Another Memorial

We are powerful and brave.

We are angry, afraid and greedy. We always want more than we have. We are ingenious.

We have invented so many superb ways to show our strength, to assuage our fear, to give vent to our anger, to take what we want.

We will hit you with rocks. We will maim you with our sword and our battleaxe. We will blow holes in your soft flesh with our blunderbus, our musket, our carbine, our pistol, our machine gun, and the life will drain from your mortal body, while we take what we want from you, your family, your home.

We will blow up your buildings, your public places, your railroad tracks, your factories, your electrical generating facilities, your airports, your roads, the very houses you dwell in.

We will organize ourselves into huge armies, and these armies will be the grandest achievements, hundreds of thousands of us in uniforms, training, planning, arming. We will tell ourselves, and you, that we only want to protect ourselves. But in our fear, our anger, our greed and our hatred, we will move to dominate you, to subjugate you, to take your treasures.

Failing that, we will kill you. We will take you in our hands and we will blacken your mind, stop your heart, wring the blood out of you, and all your kind. We will scorch the earth you live on. It is within our power. It is within our hearts.

No one of us can remember when this started. We have always done this, even before we invented our excellent weapons. Every day we teach our children to be ready for this. The marching, the taking, the killing. We do this to our children.

There is no place on earth left to hide.

This is my memorial to all of them who died. To all who killed. To all who are dying and killing even right now, as I think these thoughts. I weep for you and myself, and all who will come after us to continue the carnage. Bring glory on us. Bring your wrath and your fire. Bring peace through devastation. Bring it to every town, to every street, to every home, and we shall have peace, and our heroes at last may rest.
**************************************************************
Joe Frank has made an eloquent audio statement on this subject.
You can listen to it by clicking here.

Pigs and Pussies (Bang Bang, Part 3)

Shot down again.




My post Tuesday in which I imagined myself a misunderstood inner city almost-dropout stud muffin and Michelle Pfeiffer my earnest, misguided but highly desirable schoolmistress (yes, Mistress!) received some unexpected comments.

In the totally imaginary persona that I assumed, I may have said some things that I myself in real life don't actually believe. The short version would be along the lines of Oh, my God, Miss Pfeiffer, please don't quit teaching and if you wear that little red dress you wore in The Fabulous Baker Boys I'll do anything you ask, even memorize poetry that may or may not have been written by homosexuals. Or in other words, as far-fetched as it is, as remote the possibility, what I think when I look at Miss Pfeiffer is Hooeey, I want to roll around and get dirty with that!! Something like that. Doesn't matter who she is, or that I have like, zero chance of even touching the hem of her granny gown, let alone unzipping her little red party dress.

The comments were split between...

• Yowzah! This is a prime cut, wink wink, and
• Memorizing poetry won't work, you ignorant schlump.
  

The guys generally saw where I was going (or where I was coming from - I really cannot talk Street), and wanted to go there with me, damn the torpedoes. The women (I will never call you girls, because I respect you too much) said, with one exception* that my shallow approach would not work. I'm not sure if they meant it wouldn't work on them, or it wouldn't work with Miss Pfeiffer, or it just plain wouldn't work with any woman, period. But the suggestion arose more than once that I knew it wouldn't work, or at least I should have known.

So there it is again: All men are pigs, we only want one thing, we completely fail to understand women, and the one thing we want will be withheld from us because of our lack of understanding.

Are there exceptions? Sure, the ethereal Shelley's and Byron's who write the damned sensitive poems in the first place, and their spiritual descendants, the fevered fellows in the frayed turtlenecks who drink coffee in the Student Union (they smoked in my day, but I'm guessing that's over now) and seem to dwell in that angst-ridden fantasy land where the higher sensibilities rule and Big Drama is the order of the day.

And I'm not even sure about those guys. They might be pigs, too. I know they have at least some of the qualifications.

So what is the answer to this Big Question? We have to get together, boys and girls. We have a programmed need for each other. We actually want to be in love with each other, I think. But, perhaps due to God's grand sense of humor, the boys must forever keep guessing at the secret password, and the girls keep changing it (I can say girls here because I said boys, OK?) while wistfully seeking a man who understands, who is sensitive but still very strong, rich but not obsessed, sexual but only with them, rugged but soft... well, I'm not making a Great Expectations video here, but you know what I mean.

As always, my heart overflows with confusion and love.


* But Steph has made sort of a career of charmingly missing the point. She does it so well that she makes me think I've missed the point. Wait a minute. I have missed it, haven't I?

