I won’t see Low at the Beer Garden. Bitch. What a dumb city. What a name. Voice messages….who want them? I’m done with them. I’M done with you Heviliah. This isn’t real? Why not? I’m an everyday person, the person you see doing whatever, and you think nothing. You don’t think, oh he has no teeth or, oh, he’s great in bed.

This is what happens to me. This is what’s going on with me. I would like to start a new career, food, wine, hotel industry, behind the scenes hospitality? I don’t know. I would like some guidance, gussied up as amazingly fortuitous or not. I will run with the bullshit if it lands the right way at the right….

People want so much from you with their voices and messages, and voiced messages. They just become contacts to me, become pustules from a bad breakout that won’t play eradicate somehow. Just send me words…. I don’t feel as obligated to…

That’s the main game, becoming it, from the nation, to the planet, to the person, to boredom boring one’s insides into an endless cup of flavorless fountain soda. Inside you can hear the cacophony packing up to leave. What’s the main game? The end of the personal, and the big time days of the oh so personalized world, that really isn’t there at all.

Paid, I’ve paid.

Just give me little words to peel away. I can peel them away, drive away, dialogue rash anecdote! And here it is… no answering, no voice to put on. Honesty and directness, that’s what everyone wants! Oh yeah. Cure! Cure for everyone! Party time for the hale ascetics!

I don’t fucking know. See this tongue? See this thumb sticking out sore, bloodied rainbow jaw, and scratch off gold ruminations gone ploood?

Swoosh; peacock, so bored, too much to avoid doing. Lost my SIM Card… Where the hell is it? I lied about the knives. Whole day’s fucked! My apartments a mess! A voice message and it’s getting darker sooner.  I was listening to Gorga’s show. I turned if off. I’m listening again.  I thought it might serve as some sort of a minor tonic, burn away some puerile inner-bitching. Summertime is the best for listening, but for quiet? I’m not sure. Some hold with summer… for quiet.

It must be Gary. I knew it was. I don’t know where the time goes either, and I hate that fucking expression.

That’s how we really decided to get together, to finally have that talk. We’re adults now. I’m talking about Ray and Gary, and me of course. The radio show, Gorga’s, we all called in one night. This night, the one you may not have realized I’m still shooting out of, like a delayed bad high.  Gary disguising his deaf Gary voice, with some other voice, talking about how he wanted to bring Rizzo’s Snorissbeam’s virginity back, because he fucked up the first time, didn’t get her all ready for his Lincoln Navigator, or whatever the truck brand name he used for his genitals at the time. Funny fuck. He was. I’ll give him that.

Gary just talking without a hint of facetious gaga brim bubble, not a shredola of call-in show sabotage glee. I will admit– his call brought my interest back into the show. It wasn’t simply because it was him, and I was sort of shocked that he was in town. This was when I truly realized that. I didn’t want to hear of the special glow in the dark backpack from some stiff’s youthful reminiscences, some youth living in the pricey Quincium district close to where I knew C  Ray was now taking up residence. I wanted to hear Gary go on and on, exiting words lewd and funny on the topic of Rizzo’s Snorissbeam’s virginity. You can’t bring that back Gary, you dumb neck breaking fuck! Ha——!

Not long after that call, that call in show, we all sought each other out. We listened to each other’s calls. Gary’s call was first. I called shortly after. That’s how it worked. That’s how it works. It’s that stupid, and seemingly fraught with something powerfully other than human or material guiding the coalescing of…

Gorga talking to Gary: “What’s her number Pete? (Gary’s bullshit name) Shall we give her a call, and see if we can connect you again? We can’t bring back Rizzo’s virginity, but we could send you guys to the mall freighted with Uncle Hard Pretzel coupons. Yes? You can buy t-shirts, and everything might feel normal again between you guys. Yes? Uncle Hard coupons… It’s not every day. Was Tell us how you would do it differently? What did you do with her pants? Did you really ask to call her parents while in mid-coitus? What did you say to her mother? Did you talk to her mother? Or was it her big sister? You dirty bastard Pete. Who is this?”

