riches, are all gone. . .AmerICKa is now seen in her naked form, a harlot who gained her freedoms and riches from riding upon a beast who roams the world, seeking to steal, kill and destroy.

And here, coming on the heels of the killing of Gadhafi’s children and grandchildren, and the killing of Osama, we have confirmation of the above statement, that AmerICKa’s only remaining greatness is her ability to steal, kill and destroy. This is confirmed in Obama’s speech, in which the killing of Osama prompts the Hawaiian-born mulatto to proclaim:

Yet today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people.

I wonder how many, in celebrating the Festival of Death, caught this remark from our leader. Coming on the heels of the killing of Gadhafi’s children and grandchildren, our mulatto leader states unequivocally the killing of Osama is:

A testament to the greatness of our country.

It used to be the mark of AmerICKa's greatness was the famous *Bill of Rights,* or putting a man on the moon. . .now the mark of AmerICKa's greatness is her Death Squads. This is the New Testament of AmerICKa, a nation that openly revels in death.

There is no longer even a pretense of regret over death. . .death is now an Invocation for God to bless AmerICKa.

AmerICKa now has *custody* of Bin Laden’s body, the sacred corpse needed to reanimate an AmerICKan people weary of war, and to hold together its NATO puppet, whose seams were beginning to rip after the Gadhafi assassination attempt. . .

This cup is the New Testament of AmerICKa in Bin Laden’s blood, which is shed for the Military Media Complex, and for the spreading of the gospel of death.

UPDATE...THE DAY AFTER:

The Healing Power of the Sacred Corpse:

Oil falls, Stocks rise, Economy given *Boost!*

*Christian* Cheers Soul In Hell
The *Christian* Huckabee states: decent people the world over cheer the news that madman, murderer and terrorist Osama Bin Laden is dead. . .Welcome to hell, bin Laden.

Ha ha ha. . .here's more proof I'm not a decent person! That's why I always say I'm not fit to call myself a Christian, only Christ can make that judgment. There must be something wrong with me, I just can't pin that little flag on my lapel and go out dancing in the street, cheering one more person in Hell. . .may God forgive me.

Listen, every time there is dancing in the streets over death, whether it is AmerICKans doing the dancing, or the others, the celebrants are merely shadowing Revelation 11:3 - 10.

This Huckabee used to be a baptist pastor, until giving up the pulpit for the *higher calling* of politics. . .and being of the republican variety, I am sure come campaigning time he will issue many words on the evil of abortion, because we all know the right to life stops once the fetus drops out of the womb. . .then it's every man for himself!!

I guess we are supposed to wink at cheering over Bin Laden in Hell because of his great sins, after all, Huckabee has judged him a madman, a murderer and a terrorist, so why not enjoy his eternal torment? People just cannot resist the temptation to engage in relative righteousness. . .but from my understanding of the gospel, God Almighty only looks for one thing when He scans humanity for fitness for His kingdom: the blood of Christ. You're either covered or you're not. God don't look for the blood, and then take a second look for *relative righteousness.*

And speaking of His kingdom, these cheerleaders for Hell who have given up the gospel for a *higher calling* ought to remember the words of our Lord:

No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. . .

Gobsmacked!

2011-04-29T20:47:00.002-04:00

In AmerICKa, a somnolent state under the rule of the Military Media Complex, a *politician* could never speak the words of Putin, could never express any consideration of the *cost* in *civilian* life exacted by her wars.

No concern for the other can ever be shown, less the AmerICKan sense of superiority, of divine favor, be pricked. The others must remain biologically and spiritually invisible, the others must remain nothing more than tin targets to be knocked down in AmerICKa’s carnival shooting gallery wars.

Knock them all down with our smart weapons, and win a prize--Libya’s oil reserves or her sovereign wealth funds! Step right up! 3 Predator Drones for only a billion dollars! Knock down the tin Gadhafi and win the Libyan Investment Authority for your sweetheart!

If an AmerICKan politician ever hesitated over killing the others, he would be labeled weak, un-AmerICKan, liberal, ATHEIST.

Though these wars don’t materially benefit AmerICKa, and only drain her dwindling treasure, they produce a brutal narcotic the sheeple have become addicted to: blood pride. If we can kill the others, we must therefore be better than the others. That is all that sustains the AmerICKan identity: bloodshed. The priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so. . .

All that AmerICKa used to preen about before the world, her great freedoms, her great riches, are all gone. . .AmerICKa is now seen in her naked form, a harlot who gained her freedoms and riches from riding upon a beast who roams the world, seeking to steal, kill and destroy.

The Signs Of The Times

2011-04-29T17:05:00.003-04:00

But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

Ha ha ha. . .earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, tornados, floods, economic catastrophe. . .yet world-wide the sheeple flock to a wedding of figureheads, as if everything can continue as it always has.

When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?

Not One Of Them Is Forgotten Before God

2011-04-28T02:29:00.010-04:00

AnnArbor.com, 26 April 2011: A 19-year-old Ann Arbor man was arrested Monday night after he deliberately ran over four ducklings with a Hummer in a McDonald's parking lot, Ann Arbor police said. He was taken to the Washtenaw County Jail, where he is expected to be arraigned on felony animal cruelty charges this afternoon. At about 6:15 p.m., the man stopped at the drive-thru window in the McDonald's parking lot at 2675 Plymouth Road. Two of the man's friends were in the Hummer with him. As they were picking up their order, one of the passengers got out and attempted to pick up a duckling, police said. A duck and at least 8 ducklings had been walking around in the lot. "Employees at McDonald's yelled at him to stop," police said. The man got back into the Hummer, which left the parking lot, pulling into an adjacent lot for about 15 minutes while the men ate their food. Witnesses told police that the Hummer then returned to the lot and ran over four of the ducklings. Police said the man drove the Hummer away without stopping. Police were called and obtained a description of the Hummer. Officers caught up with a vehicle that matched the description at a nearby gas station and interviewed the three men. The driver was arrested.

A co-worker said to me:

“Man, the time and money the county will waste on this punk, getting him through the courts, housing him, all for what? A couple of ducks.”

“Apparently, you two are of the same mind, then,” I replied.

The co-worker snorted, made a face, and walked away.

It's the first time I've heard a co-worker express any sympathy for anybody in jail.

The older I get, the more I marvel how God manages to still bother about the filthy rags that constitute humanity. [And trust me, I include myself.] Garbage on earth. There have been times when I have expressed this sentiment and have had people respond: you’re supposed to be a Christian, and that’s what you think of God’s creation? That’s when I snort, make a face, and walk away. Is it really necessary to state the obvious:

God didn’t create this garbage. He created spotless mankind, male and female. Perfect specimens. Through the Fall (sin, not the season), mankind devolved into garbage. This frame of reference does not IN ANY WAY preclude one from caring about humanity any more than it precludes God from loving the world. On the contrary, when we see ourselves as the garbage we truly are, we more clearly understand our need and our neighbor’s need for salvation, and we will develop a greater appreciation for Christ’s sacrifice. That He would hang on the cross for such riff-raff!

When we commend ourselves, we only diminish the cross. Christ’s sacrifice looks smaller the higher we regard ourselves. Christ’s gift looks less expensive when we pour good inside of us. “There’s some good in everybody.” “People are basically good.” Even so-called *Christians* can be heard uttering such self-serving and dishonest platitudes. When we elevate ourselves, we make a claim of deserving Christ’s sacrifice. . .but GOD FORBID!

Anyway, back to the ducks. . .

When Almighty God, the Supreme Being, clothed Himself in human flesh (what a humbling!! Now you understand why The Human Centipede is a THEOLOGICAL film—would a human being willingly put on the exoskeleton of a centipede? God willingly lowered Himself far more, far more, when He put on human flesh), He spoke the following:

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.

When we consider these words of our Lord and Savior, we understand man is, indeed, of more value than animals. But man is not of infinite more value. . .a measure can be made. And I would imagine, if God were to reveal the measure, most would be surprised by the low yield. Most would suppose an ark to carry off the beasts as payment for one human, when I would wager a U-Haul would do the trick.

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings? In our measuring, animals come cheap. We buy them, and then we eat them, or turn them into BLING, and, unless their heads are stuffed and mounted on a wall, they are quickly forgotten. BUT not one of them is forgotten before God. We forget the animals, but God does not. So we must understand God values the animals more than we do. LISTEN, this ought to be evident, as God accepted animals as sacrifices in shadow of Christ—there is value in the blood of animals. . .not the value of human blood, but more than most realize (and, of course, there are those who go the OTHER WAY).

My co-worker returned for Round Two:

“Let me see if I got this right. This guy ran over some ducks at a McDonald’s parking lot, and ends up in jail—but if he shot the same ducks in hunting season, they’d be just as dead, but he’d be free? So what’s the difference?”

“Well, though both sports are of dubious merit, the difference is the degree of cruelty in the duck hunters. At least, I hope there is some difference in degree of cruelty. And there surely is a difference in the degree of cruelty in the spectacle. Imagine some poor little boy or girl, sitting by the window in McDonald’s, delighting in their toxic Happy Meal, and then, lo and behold, right before their eyes, cute little baby ducks being squashed under the wheels of a Hummer, duck blood and entrails spurting everywhere.”

The co-worker snorts, makes a face, and walks away.

Just as humans can convince themselves there is such a thing as a *just war,* they can convince themselves there is such a thing as a *just duck hunting*—and thus in the one instance killing is a crime, and in the other, killing is not a crime.

Human justice is completely arbitrary. . .

This young lad who ran over the ducks certainly deserves to be in jail. . .I doubt this was his first violent act, and there is every statistical reason to believe it won’t be his last, and that he will, if he has not already, *graduate* from ducks to humans (probably women and/or children).

This fellow, who killed ducks with a Hummer (and the Hummer is another indicator of aberrance), is NO angel. LISTEN, I can tell just by looking at his dumb face. Wait a minute, and I’ll tell you exactly what kind of dumb face he has.

So this kid is in jail? So what? Bums go to jail for *canning*—taking pop bottles and cans out of the trash bins in University of Michigan classroom buildings. . .it doesn’t take much to end up in jail. . .and it doesn’t take much to get out of jail, either. This duck molester will bond out in a few hours, and will no doubt join humanity’s fastest growing social club—the SELF-PROCLAIMED VICTIM’S club. That’s the dumb face on this kid. The dumb “I’m the victim” face. The dumb face of dumb fucking people who think there is *some good* in everybody and don’t believe they need the blood of Christ to escape Hell.

Ha ha ha. . .this kid’s Hummer-rich parents will get him a lawyer, he’ll be pampered, coddled, he’ll get therapy and a shiny brand new Xanax prescription for his jail trauma. No matter what the ultimate court outcome, the coddling and pampering he will receive from his family and friends will ensure his cruelty remains unchecked. He’ll never realize there’s something wrong with himself. . .

Human garbage. Why have sympathy for this one, and not for that one? That’s what I should ask my co-worker. Either have sympathy for all of them, or none of them. They are all human garbage. We are all human garbage. We all deserve to be in jail. Is it fair that a brat in a Hummer with a dead conscience who kills ducks for his own amusement sits in jail, while most of the rest of us remain *free?* Ha, there’s no point in even bothering about fair when we’re all choking in a garbage dump stinking of Hell.

UPDATE: 4 May 2011

The dumb “I’m the victim” face, proof:

Lawyer says man accused of running over ducklings with Hummer has received hate mail

The Human Centipede

2011-04-27T02:06:00.003-04:00

The Human Centipede: First Sequence: Though it begins with the clichés of the so-called *horror* film (a mad German doctor living in an isolated retreat, two dumb AmerICKan tourist girls stranded with a flat tire in the middle of the woods who happen across the mad doctor in his isolated retreat), The Human Centipede is, nevertheless, an entirely NEW kind of film. Checking its shockingly low score on IMDb, and scanning a few of the reviews, I must conclude this NEW kind of film was vastly misunderstood by the contemporary *torture porn* habitué cretins. This is an almost entirely asexual film—no one is killed while having sex, no one is raped, the doctor’s unusual deed lacks sexual motivation. The only character who wants to fuck is on screen for about a minute-and-a-half, a fat old degenerate who mistakes(?) the AmerICKan girls for porn actresses and wonders if they aren’t always wet between the legs. When the old wanker realizes there are no cheap thrills to be had, he drives off, disappointed and bored. I assume the filmmaker included this character to be a *stand-in* for the typical stinking chum who choke the cineplex horror theater shouting stupidities at the screen, and who no doubt feel *cheated* The Human Centipede exhibits only a form of *torture,* and no porn—or rather, a pornless porn—as the film’s notorious ass-to-mouth suturing is THEOLOGICAL, not coprophagical.

While The Human Centipede’s two dumb AmerICKan tourist girls wait for help that will never arrive, they attempt *small talk* to ease the tension created by the doctor’s negligible social skills. One of the AmerICKans remarks: You have a really beautiful home. Do you live here with your wife? No, the doctor replies in his guttural monotone, I don’t like human beings. This serves as The Human Centipede’s thesis statement, which shows the prior use (and further uses) of the *horror* clichés as smokescreens meant to provoke and then disorient the Pavlovian dogs who bark at the multiplex screens—while signaling to the one or two sentient in the audience this will be a NEW kind of film, a film of sublime cruelty and hate, a hate not tainted by any frustrated sexuality, but a purely *Satanic* hatred of humanity, which is expressed by the film’s *mad* doctor.

Dr. Josef Heiter, celebrated surgeon, renowned as the world’s most skilled at separating conjoined twins, is now retired and living in seclusion on his forested German estate. The doctor has a vision for transforming ugly humanity into a form more befitting its fallen nature. Indeed, Heiter has the strongest aesthetic sense of any character in *horror.* His oddly beautiful villa abounds with objets d’art—both classical and what one might call *modern surgical.*

Heiter is a bitter, angry, hateful man—why? No answer is given in this memorable NEW film. The viewer is confronted by a man disgusted with humanity, for some unstated reason (which perhaps reflects the filmmaker’s assumption that disgust is the only rational reaction to humanity, and therefore this disgust ought to be self-evident?) and feels duty-bound to transform it.

