An Angry Rant. Or, Business as Usual

The state of American politics is a ragged mess of greed and ideology.  What would one expect from a two-party system?  We live in an age were protesting and the want for change is snickered at by the majority.  Or, if we don’t snicker at it, we just say, “Kudos” from the couch.  We’ve grown fat and comfortable with the current state of being.

 

You’re kidding yourself if you believe this democracy works.  Americans have the right to protest.  And we also have the right to believe that those little punks have the right to get maced in the face.  But, dammit, your reasons have to make sense for believing that.

 

With Power comes great responsibility.  With Freedom comes great ignorance.

 

We should strike out that everyone is equal.  Even equality has a price.  You cannot say with straight face that a child born to poor parents in Mississippi has the same chance as a child born to rich parents in Malibu.  There are so many factors in play that are for and against each child.  This is a fundamental rule in Capitalism.  If there were a such thing as Equality, we’d be those dreaded pinko commies.

 

Commie.  It’s been a curse word since the McCarthy era.  That was an era of pure science-fiction transposed into reality.  Poor Bertolt Brecht.  He escaped Nazi Germany, because they too were persecuting the Communists.  He did this and came to America, where he too was persecuted for the same damn thing.  He wasn’t alone.  Writers, actors, directors, union workers, average joes, etc., etc. were put on trial.  All it took to ruin your life in this period was possession of anything that might be considered Anti-American.

 

Dalton Trumbo, an American patriot, WWII vet, and writer, along with some friends was ratted out.  Who was the rat-fink that ratted him and others out?  Ronald Reagan and his cronies, all cut from the same cloth of Holier-than-thou brown-nosers.  Where was Freedom, the pride of America, then?  It was being used as toilet paper by those who swore they were protecting it.

 

Years earlier, we put Japanese Americans in concentration camps.  What gave us the right to do that?  The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.  And they look different from us.  How many German Americans or Italian Americans did we put into the same type of camp just because of their heritage?  None or damn near close to it.  Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer.  He even gave the Luftwaffe a few pointers and personally met with Hitler.  And now he’s a goddamn American Hero.  We didn’t lock him up and look the other way while people broke into his house and stole all that he had.

 

One would think that in the 50 or 60 years since these things occurred that we have changed.  Sadly, we have not.  We’ve transplanted our suspicions from one ethnic group to another.  Granted commie is still a curse word, but we’ve added “liberal” and “conservative” to the list.  And everyone still thinks Southerners are some sort of backwood Bible-thumpers.  That much hasn’t changed.  But I’ll tell you, I’ve heard the term “nigger” tossed around a Hell of a lot more in Ohio than I ever did in Tennessee.  Take that as you will.

 

We are looking at ourselves, our past, and our government through rose-colored glasses.

 

No names in the following section have been altered to protect the innocent.  That’s life.

 

A friend of mine posted a link, which compared Obama’s most recent State of the Union Address to previous ones.  It outlined how he has re-used certain sections from old speeches.  No arguing with that.  My comment to her link was this:

The thing is, these things are still problems that need to be dealt with. We hear these words and 20 minutes later we are wondering what other kind of shit Snooki is getting into. If these problems were dealt with, we wouldn’t have to hear it again. I do the same with my students. You repeat your ass off, because they didn’t get it the first 30 times you say something. Our government doesn’t work together nor does it want to. Hence, our lower tax rating. If Obama is a failure as a president, it is only because he wanted everyone to work together and find solutions. Which in my book still makes him a better president than Nixon and Reagan and Johnson. And Bush 1&2.

To which one Jordan Michael Iwanyszyn replied:

Crazy talk! Reagan was our best President in at least the last half-century!

I could have said some pretty nasty things here.  Instead, I just refered to Reagan’s love of Jelly Beans.  No matter how much he and I share a love for Jelly Beans, I will never think of him as anything but a rat-fink and puppet of the rich.  A silver-screen cowboy.

 

Mr. Iwanyszyn further replied:

How moronic a statement! I can already tell from your kind of talk in the previous posting that you are not a conservative Dylan. Therefore, you wouldn’t get any sense out of anything I would say. If you think Obama would be a great President if he wasn’t “hindered” by Republicans, then you really don’t know just how radical this guy is. Thank God he is being hindered. It is the greatest thing that could happen right now in Washington.

Well, Hell no, I’m not a conservative, but my main question is this: Where did he get the quoted “hindered” from me?  And when did I say Obama was a great president?  I started to wonder if the past 7 years of drinking has finally destroyed by brain.  Were my eyes seeing things that my fingers didn’t type?  I started to sweat.  Losing your mind is a scary thing.

 

But I wasn’t losing my mind.  I was just dealing with an illiterate, who also happened to be a bi-partisan, opinionated Republican.  This isn’t an unique occurence with only Republicans; you find the same type of scum with the Democrats, too.

 

Feeling relieved that I wasn’t losing my mind and I could go out for beer tonight, I replied:

Jordan, I can tell you probably are a tad bit illiterate from reading your post. Did I say he was being hindered by Republicans? Are are you just assuming this because of the fact I slandered your golden bull Reagan? No, go back through and re-read it. If you’ve graduated high school you should be able to deduct from it, that I said it is both parties.

 

I’m not very couth.  I have angry fits at times.  These are uncontrollable.  And I won’t apologize for idiocy.

 

You don’t have to worry about this being a one-sided fight.  An equally opinionated and angered individual, Robert Hawkins, had this to say:

I am on Jordan’s side of this debate look he blew us full of hot air during his inaugural and now he repeated the same dang thing…. He believed in his heart that America is more revered now than ever before? WTF kind of statement is that we are a joke because we back down we lost our resolve and he is the one who pulled back on the reigns Dylan, kid I am sorry you feel that deranged and are in love with BO… but seriously do a fact check the man said GM is the top automobile maker…. get this not just in America…. but the world….. LMAO how can he ask us to believe that…… the Obamasiah has struck ignorance and stupidity into his followers…. it is a sad sad sad joke…..