Gorga kept on using Gary’s alias. She sounded more and more alarmed, something much more thrown off and angered, than some am I hoodwinked jokey edginess. When Gorga repeated who is this, I kept on saying Gary, Gare, (sounded like Glare without the L.) I kept on saying ‘glare without the L, on the floor with the radio off, computer on…  I kept saying, I forgive you, and what right do I have to say that, and shit like that. And yes, I think Gorga was not totally fooled, as evidenced at the end of that call, from what she said, the best that I can remember. I’m sure Gary called in before.  Bastard could really disguise his voice.

None of us used our real names. We sought each other out. There was a dizzying clash of feelings, emotions, anger, need for peace. It was certainly comical. We would talk about Low, and other people. I will stay away from her. I have to. The court says so. I will still occasionally listen to WDTIX.

I can do their theme song with my penny whistle. I bought Incredible Pushups to do pushups. You twist them when you’re coming up from a pushup. They rotate. I get stronger. I drew a number of animals with some green metallic paint on the black polymer surface of one of the Incredible Pushup rotating things with a very soft expensive brush. On the other one, I wrote Roman numerals. They looked like doomed buildings, my Roman Numerals. Its part of a game, a game called ‘when you notice this, when you notice that.’ You should play.

Voice mail! Who now? I don’t even pretend to have friends anymore. But I would again, and forget this game. But it’s difficult not to fondly recollect… in tranquility, the closest I’ll get to equanimity, certain emotions…

First I had to think what each animal represented. I assigned values to each one. Horse this, Rat that, understand? Perfect Pushup game, a new one all the time. I enclosed them in a lemon bright rectangle. My eye would need to focus on one of them. Whichever I focused on first, I would make a mental note, and then look askance at the other pushup rotating device, note the first Roman numeral I saw. I would do sets of fifteen or twenty. I would write down the results. I have an elaborate system devised wherein I decide if I will punish myself or reward myself for what I took in while doing the pushup set, a mean average based on my first looks.

I’ve got it down. I’ve got this game down. How do I punish myself? I’m not violent. I’m not a sore loser. I cannot countenance a cheat, a cheater.  People look at the wrong rules. They don’t listen, pay attention… I spend so much time. I don’t talk like I’m thinking now when others are around, at the learning center or a ball game.

I love music, making special meals with the radio on. I only listen to a few songs with any great passion, only a few songs make me angry. All of Cheap Trick…all of their songs scour my last nub of good will. When I found Gary’s number, one of the first things I said was: “Fuck Cheap Trick.” I called him before Ray. That was much more difficult. I turned the man into a sort of craps table, a shoe of cards, skipping slot machine, something like that. He laughed. Gary actually laughed.  We were talking! I softened, the absurdity of the call, his laugh, this enmity we were dragging around had lost its entrails.

Why should they really know me? The cheaters… I want my survivors to know me. I write a lot down. It’s time for another omelet. I’ve mastered making them. Chives are dirty, so I clean them, add part of a brick of cold cream cheese. My green and white omelet is perfect. Who doesn’t like to look at the heavy cream around the burnt silver frying pan?

A lot has to do with how hot the pan is when you pour the egg mixture. I say ‘a lot has to do,’ and I’m talking about, I mean, how the dish comes out, its texture mainly. I’m not angry all the time. I think about these things. I have a love of making food, preparing, plating it, thinking about courses, things like that. I won’t gamble anymore.  I’m getting better. I’m meeting Chinny Ray soon. I feel like I really can with a heart spared a jabbing to death by my past actions towards him. I contacted him after hearing him break down and cry on that phone call to Gorga. The pain I felt hearing him recount what happened to him in college, what he would bring back, or live over again if he had the chance, do over again. Gorga was crying. This topic, how it game up just as we all listened. It was amazing, almost enough to make an obdurate non-believer believe in something out of nature, or supernatural. I poured myself a drink, slow whiskey cold.

I knew Ray in college a little. I thought he was a wise ass. Before the whole gambling thing went down, before the game I called Chinny Ray’s Wardrobe took off beyond my wildest expectations, made a minor celebrity of me on campus. Ray tried to buddy up with me after I was attacked by Gary who went to the same college I went to in western NY. They didn’t like each other, Ray and Gary. At that time, Ray was still blithely oblivious of my game starring him of course.