The duty-bound Heiter has NO CHOICE. Though his work is exhausting and thankless, the doctor, who would be labeled *psychotic* by our modern *psychologists,* cannot shirk the responsibility of his calling, a calling our modern *psychologists* would label a delusion of grandeur. The doctor has been called to sculpt with the tools of his former trade a new human creation.

The doctor has judged humanity guilty, and for this, he will PUNISH humanity. He will strip humanity of INDIVIDUALITY, and cripple its sense of FREE WILL. He does this by severing the knee ligaments of the two dumb AmerICKan girls and one highly-agitated Jap male, leaving them only the ability to crawl. He then removes several of their teeth, and completes his transformative surgery by joining our new Adam and Eves mouth-to-anus. The three can no longer act upon whatever STUPID NOTIONS enter their minds, as they had previously done, and which most of humanity currently does. The three are SENTENCED to spend their remaining mortality daisy-chained together ass-to-mouth. They are COLLECTIVELY punished, stripped of their former IDENTITY, made a reduced form of humanity, with only a limited ability to manifest the sins of their untouched minds. Their remaining days are spent in an ass-eating shadow of DAMNATION, examining their former lives for the evidence which convicts them as human centipedes. This is exposited in the final statement of the Jap male, the head of the human centipede, and therefore the only one capable of speech. He confesses his sin to his new god, but, still showing a retarded sense of justice, wonders, Job-like, if his sentence wasn’t too harsh. So we say The Human Centipede is a THEOLOGICAL study, and thus beyond the limited grasp of the lobotomized masses who warm the theater seats, and are unable to respond to anything other than the most base sensory stimulation.

We must applaud the performance of the German actor, Dieter Laser, who plays Dr. Josef Heiter. Laser has delivered one of the great *horror* performances. With his emaciated, ascetic’s appearance, his weary barefoot gait, his guttural monotone punctuated by occasional violent ravings, he embodies the wilderness prophets of old. The ever-severe doctor allows himself one moment of exultation, and Laser cuts loose with a scene of loonily joyful adoration. He celebrates himself after successfully completing the human centipede by dancing to the sound (only he can hear) of a worshipful choir, admiring and kissing himself in a mirror, then, as the merciless Satanic god he is, he uses the mirror to taunt his creation. In The Human Centipede, guilty humanity must live under his Law, with no hope for grace.

Red Desert

2011-04-12T22:07:00.002-04:00

Red Desert: Made in 1964 by the great greaseball director Michelangelo Antonioni, Red Desert hasn’t held up quite as well as some of his others. The clip below shows all the greatness of the film (it’s beautifully framed and colored, an artistic masterpiece) and all the weakness (nothing much happens, except clumsy monologues). Though a decidedly mixed-bag of a movie, we can give Antonioni credit for making perhaps the first green movie, as this ponderous and head-scratching (there’s a bizarre pseudo-orgy scene in which a group of five Italians and one pseudo-Italian [Richard Harris] assemble in a squalid dockside shack and get ready to fuck, and then, for some reason, instead of fucking, they break apart one of the shack’s flimsy walls and use the boards for firewood) existential psychodrama depicts all the ugliness of the techno-industrial modern world. . .the film features shot-after-shot of industrial waste, belching smokestacks, rusting pipes, mud-ravaged landscapes, filthy, toxic water and polluted skies. And Antonioni is also ahead on the modern neuroses curve, as the main character, Giuliana (played by big-nosed, thick-lipped Monica Vitti) displays many of the traits that mark the contemporary female: chronically fatigued, chronically depressed, suicidal, nail-biting, restless legged, ever picking at herself, rife with anxieties--but clueless as to their origin). The only 21st century symptom missing from Giuliana’s catalog of disorders is wrist-cutting. What little plot there is involves Giuliana wandering around the bleak industrial wasteland or through sterile rooms with shifting wall colors crying out for help to a cast full of deaf ears. Giuliana is beyond hopeless, she suffers countless breakdowns, and during one gargantuan anxiety attack has to endure a laborious date rape from the pseudo-Italian Richard Harris. Even Giuliana’s son is indifferent to her loosening grip on reality, as he preys on his mother’s already-severely frayed nerves with a fake polio attack!! Vitti tries hard to make her character a believable embodiment of all the trademark Antonioni existential angst and alienation, but it’s almost an impossible task when given scenes such as the one in which she stares dazed at a map and must muse aloud I wonder if there’s some place in this world where people go to get better. Probably not. The most favorable point-of-view from which to look at Red Desert fifty years later is to imagine the film as the forerunner to David Lynch’s Eraserhead, with Giuliana’s son, inheriting his mother’s anxieties, growing up to be Henry Spencer.

A Man Called DVH

2011-04-06T22:45:00.007-04:00

Seventeen years ago, in a vain attempt to impress an anorexic girl in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I *published* (by Xerox) a newsletter comprised of my scribbled-on-my-lunch-hour-at-work fiction and council flats commentary on the not-so-great cultural issues of the day. I advertised the newsletter in an eccentric journal owned by one of the Capturing The Friedmans Friedmans. Factsheet 5, the rag was named, and it was the Yellow Pages of the kOOk’s vanity press—a listing of all the (mostly) poorly written idée fixes of the AmerICKan fringe.

The second person to write for a copy of my newsletter (which were referred to as *zines* by Factsheet 5 and the small community of kOOks who penned them) was also from Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a gentleman named David Van Hyle. Included with Mr. Van Hyle’s request was a copy of his own *zine,* titled Apocalypse Pretty Soon—certainly one of the most bizarre newspapers ever issued. Apocalypse Pretty Soon could best briefly be described as Crypto-Christian-Biker-Pornography, a head-spinning paste-up of Clinton conspiracies, crazy Christian Identity doctrine, motorcycle club urban legends and a hodgepodge of revolting bondage pictures of heavyset *mature* women. Thus began a seventeen year correspondence between myself and DVH, as Mr. Van Hyle identified himself in his *zines.*

Every other week for seventeen years, DVH sent me a large mailing envelope containing a letter and an assortment of underground literature. Then, a month passed in which I heard nothing from DVH. After another week of postal silence, I received a card from DVH’s daughter, informing me her father had *passed away.*

Though he had dabbled in the heretickal Identity movement sporadically for the seventeen years I corresponded with him, DVH had Christian roots which were formed in the soil of the Jesus People movement of the 1970s. In the months before his death, DVH was graced with a Psalms 51 refreshing, as our Lord created in him a clean heart, and renewed within him a right spirit—he began again evangelizing the true gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

DVH was that rarity, a genuine friend, one with whom one could discuss any subject—no matter how debauched—and not fear man’s retarded judgment or condemnation. He well knew the truth of Romans 7:23-24—as was made crystal clear in one memorable letter in which he described, in ultra-graphic detail, his weakness for hairy, obese, flatulent, middle-aged women.

Seventeen years worth of letters, the world spinning round and round: hundreds of handwritten pages (DVH never owned nor operated a computer) exposing Clinton, then Bush, then Obama, theories on OJ, JonBenet, Natalee Holloway, revelations of the TranceFormation of AmerICKa—from Randy Weaver to Timothy McVeigh to *9/11.* And there were also the seventeen years of our everyday personal apocalypse.

Nine years ago, lonely, in his mid-50s, DVH met a hairy obese forty-something woman. In a union only God can ultimately bless, they had a son. The newborn was the apple of the aging eccentric scribe’s eye. A new family meant the dawn of a new life for a man who thought the sun had set on his day of domestic joy. But barely a year into his return to Eden, the woefully overweight woman left DVH, taking their son, and sent Van Hyle spiraling into a black hole of urban solitude.

A smothering depression choked Van Hyle. He lost interest in his self-publishing empire, and, telling of its cold narcissism, the world of kOOk literature failed to register the absence of its merriest crankster. Quickly discarded by his obese object of grotesque desire, and deprived of his beloved son, the son who was to be his literary heir, the son who had become his motivation for pressing forward in the world (enduring 60+ hours-a-week of shit security guard jobs on Milwaukee’s meanest streets to provide for his new family), David Van Hyle’s health, both physical and psychological, rapidly declined.

DVH’s letters became psalms as bleak as those of his beleaguered namesake, King David:

Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak: O LORD, heal me; for my bones are vexed. My soul is also sore vexed: but thou, O LORD, how long? Return, O LORD, deliver my soul: oh save me for thy mercies' sake. For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks? I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears. Mine eye is consumed because of grief. . .

The last nine years of DVH’s life were scarred by ever-worsening mental and physical anguish. As his thoughts became shadowed by suicide, his body broke down. He was frequently hospitalized for various cardio and respiratory ailments, and he also had a fairly lengthy stay in a lunatic asylum.

But God Almighty, our most merciful Heavenly Father, would not suffer Satan to sift DVH to the end of his days. David Van Hyle was taken into the saving hand of our Lord Jesus Christ upon receiving His gospel in the Jesus People movement in the 1970s, and Christ would not allow Satan to pluck him from His hand, even as Satan came to tempt DVH with false doctrines in various seasons. In the last year of DVH’s life, God would restore to him the joy of His salvation. A bedridden Van Hyle saw a vision of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Minister to the sick, the poor, the despised.

Ending his life in a subsidized apartment building for the infirm, the weak-minded and the elderly, the severely depressed DVH’s days consisted of lying in bed and staring at hour-after-hour of noxious cable television as he waited his daily delivery of Mom’s Meals and his thrice-weekly in-home visits from indifferent Medicaid nurses.

One gray November afternoon, turning his eyes from the garbage on the television to his cracked ceiling, he saw the overhead of his shabby AmerICKan flat dissolve away to reveal our Lord, dressed in bright white linen, as He healed the sick and lifted the spirits of the brokenhearted. As he watched our Lord bringing His gospel to the poor, he heard a voice declare:

Behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest, and the harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few. . .

Van Hyle wept over the Savior’s love for His sheep, and felt the joy of salvation burn away the misery of the previous eight years of heavy-heartedness.

Immediately David Van Hyle began the arduous process of dressing and jacketing himself, then he collapsed into his motorized chair. He wheeled out of his room and went a short distance down the hall and knocked at the next apartment. An elderly, rheumy-eyed negress opened the door.

“Is there anything I can do to help you?” DVH asked.

Those were the first words he had ever spoken to the aged colored woman, though they had been *neighbors* for almost three years. As it turned out, the white-haired old black had been waiting two days for her daughter to show up with a Lasix prescription, and was now quite worried as she had just taken her last dose. Van Hyle, frail and short of breath, rolled eighteen blocks in his motor chair down Milwaukee’s West Layton avenue to a Walgreens, picked up the pills, and rolled eighteen blocks back to deliver the medicine to the old negro lady. He then told her Jesus had called him forty years prior, and though he had spent much time afterward in the wildernesses of the world, Jesus had never left nor forsaken him.

And that is how David Van Hyle spent most of the last year of his life, ministering and preaching the gospel of Jesus to the poor of his government subsidized housing project. Fifteen or twenty years ago, he had been a fairly well-known name in the little pond of zines, enough so that the Big Fish of zines, Jim Goad, had noticed him and condescendingly anointed him *one of zinedom’s more intriguing goofballs.* But in the last eight years of his life, after the devastating abandonment by the obese woman who took away his son, Van Hyle was forgotten by all of his former zine *friends.*

Alone year-after-year, he lay dying a slow death of depression and disease. . .but in his dark night of the soul, our Lord came to him, showed him once again the Way, and guided him back into the sheepfold. In his last year, DVH’s final letters to me were a New Testament of the Faith of Christ. In ministering and preaching the gospel to his hundred and ten neighbors, the still-gravely ill DVH experienced something only a small handful have ever experienced: a life of complete fulfillment. He was able to achieve something unheard of in our day and age, he lived in agreement with Colossians 3:1-2:

If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.

In the last year of his life, Van Hyle labored for treasure in heaven. . .

He died known only to the hundred odd souls of his AmerICKan slum yard, his daughter, and perhaps to an obese woman somewhere out there with his son, a son we pray God in Heaven is looking after. He died with no earthly treasure, but with a heart for Christ. Most will die surrounded by junk, which they mistook for treasure, and they will die with hearts terrified of the hereafter. David Van Hyle died knowing he would see Christ. He died with a rejoicing heart, and with a joy that can never be taken. . .

Kick-Ass

2011-03-31T05:40:00.003-04:00

Kick-Ass: This is a one joke movie. . .but it’s a pretty good joke. An eleven-old-girl (played by a kid named Chloe Grace Moretz, in the best tween girl performance since Natalie Portman in The Professional) is a potty-mouthed, conscienceless killing machine Super Hero-ette named Hit Girl who, costumed in plaid schoolgirl skirt with pink utility belt, black mask and purple wig, mows down (in hyper-speed) rooms full of colored drug dealers and mafiosos to a blaring Banana Splits soundtrack. The story of how this kid became Hit Girl (and all the rest of the film’s Super Hero-cum-teen angst back story, which encompasses more than a few uninteresting characters), isn’t worth bothering with. Asian filmmakers wouldn’t even have tried to construct a story line, they would have just shot 90 minutes of school girl mayhem, flavored with a more potent blend of the pedophilia that is clumsily half-hinted at here. Excepting the presence of Nicolas Cage, who gives a retro-Cage quirky performance as Hit Girl’s Adam West-imitating faux-Batman Big Daddy dad (which I guess elevates this movie to one-and-a-half joke status), the movie becomes an exercise in tedium whenever Hit Girl makes an exit. In fact, I almost gave up on this thing as just another overdone post-modern comic book movie. . .at least 40 minutes must have passed before Hit Girl made her genuinely spectacular entrance, and I was just about to hit the eject button on the dvd, but then, well, Hit Girl happened (see the crappy video copy below), and I stayed for the rest. . .though drumming my fingers through all the non-Hit Girl and Big Daddy scenes. Is there enough here to keep most mature viewers *engaged?* Probably not. But then I’m the type who gets all mushy for the expressionistic family sentimentality that sustains the Hit Girl/Big Daddy relationship (nicely contrasted with the sterile relations between Kick-Ass, the movie’s teen boy Super Hero, and his parents), and the Big-Daddy-burning-to-death scene nearly moved me to tears. . .so, you have to be sick-and-tired of what passes for AmerICKan screen realism (see the lifeless-but-critically-lauded Winter’s Bone, for example, with features the soul-less family love which the critics must experience in *real life*--the love which is posed) to enjoy this kind of thing. Let’s just hope Kick-Ass II resurrects Big Daddy and sends all of Kick-Ass I’s tiresome teen angst straight to Hell.