Once again, I had wonder, what in God’s name were these two people reading?  When and where was this debate?  So I had to ask:

 I hate to sound mean, but do you guys read? As in can you read? You instantly assume, because I said a few things that I’m crazed about Obama, but I didn’t vote for Obama. It’s called being objective. While you are obviously subjective. And has any president lived up to their campaign or inaugural address?

Man, my liberal friends are going to think less of me for saying that.  But, it is the truth.  I didn’t vote for Obama.  Although, I didn’t vote for the idiot who picked Palin to be his running mate, either.  I simply forgot to apply for my absentee ballot.

 

Mr. Iwanyszyn once again:

Dylan, I like how you have never even met me before and yet you know all about me. Yes, I did graduate high school and college, thank you very much. Maybe if you’ll read my posts you can see my grammar, spelling and large selection of words chosen and see that I am not illiterate, lol! You sure do like to quickly degrade the conversation to personal attacks. It is that kind of mentality that leads to a lot of our division out there. To call Reagan our “golden bull” it outrageous as well, as my one and only Lord is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However, to put Reagan in the same boat as Johnson (an utter failure) and Nixon is pretty bizarre. Carter is most definitely on that list though, and I will most certainly count Obama on that list.

You didn’t say it, but I deducted that you were inferring that through this statement you made: ” If Obama is a failure as a president, it is only because he wanted everyone to work together and find solutions.” Obama only wants to work together with those who agree with his radical positions. His failure is that his radical ideology and agenda is destructive to our country, and I don’t need to be subjective about that. I never said you were crazed about the guy, but when someone posts positive stuff about him and attacks Reagan, who was a successful President by a lot of standards, and still a pretty popular White House occupant with the American public, well then I desire to throw in my two-cents worth if I have the time.

It would take to long to list all the things Reagan did that made him a horrible president.  So, read this: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/opinion/21krugman.html

 

Yes, I was making personal attacks.  But, stupidity has to be cornered and have a light shined in its face.  Then someone like Zach Withers comes along and actually read what everyone was saying:

 

I have to agree with Dylan. He is absolutely right. It’s not about which party he is, but what kind of president the person has been. Our nation is in such a mess and not because of Obama, but because of a D.C. in general. We’re fighting each other,. when we should be grouping together and saving our future. Unfortunately, we are not, and we will be our own final death to the future and prosperity we could have strived for.

* and the prosperty

Me:

Zach, THANK FUCKING GOD! A reasonable person!

Mr. I.:

 Yes Zach, there is a lot of fighting going on, and the simple reason why is because we are in a clash of cultures. Decades ago, a lot of the issues we are fighting about were widely agreed upon. Now, there is a radical fringe rising up in recent decades looking to shred the Constitution, spend into oblivion, allow the killing of unborn children, have centralized control of everything, and silence every mention of God in the public square. These folks are the leftists. Opposing them are the folks who hold the same traditional view that the majority does, and as I mentioned, hold the views that society has mostly held for centuries. These are the conservatives. These folks elect the folks that go to Washington on their behalf, and they continue that culture war up there. As long as we are in this situation, which is going to be for a very long time, there will be fighting in Washington. Just part of life and part of politics. As a conservative myself and understanding political warfare and spiritual battles, I don’t have an issue with the fighting as much I do with my fellow conservatives backing down to these left-wing traditional principle destroyers ‎….and I am proud to not be illiterate, but that is far a lesser wrong than cursing the Creator anyday.

Me:

 ‎”That is far a lesser wrong than cursing the Creator anyday.” Your opinion. And people have the wrong assumption of about illiteracy, it does not mean that you can’t read; it means that you don’t fully understand what the author of the text meant by their text. Therefore, we can make the argument against the other part of your statement.

Robert reared his head once again to provide us with this garbled mis-information created by right-wing nut jobs:

 

How does one man rack up more debt in 3 years than from George Washington through Clinton? Oh yeah.by bailing out banks businesses and making sure everyone is entitled to something….. Sometimes ya just have to say no tought love…. Liberalism is a disease…… Its hard to believe now a days Liberals are socialists and republicans are more liberal than ever the shift has seriously made me sick…. Its not about pointing the finger its about Right and Wrong…. Not Right and Left….

You know what?  Screw these geeks.  This line of thinking is exactly what is wrong with America, destroying it.  Or maybe it has already been destroyed and we are cuddling the corpse of the American Dream.  As Kurtz said in Heart of Darkness, “The horror!  The horror!”

Your guest writer,

Dr. Dylan L. Martin

No Fears, It is Just a Cause of Claustrophobia

 ”Football Season Is Over” by Hunter S. Thompson

“No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.”

There’s a law.  This law states I have to be sad or unlucky if someone else is happy or lucky.  I don’t question it.  It makes me a bit happy, though.  Paradox.

I got lonely and the tantrum (aka tv) wasn’t being  good company.  So, I got redressed and decided to shave again.  I might have shaved off my sideburns if I hadn’t already.  It was one of those moods that calls for shaving off sideburns.

Stepping outside I wondered if a light was left on somewhere.  This kind of light was unusual at around midnight.  It was the moon.  The core of the light was little craters and mountains.  Stretching from these little dots were streams of light making an exquisite white ring lined with purple mist.  Goddamn was I lonely.

I pulled my jacket in closer and tightened my scarf.  I walked around the street trying to make smoke rings with my breath.  No such luck.  Only fog came out as if my mouth was an exhaust pipe.