Dangerous Mind

If I were an inner city teen, I'd for sure be in a bad street gang.

The Blips or The Cruds, whatever, because that's the only way you can survive on the street, you see what I'm saying? I'd shave my head and wear some baggy clothes, too, with a nine in my pants and a knife in my sock, just to be safe. If they put metal detectors in school, well, then I would just stop going to school, because school is for losers, and I'd rather hang with my boyz anyway.

I'd be one bad dude. Fuck with me, man, look out.

But if my teacher were Michelle Pfeiffer, I'd be good to her. No backtalk, no lip. I'd smack down any of the other guys in the class who gave her a hard time, too. She'd just be a good, honest chick tryin' to make the world a better place for guys like me. Oh, sure, she'd be hopelessly wrong about her chances. I mean, homies don't turn nobody in to the cops, man. You're marked for death, no matter how stupid the reason, you go out like a man, man.

But when you have those soft pink lips like Miss Pfeiffer, it makes dudes like me want to study Shakespeare, man. You see what I'm saying? And when you're all sincere like she is in her intentions of educating me so I can do something positive with my life, like get a good job in the United States Army or even MacDonald's, well, I just wouldn't be able to resist her, you know what I'm talking about?

Shit. You know what I mean. I would learn long division and memorize fag poems because I would know, like I could just smell it, that under that denim shirt and that bullshit granny dress she wears to school, she got this:

You see what I'm saying?

See below for answers to Friday's GuitarMania quiz.

Solos

OK, you lazy, lazy, unfeeling people.

I made my little compilation of guitar solos for you and almost none of you tried to guess the titles. Would it have been too much trouble to just make up a list of songs, any songs, and post them here in a comment? Well, now I can tell you the truth that there was a prize, and it was a brand new Pontiac 6, just like Oprah gives away at her show. But I'm sending it back, because no one cared enough to try to win it. Not only that, but maybe now there will be no GuitarMania 2, including some Yardbirds-era Clapton and the triple solo on the B-side of "Abbey Road." How do you feel now? Not so smug, I'll bet. (Note: None of this is directed at the beautiful and talented Laurie Kay Ransonette Anderson or the extremely kind and ethical Aydreeyin Oneiric.)

So here are the songs, and the artists, and the guitarists who played the solos (if I know them):

• Johnny B. Goode (intro) - Chuck Berry
• Louie Louie - The Kingsmen
• Hello Mary Lou - Ricky Nelson (James Burton)
• You Really Got Me - The Kinks (Dave Davies)
• Concrete and Clay - Uhit 4 Plus 2
• Right Place, Wrong Time - Dr. John (probably Leo Nocentelli)
• One of These Nights - Eagles (probably Joe Walsh)
• Dixie Chicken - Little Feat (Lowell George and Paul Bererre)
• I Saw the Light - Todd Rundgren (he played all the parts)
• Redneck Friend - Jackson Brown (David Lindley)
• Cinnamon Girl - Crazy Horse (Neil Young)
• Johnny B. Goode (solo) - Chuck Berry
• Cinnamon Girl (reprise) - Neil Young

Hey, it's OK. Bloggers are geeks, right? Which means you were all stupefied from watching Star Wars, and unable to think about anything else. It was really just a scheduling conflict. I love ya, now get outta here.

Jones In Love

I confess herewith to a not-so-secret lifelong love affair.

My Uncle Ralph, a truly magnificent Irish drunk, played the ukulele. If you could sing it, he could accompany you, and I made him play every chance I got. Sometimes when I was very young he would let me try to play his ukulele, but he was not a teacher and I couldn't figure out how to make it work. He encouraged me, but he didn't know what to say to make the instrument clear to me. In those interludes when I was holding the thing, the fun would stop, and I would get self-conscious in the deafening, expectant silence. Each time I would sheepishly hand it back to him, and the sing-along would resume.

So I made myself content to watch. I watched his fingers on the frets, moving around in some incomprehensible musical braille, while his other hand strummed and plucked. The strumming and plucking made more sense to me than the fingering. I could feel the rhythm, and I could move my own hand in time with it, but I knew from my few attempts that both hands had to work together, each doing an independent job at opposite ends of the instrument, or it would be no good.

For various reasons, the jam sessions with Uncle Ralph came to end when I was ten years old. Not long after that I went by myself to a matinee movie at the Paramount Theater in my little town in southern Minnesota. I sat alone in the dark under the starry ceiling of that old monument, and my future was revealed to me. The movie was "Rock Around the Clock." Bill Haley and the Comets, and they weren't playing ukuleles.