[I would be remiss, as they say, if I did not mention the disturbing *The Passion of the Hit Girl* scene near the movie’s end, wherein our little hero-ette becomes a mafia punching bag. In a movie full of obvious comic book violence, this short scene degenerates into something ugly. . .it’s a nasty little scar on an otherwise happy bit of nonsense.]

Do Ye Even So To Them

2011-03-23T22:19:00.002-04:00

It turned out the night I learned my brother died, in fact, at almost exactly the same time I learned my brother died, the two-year-old son of a Sergeant who works at the very same jail I am employed at, in fact, a Sergeant who had been my supervisor when I worked on the day shift, the two-year-old son of this Sergeant was drowning in a bathtub. The child died. The details of the terrible event are unknown, although from jail gossip it is considered certain no *foul play* is (or was) suspected.

It is a terrible event. A parent’s *worst nightmare,* as is said. Upon hearing the news, I had tremendous, and, I believe, genuine sympathy for the Sergeant. I prayed for the Sergeant and his family (a wife and three other children). Yet as I felt this sympathy, which I believed to be genuine, and as I prayed for this Sergeant and his family, I was always aware I had never really liked this Sergeant. I had found him to be an overly *fussy* supervisor--a little too eager to run a *tight ship,* in, I suspected, an attempt to gain favor from his supervisor, a deranged Lieutenant who *lives in a jail of his own.*

An example of this Sergeant’s fussiness: as part of my jail clerk’s duties, I have to write tickets to released inmates who cannot pay their twelve dollar jail booking fee. I would fill out the ticket completely and accurately, yet this Sergeant would complain my handwriting could be neater. Consider the work environment: telephones are ringing off the hook, jail gate intercoms are buzzing constantly, you have a belligerent perpetrator of domestic violence in your face unhappy at the dumb booking questions you must ask (“do you believe that other people know your thoughts and can read your mind?), you have a backlog of other new arrests waiting to be booked, releasable inmates are whining “what’s taking so long?”, arrogant lawyers are demanding their inmate clients be brought down for interviews, and here is this Sergeant interrupting the barely functioning process to nitpick about handwriting. Go back into your fucking office and stop bothering me--those were my near-daily sentiments concerning this Sergeant.

And as each day passes, I have less sympathy for this Sergeant, and he is no longer named in my prayers.

God, of course, knew my true heart at the first moment I heard of this Sergeant’s tragedy. God knew those first moments of sympathy, the first prayer, when I had heard the awful news, those first *seeds* of sympathy and prayer, were akin to the seeds from our Lord’s famous parable: the seeds which fell upon the stony places, where they had not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth, and when the sun was up, the seeds were scorched, and because they had no root, they withered away.

My sympathy and my prayers for this Sergeant had no root, and they withered away.

The human soul, at the least, my human soul, can be a stony place. . .

What a horrible *thing*--to have your child drown in a bathtub! Besides the cruel death itself, impossible enough to deal with, imagine all the recriminations (whether voiced or not), the guilt, the never-ending *if only. . .* A remaining lifetime shadowed by a grievous death.

I suppose in a week or so this Sergeant will return to work. Return to work with all the so-called *emotional baggage* of a truly dreadful death of a child. Returning to work would be bad enough in an ordinary job--but to return to work in a JAIL? Which is, after all, nothing more than BABY-SITTING society’s worst children. This Sergeant now has to baby-sit our worst brats, those of us who haven’t grown up enough to sufficiently conceal our wickedness. JAIL is a depressing place to work--24 hour DAYCARE for madmen, drunks, deviates, the violent and the rapacious. While this Sergeant considers the atrocious fate of his small son, he must listen to grown men throwing temper tantrums over missed sack lunches and being allowed only one free phone call. . .

To be depressed and then have to work in a depressing place--this thought revives my sympathy for this Sergeant. . .for a moment or two. . .then I remember his grating personality, his absurd obsession for a fastidious jail house.

I know I won’t be able to say a caring word to this Sergeant when he returns to work. I will not be able to manage anything more than a slight nod of the head and a “morning, Sergeant.”

The only self-justification I can manage for my hard heart is wrenched from our Lord’s command:

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. . .

If I were in this Sergeant’s place, I would not want my sympathy. . .

I Seen Some More Movies

2011-03-16T23:07:00.003-04:00

Machete: Ugly, horribly pock-marked senior citizen hispanic character actor Danny Trejo makes out with a nude Lindsay Lohan in this fairly amusing splatter satire of border politics. Decapitations, mutilations and other assorted mayhems soak the viewer from first-to-last frame in this triple-cross tale of former Federale-turned-day-laborer Trejo’s battle against corrupt US and Mexican officials, and a Mexican drug lord (played by washed-up gringo martial arts *star* Steven Seagal in campy brown-face). This is 21st century Walking Tall, Billy Jack stuff, meaning it’s full of blood-drenched laughs and de rigueur gratuitous nudity. Curiously for a flick this over-the-top, the acting is surprisingly flat, and not up to the cynical black comic script--with the notable exception of Jeff Fahey, who shines as an ultra-Machiavelian political fixer. Robert De Niro looks hopelessly lost playing a trigger happy Texas state senator--the former Raging Bull looks like an old Jew codger stuck alone and forgotten in the corner at a tasteless, hyper-carnal bat mitzvah party. Despite the poor acting, Machete manages low entertainment, as it feeds our 21st century appetite for junk culture, demanding nothing more from the viewer than our need to have 105 minutes of our empty lives cinema-graphically killed. This isn’t much, but it’s infinitely preferable to:

A Single Man: Set in early ‘60s Los Angeles, a melancholy UK faggot pouts for 99 minutes over the death of his long-time *partner.* We watch as the glum middle-aged English English professor (played by a bland limey with the bland limey name Colin Firth, who apparently just won an Academy Award for a more recent bland performance) makes his meticulous and rather prissy plans for suicide--though the yawning viewer knows full well the homo will never do him the merciful courtesy of following through. . .and yes, in this film’s ped-ictable and queer-jerker script, the poof professor’s will to live is restored by the completely carnal charms of a pretty blonde boy student who is positively desperate to *explore* his inner Freddie Mercury. Whereas Machete was a tolerable waste of time and will be regarded as an honest cultural artifact of our age, A Single Man is nothing more than a dreary offering to the priests of the cult of gay who hood-twink our sexually indiscriminate century. [Julianne Moore, who has done nothing since flashing her red beard in Short Cuts, is absurdly cast and ridiculously plays a limey slut aching to be poked one last time by the ex-bi, now total boylover drama queen *hero* of this drop-the-soap opera.] [We must also note the crudely propagandistic use of supermodel Aline Weber, cast as a Bardot-like icon of female sexuality reduced to tag-along platonic friend of the pretty blonde boy student in this film’s *alternative* universe. The gorgeous Weber is presented as a near-deaf-and-dumb dummy in this bizarre movie, a mannekin lacking even the plastic charms of a sex doll, so lifeless the pretty blonde boy student prefers to commit sodomy with a cranky old poncy professor. This is cinema for abberants.] In contrast to the pseudo-suicidal tendencies of A Single Man, we have:

Bad Santa: Apparently released way back in 2003, I just now got around to watching this holiday masterpiece which features a remarkable performance from Billy Bob Thornton as a self-loathing low-life seasonal shopping mall Santa/safecracker. Thornton’s Santa is one of the great drunks of screen history--a bitter, gutter-dwelling loser painstakingly (and rendered in unrelenting black humor) engineering his own death. Empty save for psychic torment, our bad Santa staggers bleary-eyed and hungover through the holiday season, half-listening to the mass-marketed pleas of the freshly-scrubbed plastic children of mall AmerICKa whom he rushes off his lap as he bides his drunken time until he and his colored dwarf *elf* partner can rob the department store of just enough cash to keep him alcohol brain-dead until the next Christmas. The greatness of Bad Santa is the dark script stays true to its comically bleak soul while still serving up a small helping of holiday redemption. Bad Santa’s heart grows a size or two larger while he grudgingly aids the one person in the world possibly more tortured than himself: a pathetic, picked-on, semi-deranged fat boy living in near-total neglect. Bad Santa is a spot-on sardonic character study of the empty AmerICKan soul, and I can’t imagine many other actors capable of pulling off the performance Thornton gives. He never winks at the camera, as most *movie stars* would. He remains true to his character’s sick soul, and allows the black humor of the script to arise not from any *comic acting,* but from his deadpan delivery of his disturbingly funny clashes with the supposedly healthy AmerICKan mall automatons who cross his path (or his lap). After sixty years of ever-increasing AmerICKan degeneracy, Bad Santa emerges as the true heir to It’s A Wonderful Life.

Mighty Men Which Were Of Old

2011-03-09T22:44:00.007-05:00

I was living. Helping the kids with their homework. Dinner with the kids and the old lady. Cleaning up the dump. Getting the kids to bed. Listening to the old lady’s grievances. I was living. Doing the same things I do day after day after day. Living. This is life.

I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. . .

I had about an hour to kill before I had to go to work. I look forward to that hour each day. Sixty minutes rest for my ears. I usually read for fifty minutes, then imagine a different life the last ten.

The phone rings. I hear the old lady clomping up the stairs. She always wears her shoes in the house. I hear her clomping all over the place all day long. It’s one of those *little things* that could drive a person insane. I hear the old lady clomping up the stairs after the phone rings. The call must be for me. I almost never get a phone call. No good can come of it. My sixty minutes of ear rest will be ruined.

“It’s for you,” the old lady says in a solemn tone, with a solemn look. Even she knows the call is no good.

I go downstairs.

“Hello,” I say into the telephone.

“Hello, sir. I’m Detective Ted Wilson of the Eau Claire, Wisconsin police department. . .”

Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Eight years ago I saw my brother off on a Greyhound bus headed for Eau Claire. He had two huge, almost-unliftable cartons of books, a backpack filled with a few items of clothing and some toiletries--everything he had to show for forty-five years on this earth. That, and a check for a hundred-fifty-thousand dollars, folded in half and stuffed in his shirt pocket. That was the last time I saw my brother. He had blown into town after I hadn’t seen him for twenty years. He stayed a few memorable weeks, then I drove him to the Greyhound bus station in Toledo, Ohio, the town we were born in, and there I said goodbye to him--the only white man in a waiting room full of broke-looking coloreds.

This Detective Ted Wilson says he is sorry to tell me they found my brother dead in his small Eau Claire, Wisconsin apartment. He made a point of saying it was a small apartment.

“Your brother appears to have lived a very spartan lifestyle,” the Detective says.

“Yes. But he always had a lot of books. Were there no books in his room?”

“No, I didn’t see anything like that,” the Detective answers.

Then the Detective, almost in a complaining fashion, tells me how difficult it was to locate me. There were no papers in my brother’s apartment identifying any friends or family.

“The other tenants said he was an extremely private person.”

“Yes.”

The Detective tells me he was only able to find me after doing a search on my brother in their *system,* and finding an old record indicating my brother was incarcerated in a County Jail for ninety days in 1980, and my name was the only name on his Visitor List. That’s how he *discovered* me, the Detective says. I almost tell the Detective I am now employed at that very same County Jail--but realize that would only needlessly prolong the uncomfortable conversation. Instead, I ask:

“What did he die of?”

“We don’t know. An autopsy will be performed tomorrow morning.”

I give the Detective the few basic bits of information he requests, and he tells me the Medical Examiner will call me tomorrow afternoon with the autopsy results. I hang up the telephone. Fifty-three minutes until I have to go to work.

“Why don’t you take the night off?” the old lady says.

I shake my head.

“Why?” she asks.

“There’s no point.”

“There’s no point?”

“The time for that has passed.”

“The time for that has passed?”

“That’s right. The time for that has passed. I should have taken the night off last night. Or a week ago. Or a month ago. The time for that has passed.”

The old lady looks like she doesn’t understand. It could be an act, but that is OK--it’s not her problem. My brother’s death is not her problem.

I go back upstairs. I pick up my book, Bernhard’s Gathering Evidence--really, I couldn’t have a much better selection, considering the circumstances.

My brother died at age fifty-three. He lived the last thirty years of his life as a *bum*--homeless for all of those years until he pocketed his check for 150k, then I assume he lived his last eight years as a comfortable bum in his small apartment in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I’ll have to visit that city, someday. . .

In reality, my brother was homeless all of his fifty-three years. . .

He never *held* a job. Never.

Now, for me, there is nobody left on this earth who knows what it was like. . .

At some point I will tell my kids, my two sons, the great value of brotherhood: that as long as both of them remain alive, they will each have one person who will know what it was like. . .the whole rest of the God damned world can contradict them, but as long as they both remain alive, they will each have one faithful witness.

My brother and I could not stand each other, until we were teenagers. But by then, we only had a few years left before he began his decades-long wandering. . .

He went from college town to college town, stealing books from the great university libraries of AmerICKa. As far as I know, he was only caught the one time, for which he did his ninety days at the County Jail, the very same County Jail at which I now *earn my livelihood.*

My brother needed those books for his independent studies. He was a true autodidact.