So that’s how I got here.  12.45 am in my office.

I hug  the thought of you, where ever you are, with whomever you are with, because I miss you, missing sock.

Setting Me Up. Or: Bad Choices and Then Some.

“Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.” ― Hunter S. Thompson

‎”If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”– Desmond Tutu

“Just like a broken heart is a reminder that someone loved someone else too much, a hangover is a reminder that there was too much fun had by someone in the company of someone else.” –D.L. Martin

***

For Lady Person.

***

Welcome to America.  It is a country of great wealth spent by the few made possible by the majority.  We are Capitalism at its finest.  Come see our failing industry and growing police state.

***

I live in a land, where the poor grow poorer and the wealthy are given tax cuts.  If you are dirty, stinking rich here, expect your own TV show after you’ve made a porn video.  If you happen to not fall under that category, I hope you like eating shit and dying.  That is what’s expected of you.  Eat shit, feel lucky you have shit to eat, be quiet, and die out of the riches’ sights.

We put the loan sharks out of business and replaced them with credit card companies and banks.

Here is a country that worries about the sanctity of marriage and cream our best pants over celebrities spending millions upon millions of dollars on their wedding day. . . only to divorce a month later.  Hell, we’ll even cream ourselves over other countries’ royal family members getting married.  We are not picky.

This country of mine, the only one I got, has forgotten that we are a proud nation of people descended from intellects, thinkers, and people willing to over throw the government at a moment’s notice.

We thought, we’ve all been living dreams and parties that the Nazis would have thrown if they won the war.  Instead we woke up to the nasty realization of the horrid hangover that the Germans themselves woke up to in 1945.  We have seen the high waters of good times … and all we have left is the water stains on the wall.

***

After the events of UC-Davis, I’ve finally realized common decency is extinct.  Linda Katehi, the university’s chancellor, has recently brewed up a witch hunt to cover her own ass after calling the cops on her own students for trespassing on the college’s private property.  The same property the students paid tuition to be on.  Why is she doing this?  Simple. . . wealthy alumni have decided to withhold money.  That’s the thing with this country.  If you want anything done, threaten people with taking money away from them. . . Then see what tune they sing.

***

I’d like to consider myself a Tennessean from California living in Ohio.  In all honesty, I’m a mumbler with a fondness of hats and having a new address every couple of months.  And the only life lessons I have learned from having all these hats and new addresses are this: 1) If times get rough, check yourself into a mental institute.  You’ll have a bed, three squares a day, and all the company you will ever need.  And 2) the further away you get, the closer to home you’ll be.

***

Two main features keeping this town from becoming a booming metropolis are the lack of good looking singles and a decent Mexican restaurant.  Now these might not seem to be your average notions of pillars of any society, but what the hell, the ones we’ve set into motion aren’t doing so well either.

As Americans, we’ve been given the right to assemble and speak our minds.  Then the government save its own ass by letting it be known that there is a loop hole… We can assemble and protest only as long as it isn’t on private property.  But what isn’t private property these days.  Public parks are private.

This has put our society in a sate of fear.  How do people live in such a state?  By watching television and speaking of our own fears in a darken room.  Our only place of freedom remaining is our front porch swing.  No one has the dreams and ideals of the 60s and 70s anymore.  We learned our place when the military shot 4 protesters on a college campus in May of 71.  Have we learned our lesson, though?  Yes and cookie cutter conservatives dangle it in front of us as a warning for future generations.

That warning is this:  Accept your place and what society has given you, or we have the means to take all that away!

***

Ich stehe im Regen und warte auf dich.
Ich warte im Regen und steh’ auf dich.

This is your reporter on the daily banal saying Good Night, Happy Holidays, and Love as always,

Kurt Doonesbury

Halte ich dich für stärker als du bist? (2011 ed).

 your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

–Charles Bukowski

Jesus Christ.  What has it been?  Months? Mere life times?

A life time, it seems to me, has floated right on past waving its dainty hands at me.  I still wear my hats.  I still swear like a sailor.  I still drink way more than is required of anyone to drink.  I still dream of piano lessons.

Those qualities I will never be happy to see go.

The Goddamn Tree Story, Again

I would like to be a tree.  Not just any tree, mind you.  I would be an oak tree.

The biggest trees start out as small acorns.  Trees! Boy, are they ever so big!  And strong!  You can’t easily move a tree and if you do, you’ve probably killed it.  Defiant to the end. That’s why I would be a tree.

You don’t really know what’s going on in a tree.  You probably think it is just a bunch of wood and squirrels and birds’ nests, just like the next tree and the one right next to that one.  But, the next tree is a maple and the others are pines and I’m an oak.  And that maple tree is full of syrup.

If I was a tree, I’d let you sit underneath me for I would be crooked with gnarly branches that offer shade.  As a matter of fact I’d love it if you came and sat underneath my leaves and leaned against me and thought, “he’s strong enough to support me”.  And lord, I would try.  At the very least, I’d try.  I just wouldn’t tell you my one weakness: You could chop me down.

But, you could and you might.  Chances are, if you don’t someone else will.  And I would rather you chop me down.  As a tree I would, afterall, just have to take those chances.

P.S. if you cut me down, please make me a chair or at least a writing desk.

 

Love as always,

Kurt Doonesbury

The Echo Factory, or: Das Leben ist (k)ein Streichelzoo

“In a land there’s a town
And in that town there’s
A house
And in that house
There’s a woman
And in that woman
There’s a heart I love
I’m gonna take it
With me when I go”

–Tom Wait’s “Take It with Me” from Mule Variations

Dear Readers and Readerinos,

Your reporter on the world, life, love, rocking chairs in front of Cracker Barrel, and classic rock stations between Ohio’s I-75 and Timbuktu is writing to you for the first time in a new time zone, an old home.  I find myself sitting in my parents’ living room with a movie on TMC writing to you.