Now this program…Ray, breaking down, crying…  It was not easy to stay on that phone, choking that phone like a fake spider at the end of a drunken night in a cheap rocking chair. He had no idea yet, Ray had no idea about how so many students, even some faculty members gambled on what items of clothing he would be wearing on a given day (including accessories for supplemental points towards cash reward.)

So we buddied up sort of. All my games, the betting, those white cards we distributed, pocketing cash, every article of clothing of Chinny Ray’s wafted along in my head, (not many to count) making me so sick. The English teacher who always bet the same: tight stone colored chinos with drab olive sweater and those cheap brown sneakers, Poonies, or whatever they were called. He was smart that English teacher, and a fucking perv to. D.H Lawrence my ass.

So there you have it. I was listening to Ray. Ray’s quavering voice, all the details as Gorga’s breathing got labored on the silent other end of the phone magic totter. He wanted to bring back his years in college, his early years. The gambling we did robbed him of those years, wanting to remember even the parts where he enjoyed himself, oblivious of my game. Me, I was the leader of it. I was the main fuck, but not the only. Everyone, all those bastards who would stealthily follow him around campus, the awful, viscose penalty boot to the sack, every shitty eye on you, every joke circulating at a party. Ray might have been just sitting around in the kitchen by the Chex mix party bowl, wanting to vomit, downing light beer or grape juice and vodka or whatever. I felt sick listening. I was behind this miserable call, this heart desiccating tale. He wanted to bring back those years, no one gambling on his clothing. No hidden cameras by his dorm room, no privacy eviscerated, turned into ethereal diarrhea, or whatever you want to name it, Gorga getting teary in vox.

Everyone was dressed neatly. They would come. We would meet. There would be a katrillion scattered episodes of menial or otherwise— personal Armageddon’s going as I waited. Everyone gets a free liter of Zero Spirit Shock soda to drink and toss. Everyone would be predigested, would become their experience. All resistance absorbed, used to keep the awful brittle but bruising order of things up. I kept writing sentences that started “Everyone…” I stopped. I stared at people passing by. Some of whom might be greater friends to me than any I might imagine without uttering a single word. Passing them, they pass you, they are still, and you are, together but not together. The way things really work the mechanics of how things that don’t work—operate.

Ding Dong. I was still getting dressed in my house in my head as I dozed into the runner of news squirting itself into wraparound dross under some somnolent interview. A myriad of outfits were slung over various chairs in the large basement where I store my wine, ride my garage sale exercise bike, peek at old costumes I use to wear back in Chittenango time, stuffed in boxes. I went with a vintage Gitman Bros sky blue button up shirt and a pair of stylish brown suspenders with a very fine set of red pinstripes on the back lower portion of the legs.

I was dressed in a more self consciously elaborate way.  I want to be stylish but not saliently so, as many men do at perhaps a certain point in their life, or on a given occasion. It is a hang up I still have now and then, years after I discovered that strangers and friends were betting on what I would wear every morning. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and I draw a picture called ‘Chinny Ray’s Revenge.’ This was an exercise suggested by my therapist, and had proven successful.

I had a reputation for not having much style, and for my wardrobe to consist of a few generic staples, and little in the way of accessories.  Betting on my exact outfit with the paucity of its possible constituent parts so pointedly emphasized by a nonchalant sharp, would lead a gambler into a dangerously cocky faith in ‘winning.’  There’s nothing more American than the scene of a confidence man moving from city to city, awakening festival, to somnolent gathering of those looking to cheat the world, potion eyes stuffed with a crystal blue flagon, leaky tent throats unable to get cleared in time.

The game would only occasionally result in a partial victory most of the time. Such partial victory payouts or belief in future payouts were enough to keep the sucker stream felicitously flowing. Sound familiar? Singing: the micro, the macro, the fed, the fen roll, the magic of compound interest, the NGO, the Paper View, Dollar Dreams or Less Canopy blowing like a sail on evaporating seas, the two day sale, the mucky pup state’s dangling handlers and the whole damn paper empire… Sam Forskrenn knew this better than anyone. He made a lot of money off my misery. I was going to think of it, so I tried to think of it in a cold disinterested way, to learn what it was about, to disinfect myself from its refueling sting.

a story most blowhards on the radio (never mind most of TV land) on the so called left of right do not speak about because they know they champion the same slime that they dramatically vilify… All tax payers and citizens in general, should be outraged instead of yammering on about individuals or political parties.