He was kicked out of school, permanently, in the tenth grade.

[He was then shipped off to the Jobs Corp in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was dismissed after two or three months as a result of a *racial altercation.* When no one in the family would take him in, he was forced to join the AmerICKan Navy at age seventeen. Imagine! Within a few weeks I received from my brother in the mail a photograph of himself in his Navy costume. This remains the only photo I have of my brother. If one did not know my brother, and saw only the front picture side of the photograph, one would likely conceive a completely FALSE IMPRESSION of my brother. But upon turning the photograph over, and reading my brother’s brief note, one would begin to have a clearer understanding, as he printed in his customary neat block letters: THIS IS MORE RETARDED THAN JOBS CORP. SEE YOU SOON. He was given a General Discharge and back in *civilian life* before his nineteenth birthday.]

He would become fixated on certain semi-arcane fields of knowledge, and study them like a mad scholastic monk for six months or year. Then a new avenue of inquiry would take root in his mind, and a whole new set of books would have to be stolen. . .

Thirty years ago my brother was investigating the Book of Revelation, producing indecipherable charts plotting the End.

Eight years ago, he was in the middle of a dual study of the theory of economic inflation and the validity of mental illness. As I recall, he was reading Schumpeter and Szasz simultaneously, and saw some esoteric link between the two. He had come to Ann Arbor to pilfer a book from the University of Michigan library, and I happened across him one spring day on the University Diag. As I mentioned earlier, he left town with a check for 150k in his shirt pocket, and the knowledge he could now purchase a computer and find or buy almost any book he needed on the internet. His criminal career hop-scotching across AmerICKa’s college campuses came to an end, and he apparently stayed put in Eau Claire, Wisconsin for the last law-abiding eight years of his life.

[Now that I think of it, the reason Detective Ted Wilson may not have seen any books in my brother’s room is because my brother may have went over to the *Kindle*. . .]

I have hated them that regard lying vanities. . .

My brother had no patience, no tolerance, no connection to other people or their institutions or groups.

He suspected everybody of dishonesty and ill intentions. . .

Over the long, long years, with various girlfriends, wives, in-laws, etc., in trying to explain my brother’s absence, none could ever understand when I told them, given my brother’s genesis, it was impossible for him to *fit in.*

“But you have always managed,” they would all essentially reply.

And that would be the end of the conversation, for it would be pointless for me to continue.

To the others in my life, even though many of them were far more *successful,* my being able to maintain a family and scrape by for the last twenty-five years paycheck-to-paycheck *holding* a series of ever-more-increasingly-ridiculous jobs, was *proof* of having the ability to *fit in.* And so, they reasoned, my brother also should have been equipped with the ability to *fit in.*

Their error has always been the failure to see I am living an artificial existence. . .

To them, this *fitting in,* this everyday life of work, family, country, is genuine existence.

My brother instinctively rejected it, as a fish would instinctively reject the moon. . .

It is good for me, it is psychologically healthy for me, to work at the jail on the night of my brother’s death. The environment *in custody* helps clarify *things.*

My brother, in contrast to the vast majority of the sad-sacks I book in, ended up in jail, once, long ago, briefly, because of a QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE. He wanted certain texts at his disposal for his studies. He could not conform to, nor accept, the University library’s hours of operation. He could not *fit in*--nor did he ever desire to *fit in.* He rejected the *life* of the masses as artificial, and sought, through his studies, to expose this *life’s* END and its MENDACITY. Thus, my brother was LARGER than *life.*

[I must imagine the reaction of the little persons who dwelled in the same building as my brother, when my brother, a GIANT of this century and the last century, died in their midst. They must have commented on this wise: “What’s going on?” “I think the bum in number three died.” “Oh.” And then they quickly return to their small apartments, no doubt to blaring televisions--never aware a GIANT had roamed amongst them. This is the way of the world.]

In contrast, the little persons I book into jail desperately desire to *fit in.* They believe the artificial life of the masses is genuine life--but they fail miserably at it. All the beasts that come in on Domestic Assault charges--they want a *family.* Yet all their effort produces is antagonism--and the inevitable result is violence.

Nearly all crimes fit the pattern: the crime is the inevitable result of the little person’s failure to *fit in* the artificial life of the masses he/she desperately desires to imitate.

It is true over the course of the long, hard fifty-three years, my brother’s mind deteriorated into paranoia--yet he stayed true to his original and uncorrupted view that what we call *living* is artificial. Thus I believe, his mind now healed by our Lord Jesus Christ, my brother must smile from Heaven at the ironic sight of his brother: the counterfeiter passing as jailer.

Tomorrow will be the same. Helping the kids with their homework. Dinner with the kids and the old lady. Cleaning up the dump. Getting the kids to bed. Listening to the old lady’s grievances. Living. Yes, the time has passed. I should have taken a night off a month ago. Now there is no one left who knows what it was like. . .

The Court-Ordered Ecstasy Of Edward Huffman

2010-08-30T15:44:00.007-04:00

White steers a tall, emaciated geezer through intake and up to my station. Wrinkled, sallow skin loosely covers the ancient inmate's bones.

"This is Huffman," White says in the same tone you'd use to say 'this is a sack of shit.'

Edward Huffman. I had to call him down from PC to administer a DNA test.

"I was wondering when you'd get around to this," Huffman says in a rather merry wheeze.

I tear off one end of the paper wrapper covering the swab stick.

"All right, Mr. Huffman, if you'd just pull the stick out, and then swab the little foam pad up and down the sides of both your cheeks, please."

Huffman delicately grasps the stick with his bony fingers, and slowly slides it free. His fingernails are long, yellow, and filled with the black muck of the jail. Huffman stares at the swab, a loony grin on his face. This fellow is the perfect creepy old man.

The old boy stuffs the swab into his mouth and goes at it with a fevered enthusiasm. His mouth hangs open, glistening. He's salivating as he furiously strokes the insides of his cheeks. I watch Huffman with a morbid fascination. His eyes flash like lightning storms. He has a look of maniacal ecstasy, as if the act of this court-ordered DNA test brings to life again the sordid deeds he enjoyed with a child under the age of thirteen, and for which he now requests Protective Custody.

For the test, Huffman has to swab two sticks--which just seems to double his pleasure. I wonder, as he's rapturously rubbing the second swab around his drooling piehole, if somewhere in the county a boy or girl is shaken with a sudden shiver? Is a child's spine tingling? Is Huffman's reprobate reverie emitting psychic haywires? As Huffman seems to float on a Cloud Nine daydream, is there a child blackened with a spontaneous dread? Some kid who had managed to momentarily escape the nightmare, now looking over his/her shoulder, sensing the return of the beast?

Maybe Huffman was once just such a kid. . .and then as the years passed, he changed over? Who knows?

"All right, Mr. Huffman, that's good," I say. "Give it a rest before you shred the thing."

White laughs. And then, so does Huffman. Whereupon White stops laughing.

I take the swab from Huffman, roll the foam pad on the pink dot on the test card. I get his thumbprints, then send him back with White.

The old bag of bones will spend most of the rest of his life alone in a cell. First, here. Then, after he's sentenced, in prison.

How does that happen? How does that whole thing happen? Quite a tangle to unknot. And I'd say it's in most of us, give or take three or four years. . .

I look down at the two pink dots. Huffman's saliva is turning them white. Supposedly the code is right there, drying on those pink dots. Maybe those cells down there are Huffman's real prison? Who knows? I don't know. . .I don't know.

The county jail is a strange place to work. Man's crazy try at judgment. Really, I ought to feel guilty every day when my shift is over and I walk out the gate, for leaving Huffman and all the rest behind. But I always feel ten years younger going out than when I come in. . .

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On Dangerous Ground

2010-07-08T09:40:00.003-04:00

Robert Ryan, always one of Hollywood’s best at playing violent misfits, seethes as Jim Wilson, a big city cop slowly being suicided by the job. After years of performing the thankless and soul-crushing task of collecting the city’s human garbage, Wilson’s skin is worn dangerously thin, and he rages at the slightest provocation.

Like Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle twenty-five years later, Jim Wilson is sickened by the depravity of the city, and lives an isolated existence. Whereas Bickle sought release for his sexual frustration in pornographic theaters, Wilson appears to indulge in kinky sex with gutter girls, judging from one classic scene in which he appears to oblige a masochistic girlfriend of a gangster he is chasing. (In another similarity to Taxi Driver, On Dangerous Ground briefly sports an underage prostitute, played by Nita Talbot and looking like a jailbait cross between Gloria Grahame and Lauren Bacall).

As Wilson’s temper spirals out of control, his police captain sends him out of the city for a cure. Wilson is sent upstate to help the yokels track down a teen girl’s killer. The bleak snow-covered landscape is a kind of Magic Mountain for Wilson—he can breathe in the clean cold air, after years of choking on the city’s sewer fumes. Wilson is finally able to let his guard down a bit, and actually seems less trigger happy than the local vigilantes (though when one of the hicks gets a close-up look at the face of death, his innocence bewilders the calloused Wilson).

In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle believes his ministering angel is Cybill Shepherd’s Betsy, and he becomes obsessed with her. On Dangerous Ground’s Jim Wilson has a fixation with Mary, the blind sister of the teen girl’s killer. Mary is not nearly the worldly princess of Taxi Driver’s Betsy. Mary lives nearly as isolated an existence as Wilson, having sacrificed her own happiness to look after her disturbed brother. Quirkily played by Ida Lupino, Mary is frail and sad, and also a bit of a dreamer. . .she’s kind of a northern woods version of one of Tennessee Williams’ southern gothic girls.

Wilson and Mary, recognizing the desperate loneliness in each other, communicate in fits and starts, never quite fully connecting. Had On Dangerous Ground ended one scene earlier, with a teary-eyed Jim Wilson driving alone back through the dark and ugly city streets, instead of turning back for a tacked-on and phony happy ending in Mary’s arms, this would have been one of Film Noir’s greatest entries, a character study of two emotional exiles, doomed by their contrasting environments. The Smiley Face ending scars an otherwise powerful portrait of alienation.

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The Last Trumpet

2010-07-05T22:49:00.002-04:00

Received today news of the death of David Meyer, age 60.

"David Meyer?"

Few knew of him. And of those who did, most laughed at the Christian *nut.*

Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of His coming?

Meyer published a newsletter: *Last Trumpet.* Sent it out faithfully every month for the last twenty-nine years. He’d sift through the news and pick out the stories he believed heralded the nearness of the *End Times.*

I didn’t agree with all of Meyer’s theology. For example, if trouble hit New Orleans, it was usually because the city sponsored a Faggot’s Day parade. Well, if that were the case, why weren’t San Francisco and New York and some of the other premier faggot enclaves similarly troubled? Such doctrine fails to square with our Lord’s teaching (Luke 13:1 – 5).

Meyer, as he dutifully informed his readers every month, was *saved out of the occult,* and hence he had an eye for the witchy shadows creeping across America. The sheeple see only the lying vanities of the world, while Meyer had a pretty good eye for the unseen *rulers of the darkness of this world.* That was his trademark, so to speak, reading the events of the day as the signs of the *End Times.*

Unlike the vast majority of red, white and blue Christians, Meyer understood America was under a Satanic spell, and that the majority of those Americans who call themselves Christian are either hereticks or apostates, and the American *church* is a spiritual weakling composed of shameless materialists, sensation seekers, Jesus compromisers, and spineless pew-warmers who buckle under the small weight of their daily cross, and pout over their imaginary persecutions.

In the June or July 2001 issue of *Last Trumpet,* Meyer related a vision he received while on a trip to New York. He saw Manhattan choked with flames and smoke. The vision would turn out to be eerily similar to the famous events of *9/11.*

Meyer’s time on this side is over, and I would imagine he is now with our Lord and Savior. He devoted nearly half his life to a newsletter warning the *End* was near, and sinners should repent and receive the gospel of Jesus before that Door was shut.

Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able. When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to the door, and ye begin to stand without, and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us; and he shall answer and say unto you, I know you not whence ye are. . .

I wonder what it is like, over on Meyer’s side, out of the Big Lie, secure in Eternal Truth? His labor done, his soul rescued from this burning rubbish heap of time, the Adversary must not seem quite so alarming.

Satan will continue gathering the world until the Last Day. With Meyer gone, there is one less faither standing in his way. And that is how the *End Times* clock truly ticks down—one faither at a time, until there are so few left, our Lord, looking forward to that Day, could well ask:

Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?

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The Box

2010-06-01T19:58:00.005-04:00

Gimpy Norma and hubby Arthur are a fairly successful 1976 prototype yuppie couple. Norma teaches English at a fancy Virginia prep school, and Arthur is a NASA scientist who helped design the camera for the Viking Mars probe (Mars and the Viking mission are important to the movie’s plot—somehow.). They live a little above their means, and though not in desperate financial straits, money is a little tight. One chilly Christmastime morn, as they sleep peacefully in bed (better is little with the fear of the LORD than great treasure and trouble therewith), Norma is awakened by the ringing of their doorbell. She groggily goes to answer, looks through the peephole and sees a black limo drive off. Opening the door, she discovers a package on the step. At breakfast with Arthur and their eleven-year-old son, Norma opens the package and finds a pyramid-shaped box capped with a red button, along with a note stating that a Mr. Steward will come to their house at 5 pm.

It turns out to be a rather rough day for both Norma and Arthur. Norma is viciously teased about her gimpy foot by one of her (weird) students, and then is informed by the principal the school can no longer provide a discount for her son’s tuition. Meanwhile, Arthur goes to work at NASA, and receives the news that he has been rejected for the astronaut program (his life’s dream) because he failed the psychological exam.