The music and the electricity was so powerful it was all I could think about for days. I even tried to build an electric guitar of my own. Actually I tried to get my dad to do it, but he wisely declined, realizing that, on the off chance that we succeeded, neither of us knew how to play it. For five years I dreamed of that movie, that sound, that excitement, and I asked my parents for a guitar at every gift-giving occasion.

When I was fifteen, I got my first guitar.

I started late, I guess, but I caught up fast, bcause I didn't put the thing down for about two years. Before the first year was up I had started a band, my first of many kid bands. I learned by listening to records and copying what I heard. I had a turntable that could run as slow as 16 RPM, so I could slow down the difficult parts and work on them out of real time.

I played it until my fingers stung from pressing on the strings. After a few months my fingertips were hard and impervious to pain. I taught myself how to do most of the things I wanted to do. When I touched the instrument, put my hands on the neck and the strings, it cried, it moaned, it screamed and whispered. When you see guitar players making faces as they play, they are not putting on a show. They are feeling the music as it flows back and forth between the player and the instrument.

If you want to hear some of the playing that inspired me and made me fall in love and kept my heart a happy prisoner all these years, click on the guitar above, or here. A lot of what you will hear was culled from old vinyl, so don't be judging the sound quality. Just dig the licks. These are guitar solos only, except for one vocal phrase I left in, and yes, I know it's raw. Frankly, it was the violence that attracted me at first.

Warning: The file is over 4 MB. If you're on a dial-up connection, go get a haircut while it downloads.

There is an alternate version of the file here. It's in the Microsoft .wma format, smaller for faster downloads, but not as universally compatible. Best bet is to right-click on it (or whatever you Mac users do) and save it to your computer, then play it.

Who can name all the songs? (Hint: One of them is in there twice.)

This is a Crime

I just washed my car this morning.

OK, I didn't exactly wash it. I went to the car wash. The point is, my car was freshly scrubbed, and looking good. Then I parked it and went in to work.

When I came out of my office eight hours later, I discovered that the automatic sprinklers near where I had parked had come on and sprinkled my car. My beautiful red car was covered with muddy waterspots. As you may be able to see from the picture (or not, now that I look at it), the spray from the sprinkler went all the way across the car to the street side. The spots show up nicely on the windshield, but let me assure you that the entire car was covered, front and back, left to right. Then the hot sun dried them out, and now I will have to go back to the carwash, or else wash it myself, the very next day.

This really pisses me off. Why do the sprinklers point out in the street? They must, because there was no wind today. The sprinklers were simply aimed at my car. I wonder if any water got on the grass.

I will admit that this is not as bad as being attacked by snakes, or having lunch with Dick Cheney. Maybe I should count my blessings. But, damnit, I spent time and money at the carwash, and then my paint got all fucked up, like, immediately.

OK. Sorry. In other news, my story called Promised Land has been moved to this location. I couldn't handle the pressure of trying to write right here in front of everybody. So it has it's own space now, where you can read it if you feel like it, and I get to work at the leisurely pace befitting a man of my age. I don't expect any readers to go there and make comments on it, but I have enabled comments just in case, so feel free. Getting it off this blog makes it easier for me to just write, and even go back and make changes, the way you'd do if you were writing a story, and not a blog. I will also add Promised Land to my blogroll in the sidebar. Don't get me wrong: I'm hoping someone will read it. I just won't come after you if you don't.

Rules of the Game

Sundays we played volleyball.

Looking back it feels like we played the game for years, in the bright sun, under the gray sky, on still and humid September Sundays. We played. But it couldn't have been years, could it? People came and went, the energy surged and waned. We paired off and disappeared, sometimes forever. But everything was forever then. How could there be an ending to those holy days, those brown and beautiful bodies, those perfect visions?

I can still feel the sting of the ball, its heft as I dug it out just before it hit the grass. I can see it spin up again, two more chances. We could fly in those days, before we found out about the things that are not possible. You have to keep it in the air. It can never touch the ground, but you can't just grab it and stop it. You could save it that way, of course, but it's not allowed. The rules of the game. What makes perfect sense, you can't do that. You must serve, dig, volley, set, fake and spike, defying gravity, the rules of the game countermanding the laws of physics, of life, of the natural order.

We were out of college, all of us big boys boys and girls, starting our real lives, looking for our places in life, the ways we would make good, change the world, build the future. We were artists, con men, housewives and whores, makers, buyers and sellers door to door. We were learning the rules, making the rules, breaking the rules. Twenty or thirty of us, this is the way we partied, every week. Hard-fought games in the sun, Mexican beer in the coolers, whiskey, wine, music and drugs under cover of night.