October 15, 2009 How the Bankers Bought Washington Our Cheap Politicians By ANDREW COCKBURN Smart investors have certainly had plenty of opportunity to make money lately. Gold is up twenty percent. Oil has doubled. The Dow roars through 10,000. But one investment has far, far, outperformed all others in epic returns: politics. Wall Street balance sheets make this very clear. Last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, major banks and other financial institutions in receipt of $295 billion in TARP money pumped $114 million into Washington in lobbying and campaign contributions. As a stand-alone figure, $114 million sounds like a lot. Set against the torrent of cash flowing in the opposite direction, it is minimal. At 258,449 percent it has been called “the single best investment in history.” Our elected representatives are giving it away. No one should be surprised at the bankers’ dominance of Washington. They even boast about it. Hailing a further emasculation of the powers of the proposed Consumer Finance Protection Agency, the American Bankers’ Association recently issued a press release commending lawmakers for removing “the unworkable requirement that communications with consumers be ‘reasonable.’” Keeping banker-consumer communications unreasonable has been only part of the labors of the House Committee on Financial Services, chaired by Barney Frank. Yet the sums ladled into members’ campaign coffers are by no means proportionate to their actions. Pushing for a change in the so called ‘mark to market’ accounting rule earlier this year, a coalition of financial industry PACS, according to the Wall Street Journal, contributed a total of $286,000 to committee members. Various members then communicated their mounting dissatisfaction with the rule to the accounting standards board which, coincidentally or not, decreed the rule be changed. The decision did wonders for Wall Street balance sheets. Wells Fargo’s capital officially soared by $4.4 billion, while Citigroup boosted its reported earnings by $413 million in the first quarter of ’09. Yet Melissa Bean, D-Ill, who got the most money from the coalition of any committee member, garnered a mere $20,000 toward her next campaign. Chairman Frank was apparently satisfied with $8,500. To be sure, it’s not just the financial industry that knows how to get the most out of a dollar on Capitol Hill. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, corporations angling for earmarks in this years Pentagon budget spread $1.25 million among the 18 members of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. That’s only $69,000 per member — and these are Senators! — who nonetheless approved $762.3 million worth of earmarks sought by these same corporations. Officials in other countries have a greater sense of self worth, as U.S. corporations doing business internationally surely know. Just this year, the Haliburton Corporation admitted to paying $180 million to Nigerian officials in connection with the Bonny River liquefied natural gas terminal project. Greece has been recently convulsed by revelations of the hundred million euros in bribes allegedly lavished on their elected politicians by the German Siemens corporation. Just a generation ago, our own legislators displayed a more robust attitude to those seeking favor. In his instructive memoir “Wheeling and Dealing – Confessions of a Capitol Hill Operator,” former Senate aide Bobby Baker recounts his efforts in collecting the half million dollars in cash demanded by Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma from the Savings and Loan industry in return for a favorable legislative adjustment. And that was in the 1950s, when a dollar was still worth something. The S&L representatives, records Baker, complained bitterly, paid most of the sum demanded, and duly got their reward. Pending concrete revelations about contemporary Kerrs in House or Senate, we have to assume that nowadays campaign contributions are as reported and cited here. Therefore, given the evident selflessness or timidity of today’s lawmakers, we might venture a modest proposal: political contributions should be taxed — at source. Given the current state of the exchequer, a rate of one thousand percent would not be out of order. Thus the $1000 contributed by the Mortgage Bankers Association to Congresswoman Bean in pursuit of that bountiful accounting rule change could yield a cool million for the taxpayer. Though leaving several trillion to go, it would be a start. If possible, this tariff should be retroactive, so we could collect on the donations inevitably flowing to the lawmakers charged with deliberating this necessary measure. It’s time the rest of us got in on the act. Andrew Cockburn is the co-producer of the 2009 documentary American Casino. He can be reached at: amcockburn@gmail.com