Back at home, a depressed Norma mopes about, and then as the clock strikes five, Mr. Steward arrives. This Steward, who will turn out to be quite a mysterious figure, indeed, has a mug one will not soon easily forget, as a good portion of the left side of his face is gone, marked off by a large and gruesome burn scar. After recovering from the sight of Steward’s unsettling visage, Norma lets him in, whereupon he explains the meaning of the box:

If you push the button, two things will happen. First, someone, somewhere in the world, whom you don't know, will die. Second, you will receive a payment of one million dollars. You have 24 hours.

Naturally, Norma and Arthur debate the pros and cons—though Arthur is skeptical about both the money and the death, believing the situation will turn out to be nothing more than an elaborate prank. Norma thinks the money will make their life better, and is therefore more inclined to have *faith* in the box (for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also). Arthur is then prompted to ask if Norma really thinks they need money to be happy (for what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?).

As the deadline approaches, Norma yields to temptation and pushes the button (and the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me). Steward once again appears right on time, delivering the million dollars and taking back the box. Before he leaves, however, he issues a cryptic comment that may imply Norma or Arthur will be the box’s next victim. Immediately, Norma and Arthur regret Norma’s decision, and Arthur tries to return the money (then Judas, which had betrayed Him, when he saw that He was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders), but, alas, too late! The deal is done. . .

Certainly one could say of the plot to this point it requires a fair degree of credulity. And yet these opening scenes are as close as The Box gets to *realism,* as the eccentric script takes one increasingly bizarre turn after another. As Norma and Arthur try to unravel the mystery of Steward and the box, the viewer learns the following:

Steward also worked for NASA on the Viking Mars mission, and while on duty, he was killed when struck by lightning (I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven), but, in a rather sinister miracle, he returns from the dead, though with a good portion of his face burned away (and I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast).

Steward now works as a glorified errand boy/messenger for those who brought him back to life, and whom he enigmatically terms his *employers.*

Steward’s *employers* may be from another dimension. . .or from Mars. . .or from Hell. There are clues, I suppose, as to the precise identity of the *employers,* and these clues might seem more obvious upon closer or repeated viewings of The Box, but, to me, IDing the *employers* didn’t seem particularly germane to the spirit of this curious movie.

There are many other lesser *employees* of the *employers,* and, seeming to accord to the degree to which they have become indoctrinated into whatever the *employers* *mission statement* is, they exhibit symptoms ranging from nose bleeds (when they step out of line) to total mind control.

I must also mention the feel-good subplot involving Arthur’s attempt to construct a prosthetic foot for gimpy Norma (and if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched).

Indeed, The Box is thoroughly implausible. . .and yet it is, without doubt, the most realistic American movie of recent memory. No film has better captured the chilling spirit of beguiled America. It depicts Americans undergoing trance-formation, the victims of an unknown power (for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places).

The Box offers an artfully crafted surreal mix of SciFi, horror and metaphysics, yet at heart it presents a simple parable of a people who condone the killing of nameless, faceless others in exchange for material comfort. The Box, quite simply, renders the *American Dream* as gnostic nightmare.

As one observes America choked with ‘Who Would Jesus Bomb?’ patriots willing to push America’s red war button, one must conclude The Box presents America exactly as it is:

A Crypto-Christo Creepshow.

A vastly under-rated film (by both viewers [5.9 on IMDb] and critics [47 on metacritic]).

PS: The Box’s vision isn’t totally bleak, as the movie’s Sophie’s Choice-esque conclusion offers hope for redemption (but, unfortunately, The Box’s soteriology finds no parallel to the gospel).

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The Hangover

2010-05-19T12:52:00.002-04:00

This is the new standard for excellence in Hollywood. This type of film reflects, as in a Fun House mirror, the early 21st century American character: adolescent, and craving bread-and-circuses. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood's highest art was found in Film Noir--dark, gritty tales of the newly post-Christian soul. Now, sixty-to-seventy years later, and fully and unashamedly carnal, we have Film Cirque, the circus films which revel in American arrested development and the nearly single-minded pursuit of the basest pleasures.

There is no denying the great humor of The Hangover, a tale of a Las Vegas bachelor party that strays far from the usual track of liquor and titty bars, and ends up in a roofies-fueled comic nightmare of (among other weirdness) auto-dental-extraction and insta-parenthood. This is a jester's The Lost Weekend, in which the delirium tremens of four juvenile American males result not from withdrawal, but from the tasers of the clown police. This is the 21st century America in which the terminally sophomoric male can have both his madonna and his whore in a single female soul (played here by a remarkably well-preserved Heather Graham).

That the hero of this American folly should be an obese child molestor is entirely fitting. There is room under the Big Circus Tent of American Uncritical Hedonism for every debauchee. It is a testimony to the cleverness of the script that the audience laughs good-naturedly at the pervert antics of the pedophile character Alan, including his infant masturbation simulacrum. American dysfunction is presented as essentially harmless, the aberrant characters have a joie de vivre which immunizes them against their own stupidity.

The Hangover is well-written, well-directed, well-edited, well-acted and fast-paced freak show comedy. It's a cotton candy movie, the only kind Hollywood still excels at. It dazzles with its demented action, the audience laughs easily at its kOOky characters (you know you have a movie chock full o' kOOks when Mike Tyson, playing himself, seems the epitome of reason)--and when it's over? No thought has been provoked. But there's no point in criticizing The Hangover for its limitations. It's a movie from and about severely limited people, and it must be applauded for its lunatick honesty. This is America, in the Looking Glass.

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Born To Kill

2010-05-12T13:33:00.005-04:00

A bizarre story (that often defies logic) of two bitter white trash souls, desperately seeking entry into *polite society.* Storied Hollywood thug Lawrence Tierney plays not-so-subtly named Sam Wild, an astonishingly arrogant, insanely jealous and paranoid prototype metrosexual killer (think Patrick Bateman's roughneck grandpa) who enters a twisted love/hate relationship with Helen Brent, a life-long charity case tired of living off the scraps of her wealthy foster sister.

There's no point in hashing out the plot, other than to say Sam Wild will murder you even if just your shadow gets in his way, and his homicidal charm really gets Helen wet between her legs. Helen's almost as cold-blooded as Wild, as she tells one character who threatens to turn over to the police incriminating information about Wild:

I'm just warning you. Perhaps you don't realize - it's painful being killed. A piece of metal sliding into your body, finding its way into your heart. Or a bullet tearing through your skin, crashing into a bone. It takes a while to die, too. Sometimes a long while.

Sam and Helen are like two roaches feeding off each others dead souls, and their sick relationship ends in chalk outlines. Ignore the two-bit Grand Guignol plot and enjoy this weird little flick for the demented characters, which include not only Sam and Helen, but a couple of noteworthy nuts among the supporting players. Elisha Cook Jr., plays Marty, Sam's faithful (but unexplained) man servant. There's definitely something queer about the relationship between Sam and Marty. Marty follows Sam everywhere, always trying to calm down his hot-tempered big buddy--why? Dunno--other than it's certainly queer. Anyway, Little Elisha delivers this classic line, shortly after one of Sam's impromptu murders:

You can't just go around killing people whenever the notion strikes you. It's not feasible.

Esther Howard plays Mrs. Kraft, the buttinsky friend of one of Sam's murder victims. Howard is real riot as the bug-eyed, loud-mouthed slovenly gadfly who tries to put Sam behind bars, in between her numerous beer drinking marathons.

Enjoyed on its freak show terms, Born To Kill is an amusingly twisted little tale that still packs a heavy punch sixty-three years after it first crawled out of the cinema sewer.

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The Hitch-Hiker

2010-05-10T16:10:00.002-04:00

This is one of the great little treasures of Film Noir, over-looked on all the *Best* and *Greatest* lists, but it's surely the finest portrait of a serial killer from its era. Unusual for the time, the film generally avoids moralizing and artificial judgments, and one could almost label the story of Emmett Myers, a hitch-hiking drifter who kills the unfortunate good Samaritans who stop to offer him a ride, a primitive docu-drama.

Written (and based on the real-life spree killer Billy Cook) and directed by Ida Lupino (fifty-seven years before all the hoopla over the *female director* Kathryn Hurt Locker Bigelow), the story is remarkably free of the cliches of the day. And there's barely a wasted shot in the crisp seventy minute telling of the tale of two Average American Joes on a get-away-from-it-all fishing trip who make the unwise decision to pick up the Hitch-Hiker, Emmet Myers. Myers forces the two buddies to take him through Mexico, making it crystal clear he'll kill them when they are no longer of service.

William Talman plays the Hitch-Hiker and gives us one of the most memorable *bad guys* in screen history. With his greasy hair, bum eye and filthily stained teeth, Talman's Emmett Myers could have been Henry Lee Lucas' father.

Even more ugly than his mug is Myers' text book sociopath's profile: alienated, lacking empathy, drowning in self-pity. Talman's Myers delivers the serial killer's sermon for the ages, as he tells his two hostages:

You guys are soft. You know what makes you that way? You're up to your neck in IOU's. You're suckers! You're scared to get out on your own. You've always had it good, so you're soft. Well, not me! Nobody ever gave me anything, so I don't owe nobody! My folks were tough. When I was born, they took one look at this puss of mine and told me to get lost.

Ida Lupino must also be commended for the film's almost anti-climatic ending, as she cleverly tweaks Hollywood for its tendency toward the *big shoot-out* finale. There's a shoot-out tease, here, but no typical Hollywood tidy *satisfactory* ending with the bad guy lying in a pool of his own blood. A movie decades ahead of its time, it remains psychologically valid in the 21st century.

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Criss Cross

2010-05-07T10:12:00.003-04:00

Here’s another Burt Lancaster/Robert Siodmak picture that some think is one of the All-Time Film Noir Greats (like The Killers)—but in reality, it’s pretty mediocre (like The Killers).

Lancaster plays Steve Thompson, a zero with only one thing on his mind: his ex-wife Anna (played without much sizzle by Yvonne *Lily Munster* De Carlo), who is now married to gangster Slim Dundee. Desperate to win back Anna, Thompson, an armored car driver, cooks up a scheme to double-cross Slim in a robbery—but, of course, *things go horribly wrong.*

Really, about the only thing that holds interest in this hum-drum love triangle is spotting all the bit players who went on to better things, such as Tony Curtis and Alan Napier (Alfred the butler on the Batman TV series).

The great Noir villain Dan Duryea plays Slim Dundee, who is supposed to be the bad guy here (in one scene Lily Munster shows Lancaster the bruises Slim has left on her), but Lancaster and De Carlo are such dullards, I imagine most viewers, like me, end up sympathizing with Slim, who actually has some personality, and see the movie’s supposed tragic ending as a happy ending, instead.

Again, as in The Killers, Lancaster’s character is pretty hollow. Indeed, the only memorable thing about Steve Thompson is the ridiculous coat he sports through most of the film. I mean, look at that thing! How can you take anybody seriously who goes around in a goofball get-up like that?

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Scarlet Street

2010-05-06T16:15:00.004-04:00

With all its confused gender and identity swapping, this may be Hollywood's first transsexual picture. Scarlet Street tells the story of pathetic Chris Cross, a fifty-year-old virgin, who, despite being married for five years, has never seen a woman naked. To escape his crushing loneliness (and perhaps to save on rent, as well), Cross married his ball-cutting landlady, and ended up as her domestic servant. The frog-faced star of David, Edward G. Robinson, plays Cross, and appears in much of the film in a flowery apron, doing the cooking and cleaning. He's clearly the woman in his masochistic marriage, dominated and bullied by his butch wife. Cross' only pleasure comes from painting, but he's so beaten down, he doesn't think his pictures are worth showing.

In a fluke encounter, Cross meets Kitty, an attractive young woman whose beauty only goes skin deep--but that's enough to blind the hapless old eunuch. Kitty is a real alley cat, and she just about devours the mouse-of-a man Cross in a series of increasingly high-stakes cons.

Kitty is involved in an S&M relationship of her own with pimpish boyfriend Johnny. The more Johnny beats Kitty, the more she loves him. In fact, Kitty is a lazy tramp (there's a nice scene of her spitting grape seeds around her filthy apartment, dirty dishes piled high in the kitchen sink), and really only gets the energy required to fleece Cross from the motivational beatings Johnny gives her.

The sap Cross, who has been a loyal and faithful bank employee for twenty-five years, and a punching bag husband and *solid citizen,* begins what might seem a moral slide, as he steals from his wife and then the bank in order to get the cash necessary to support his Kitty addiction. But then money quickly starts flowing in when, in a rather far-fetched plot twist, Johnny accidentally launches Cross' art career. Cross' paintings are discovered and take the art world by storm, but at Johnny's violent urging, Kitty takes credit as the artist, which leads one art critic to marvel at the *masculinity* of her work. The colossal patsy Cross goes along with the scheme, stupidly thinking his pictures are only valued when they are believed to be the work of a woman.

Robinson's skillful performance, though, subtly suggests Cross has always been other than he appears, and that he just needed the scent of Kitty's kitty to give him the courage of his flawed convictions.

Indeed, when the mercilessly suckered Cross finally wises up and realizes what a dope Kitty has made of him, that she loves the repellent Johnny and considers Cross to be a literally laughable ugly old wimp, all of Cross' tangle of repressed conflicts and desires explode, and he assaults Kitty in a predictable act of psycho-sexual revenge (one can only imagine the sticky mess in his pants after he has had his violent way with Kitty. . .and the film would have played much better had the masochistic Kitty stayed true to character, and welcomed Cross' ultimate S&M finale).

Scarlet Street is not-quite a great movie. The plot requires a too-high degree of credulity, the early scenes are played a little too light, and there is an over-long and tediously moralizing post-script. Most damaging, however, is Joan Bennett's performance as Kitty. She tries hard, but lacks the charisma necessary to light up what could have been a great femme fatale role. She's dull, not seductive, and it makes Robinson's blind infatuation hard to believe.

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The Seventh Victim

2010-05-03T21:10:00.006-04:00

The film opens and closes with a quote from a John Donne sonnet:

I runne to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday.