To end up in my parents’ living room with a movie on TMC writing to you, it took a little more than 11 hours of driving in the direction of Tennessee.  Technically only about 8ish hours of driving.  About 2ish hours were spent in an Arby’s parking lot looking at my keys dangle from the ignition.  I was on the outside of my locked car looking in.  Even with everything perfectly still, car keys have a way of swaying a little while hanging from the ignition.

I was in Kentucky when this happened.  I was driving my car, a white, used Buick with Ohio tags with an Auburn sticker on the trunk.  I was one state away from my car being a target on wheels for Volunteer sports and southern pride fans alike.  Kentuckians are a little more accepting of pseudo Ohioans.  Afterall, Ohio is one of Kentucky’s many, many hats.

Most of the people I know still falsely believe that I live in Kentucky.  There is a Bowling Green, Kentucky, which seems to be better known in Tennessee.  I’ve been there once.  I had lunch there at a Sonic with Mary Beth.

So, there the keys swung.  My hands and forehead rested on the glass and my mouth muttered some choice words, mainly words that appear like this “$*!%” in newspaper comics but sound a lot like “fuck” and “shit” when muttered correctly.

“Fuck,” I said.  “Shit.”

It was then that I realized that my cellphone was still in the driver’s seat.

“Shit,” I said.  “Fuck.”

I went inside and asked the girl at the register if she knew anyone that could get my car open.  “Oh, sure,” she mentioned.  “It happens to me all the time out in this parking lot.  Hell, it was even last week, when…”

She proceeded to tell me about last week and the events that led to and occurred after she had locked her keys inside her car.   It was a greenish or maybe even a brownish colored Cougar.  I wasn’t sure.  It was definitely a color one expected to find in a bathroom after a party, I thought.  A color only possible if emitted from a sickly human body.

I ordered lunch and took it out to my car after the police were called.  I ate a sandwich and slurped my Coke.  I gave smiles to people who stared as they went into the Arby’s.  I was kind of half sitting, half  standing on the hood of my car trying to keep the bag and wrappers from blowing away.  I tried to give the impression that it was normal to half sit, half stand on one’s car eating Arby’s outside of the Arby’s.

I might as well have been standing out there with my fly down.

When the cop arrived nearly two hours later, I tried to make small talk.  I wanted to convince him that I wasn’t an idiot, that locking my keys in my car has never really been anything that has frequently happened in my life.  Though, it was.  I couldn’t help but laugh nervously.  He wasn’t convinced.  “Ohio,” he said.  He wasn’t asking a question.  He was stating the obvious.  “Just passing through?”

I told him I was.  I proceeded to tell him more information than he asked for and he politely ignored me.  He wedged my door open and ran a rod into my car to push the unlock button on the door.  He unlocked it and asked me to sign something and left.  I think I said “thank you” a couple of times too many.

The rest of the trip went without a hitch.  Except for an episode with my pants and seat-belt getting tied up.  But, that story is kind of boring.

Being home is being home.  I always feel welcomed and missed when I arrive.  I find myself spending most of my time getting caught up on the happenings of home.  Friends and people I haven’t seen in ages want me to spend time with them.  Family want me to spend time with them.  I’ve learned this usually means lunch or some sort of food intake.  I don’t mind this one bit.  My pants mind a little.

I always sort of thought that going to a new place meant you were allowed to forget all of your old problems.  At least for a little bit.  Though, it is more like your problems allow you to have a two day head start.  Then they come and creep up on you and remind you that they are there.  My nephew asked why the girl I was home with last wasn’t with me now.  A rain storm hit and my windshield slid down.  Everything in my car was soaked in the process and I could feel my bank account hurting.

I set out and went to search for a cheap and easy fix for my car.  It seemed to me that I might as well have been searching for the Easter Bunny or Britney Spear’s career.  Everyone informed me of the dangers of removing a windshield.  They tend to break.  The windshield was three weeks old and I nor my bank account felt like buying a new one.  I called the man up in Toledo, who had installed it for me in the first place.  He seemed rather put out by me calling and informed me that older cars sometimes leak when they get new glass.  I tried to explain that my windshield was leaking since it had fallen down.  He asked me what I had done to it.  I thought about telling him that the only thing I did wrong was take it to him to get it fixed, but instead it just came out as “nothing”.

It became apparent that the man in Toledo, the man who owns a business called Honest Abe’s Glass, wasn’t interested at all in helping me.   I called a few places, made a list with names and prices, and marked off the names and prices when I found a cheaper place.  Of course none of them could fix them that night nor promise not to break my windshield.  So each name except one had two prices next to it.  One price told me how much it would cost if they didn’t break my windshield.  One price told me how much it would cost to replace my windshield.  The one place that didn’t have two prices next to it flat out assured me that they were going to break my windshield when removing it.

I’m not sure if I would call that brutal honesty or just capitalism.

When I got fed up with looking up names in the phone book, I told one mechanic that I’d be by first thing in the morning.  I cleaned up my car a bit and tossed everything that had gotten ruined, including my mom’s birthday gift of David Sedaris tickets.  Though, that was an accident.  The throwing away of the tickets, not buying my mother David Sedaris tickets.

I arrived a little before 9 in the morning and was greeted by a southern Mr Clean who looked at my windshield and said, “Sheeyit.”  He looked it with his hands on his hips and just stared for a moment.  He took his finger and poked around the windshield.  He jabbed it in places with his finger and said, “Yup, I’ll fix your car if you remove that Auburn sticker off the back.”