 

I’m a big dick! Did you hear me? A big messy, fussy, stale dick with lot’s of lucre. I fucking own the media (but why should that matter, it’s a matter of ‘free speech. I bought my political position, and therefore can be more ‘honest’ than other politicians, because I don’t ‘need’ the money. Have you heard this oh-so-compelling argument before? I must insist on a ‘left-wing’ conspiracy, dark persecuting red toga draped Trotskyites visit me at night and play Spanish Civil War songs in my ear to taunt me. I must lay the blame on these wicked politically motivated foes as opposed to my obvious and myriad crimes, coupled as it is with an acute disgust that many may possibly have (not under the corporatist haze of distractions,) with my nations history of ‘funny-business’ regarding money and politics— to put it mildly. God! I’m like fucking AIG insurance, or one of these persecuted and harrowed Investment banks under-siege by the socialists that want to plug up the good times, and force everyone to stop having sex, and take up community work, or compulsory hammer and sickle crocheting, (who are only flanked by former Wall-Street and financial company ‘gurus’ and top dogs for looks, and to deceive the weak eyes of the the business elites of the world who are in fact so fooled. You see, they really take orders from bearded Marxists on radical college campuses eating blueberry flax and Engels diarrhea goulash, somewhere in the Pacific North West. Yeah, it’s me talking, Silvio fucking B, hooker whispering sweetheart of the hard working ‘finance’ north, teenage girl ogling so-called scum-bag of the corporatist-clown-euro-right, Berlusconi the harlequin! Hello dears!

For those who have not followed along; I have posted 2 other excerpts of a recent story that hopes to see itself in a published collection of short work. The story is called ‘The Coroners Squirting Flower.’ Here is the third excerpt.

I should be doing my Incredible Pushups right now. I should be listening to WDTIX Norohosquet with all my windows open, combing my hair in the breeze with all my posters keeping me company.  Most of them are signed. I wouldn’t sell them. I don’t get that. Why? Money? Just look at all these! Touch them. My god; every story, they have one. It wasn’t just…ring it up, sealed, and on to the next thing. Stories, if you can make people feel that they can insert themselves, drive the last leg, crash in front of yours almost unscathed, give you time of day, they give it to you.  I’m trying anything, therapy is sort of working.

I should move back to Watkins Glenn, back to New York. Maybe Crystal Dave is still painting pictures of Elvira after the accident, and making up card games that only we know how to master. Crystal Dave and Sam, what a pair we were! Brunko junkies! Everything seemed so much sweeter back then, probably because I didn’t need or want much at all, or thought I couldn’t help but notice how everything works, how everything doesn’t work…that smug –callous force filed.  I am alone, then–now, everyone. I know, sweet sunset hand walking alone, alone. That’s fine. I’m ok. I’m not upset. Look, I’m smiling here.

I’m living alone now. I use to have a roommate, a girl friend, a mother, a neighbor who used the word ‘nigh’ too often.  If it was getting dark (for example,) he would say, well nigh sunset. I hated that, but would bet with others, other neighbors, when he would say it, the frequency, things like that. Put some dollars together. Here that fucking word, grab my pen, or pocket recorder, keep tabs. I got really into statistics. That’s how it got started, the gambling games, in its budding adolescent stage.  I was no ordinary gambler. It really wasn’t so much about the money.

I was most famous for betting on the clothing worn by a Chinese kid I went to college with.  There were only a few items of clothing he would wear. His roommate said his clothing consisted of a handful of generic staple items, and it became fun and easy to bet on what the exact assemblage of these items would be, right down to the occasional scarf or hat, or footwear. It started as a joke, something to bet on in Helyar hall as the turdy little cliques spiraled into one another, something amusing to bet on that could draw on most people’s tendencies to want to annihilate other people’s right to privacy, feed that need to be ‘energized’ by others drawbacks, or humiliation.