So you know it's not going to be Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but even if the film were released today, I think it would still be considered unusually somber.

The story starts with nice girl Mary being forced to quit her cloistered private all-girls school to go to New York City to look for her missing older sister, Jacqueline. And let me tell you, Jacqueline is one weird chick, and I assume she must have seemed especially weird to The Seventh Victim's 1943 audience. Weary and restless, with her pale skin and jet black hair, finding nothing in life to hold her, Jacqueline would fit right in with our contemporary angsty goth girls.

Had there ever been a more morbidly depressed character to appear on the screen? Jacqueline would have given pause to Bud Cort's Harold. When Mary discovers Jacqueline has rented a room she never uses, but for which she faithfully pays the rent every month, she convinces the landlord to let her in. I figured Mary would enter the room, poke around and find a clue in a book or a picture or something--the typical mystery stuff. Given my own surprise, I wonder what the '43 audience's reaction was when the door opened to reveal a room empty except for a chair and a hangman's noose dangling over it?

It turns out Jacqueline has told several people of her death wish, but nobody seems to have really understood her. For example, Mary (played by Kim Hunter, who would later earn fame as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire) learns Jacqueline has married the lawyer Gregory Ward, whom she quickly abandoned. Ward has been looking for Jacqueline, also, and when Mary tells him about the room with the chair and the noose, Ward (played by Hugh *Ward Cleaver* Beaumont, and foreshadowing his relentless Leave It To Beaver optimism) downplays the macabre implications by saying:

Your sister had a feeling about life, that it wasn't worth living unless one could end it. I helped her get the room. . .No, that room made her happy, in some strange way.

As goody-goody Mary and the square Ward spend time together looking for Jacqueline, they discover in each other the bourgeois charms that suit their conventional 1943 souls--they *fall in love,* and become a bit less diligent in their hunt for Jacqueline. A bohemian poet who'd been on the fringe of Jacqueline's social circle assumes the lead role in the search, and he persuades a cynical psychiatrist who is treating Jacqueline to reveal what he knows. Through this ultra-sophisticate shrink, Mary learns her terminally bored sister has joined a gang of Greenwich Village Satanists!

But Jacqueline has broken the Satanists' code of silence by revealing the group's existence. The previous six cult members who did the same have all died--will Jacqueline become the seventh victim?

Billed as a horror movie, The Seventh Victim is more goth trippy than scary. Lean (it runs only 71 minutes) and elegantly moody, this is a beautifully eerie melodrama, with several hauntingly visionary moments (the suicide room with chair and noose, a creepy subway ride, a better-than-Psycho shower scene, the slow-burn showdown between Jacqueline and the devil worshippers, and that rarest of all movie moments: a pitch-perfect ending, which contrasts death-loving Jacqueline with a death-fearing woman who lives down the hall from the suicide room). This is first-rate gloom-and-doom.

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Kiss Me Deadly

2010-04-30T11:32:00.003-04:00

Ha ha ha. . .what a movie! And some critics take this thing seriously! And debate its *meaning!* This is Goofball Noir--and if you take it as that, and nothing more, you'll be mildly amused.

This Magnum Dopus begins with Cloris Leachman running down a highway nude, except for a trench coat. And the trench coat is probably the star of this flick, as even a young Cloris Leachman still looks like Cloris Leachman. Anyway, Mike Hammer, a tough-but-dim-witted private eye, just happens to come driving along, and a furiously huffing and puffing Leachman flags him down. Leachman jumps in the car, and like all the ugly actresses in this picture, she is instantly attracted to Hammer--even though she is also in what is frequently referred to as *grave danger.*

And even though she is running for her life, literally holding the key to unlock the secrets of the universe, she takes a timeout from her own personal nightmare to psychoanalyze her new friend:

You're one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself. Bet you do push-ups every morning just to keep your belly hard.

OK. But anyway, it turns out Leachman has just escaped from a loony bin, and she tells Hammer remember me if anything bad should happen to her.

Well, Kiss Me Deadly is only a mystery movie because Cloris Leachman is too much of an airhead to tell Mike Hammer exactly what the Hell she has gotten herself into. Listen, not to spoil the preposterous plot of this thing, but Leachman has a secret of apocalyptic dimensions, and yet the only info she gives up to help safeguard sunny southern California from a possible nasty dark mushroom cloud is her nearly useless enigmatic advice to remember me.

Of course, some wrong-doers soon appear and try to kill Leachman and Hammer. Hammer survives, and because Leachman has been kookily cryptic, he now has a mystery solve, instead of being able to just turn over the crime of the century to the government.

Hammer's investigative techniques consist of wandering around looking for people who knew Leachman, while coincidentally bumping into various women played by ugly actresses (one of them, who plays Hammer's girlfriend/prostitute employee, is the greasiest-looking chick I've ever seen. . .gobs of oil shine off her face. . .did somebody wipe her down with Turtle Wax or something?) who become instantly attracted to him. When he does find somebody who knew Leachman, Hammer asks one or two pointless questions, smirks, and then hurries off to an auto shop run by his annoying ethnic pal who loves to shout (for no known reason) VaVoom!

Hammer's peculiar *investigation* is interrupted by several half-hearted attempts on his life by the wrong-doers, some of whom Hammer dispatches off-screen with what one must assume to be his SuperHero powers.

Miraculously, Hammer gets one bright idea at the end of the movie and manages to figure everything out--but listen here, have you ever seen Repo Man? The pseudo-Punk Theater of the Absurd cult classic Repo Man has a similar mystery. . .but a much more cosmically grounded ending than this weirdo Noir entry.

PS: Dick Cheney must have seen this on a late show ten years ago, and plagiarized its insane plot for his Iraq/al-Qaeda disinformation.

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Act Of Violence

2010-04-28T11:16:00.003-04:00

Frank Enley is a successful building contractor, a pillar of the community, and is adored by his gorgeous child-like bride Edith (played by a barely 20-year-old Janet Leigh). But old boy Frank has a dirty secret from his past. . .seems he was sort of an American kapo in a German POW camp during WWII, and he sold out his GI buddies for a few good meals by revealing their escape attempt to the Nazis. All his buddies were killed. . .except one, Joe Parkson, who was left a cripple. Parkson has devoted his post-War life to hunting down Enley.

Act Of Violence has a simple, straight-forward revenge plot, but the film is well-made and asks a fairly sophisticated series of questions on morality, and features a wide variety of psychological misfits in its cast of characters.

Robert Ryan plays Joe Parkson, and he’s pretty creepy for most of the film, as crippled mentally as he is physically. Ryan gimps along on his bum right leg (it sounds like sandpaper dragging over wood, and in one memorable scene that’s all the we hear as Enley and his wife cower in their kitchen, listening to him shuffle around the outside of their house), gripped with a mania to kill Enley.

Van Heflin plays Enley, and he does a fine job as a man who sinks lower and lower as he processes his own craven nature. Enley hits rock bottom when, on the run from Parkson, he meets up with a cheap bar tramp (played by the old movie queen Mary Astor) who introduces him to a sleazy lawyer and an even sleazier thug, setting up the film’s rather unsatisfying and convenient denouement.

We don’t see much of Janet Leigh, unfortunately, although she still manages to look hot even in her character’s frumpy pajamas. . .and she does a decent job playing the innocent dollhouse wife (in one early scene, before she and Frank are aware of Parkson’s threat, Frank is about to leave on a fishing trip, and she pretends to be upset, but when Frank says he is willing to cancel the trip, with the implication they can have lots of sex, she becomes truly mortified, and quickly shoos Frank out of the house) who gradually comes to terms with the realization her husband does not belong on a pedestal.

Not-quite-great (because of its easy-way-out ending), but still pretty compelling viewing even sixty-two years after its first release.

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The Big Combo

2010-04-27T10:06:00.003-04:00

One of the greatest of all the Film Noirs! If you can imagine Zola seventy-five years after L’Assommoir or Nana writing a detective picture peopled with his trademark gutter obsessives, then you have an idea of the certifiable flavor of The Big Combo.

The plot is driven by a twisted love triangle involving Mr. Brown, a merciless crime boss, Leonard Diamond, a double-minded detective, and their mutual object of desire, Susan Lowell, a blonde society princess brought low by her taste for the pleasures of the flesh.

As Diamond compulsively tracks Brown to get to Lowell (he’s been stalking her for six months, and when the police department refuses to pony up for his surveillance, he pays his expenses out of his own pocket to follow her to Las Vegas and Cuba), we meet an assortment of secondary neurotics, including showgirl Rita, a sort of anti-Susan Lowell, of whom a weeping Diamond says upon her death I treated her like a pair of gloves. When I was cold, I called her up. And there’s also Mingo and Fante, Brown’s peculiarly inseparable henchmen.

There’s something in The Big Combo for everyone: fetishists will admire the high-heeled scene where Rita orders Diamond to put her shoes on her feet. Fanciers of homo-erotics will be tickled pink as they see Mingo and Fante sharing salami(!) in their cozy little room, and then reaching for Kleenex at Mingo’s utter lover’s despair over Fante’s death. Sadists will marvel at the ingenuity Brown displays in torturing Diamond with a hearing aid and a bottle of hair tonic. Dime-store philosophers will busily scribble notes as Brown, a demoniac’s Dale Carnegie, lectures on how to conquer the world through inspirational hate. And sex addicts will quiver and moan knowingly as they watch Susan Lowell, in the instant after telling Brown I hate and despise you, become helplessly enraptured as Brown goes down, down, down on her. If anybody ever deserved an Academy Award for five seconds of acting, it’s Jean Wallace as Susan Lowell, becoming intoxicated at Mr. Brown’s dirty deeds. The dilemma of Romans 7:23 (But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members) has never been so ecstatically and graphically presented as on Ms. Wallace’s fevered face.

Richard Conte is outstanding as the arrogant and ruthless Mr. Brown. Delivering classic tough guys lines (Joe, tell the man I'm gonna break him so fast, he won't have time to change his pants. Tell him the next time I see him, he'll be in the lobby of the hotel, crying like a baby and asking for a ten dollar loan. Tell him that. And tell him I don't break my word) at half-a-click faster than the rest of the cast, he appears to be operating on a higher level than everybody else, and creates his character's aura of invincibility.

Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman are also quite good as Fante and Mingo, Brown's queerly bonded muscle.

The Big Combo is literally one of the darkest of the Noirs. It seems as if everyone in this movie is trying to save on their light bill. Even the hospital where a suicidal Susan Lowell is taken is a gloomy, barely lit crypt of shadows.

Unfortunately, The Big Combo does not have an ending worthy of its first sixty minutes or so. The whole thing begins to unravel as the dead bodies pile up in a clumsy attempt to tie up the script's loose ends, and bring about a weird Casablanca-alternate-ending for Diamond and Lowell. A small price to pay, however, for the perverse pleasures that precede it.

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Blast Of Silence

2010-04-23T09:46:00.004-04:00

One of the last of the true Film Noirs, this ultra-low-budget character study of an angry, alienated hit man on a Christmas assignment in New York City has earned a reputation as a minor cult classic. Featuring more hard-boiled existential monologue (in a second-person narration delivered by a gravel-voiced Lionel Stander) than dialogue, this gritty tale of a born loser seems a cinematic forerunner of Taxi Driver and I Stand Alone.

The movie begins on a note of the darkest pessimism, with the hit man, Frankie Bono (played by writer/director Allen Baron) riding a train to NYC. Going through a pitch black tunnel with a tiny light at the end representing birth into a hopeless world, Stander intones in a merciless voice-over:

Remembering, out of the black silence, you were born in pain, you were born with hate and anger built in. Took a slap on the backside to blast out the scream, and then you knew you were alive. Later you learned to hold back the scream, and let out the hate and anger another way.

Well, there’s no Christmas cheer in the Big Apple for Frankie, as he wanders the streets alone, biding his time until he can kill his mobster target:

You’re coming into town on Christmas. It gives you the creeps. But that’s all right--everyone on the goodwill kick, maybe they’ll leave you alone. You hate cities. Especially at Christmas. But that’s all right, too. When the Better Business Bureau rings the Christmas bell, the suckers forget there’s such a business as murder, and businessmen who make it their exclusive line.

There’s a fine scene of Frankie tracking the mobster in Harlem:

The streets of Harlem are busy enough. No one notices you. Your hands are sweating but that’s all right because you know what it is—the hate of Harlem. You hate them and they hate you.

Another memorable scene has Frankie visiting the filthy apartment of a repellent and grossly obese gun dealer, who wheezes business with Frankie in between feeding his pet rats.

Frankie’s lonely walks through streets of New York end when he wanders into a restaurant and an old friend nags him into attending a party, where he meets Lori. Lori tempts Frankie from his years of isolation, but he is far too damaged to connect with her. The one *date* they have ends in a near-rape attempt.

The scenes between Frankie and Lori could have elevated this film to the minor masterpiece level, but unfortunately, the actress who plays Lori, Molly McCarthy, gives one of the worst performances I’ve ever seen. I mean, a pot of dead flowers would seem more appealing and lively than Molly McCarthy’s Lori. McCarthy’s Lori would make an autistic seem like the life of a party. Even *wooden* would be too much praise for her acting. That a bitter loner like Frankie would be attracted to such a stick-in-the-mud? No, it just doesn't work. And the great tragedy of McCarthy's clumsy turn is it undoes all the *art brut* atmosphere of the first third of the film, and makes you aware, painfully aware, you are watching a cheapie.

Fortunately, once Frankie is done with Lori, the film quickly regains its edgy luster, and ends on an as equally beautifully grim yang as its opening yin. All-in-all, not a bad little movie, and certainly more interesting than our contemporary Hollywood fare, shot with budgets literally 5000 times as large.