I met you there on that field, and we played that game for all it was worth. After a while I told you that you had a nice set, and you cast your lovely dark eyes down, but you knew exactly what I meant. Then we played a different game, a game that didn't have such easy rules, or maybe there were no rules at all - I never knew for sure.

I thought I was so smart. I thought I could play you, and you let me think it was true, while you volleyed and set me up, in the game where you made the rules. I thought I was winning you, but I was losing myself.

What a prize I was, brown and lean and smart and hard. What an ass I was, young and thoughtless and cruel. I guess you got what you were after, although I know I didn't give you what you wanted. I guess I took what I needed from you, and I thought it was love. For a moment I held your heart in my hands, and you gave me indulgence and forgave me my sins.

Now I can't find you anywhere, and I am certain that I never will. I catch glimpses in dreams, and I cannot speak. But I have learned the rules of the game, and now is when I need to confess to you, and now is when I need one last absolution.

Get Thee Below Me

Well, OK. It's never too late to learn.

Boy, that last post sank like a stone, didn't it? Let's bury it a little further right now. It was just stream of consciousness, in a way. I bit my tongue, I wrote about biting my tongue, I bit my tongue because I was eating too fast, food was in my mouth because of the eating, and yeah, it made kind of a nasty picture, but believe me, the reality was much worse for me than the description was for you.

Somehow it just turned into that kinky kissing thing which, coming right after the ghastly image of half-masticated food - and come on, some of you were also thinking about blood, too, weren't you? - well, I can see now that it was just too much. Since I am a sophisticated man of the world, you're probably thinking "How could he have committed such a faux pas?" I could say that I love you all, and I was overwhelmed by the desire to plant a smooch on you. In fact, that's really my only defense, weak as it is. So that's what I'll say.

Sue me.

Just Gimme A Kiss... Like This.

I bit my tongue at lunch today.

And I mean I got the back part of it caught between the molars, back there where the jaw has the most possible leverage, in the area I usually use for crushing diamonds, and chomped down on it good and hard. I was eating at my desk, like a pig. Worse than a pig, actually. I was eating fast, stuffing food in faster than I could swallow, getting it on my face, on my desk, on the floor, everywhere. Luckily I was alone in my office. I was doing something on the computer and answering the phone, and I just got that big ol' piece of tongue-meat caught in my teeth and before I could stop pigging I had bitten it so hard that I almost cried. I had to stop all activity for about a minute. This is not a pretty picture, folks, me sitting there trying not to weep or drool, my mouth filled with half-masticated salad, unable to close it.

I was able to finish my lunch, because I am a pig, but much more slowly, and within the hour the pain started to spread downward so it felt like a sore throat (it still does, eight hours later). For several hours the pain radiated as far south as my sternum. Just a moment earlier I had been pain-free and lovin' life. Now I was crippled in the mouthal area. Like a toothache, it was all I could think of, and I know it will be with me at least all through tomorrow, when I have meetings.

I didn't want to bite my tongue.

I wanted to bite your tongue.

I wanted to put my hand on your shoulder and begin slowly to draw you toward me. Trying in vain to look you in the eyes, I'd be seeing only your mouth. When your face came close to mine, I'd brush my lips on yours, just a whisper of a brush, then I'd use my lips - only my lips - to gently push yours apart. I'd slip my hand around to the back of your neck, the better to hold you still, and I'd use my tongue to tickle just the very corner of your kissy mouth, that edge where the top and bottom lips dissolve into one another, first the left side, then the right, then back, two times, maybe three, my tongue starting to stroke your luscious lips with each pass across them.

I wanted to make love to your wanton mouth with mine, softly bite and tug that pouty smile right off your face, taste that space just behind those lips, run my eager tongue along your teeth, meet your own soft and sexual tongue in the wet darkness there. I wanted to devour you, be inside you and all around you, starting with your beautiful, hungry, lascivious mouth, the only part of all your gorgeous parts I can think of tonight.

And all I want from you, all I will need tonight, all I ask, is your hot breath, your pliant lips, your open mouth, your searching tongue and your dirty desire.

Can you give me that?

A Lump in My Throat

Ma, send me money now, I'm gonna make it somehow...

I convinced myself at an early age that I had no artistic ability. I don't remember doing this, but somehow it must have happened, because there exists no evidence of me ever trying anything creative as a child. I didn't fingerpaint on the walls or go out in outlandish costumes on Halloween. I choked in the sixth-grade Christmas pageant. I was Joseph, and I screwed up my lines.