Look at all the shows on TV now, look at all the boost-drinks in their bullet like containers. This was before all that, but it was there to be tapped anyway, on a personal level. Look at all this need to be jilted and stacked with the love of viewing, witnessing the failure of others. Bet on it America…

But I won’t go into that game about C. Ray just now.  He was so self-conscious, more than the average kid that age is. I should be listening to WDTIX, maybe open this one window in my kitchen, the one with a screen with a gash in it. Fucking black bored flies and this gash, and this wind…and they all get in. You never know, maybe Chin’s listening. They play a lot of stuff he listed to, even back then. I know about this shit. I bugged the room. I had all sorts of ways of getting listening devices in there. I knew all the RD’s and they would bet on my games. So I knew what Ray listened to.

I won’t listen to Low’s show. I’ve had it with her and her fancy exile exotica shit. It’s been over a year since we were together, but we never did that, got really close in that potentially very close way, but no. I listen to the station for her, but not just for her.  I saw her picture on WDTIX’s website, combed her bloggy with my right index finger rolling down to see every word, lit up. I Snogged Searched for her Pickys on every elevated glumble sit at the pooter, just one picture please, someone flick-flick for my flick flicks…..find her, some time, some party, pissy post it, some event, a BBQ? Give me her face, give me her face with BBQ on it, share, share, it’s about sharing you fucks….

It’s’ summer now, and now, and keep on coming, and ending. Low could have won. Both of us might have won together. I had just the thing, the right rules, nothing so stringent. It was a great game, better than Chinny Ray’s Wardrobe, the game I kept secret with the Chinese kid in college, selling little white cards with certain clothing items belonging to this kid to tick off, sections, made a lot of money, had to take pictures of the kid clandestinely as he walked out of his room, reveal what he wore at a certain time in a certain place. It got more sophisticated. A lot of people bet. It was hush. I kept it very hushed up. It grew in popularity, the thing to do. The technology wasn’t all there back then, it was not cheap. I made good cash. I got pretty popular. I got some pants down because of my rep for that. I remember my friend Hammy telling me, someone wants Sam’s lovin, and I was ready for it. I started Chinny Ray’s Wardrobe.

It got crazy. The way people would follow C. Ray around campus. He didn’t go to many parties, and people were pretty decent about keeping this shit quiet (decent? Well no but…), but how did he not catch on? I’m laughing over it. Eventually, word got out, but school was over, was just about over, he left, transferred… I almost really fucked him up. He thought I was up to something that I wasn’t up to, but didn’t know what I was really up to. I almost had to, but didn’t. But it wasn’t Chinny that reported my actions; it was someone profiting on the game, Mumbly Necks. Gary, this guy Gary… He was a fucking rat, a piece of shit. What he did really pissed me off.

I needed to get away from DJ Low. That’s what I called her. I don’t do pills. I only speak English.  It’s fine. I’m ok with it. I really only called into Gorga’s Irascible Monday show recently. I’m talking call in show now. This is/was my favorite call in show of all time. I became obsessed, well-nigh, fuck me!  Love/Hate… God, I torture myself. Living alone works, and I’m not obsessed with anything. I’m getting better, seeing someone. We all need someone to really listen to us. Now-a-these-days… come on!  You know it’s just all bullshit, relations, what passes, unless it dates from an earlier time or something like that… I mean, it’s getting worse, flat, everything becoming that way, the more listlessly rolled over by rickety moments of blithe happy-waddle, the more you won’t know woe where it helps, where it moves you through shit, and you get a damn chance to scrape bottom, to know how to be king of that whipping bottom… is how you….

I’m not a smart ass. I spend a lot of time alone, and what else should I do? I should probably sculpt something, and then, I don’t know what. A lot of smart ones knew real woe, and they went after it, not to flagellate themselves with it like bonko vipers gone dafty-doo, and there’s more than one way, much more…and now-a-these-days…not so bad. I’m getting off my ass in a minute.

My speaker wires are all fucked about. They are not working properly, probably sabotaged, cleaning people probably did it. But who hires them? I can’t concentrate.  My apartment’s a drag. If I see something out of place, can’t really concentrate then. Have to get on this and that, before I can settle down to this and that. Delphi Two is a drag. It’s a city I wish could be rolled off into a poster, chucked in the back of a truck. I’ll smoke this joint, and get lost listening to a few songs on WDTIX, or maybe I’ll put on a record, as I prefer to do during dinner. Keep the fucking poot off.