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The Killers

2010-04-21T10:05:00.003-04:00

Terribly over-rated. The Hemingway short story this is based on takes up maybe the first ten minutes of the movie, and it’s sterling silver screen. But the rest of it, providing the back-story, is pretty lame. For example, Burt Lancaster is tricked into a phony double-cross by Ava Gardner, and when he finds out he’s been played, he tries to kill himself by jumping out a hotel window, but the old bag who comes in to clean his room stops him with a couple lines of catholic Hell-fire. Listen, if Lancaster’s character is that easily spooked by the church of Rome’s hocus-pocus, how the Hell did he ever have the nerve for a life of crime in the first place?

Lancaster’s character is one of the great Straw Men in film history. The script sets him up for whatever is needed, then knocks him down just as quickly. There’s nothing real about any of it, especially his mania for Ava Gardner. He meets her at a party and is INSTANTLY bewitched by her. This isn’t love at first sight, it’s mesmerism. I guess this is all supposed to be a case of style over substance, but the style, other than the opening few minutes, is nothing special, either. Even eye-candy Ava Gardner doesn’t seem to have any real appeal here, either. In fact, she seemed a lot hotter almost twenty years later as a middle-aged wench in The Night Of The Iguana. The Night Of The Igauna? I should have watched that, instead.

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The Earth Hiccups In Iceland

2010-04-19T09:03:00.002-04:00

The earth hiccups in Iceland, and the mighty can do nothing.

Often we lose sight of how weak the supposed great really are. In the bubble of what we call *day-to-day life,* we struggle against the material mischief of the wicked. But the power and authority of the wicked is temporal, utterly insignificant outside the lying vanities of the world. Nothing the world treasures has any lasting value. The shame is how the poor lust after it, too.

Satan sifts everyone as wheat. . .some benefit longer than others for betraying Christ. The Jew Madoff lived as a mighty one for decades, but now he is a punching bag in a North Carolina prison. Even if the demoniacs don’t toss their patsies to man’s schizophrenic justice, their sin condemns them just as everyone else. The elite and the great unwashed are all subject to their own fallen nature, troubled in mind, body and spirit until they end up together in the fraternity of the grave. The great of this world have their moments of delicious living, which they extort from the poor, but how quickly those moments are forgotten, once they cross-over to eternity!

The earth hiccups in Iceland, and we see how fragile are all the schemes of man. And yet that is where the overwhelming majority of God’s human creation deposits their faith. That bubble of *day-to-day life* is Satan’s masterpiece, separating the masses from the Eternal. Great clouds of ash in the sky, yet even the signs of the times are beyond the bubbled mass!

The Satanic bubble of *day-to-day life* will only pop at the End of the Age:

And then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

May God in His mercy send the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ to penetrate the bubble of *day-to-day living,* and save souls from that doleful epiphany for the great unwashed, the unbaptized of the earth, as they realize in an instant they lived a lie.

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Moontide

2010-04-16T11:56:00.003-04:00

A strange early Noir entry, directed by Fritz Lang for about two weeks before he quit in disgust over the French mega-star Jean Gabin, who was making his first American movie appearance in this one.

Gabin plays the ridiculously named *Bobo,* a hard-drinking French dockside drifter, burdened with a faggy leech of a *friend* named *Tiny* (played by It's A Wonderful Life's Uncle Billy). As best as can be determined from Moontide’s obtuse script, Tiny once helped Bobo escape from a murder pickle, and now out of blackmail-tinged gratitude, Bobo lets Tiny use him as a kind of one-man dock worker temp agency—Bobo works, and Tiny gets a nice cut of the pay to finance his E-Z barfly life.

Moontide features one of the most bizarre scenes in Hollywood history, with faggy Tiny shown in a lockerroom sadistically snapping a towel at a nude Claude Rains, with nothing before or after to explain this arbitrary glimpse of the pseudo-homo nightmare world.

There’s another weird scene early in the film. Bobo is on a bender, and his descent into an alcoholic blackout is rendered in a surreal montage, featuring clocks with wildly spinning liquor bottles for the hour and minute hands. Salvador Dali was hired to do the scene, but his ideas were found too disturbing for use, so a watered-down Hollywood version was substituted.

Moontide’s rather thin plot revolves around the murder of an old rummy named Pop, with Tiny showing up every now and then to darkly hint Bobo did the killing during his drunken blackout.

This non-mystifying murder mystery quickly takes a backseat to the romance between Bobo and Anna (played by a scrawny-looking Ida Lupino). Bobo saves Anna as she tries to drown herself in the Pacific Ocean. Why is Anna suicidal? Who knows? Who cares? Certainly not Anna, who regains her will to live with astonishing alacrity after meeting Bobo. In fact, Anna marries Bobo three or four days after her suicide attempt, and there can be no finer testimony to the joys of living on a bait barge with an alcoholic French drifter.

Tiny, now broken-hearted in addition to being faggy, turns up one last time to nearly spoil the newlywed’s fun, but is eventually forced by Bobo to take a long walk off a short pier. And so Bobo and Anna can live happily-ever-after selling chum together.

Because this thing started production shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, with the resulting Pacific Coast-wide fear of further Jap mischief, no filming could be done on location at the San Pedro harbor, so a bait barge set had to built in a studio—thus all the waterfront scenes look loopily artificial, further adding to the already kooky vibe of this eccentric Noir exercise. Worth a look only for the sake of curiosity.

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Observe And Report

2010-04-15T12:25:00.004-04:00

If one were to interpret this movie literally, as just the story of fat, vulgar, lunatick mall rent-a-cop Ronnie utterly failing to function rationally in society (and likewise for his bizarre associates and his drunkard mother), one would become quickly irritated with the tedious crudity and obscene humor of this 21st century *screwball* comedy.

But if one can accept this grotesque farce as a parable of our contemporary American times, one can appreciate its apocalyptic take on the vanishing American Dream. Set in the mall, the retailverse is the perfect microcosm of materialist America, and Ronnie, therefore, stands as the American Everyman, chasing a Dream he can never catch, and for which he is not fit.

Unstable Ronnie answers the trivial frustrations of his mall patrol with potty mouth profanity and violence, and thus serves also as a larger symbol of the irrational American empire, an empire unable to process the complexities of other cultures (this is allegorized in Observe And Report in the subplot involving Ronnie’s personal war with a Middle Eastern mall merchant), only able to lash out with its military, seeking to solve all the empire’s problems (real and imagined) through violence.

The supporting characters are similarly archetypes of ruined Americans. There is Brandi, the oblivious cosmetics counter slut, who thinks nothing of exposing most of her young white flesh in tiny tight skirts and titty revealing tops, yet who then is somehow scandalized by a male flasher who trolls the mall.

Observe And Report also features a supposed *good* girl, Nell, who works at the mall pastry shop. She’s presented as one of America’s vague new megachurch *Christians,* a reformed tramp who fancies herself a *born-again virgin.* Yet just as American Christendom rejects Christ’s call to resist not evil, and to love, bless, pray for and do good to them that hate you by condoning America’s endless wars, *Christian* Nell rejects the Savior’s teachings as she embraces Ronnie’s brutal assault on her manager, a Napoleonic dimwit who had been cruelly teasing her.

Of course, I may be guilty of reading too much into Observe And Report. It may simply be just a cinematic exercise in the dumb and the coarse, and in that regard, the natural fruit of America’s rotten culture.

One other fellow who seems perplexed as to how to interpret Observe And Report is the film’s supporting actor, Ray Liotta, who plays Ronnie’s real cop foil. Liotta appears befuddled in most of his scenes, and unsure whether to go for the broad laughs of a stupid comedy, or play it more subtle, as if in a dark satire, so he stumbles dumbfounded throughout most of the picture.

Celluloid garbage of no redeeming social value? Or blistering parable of decaying America? Or, perhaps, one and the same?

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Detour

2010-04-13T09:56:00.004-04:00

This thing looks about as cheaply made as an Ed Wood film (and supposedly it was shot just as fast: six days), and features the most preposterous *twist* of fate in film history, yet it remains weirdly memorable sixty-six years later. Why? Because this is an S&M film, and perversion is timeless.

In Detour, Tom Neal’s Al is the masochist, a lounge piano player with Carnegie Hall ambitions, a man of exceptional self-pity, born to frown and whine and pout over the continual kicks ‘fate’ will send his way.

Hitchhiking from New York to California to see his girlfriend, Al gets a ride with a self-aggrandizing gambler, who has a heart attack and then falls out of the car and hits his head on a conveniently placed rock. Life’s whipping boy Al assumes he’ll be charged with murder, so he hides the body, then rides off in the dead man’s car.

At an Arizona gas station, lucky Al spots a female hitchhiker, Vera (played by the appropriately named Ann Savage). There’s something about Vera:

She was young - not more than 24. Man, she looked like she had been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world! Yet in spite of that, I got the impression of beauty, not the beauty of a movie actress, mind you, or the beauty you dream about with your wife, but a natural beauty, a beauty that's almost homely, because it's so real.

That’s Al’s description of Vera. The key line: not the beauty of a movie actress, mind you, or the beauty you dream about with your wife. Ha. That’s 1940s speak for the kind of dirty girl you don’t marry, but pick up, finger and then throw in the gutter. But our boy Al is no match for Vera, a snarling sadist the like of which has never been seen on the screen before or since. As it turns out, she knows about Al and the gambler, and quickly has Al under her greasy thumb, and friend, Al doesn’t really protest too much, or try too hard to get away from her.

Ann Savage’s Vera is the wildest, most over-the-top femme fatale in all of Film Noir. She’s got dirty hair and a dirtier mouth and an even dirtier mind. And it’s all very tempting to our boy Al. If you watch this thing and break the 1940s code, you can almost hear Al begging for Vera to piss on him. . .

A cheap, absurd little film, barely an hour long, yet a grimy masterpiece of human baseness. Lit up by Ann Savage’s crazy star turn, it will shine forever in the B-movie firmament.

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In A Lonely Place

2010-04-11T16:03:00.003-04:00

Our Lord once observed:

If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

Such is the state of Humphrey Bogart’s character Dixon Steele in the Noir epic In A Lonely Place. Steele is a fading screenwriter, a bitter, paranoid, violent barfly with a hair-trigger temper. When his devoted agent offers him a chance to rejuvenate his career by turning a trashy best-selling novel into a script, Steele grudgingly agrees. He then invites a restaurant hatcheck girl who has the read the book to his place to tell him the story, so he can avoid the hassle of having to read the crappy book himself. Alas, the hatcheck girl is murdered a couple hours after leaving Steele’s apartment, and Steele becomes the prime suspect in the killing. The closest Steele has to an alibi is his new neighbor, Laurel Gray, who happened to see the hatcheck girl leave Steele’s apartment alone. The murder mystery quickly takes a backseat to the relationship that develops between Steele and Gray.

My favorite scene in In A Lonely Place is the one in which Steele summons the nerve to go to Gray’s apartment to ask her if she’s decided whether or not she wants to start a relationship with him. Bogart’s Steele is a hand-wringing nervous wreck. He’s fallen hard for Gray, who is played by Gloria Grahame. Grahame’s Laurel Gray has snapped Steele out of his cranky crash to the bottom. Infatuated like a blushing schoolboy, Steele imagines a new beginning with Gray. Gray is his last chance to escape his lonely descent into oblivion. Bogart is completely convincing as the sweating, fretting Steele, desperate to know if Gray will commit to him. Up to this point, Grahame’s Gray has been cool and coy, keeping Steele at a distance, but when she agrees to begin a romance with him, Steele is instantly transformed. “I know your name! I know where you live!” he says in a non sequitur of malignant triumph, his hands around Gray’s neck as he is about to kiss her.

By the end of In A Lonely Place, it is Laurel Gray who is the hand-wringing nervous wreck, terrified nearly out of her wits she is just one ruffled Steele feather away from having the shit beat out of her. And the hatcheck girl murder is mere afterthought compared to the mystery of Steele’s sick psyche.

In A Lonely Place has one of the great unhappy endings in film history, as Steele trudges wearily and alone to his apartment, undone by his damaged soul. He’s the precursor of the modern American wife-beater, a slave to his emotions, unable to control his behavior, and a helpless witness to his own destruction. Bogart is no Johnny One Note tough guy, here. He has to play the divided soul, and he gives a top-notch performance as man whose better angels lose out to the bitter angry angels of his dark nature.

As much as I like the naughty Noir nymph Gloria Grahame, it must be said the role of Laurel Gray is a little beyond her usual cheap tramp range. She’s a little too toying in the beginning, and a little too melodramatic at the end. But this is only a minor distraction from an otherwise early masterpiece of Obsessive Love, American Domestic Violence Style.

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Sudden Fear

2010-04-06T21:04:00.003-04:00

Sudden Fear: An aging Mommie Dearest stars as a rich playwright who fires ugly-and-weird-looking Jack Palance from her latest Broadway production because Palance, being ugly-and-weird-looking, is too ugly-and-weird-looking to play a romantic lead. Later, Mommie Dearest meets ugly-and-weird-looking Jack Palance on a train, and ugly-and-weird-looking Palance charms the panties off the old-and-no-doubt-sexually-frustrated-Mommie Dearest bag. Ugly-and-weird-looking Palance may be ugly-and-weird-looking, but his sweet-talking and his fawning attention, and no doubt his youthful bedroom vigor, soon make him seem to old bag Mommie Dearest all an old bag of a woman could want in a man, no matter how ugly-and-weird-looking.

Of course, for Mommie Dearest it certainly is too good to be true. Ugly-and-weird-looking Jack Palance is still bitter over being fired, and, more importantly, he smells the old bag’s money, and it is an intoxicating scent, indeed—fragrant enough to cover the stench of coital relations with Mommie Dearest, who really is nearly old enough to be his Mommie, indeed.

Noir Super Hottie Gloria Grahame plays the ugly-and-weird-looking Palance’s real object of desire, and the odd-looking couple scheme to murder Mommie Dearest. . .but Mommie Dearest discovers the odd-looking couple’s vile plans, and seeks to turn the tables on her much-younger tormentors.