Maybe it was an incident in first grade that closed the book on my creative efforts. We were "working with clay" one day. The teacher handed out lumps of brown clay. Everybody got a lump, and we all messed around with our lumps for a while. The teacher was going around the room, making sure everybody had a lump, and, it seemed to me, making sure that we were all comfortable and enjoying ourselves with our lumps of clay. After a tough hour of "See Dick run" I was ready for a little R&R, even though reading came naturally to me.

So I was bashing my lump of clay around on my desk, or maybe we were sitting at a table, I can't recall, rolling it into a ball, flattening it, shaping it into a cube, when the teacher finally got everyone settled and went back to the front of the classroom and made the announcement that she wanted each of us to make an animal with our clay.

I was stricken with horror. An animal? I couldn't make an animal. How do you make an animal? I had no clue. I stared at my pancake of clay in front of me on the desk, trying to think what to do first, my stomach in a knot and my heart sinking fast. I tried to complain about the assignment, tried to explain that this was just too difficult, that there was no way, but the teacher smiled in that bitchy, patronizing way they have and told me to get to it, of course you can make an animal. Just go ahead and make one, any animal will be fine, we're not here to judge.

Perfect. She couldn't see the panic I was feeling, and she was going to force me to perform for her. This is probably why to this day I look for tall, dominant women to tie me up and - wait, that's another story.

Anyway, I made a snake.

While the rest of the class was shaping legs and ears and tails and antlers, the little bastards, I took my clay and rolled it into a thin tube about a foot long. I tapered it a little at the back end, but I doubt if I had the herpetological expertise to make a hood, the characteristic mark of the cobra, or even a mouth. So I probably didn't. This is all a little blurry to me, as I am just recovering this memory now after all these years.

I had found a loophole. Legally, a snake was an animal. She didn't say "mammal," or "any animal except a snake." She had said "...any animal will be fine." So I had her, and I was off the hook.

Of course you know what happened. The snake didn't fly. I remember clearly when it was my turn to show what I had made, I held it up and said "I made a snake." Even though I knew I was in compliance with the letter of the assignment, I had a lump in my throat, because I knew the snake wasn't going to cut it. And it didn't.

Her smile turned into a sneer, then a small, derisive snicker escaped as she told me that a snake wasn't good enough. Oh, she didn't use those words, of course, but her meaning was clear enough: "You are a rotten kid. You have tried to slide by on this assignment, using a technicality. And you are not getting away with it!" In sympathy, the rest of the class laughed uproariously at me and my snake. My face burned, my vision blurred, my heart palpitated. If we could have found a hole, we would have crawled into it, me and the snake.

She forced me to make something else, and I think I made a cow, taking care to make the worst cow ever sculpted, to prove to her that I had no aptitude for this, that I was right and she was wrong, and she should never have tried to make a sculptor out of me. As soon as she saw it and half-heartedly approved, I destroyed it violently. And I never tried to make anything out of clay again.

In fact, for many years my nickname was Snake, because I always tried to slide by on technicalities, hoping some strong woman would take me in hand and - no, no. Other story. I remained The Snake until I played in a softball league with a guy named Ed who weighed about 130 pounds but whose amazing sinuous swing was good for a home run about every third time he batted. He actually wanted to be called The Snake, and by that time I was glad to shed that skin, so to speak.

I carried the trauma of that horrible first-grade play-time humiliation into adulthood, although it was effectively repressed and I seemed normal. Until one night on the living room floor at the home of some friends with young children. We were playing with some of the thousands of toys that kids seem to accumulate these days, when somebody brought out a couple of cans of Play-Doh.

And handed me a lump.

The memory of that horrible first-grade embarrassment came flooding back. The kids were making animals. Handily shaping their lumps into whatever the hell they chose. And I made the decision that I had to stand up and fight my demon, or it would torment me forever. I determined that I was going to make an animal, or die trying.

Here is what I made:
There's a bigger version up at the top of this post, for those of you who are stunned by the artistry and want a closer look, and who missed it while you were up there the first time. I made it completely from scratch, without a picture or a model to work from. I just closed my eyes and saw elephant. Don't tell me you didn't know it was an elephant. That would make you no better than the kids in my first grade class, who laughed at me and my snake.

Since I made this elephant my self-esteem has been sky high, and women frequently tie me up and have their way with me. Yes, I have learned an important lesson. And that lesson is this: Play-Doh smells real good, but it tastes like shit.