All these cities, most, becoming just awful movie sets, you wish you could just wheel them off into the end of the day, no one’s looking. Bye city, extreme western cruel unthinking kindness, bye! Nice to see ya….Hi’ya! Go, leave now, take off your cloudy face, your Mayor welcome signs, spew yourself over the precipice where the dumb cartoons play chicken with tawdry devils in drag.

But I do love the main library of Delphi Two. It’s always beautiful. It never mocks, or makes you think it runs away late at night with its cold cream, candy bars and condoms tucked into its carpet bag. City, that I live in, do you sprout stout heavy library legs and run away from you’re population when everyone is distracted, asleep in whatever way? There’s a statue of Gillian Trudeau giving the finger to a jackbooted thug representing the Klacka Clan of our frontier era. I’m a Scoloneian, and that still means something to me, certain things to be proud of and ashamed of, just like myself. I’m not crazy. I don’t care. People will try to hijack what something like Scoloneian is supposed to be all about. Let them. I won’t listen, and no one will make me. It means what it means to me and that’s it.

Proud Gillian Trudeau done in bronze, not dwarfed into a stiffening pusillanimity by its scale or execution, its energy unbitten by its environs, but rather strengthened. I love it. I like sculptures a lot. It’s one of those things I think about a lot, and need to find ways to talking about it more elaborately with myself and others. Trudeau can’t be dicked into anyone’s slimy ideological narrative graft.

This statue sits off on the east side entrance. That’s where I snack, and take notes. I take a lot of notes. I’m staring at them now.  There are note takers that come around the same time. I won’t talk to them. But many of them are with me. I feel them with me. I bite into my white nectarine, clean my chin.

I saw Gary at the main library once. First, initially, when I saw him; I just wanted to throttle that neck breaking devil.  Had he followed me to Delphi Two? Impossible! Possible> what was his game? Was this his game? Were people betting on me without me knowing, betting on some ordinary thing I did everyday…looking in on me, following me?

Gary. Curd freezing dick, he cheated. He placed a camera or something in Ray’s new room. Inside the fucking room, audio is an advantage, but a fucking camera. That sonofabitch knew. He knew what he Ray would be wearing. I’m not the only one who knew he was cheating. Taciturn Swede, wheedling bumpko…! The whistle was blown. Gary cheated me out of a lot of money. He played it smart, with his deaf bullshit. It wasn’t just about money. I know I’ve said that before about other things. This is all serious, not some squirting flower trick raised from the dead pocket of tired jokes. I’m not throwing a bucket of bloody chicken in your family’s face, as they open the door with benign expectations or something, looking for a fucking tip. This is not the sort of thing I do, what I’m gunning for. Expectorating gods and their fucking hankies all swinging in the air….

I hadn’t forgotten about Gary. No way. I did not approach him that first sighting at my favorite entrance to Delphi 2’s main library.  It’s over. There had to be peace. I’m not a man who needs vengeance, who is a lifetime enemy. I don’t think I am.  My rocks don’t get off on that sort of thing now.   That’s not to say that what Gary did isn’t hard-etched and sliming up my mind. Things are never so easy, so clear, so bullshitless and clear, so this and that and stop and go, and new and end, and hi you dumb fuck… friends?

Gary says he saw me at the Leg Up with his girlfriend. I didn’t even know he was in town when he told me this. I suspected he was. I thought I suspected he was now, after he told me he saw me getting shit faced at Leg Up. He said he was calling me, and I looked at him an ignored him. I have a hard time understanding him. I detected his voice as he called Gorga’s show though. I know he can disguise his voice pretty well, despite his hearing problem. He really fucked me, got me expelled, eventually. I thought we would…

I’m calling Gorga’s show. I would eventually. The topic is what you would bring back that has been lost. The show is an hour long. I had to tell Gorga what I would bring back. I waited and I waited, my apartment was getting sick in front of me, its fixtures and furniture accumulating a born again pallor, a lopsided heaviness, its vistas shorn even of the few charming portions of its insipid and squalor fuck-all.   I waited. My black phone, my heavy round fists, my irritated red leg… born in New York State, my leg, off the ottoman, TOOT, on the Ottoman.  I can’t stand this city. I’m not usually so angry… anymore.