Flicks like Sudden Fear are made-to-order for Grande Dame scene-chewing actresses like Joan Crawford, and Mommie Dearest didn’t disappoint here, putting on enough of an over-heated thespian display of love, fear and hate to earn her last Academy Award nomination. This is good old-time movie fun.

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Out Of The Past

2010-03-31T10:10:00.005-04:00

One from the Film Noir pantheon, featuring the quintessential Robert Mitchum experience. Mitchum plays, in trademark fashion, a character supremely underwhelmed by everything and everybody around him—with one fatal exception: attractively adorned pussy. Mitchum’s character throws his life away, and without much anguish, because he realizes he’s not tossing out much of value, anyway. He’s aware of his imperfection, he’s aware he’s a loser. In the end, all that seems truly important to him is to maintain the illusion he can lose by doing it his way.

Out of the Past features a trio of old school hotties: Rhonda Fleming, Virginia Huston and Jane Greer. Greer’s character is one of the most amoral femmes fatales in screen history. Her allure, remarkably, is due more to her sociopathy than her fleshly charms. Her nearly demonic deviousness prompts Mitchum’s character to utter the classic line:

You’re like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another.

But her appeal is so powerful, Mitchum’s character is more than willing to follow her gutter-to-gutter. Greer’s character neatly summarizes their relationship:

You're no good, and neither am I. That's why we deserve each other.

Virginia Huston plays the ‘good girl,’ about the only character not totally enslaved to carnality. There’s really no place for her in the dark world of Out of the Past, and in the end, she must believe a lie in order for her to make the compromise necessary to keep on going.

Made over half-a-century ago, Out of the Past is an icon of post-Christian America, a land of the double-minded, for whom one thing is just as good as the next, and for whom moral distinctions are not worth troubling over. Timeless.

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Joe Stack. Pioneer?

2010-02-19T10:03:00.003-05:00

AP, 19 February 2010: A software engineer with an apparent grudge against the government crashed his small plane into an office building with nearly 200 Internal Revenue Service employees inside, killing himself and at least one worker. Before flying his single engine Piper PA-28 into the hulking black-glass office building Thursday morning, A. Joseph Stack III apparently posted a rambling screed on a Web site in which he railed against "big brother," the "unthinkable atrocities" committed by big business and the governments bailouts that followed. In the note, signed "Joe Stack (1956-2010)" and dated Thursday, he said he slowly came to the conclusion that "violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer." In the self-described "rant," the author fumed about the IRS and wrote, "Nothing changes unless there is a body count." "I have had all I can stand," he wrote, adding: "I choose not to keep looking over my shoulder at `big brother' while he strips my carcass."

My first reaction to events of this kind is always amazement we don’t have more.

In a nation populated overwhelmingly with pseudo-Christian baptized materialists, sheeple devoted solely to the pursuit of treasure on earth, I live in expectation of a great wave of *domestic terrorism,* as the sheeple’s credit wealth evaporates in the wake of America’s economic collapse.

But then, considering the craft of the Military Media Complex, my amazement ceases, as I watch the story of the *lone nut* replaced by coverage of more important news events, such as the *apology* of the perpetually erect Tiger Woods, or the latest crash of a female skier at the Olympics, or the most recent weep-fest from a dismissed American Idol wannabe.@@@

I must concede the American masses remain hypnotized by the *broadcast reality* created by the Media wing of the Military Media Complex. Much like terminal cancer patients die in a medicated state of unfeeling, the sheeple die painlessly, over-dosed on the gross *entertainments* of their televisions and other assorted electronic gadgets.

Poorly and shallowly educated, raised on the brain sugar of the boob tube, the American is unaware he/she is the product of mass manipulation.

Still, one wonders how long the electronic opium can continue to placate the sheeple. We are still only in the very earliest stage of America’s economic ruin. Perhaps a day will come when the new reality of poverty breaks down the electronic barrier of the *broadcast reality,* and more and more sheeple will make the same discovery as Joe Stack:

It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their 'freedom' … and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.

Joe Stack. Pioneer?

@@@Unlike the story of the famous Detroit airport *underwear bomber,* who only managed to singe his own pubic hairs. Yet that *terrorist’s* story was *big news* for days, as it served the Military Media Complex’ interests to keep the sheeple frightened their *broadcast reality* might be threatened by the other. . .and that fear, of course, keeps the *defense* budget sacrosanct. But we can’t have the sheeple fretting over *domestic terrorists*--that truly hits a little too close to home, and threatens to break the electronic trance which molds the sheeple.

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The Man Suicided By America

2010-01-27T13:44:00.002-05:00

Ha ha ha. . .listen to the idiot around the 1:29 mark talking about the Great Man:

“His anti-communism somehow transmuted into an anti-Americanism.”

What did they expect the Great Man to do? Put on a little flag lapel pin and give charity exhibitions to raise money for the *9/11* families??

America made plenty of coin off this poor son of a bitch in the ‘70s, they owed him his later eccentricities.

“His anti-communism somehow transmuted into an anti-Americanism.”

'Somehow transmuted?!?!'

The Great Man wasn’t transmuted. . .he was suicided.

Bobby Fischer was the man suicided by America.

The Scales Are Tipped In My Favor

2010-01-13T14:04:00.002-05:00

I committed murder.

I committed suicide.

What a pig, I am. A beast.

Lacking natural affection.

The great Cioran observed that what he knew at age sixty, he knew at age twenty, and it had been forty tedious years of confirmation.

Tomorrow I turn fifty, and I can say the person I am at age fifty, I was at age twenty. Thirty years of abusing God’s patience and long-suffering.

I’m no Count Muffat—I’ve been what I am for as long as I can remember.

For thirty-eight years X has never been too far from my mind. I met her in sixth grade. The golden-haired girl joined our class in February, and it was as Marlowe wrote:

Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

In May of that year my mother informed me we’d be moving at the end of the school year. I was sick to have to leave X. It was the first and only time I’ve felt, as that worst cliché expresses it, *life was unfair.*

Of course, at that time I was outside the light of the Gospel, and lacked the proper frame of reference. I was also twelve years old, and thus even stupider than I am now.

Today, looking back on five decades of sin, with the last three-and-a-half decades in the light of the gospel, I vouch for God’s patience and long-suffering, and testify He has not dealt with me according to my sin.

I can certainly sympathize that to multitudes in our Satanic world life does, indeed, appear ‘unfair’—but I can say of myself God has surely tipped the scales in my favor.

I have committed sins that to specify would be an act of vanity, and a scandal against shame.

But it’s always the lesser offenses, the everyday sins, which reveal the failure to yield to the Holy Spirit. The stagnated soul, loitering between this world and the next.

Two weeks ago I read an article on a local internet news site that made mention of A. A had been in the same sixth grade class as X and I. Seeing A’s name, I thought of X. Over the years, I’ve tried to track down X, but X has a common name, and I’ve been unable to locate her. But I found A on Facebook, and B on A’s friend list, and C on B’s friend list. I sent messages to A, B and C—the end result of which was locating X yesterday on the internet, on her work place’s web page. There was her name, and a picture.

I groaned so loud upon seeing the photograph, seeing X’s current appearance, the woman in the office next to mine asked if I was all right.

I was going to say ‘time has worn away X’s beauty,’ but, no, time has worn away X. That’s not her in the picture. Even after confirming again with B & C, I still refuse to accept it is X. She turned into something ordinary. American ordinary. Heavy and sloppy looking.

Listen, X had been no ordinary twelve year old. You understand Traci Lords was no ordinary twelve year old. X was cut from the same cloth, but fairer of face.

I was actually angry at X for being old and dumpy. She has accomplished much in life—certainly for more than me. She’s in a respected profession, and has even had a book published.

But once I’m done typing this, I’ll never give her another moment’s thought.

Our middle school relationship was really the only entirely pleasant one of my life. The rest have been tainted by *maturity* (aged sin). Reality after X was so vulgar, I would have dreams of her into my mid-twenties. These were Edenic dreams. When I read of Eve in Genesis, I pictured X. But now she’s a dumpy old bag. . .

I actually thought, thank God now we moved after sixth grade—my current wife is in far better condition. . .

I’ve destroyed my dream. I could say by looking back, like Lot’s wife, I’ve turned X into a pillar of salt.

But I’d already killed her long ago, long ago. It’s only just now the grave is discovered.

I’ve committed awful sins—but it’s the core, the rotten core, the rotten heart which is the problem (Matthew 15:19). Every day, every day, shallow, with litter interest in or feeling for other people—the soul of a murderer who will destroy somebody for *losing their bloom*—a grotesque parody of our Lord:

Now in the morning as He returned into the city, He hungered. And when He saw a fig tree in the way, He came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away.

I murdered X. I defaced those sixth grade memories of her.

I committed suicide. I no longer walk about Eden with a daughter of Eve.

No love in me. Only scorn for a dumpy old bag. . .

That’s me at fifty, thirty-five years under the Gospel. . .

Life is surely not unfair. . .

My love of Christ grows in proportion to my self-disgust. . .

The Garbage People

2010-01-07T13:07:00.008-05:00

Newsbizarre.com, 7 January 2010: The death of a former model, 26-year-old Paula Sladewski, has shocked America. Her body was found burning in a Miami trash bin. A former glamour model and bikini girl who appeared briefly in the 2003 “Playboy: The Ultimate Playmate Search” video, Paula Sladewski had been working as an exotic dancer in Los Angeles when she took a New Years Eve trip to Floria with her boyfriend. The vacation was for New Years Eve, to see Lady Gaga perform live in concert at Miami Beach's posh Fontainebleau. It was a trip that Paula Sladewski could not have known would be her last.

One of the last to see Paula Sladewski alive was boyfriend Kevin Klym. Kevin Klym reported Paula Sladewski missig to police soon after she went missing. The pair had had a fight when they were out in downtown Miami, Florida on Sunday January 3 2010. Klym said he last saw Paula Sladewski about 7 a.m. at Miami's Club Space. 34-year-old Klym told authorities that he wanted to leave the nightclub because Paula Sladewski was ``too drunk.'' The report said Paula Sladewski yelled at her boyfriend and bouncers threw him out of the club. That was the last time Paula Sladewski was seen by her boyfriend.

On Sunday night, police found the charred body of the model beauty Paula Sladewski in a North Miami trash bin. The body of Paula Sladewski was so badly brunt, only dental records could be used to identify her. A relative of model and dancer Paula Sladewski, stepfather Richard Watkins, said his stepdaughter had a “very volatile relationship” with boyfriend Kevin Klym. There were even domestic violence charges filed against Paula Sladewski June 2009.

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

There has always been the shadow of the devil trailing the so-called *fashion* and *modeling* industries. The Fashion Industry was truly born in sin, back when the eyes of Adam and Eve were first opened. . .

What was born in shame is now celebrated as a Hallmark of Culture. . .

What is today called *Fashion* mocks its origins with its utter shamelessness. . .a Satanic shamelessness that delights in the *open eyes* of man.

This girl, found in a Florida gehenna, is just one of hundreds of thousands of similar girls (by dream or reality), all seduced into a Satanic ritual. . .the ritual of the inversion of fashion.

All models are strippers who, to varying degrees, remove their fig leaves. . .by removing their fig leaves, they say “we have no sin.”

They are, of course, role models. . and the ugly follow their lead.

The *modeling* and *fashion* industries, despite an aura of *glamour,* are nakedly depraved. . .addiction and rape lurk offstage (see the Elite scandal, the Anand Jon Alexander scandal, or the bizarre case of Karen Mulder, for example).

So many girls are abused by fashion, a case like the one here, with the girl ending up burning in a dumpster, seems a mere cliché. Yet every day thousands more girls take off their clothes and pose for pictures, imagining themselves as future icons. One must imagine their lives are already garbage. . .they live, as it were, in burning dumpsters, and so they risk nothing by accepting Satan’s call to his ritual of inversion.

There is a picture of this Florida dumpster model, dressed immodestly, an alcoholic beverage in her hand, aged well beyond her mere 26 years—yet with a smile on her face. Born into it, I suppose. It’s all good, we have no sin.

Her *boyfriend,* according to another news account, had punched and broken her nose on one occasion. . .yet she goes on *vacation* with him, anyway. . .they party, fuck and fight. . .she ends up smoldering in the trash. . .

This is who we are. . .the garbage people.

Few There Be That Find It. . .

The Eleventh Step

Part IV

They Fuck Horses In The Ass, Don't They?

Part III

Part II

Sixty

Part I

Hobo With A Shotgun

The Court Jester

Liquidate

This Is The True North

Family Night

The Industry Of The Future

Christine

Déjà Vu Iran, Black Swan, The Ghost Writer, Jim Tressel

This Is Real Democracy

Obama's Timid Proposal

Rape Of The Coloreds, Part IV

Rape Of The Coloreds, Part III

Rape Of The Coloreds, Part II

Rape Of The Coloreds

*Luxury Villa* For Sale

"A Testament To The Greatness Of Our Country"

Gobsmacked!

The Signs Of The Times

Not One Of Them Is Forgotten Before God

The Human Centipede

Red Desert

A Man Called DVH

Kick-Ass

Do Ye Even So To Them

I Seen Some More Movies

Mighty Men Which Were Of Old

The Court-Ordered Ecstasy Of Edward Huffman

On Dangerous Ground

The Last Trumpet

The Box

The Hangover

Born To Kill

The Hitch-Hiker

Criss Cross

Scarlet Street

The Seventh Victim

Kiss Me Deadly

Act Of Violence

The Big Combo

Blast Of Silence

The Killers

The Earth Hiccups In Iceland

Moontide

Observe And Report

Detour

In A Lonely Place

Sudden Fear

Out Of The Past

Joe Stack. Pioneer?

The Man Suicided By America

The Scales Are Tipped In My Favor

The Garbage People

Luxury Villa For Sale