Love as always,

Kurt

Sport

“True love is the only heart disease that is best left to ‘run on’–the only affection of the heart for which there is no help, and none desired. [...] The course of free love never runs smooth.  I supposed we have all tried it.”
- Mark Twain’s Notebook

The year was 2009.  It was winter and as cold as one would expect the Alps to be.  I sat at a payphone in the lobby of my dormitory and had a steady stream of water works drip-dropping out of my eye-holes.  And dammit, they wouldn’t stop.

Earlier, I headed down to Salzburg’s Hauptbahnhof to get change.  I had a twenty Schein and was willing to trade it in for coins.  It wasn’t a long walk, I lived right next door, but the weather didn’t make it any shorter.  The rain drops had no idea either whether they were supposed to be rain or ice or snow.  Whatever they were, they made halos around all the lights as if by some cosmic joke the world was blessed.  And dammit, it was.

The trains made a sound like a sax playing a scale when starting to roll down the tracks.  The walk over the bridge was made pleasant by this odd occurrence.  It fooled me the first couple of times I walked over that bridge.  I stared at the windows of neighboring apartments and down at the streets and sidewalks searching for this lone saxophone player.  And dammit, he wasn’t there.

The man at the kiosk wouldn’t give me change unless I bought something.  I bought a tiny bag of Milka and told him I wanted coins and lots of them.  So he did.  Not exactly 20 € worth but near it.  My pants drooped under the weight.  I jingled-jangled back up the bridge and clink-clunked the way down.  This time no saxophone.  Only brakes.

Now I found myself at the beginning of the story.  Dropping coins in the slot.  Calling the USA.  Explaining I had been try to call earlier and that I was Steven’s son.  Yeah, the youngest one.  I explained this to my great-uncle’s wife.  She warned me that he might not remember me.  I assured her that was O.K..  I wanted to talk to him anyway.

My Great-Uncle Harry was just that, great and my uncle.  He was a genuine, kind, caring man.  And he wasn’t ever bitter about life or how it turned out.  He and my grandfather were dumped in an orphanage as children and they both served in World War II.  He came back blind in one eye from the cabin pressure.  He came back and worked honest, decent jobs.  He was a father, grandfather in the years that followed, and an uncle.  He did things his brother never would have supported.  He supported the ACLU.  My grandfather was of the mind to believed children were like dogs and pedigrees got breed with pedigrees.  My brother and I were mutts in his eyes.

My Uncle didn’t care one iota if I was a mutt or Great Dane.

He treated me, like I imagine he treated anyone else, with respect.  He smiled a lot.

He bought me a “golfer’s” hat, because I wanted one (because he wore one).  I still wear those damn things.

The nice thing about that call, given all the tears and my heart breaking, was that he remembered me.  He called me by name, asked me if I remember us getting french food when I was a kid.  And dammit, I did.  He always called me “Sport”.  Maybe he called everyone that.  I don’t know.

I was running out of change and told him so.  I told him I’d call back in a day or so.  He said, he’d enjoy that.  Uncle Harry told me he enjoyed the letter I sent him a few months earlier.  I told him I’d send him another one.  He said, he’d enjoy that very much.  “Dammit, Uncle Harry, I sure do love you,” I said.  “Well, Sport, I sure do love you, too,” Uncle Harry said.  “I won’t forget it, and neither will you.”

Damn, damn, damn, I cried.

I still do.

I wrote him a letter.  I know he got it.  His wife told me that much.

I found out a few days later that he had died.  He wrote me a letter, too.  I never got it.  I never asked to see if he ever sent it or if anyone knew where it was.

When I found out, I had just stepped in from having drinks with some friends.  I was a bit drunk.  I read the email from Grandmother.  I called my mom instead of my dad, Harry’s nephew.  I told her I loved him and that it really hurt.  And dammit, it did.

It still does.  Numbed a bit down but still painful.

I turned off the lights and sat between my bed and desk.  I cried.  I made noises like a seal barking.

It’s the saints in our lives, a kind word, a kind gesture, love instead of ugliness or hate, charity of friendship when you have nothing left to give that really makes life worth living.

Love as always,

Sport

Time to Wear the Big Boy Pants

In my last entry I wrote somethings about an ex-girlfriend of mine, which might or does sound pretty awful.  Rather awful and terrible in fact.  I would like to apologize to all parties.  I am sorry.  I do not hold any resentment to any of my exes.  Our lives were lived in the way they were lived.  And we can do no different.

I am in no way perfect and, it seems to me, I never went out into the world to be perfect in any meaning of the word.  I never meant to be anyone’s knight in shining armor.  I might as well be wearing tin-foil with a pot on my head.

Just FYI to anyone reading this and thinking they want to date me:  I am a human-being, I am flawed, and I have been known to fart in bed.

I also laugh at dick jokes and take long showers.

Though what I had written was rather true, I did so because of an exercise a colleague told me to try.  His advice was this:  Be mad as hell, even if you don’t want to be mad as hell.  And that is what I did.  I felt relieved and then came the feeling that I did something wrong.  It was a private matter I should have kept to myself.

To make up for it, I am going to share with you something I did to an ex-girlfriend and am not at all proud of.

This is what I am not proud of:  I wrote in a journal if it was at all possible to love two people at once.

And my girlfriend at the time read it.  She was heartbroken.  She must have felt like something the cat dragged in.  I was the cat.

Did I mean what I wrote?  No, not really.  I believe you can love as many people as you want.  But, you only really “love” one person.  And love my girlfriend I did.  Only her.  If I had taken the time to think about what I was writing, if I meant, if I gave one thought about how she would feel if she read it, if, if, if, if, if, if, etc., I would have never done it.