People called in. I waited for someone to pick up. There was no busy signal, just interminable ringing. My number’s blocked. God damn it do I hate those sonofabitch screeners. It’s not a joke to me. I need to speak out. I’m going to record myself. I recorded myself.  I’m listening on the phone to Gorga’s show, very still with heavy black phone, worse window in my house, not quite staring at anything, or looking at anything, as in most of the time, and that’s also bumming me out, listening to this:

Bring back The Battle of the Network Stars. That TV show. Remember The Chips guys Gorga, and Threes Company, that tug of war with the delicious mud in the middle at the end of the program? (Laughs, recognition, laughs) All the stars tugging the others into the mud at the end, the final part… All those shows, sometime in the 1970’s and 80’s….Howard C, and Lynda Davis, and Michael J. Fox! Remember! Bring that back! And do you remember the cartoon spinoff, ‘The Laff Olympics,’ what else! Ha. (Bleeps)

Gorga was enjoying herself. The calls were all fairly awful, but she was in great spirits, and that kept me in my mind, in my spot of mind where everything is allowed, there is no shame dungeon to be led to. I was ready to call in. I had heard enough  people talking about what they would like to bring back which was now lost, irredeemably lost…. the regional fast food hamburger that could never be found again, and the genuine poignancy of Polaroid not around to make their unique product anymore, no one buying the technology, and putting it back on market again. The callers kept calling in.  It was all light hearted, not so terribly really. I was ready to call.

Games usually make me angry, ever since I was a kid. They overjoyed me to.  Losing itself did not make me so angry. That I can handle no matter what anyone says. It’s the cheaters. They don’t even know my games, the ones I make up all the time in the middle of the game, my game, but they learn how to cheat first. There cheating on games they don’t know about yet! Fuck if they don’t. I’ve always enjoyed playing a variety of games that I have made up. I’ve been doing this since I was just a shoot in the shade of itinerant papas. All my fathers were wandering trees. My Mama wouldn’t let me cheat. She would get angry with me. I was always a sore loser. That’s bullshit! I change significantly when I play my games.

That’s the story. That becomes my story. No, not anymore, I won’t. I don’t know how. Or… how do you play? Then they cheat. They cheat me. I don’t want money from winning my games. The idea is abhorrent to me if understood as the prime goal. I don’t need to win. But people should play the way these games were designed to be played, the way I designed them. Sometimes the games are inside. I don’t need any dice. I’ve studied the classics. I’ve read the Roman emperor Claudius’s guide for playing dice. I’m a tutor at a learning center for adults. That’s my job, all sorts of subjects I’m good at. This is what I’m thinking about as I hold the line, listening to some of the callers call in Gorga’s show.

I did well in college. I taught at a few smaller universities in Western, NY. I was expelled from a university in that same region. Expelled!  It was towards the end of my second year. I mentioned this before. It was Gary the neck breakers doing. I was sputum in there fucking mouths, or foul air bellowed out from the cracked mouth of a pathetic institution. That’s how I was treated.

Waiting to hear the next call, Gorga laughing, always laughing, low, and harmless laughing— erotic, but simple, simple and erotic. I sit by the radio. My radio wants to drag me to the floor and make me roll with it, taunting me, pulling at me. I sit by my computer. My computer wants to teach me a lesson. My computer wants to take away my fluids. My fluids, my fluids want to hijack my veins and demand a ransom from my heart. My heart, my heart wants to jump inside my veins with its antiquated fighter pilot leather hat all bloody and beating and broke, and sail away to I don’t fucking know where. I can’t think straight. I can feel’s Gorga’s mouth on mine. I know it’s kind of crazy. But I can feel it. MMM. I look at screens, at little words announcing that something is new, new, old, respond, respond to it.

I’m no speed dial whore, but I’ve written songs about them. The speed dial strumpets won’t let me aerate my call in fix. Then the call begins This would be the call that would bring us back together again, Gary, Ray, me. It was Gary on the line. As I mentioned, he could disguise his voice amazingly, considering. I knew it was him. So I listened.