She told me once she still loved her ex-boyfriend.  But, it was different.  And that was what I meant, too, but wrote it all wrong.

Ect.

Kurt Vonnegut-- Breakfast of Champions

We fought about my journal entry even when the fights weren’t about the journal entry.  Well, I think now, I deserve it.  I just thought, if I stuck around and did my damnedest to love her, she would see that there could only be one person.  It turned out that wasn’t enough.

I had royally screwed the pooch.  I’ve never been sorrier.

So, while what I had previously written is true, I made one huge mistake before either of those.  I wanted to share that with everyone.

Love as always,

Dylan Martin

Dancing Again. Or: Wenn sie noch nicht gestorben sind, dann Scheiße.

“i know,
all beautiful places
are prone to natural disaster.
but being swallowed
by the earth in manila
beats a slow death
in the Midwest.” –Broken Crow

“A whore ain’t goin’ to love you, unless you give her your money.”

Someone has to kick the Micky Mouse out of our heads.  Not that I believe that Walt Disney has brought on the deterioration of the American society at large, but  that we all seem to want to live in a magical fantasy land where everything comes out our way in the end.  A fantasy land where everyone has their own happy ending.

Stories with happy endings are pulling the proverbial wool over our eyes and it seems to me that no one wants to hear what happened to Cinderella or Snow White six or seven years down the line.  Afterall, what could go wrong with a girl that marries a guy after one date and a girl who goes off with a guy that goes around looking to kiss sleeping chicks with midgets.  No one wants to think about that.  To get our minds off that track, the narrator tosses in a little blurp about “living happily ever after” and they roll the credits.  As if it was all just an after-thought.

I am lucky enough to say I have experienced a fairy tale twice in my life.  Whoopee!

I guess I shouldn’t really say I experienced them myself.  I should say that their outcomes influenced my life to progress down the path to a certain ending.  In short, the fairy tale that pulled some strings in my life goes as follows:  Prince Charming showed up drunk on my now exgirlfriend’s doorstep which lead to me sleeping on the couch and then later she made out with a strange frog that wasn’t a prince in a bar.  Whoopee!

The Germans end their fairy tales with: Wenn sie noch nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute.  My translation of that is this:  Well, if they aren’t dead, then they are still alive today.

Nothing about being happy.

Nada.

Zilch.

I guess the Germans idea of a Happy Ending to a movie is that Hitler kills himself at the end of der Untergang.  Whoopee!

There was no real happy ending to World War II, it seems to me.  The Nazis killed over 6 million Jews, we dropped the atomic bomb on Japan killing anywhere between 150,000-246,000 people (including women and children), and German bicycles were being crashed all over Germany by Russians who didn’t know how to ride bikes.  Whoopee!

All of these facts and more can be found at your local library or Borders bookstore.

I guess that and the fact that a bill to get rid of unions and cut the wages of cops, firefighters, and teachers can be voted on and passed on to the House is kind of depressing to me.  When it is brought up, people just seem to say la-de-da and drool on themselves.  Not a goddamn care in the world.

Maybe people should care just one iota more.  Maybe they would care one iota more if they knew their children are posting on facebook that their religion is “evolution” and their political view is either “Obama iz cooolz” or “boring”.  This is the world we live in.  Kids think the opposite of being a Christian is believing in evolution and politics is simply either hating the president or thinking he is cool or boring.  Future generations will probably believe that since Americans hate the French that we took their gift of a giant metal statue of a woman and placed it in the sewer waters of New Jersey.

Hey, I have beer in the fridge.  Whoopee!

***

Anyway, that was my rant.  I got to say horrible things about Disney, children, Russians, Nazis, and my ex.  And I wrote something.  Tune in next time for whatever I haven’t thought up yet.

Love as always,

Kurt Doonesbury

Stay Here and Be Prepared for Anything: A Written Collage

Favorite Song

There are some who believe that the universe will expand and continue to expand until it collapses back on itself.  Then the universe, as if being pulled like a rubber band, will expand again. It will repeat this process forever.  On and on again.  Over and over until the end of time and the beginning of time.  The people who believe this go on to say this:  When the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now.  Whatever mistakes we are all guaranteed to make, we will be guaranteed to make again.  Over and over.  So not only will we have to live with them this time around but also on our next trip through our lives.  Again and again, forever.    There is only one thing I can see to do to try and avoid this.  And that is this:  Try and get it right this time around.  This time is all you have.

Or you believe that God created the Heavens and the Earth and after one lackluster ride on the merry-go-round, that’s that.  And if it is anything like the paintings I’ve seen, it’s a lot of sitting around on clouds playing a harp in the afterlife.  And no pain or suffering.  So, no jokes or laughing.

Sounds like Hell to me.

“Daddy’s gonna stroll down that far subterranean shore, all littered with the flotsam of hopes and dreams. Relics of ancient times. Lonely cenotaphs. Standing along that melancholy tideland.”

“The little fishes, abandoning themselves to the waves, dance and sing and play, but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows its depth?” ~ Miyamoto Musashi

Anyway, here’s a poem from Neil Gaiman that I just discovered today.  I like this poem since it goes along with another favorite of mine and one I wrote for a friend in a card I made for her.  Anyway, for real this time, here’s a poem from Neil Gaiman:

Roses are red,
Violets are purple,
Which is a very hard word to rhyme

And makes me happy that on February the 14th we don’t traditionally have to give each other oranges.

I think my life had to be pre-ordained.  We count on time as if we know what it is.  We don’t!  I can remember leaning up against a tree, and I think I knew everything that was going to happen.

A start to a story never written:

They spent hours talking to each other, but that was over the course of a lifetime.  And a lifetime is often too short for the time needed for friendships and love. „I would like to be in love with someone.  If I may, could I be in love with you?“ he typed.  It was already a long time ago when he had that opportunity to say that.  Like many other important decisions he passed it up.  „You got to play it safe,“ he would say. Playing it safe was not playing it at all.

But, he was never really good at that.

Playing it by someone else’s rules and standards was what it was.  And he did so until he got hurt and benched for the rest of the game.  Tears would roll down his face.

He dreamed of second chances.  And he sighed at the realization that no such thing existed.  The notion that someone fouls something up so bad that it would require a second chance is all too common.  Though, one quickly finds out, that the second go around in comparison with the first is nothing but apples and oranges.  Or, better yet, apples and shrimp.

Lucky for him, he never got second chances.  Be it apples or shrimps.

Der glückliche Pechvogel

People don’t like me.

They don’t like how I talk.  As if it was like clothing and I chose to speak with this voice, with these words, with this accent.  They don’t like the things I talk about.  I love the things I talk about it.  These crackpot notions and ideas that blanket my thoughts, hopes, and dreams.

It’s all very hurtful to hear.  As I always say: It makes me feel like something the cat dragged in.

I find myself in a funny place.  No longer in my comfort zone, I try to make head and tails of it all.  My friends are all new people.  I am probably, too.  We always try and make it like it once was.  But, it sadly cannot be like it once was.  And you find yourself alone with a full room.  And all you want is someone to talk to.

Life can be absurd at times.

Like how I cried watching a movie. Don’t ask me why.  I just did.  I don’t even know why.  It was science-fiction.

It was one of those moments where all I could do was shrug my shoulders and laugh a bit.

There’s a law.  This law states I have to be sad or unlucky if someone else is happy or lucky.  I don’t question it.  It makes me a bit happy, though.  Paradox.

I got lonely and the tantrum (aka tv) wasn’t being  good company.  So, I got redressed and decided to shave again.  I might have shaved off my beard if I hadn’t already.  It was one of those moods that calls for shaving off beards.

Stepping outside I wondered if a light was left on somewhere.  This kind of light was unusual at around midnight.  It was the moon.  The core of the light was little craters and mountains.  Stretching from these little dots were streams of light making an exquisite white ring lined with purple mist.  Goddamn was I lonely.

I pulled my jacket in closer and tightened my scarf.  I walked around the street trying to make smoke rings with my breath.  No such luck.  Only fog came out as if my mouth was an exhaust pipe.

So that’s how I got here.  Midnight, awake with nothing to say.

I hug  the thought of you, where ever you are, with whomever you are with, because I miss you, missing sock.

To feel human again.  Boy oh boy was that a good feeling.  Sometimes people have a way of treating you as if you are no better than a dog.  Some people treat dogs better than fellow people.  Such treatment made me feel like an unloved dog.

On the outside I looked like a human-being and if you touched me I felt like one, too.  The only difference was the electrical wiring in my head told me to believe or disbelieve in different things and to think my thoughts.  Being yourself is a dangerous game.  My problem was that I was myself and this person was engaged to a girl whose parents didn’t care if I was a person that cared deeply for their daughter.  What they wanted for their daughter was a member of their church.  They spoon feed her these ideas until she spoon feed me these ideas.  These ideas were that I, being who I am, wasn’t good person.  And when someone you love tells you that, you start to think you’re a dog.  My grandfather told me the same thing.  He was a racist and said that my brother and I weren’t pedigree.  The beautiful things we fill children’s minds with.

The thing is, if you judge someone by their beliefs or religion or their lack there of, you might as well judge them by the color of their skin or if they are handicapped.  That sort of ignorance is just as bad as racism.  I’m an atheist and a humanist.  I try to go through life being the best person I can be and try to help those I can without any notion of want of reward.  I don’t want any.  What I do want, though, is that if enough people believe this and follow through with it, the world might be a better place.  Because for as beautiful and big place that the world is, it is the breeding ground for hatred and pain.  And religion is popular, because people want to believe that something better awaits them.  I want to believe that something better is here and just at our fingertips.

The truth of the matter is I was made to feel like a dog for believing this.  What made me stop feeling that was a random meeting with a girl.  It was as if someone performed CPR on my soul.  And I’m content with believing there is no Afterlife, no promise of eternal life, no paradise, since I know someone like her, perfect or imperfect as she may be, exists somewhere in the world.  What makes that so beautiful is knowing these moments are fleeting and there is a great void in my life when she isn’t around.  And I couldn’t feel that beauty without being a human-being.  I wouldn’t be a human-being without her.

I’m afraid all this traveling and searching for whatever it was I thought was going to make me me was a fool’s errand.  I’ve been me this whole time.

So, you spend your life looking for some thing.  You don’t realize you are looking for this thing, but trust me you are.  You replace the void of not having this thing with other things.  Loud things, silly things, easy things, flashy things.  And then when you think you are about done with things and don’t want anything else to do with things, you find THE thing.

This thing is probably the last thing you thought you wanted.  But, it is definitely the thing that fills up the rest of life with great happiness and joy where it is missing.  Mainly the areas around the elbow, left ear, and of course your liver.  Oh, and heart.  You find this thing, whatever it may be, and you call your mother.  “Mom, mom!  I found this thing!  It’s wonderful!“  You can’t remember the last time you were this happy.  Then you add, „Don’t tell dad.  He’ll never let it go.“

You let everyone know.  Some people try to offer you other things.  And you are defiant.  “No, I don’t want your crummy things,“ you say. „Wait, show me the blond thing again. . .“  Then you realize the blond thing wasn’t even close to the new found thing.  Definitely don’t take the red thing.  They just talk about music.  Anyone can talk about music.  We all like music.  Why can’t more things talk about German Literature or Philosophy or books…

Then you have to leave the thing behind.  Live your life as if that thing never existed.  Kid yourself that that thing, the one thing you never realized you wanted till you found it, just can’t be had.  Not that you’d want to lay claim to something as fantastic as the thing in question.  But, life is just dull and unfulfilled without it.

Love as always,

Kurt Doonesbury

A Tennessean from California in Ohio

 

“Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, well, he eats you.”

It comes and it goes.  It comes and it goes.

I’m not all that great.  In fact I’m pretty short for a man.  And I’ve never been in many fist fights.

Back up a couple of months.  Let’s say, November.  Or somewhere in that general ballpark.  November.  I stopped shaving.  And in in the general ballpark of the month known as January, I ceased to live in Toledo.  That’s one to go down in history as one hell of a fantastic day.

Ich warte im Regen und steh’ auf dich.

Kurt thoroughly believed love and falling in love was the best and possibly the only truly great thing in life.  But, when he started to really think about it, Kurt felt rather hurt by it.  As if his parents told him he was adopted or his best friend turned out to be a stranger.

He always heard one should keep its heart open.  The unspoken second part to that was, of course, be prepared to be disappointed– or how he like to put it, be prepared to be walked on if you are willing to take that risk.

This is your reporter saying “Howdy” from the frozen tundra of northern Ohio.  And I think the old saying is: “It’s colder than a witch’s tit”. Or: “teet”.  Depending on your dialect.

Though, the British would say: “It’s colder than a brass monkey’s balls”.

Can’t say I’ve been lately feeling up either a witch’s breasts or any metallic monkey’s genitals.

My jeans’ cuffs are as stiff as cardboard and probably, though I haven’t tasted them yet, saltier than a cheap Mexican restaurant’s three day old tortilla chips.   I come home every night and I’m covered in a thin blanket of frost and my cheeks and forehead is a nice shade of rose.  The little wrinkles forming on my brow are filled with tiny snowflakes that melt away as I step inside.  Before I shaved my sideburns off, little icicles would form on the tips of the hairs.

“To say ‘I couldn’t live life without her’ would just be silly.  Obviously I could.  And have.  But, was it easy it?  Dammit no.  I’ve missed her every moment, every blink of my eyes, every fleeting second…  When I was younger, I knew something was missing and didn’t know what until she came into my life and wrecked the whole damn thing, God bless her.  Now that I’m older, I know I miss something.  Not just something, though.  And how I dreamed of us being old together.  Me a weathered, hunched man and her just as beautiful as she ever was.  Maybe even more so.  It is a dream afterall.  Now that I’m old, I dream of us being young.  Because that’s when dreams were reality.”

Loree Rackstraw wrote a memoir of sorts about one of my heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, jr.  It starts out with her being a mother of two, single, and a wannabe writer of some fashion.  She was a student with nothing published or even completed.  Someone who walked into a movie theater and saw the manuscript they have been laboring on for what to them seemed like ages suddenly popped up on the screen.  Or at least she said.  To put it nicely, she was disappointed when a bear of a man walked into the classroom to teach a writing seminar.   She’d never heard of him and he wasn’t trained in the arts in a academic sort of meaning.   He lit up a cigarette before even uttering one word.  She felt utterly disappointed.   She felt that way until going to see him in his office.  He was sitting there in a battered chair with an upside-down trashcan being used as a base for his typewriter.  Oddly she seemingly fell in love with this bear of a man, who had a “mediocre” book published and was trained not in literature but rather in chemistry and anthropology.  Forty years later, forty years of telephone calls, of sparse visits, and of numerous letters and of self-made art, she sees him for the last time.  He was back to teaching.  Though, his typewriter replaced by a laptop.  Loree rode in a car with Kurt Vonnegut and his daughter.  They dropped him off at the University where he taught and feels ostracized by his academic colleagues.  He came back as if he forgot something and she felt that’d she have to live some day without this man.  What he did was to lean into the car and told her “Give us a kiss.”  And he walked off with help from his cane.  They never saw each other again.  She was 70 and he was 80.  He would live another four years.

But, man oh man, if that isn’t nice, I don’t know what is…

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan

“We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.” –Frederick Koenig

My brother and I are as two too different of people as two people can get.  Yet, we were brought into the world by the same two people and raised by the same two people.  And here we are.  Two completely different people.

I admire the hell out of him.  That isn’t to say I agree with him all the time or even pretend to like a lot of the same things he likes.  I have to be drunk to watch football.  He doesn’t.

People that know us and have known us for a long time might find it hard to believe that I admire the guy.  I did once bite a chunk out of his arm.  In all fairness, he has busted my nose more than once.  I still love him.  I hope he still loves me even though he is missing part of his arm because of me.

Thinking about my brother puts my life into perspective.  I got the better lot.  I’m moderately well educated, about as well educated as anyone coming from a middle-class family can be, and am well traveled, about as well traveled as anyone coming from a middle-class family can be.  Maybe a little bit more so for that last part. He followed my father in the family business.  He’s fourth generation plumber.  I’m a twenty-something year old closer to thirty than twenty working a job that only has a discount on books to offer.

Here is an other thing we do have in common:  We clean toilets.

We have one more thing in common, even if only slightly so.  The one thing we share is trying to make broken things work.  These broken things are hardly ever concrete, tangible objects.  So no broken ovens, television sets, etc. etc.  We hold onto broken relationships with people.  I think that is one field we have always tried to be optimistic about.  In the end, we find our lives emptier than we could ever have imagined.  Then we find ourselves on the phone to each other talking about nothing special.

It means the world to me, these talks about nothing special.

This is your reporter far from home signing out to battle the frozen tundra on his way to his bed,

Kurt Doonesbury

P.S.: Love as always