Surfer Dreams

“Mild-est Tuesday evening in Southern Indiana since Chile’s signing of the Halston-Mayes Agreement. In 1994 the island nation of {illegible}…

I have excellent web-access while dreaming, and lots of the articles I read while solidly in REM overflow with vital information about which I was un-clear or unaware.
I suppose this odd new form of sleep-walking (‘sleep-surfing’?) will bless/ plague me until I quit doing so much waking-life net research just before bedtime. Meanwhile, I wake up informed.
Except this morning, for example.
I sleep-read and re-read and re-re-read the above headline for maybe a solid hour just now. (4AM to 5AM) There on the bed cocooned in my patented fitted-sheet protection against mosquitoes. To its credit I suffer not from Dengue, E. or W. Nile, malaria, or even ‘chicken-gumbo'(sp?) disease.
No, I suffer from ‘sleep-paralysis’, as in “I ain’t gonna get out of bed until I understand this-here article.”
But what to make of it? This time I simply couldn’t scroll past the bold headline.
Dream-analysis would say that the message, the trigger, is the unresolved feelings I have in real-life encounters with stories whose mystifying titles only become understandable after a full read plus WIKI links.
So, mystery solved? Except for the deal with Chile. Am I fer-it or ‘agin-it? And Indiana weather??: ‘mild’, compared to what?

I raise these questions here kinda like the kid in the joke who asks his Dad deep questions, three times in a row, only to hear a distracted ‘I don’t know, son.’ Finally the child apologizes for bothering his Father, to which the Dad replies: “Hey, if ya don’t ask, you’ll never know?”

For me Void Press is like that Dad. I learn next to nothing about my posts, my creative(?) output. (With the exception of a handful of much-appreciated commenters)

Still, I dream of, like, piles of feedback. Probably the only way I’ll go viral here is by abandoning the mosquito-net and contracting Chicken-gumba, whatever. ‘A high fever, at times accompanied by delusions’. Yup, sign me up.

A MAMMAL, DEB (‘K-C‘) IS STILL AWARE, NODS AT FTA’S DON-ERA WALL: “IT’S SICK! BEDLAM, MAMA!

I must confess I worked with Joey (Smith) longer than usual to fathom this snippet from “The Moronic Verses”, a recent addition to the Book of Morons. The two of us, un-typically after a quick lunch of salmon, rushed over to the All Saint’s Day Ladder-Day Sale in Brownsville, TX, where once a year, a selection of the 2,793 ladders confiscated from wall-climbers are sold at 50% off list, or in the case of crude wooden contraptions, at ‘firewood by the cord’ prices. These relics are the main net-profit from the old 18 foot border-fence with Mexico. Yes, Vincente Fox is ‘paying for that fucking wall’ at least in lost aluminum and wood. His successors are stepping up production of 33′ extension ladders as we speak…
But none of that helps demystify the holy inspired phrase here. Joseph Smith the Elder’s gr-gr-grandson is gr-eat at translating gibberish; especially if no one ever gets a glimpse at the ‘lost’ original.
 But who is ‘DEB, alias ‘KC’, why is her awareness in question, and what function is served by God’s reminding us of her mammal-hood?    She seems to have a low opinion of the new ‘beautiful, trust me’ Great Wall. Perhaps her Mother, to whom she seems to be complaining, is already sick of the commotion, the drones crashing in her garden, the tunnel exits mistakenly sprouting through her lawn: (“Oops, lo siento mucho! Damn GPS!”
And now Joey takes one last towel-shrouded private look at the document. Sure enough, bingo. Reptiles seem to be having no problem burrowing under or scaling The Donald’s Potemkin Fiasco. But mammals, that’s another story.
So there you have it, backwards and forwards. The FTA’s staff (those who haven’t yet quit in disgust) are, as always, busy charging admission (small unmarked bills) to the abortion which was once the proud USA, a beacon, a lamp unto the nations.
And the Angel Moroni is slouching back toward Bethlehem to do a major re-write.

Note: I try to write for ‘everyman’, yet I don’t often furnish links to the cultural references herein. Try ‘Salman Rushdie’, ‘Latter Day Saints’, Brownsville, Yeats.. Oh, and the front page of any paper, any day, in this critical (as in ‘critically-injured’ election season. At least ‘DEB’ voted for the best woman/mammal on the ballot/ JS/ Tel Aviv

‘Little Mort’ ruined my life(?)

 Ok, lately my professional success-rate seems to be on an ever-steepening descent-vector.
It’s entirely possible, however, that any American drama in Tonawanda, NY is doomed to be, as someone once  observed, a one-act play.

Contracted to the parent company for the ‘Dextro-mart’ chain of convenience-stores, my task was simply to organize a real-or-engineered community out-pouring of support for building yet another of the familiar red-and-yellow Dextro ‘Quikee-marts, in this heavily Italian-Catholic suburb of Buffalo. NY. An area where I’d thought I had a feel for the locals, despite my obvious religious and cultural ‘understanding-gap’.

(And in fact only my more ‘veteran’ neighbors show a smile of recognition when I recount having spent hundreds of hours glued to The Joey Reynolds Show’ on WKBW ‘1520 on your radio dial’ as a young pup in far-off PA)
And so again this time, based on a record of previous victories, I elected to enlist my big-shot friend, Vasco Santino, for the effort. Fifty-something+ by now, but looking all the part of ‘one-of-us’ in the ‘hood’, he quickly agreed to sub out the chores of collaring ‘demonstrators’:
“Yo, ‘Da Gamma’, I’m’a not-a gonna ask ‘how you done it?” I joked when we met. (Oy, he has never yet shown any reaction to my calling him ‘Da Gamma’ I always wonder why not. And in fact, all the true homies call him ‘Santa‘. More on that later.

So ‘Santa’, whose friendship I consider a gift here in a locale I will never truly comprehende, swung into action, and the late-afternoon gathering, painted signs held aloft, was a joy to see as I approached the scene, trying to stay anonymous.
(OK, I must admit that ‘Dextro-mart’s success in the tight market owed me at least a complimentary large pizza or plate of ‘to-die-for’ Lasagna . Having come up with their constantly-repeated blurb: “Dextro-Mart: Right there when you need us, and on the right side of the road!!’, I felt rightly proud of my ‘clever-but-probably un-appreciated’ coinage. Kinda like Maine’s Dexter Shoe Company’s famous (?) “Dexter; We make the right shoe for both feet!” gem. But having busted my ass this time only to fail, I do need to realize that there’s a clever word-smith born every Tuesday; to wit; ‘Fractured, but whole’: If my modest slogan was an industrial diamond, the above phrase is, to it, the “Great Star of Africa”.
Anyway, ‘Santa’ pressured/ blackmailed over a hundred ‘eager shoppers’ to line the street last Thursday, (at the corner of Colvin Blvd and Woodcrest, where Wolf Blitzer went to high school hoping to be a journalist, or at least a celebrity long ago.)

One of them, unfortunately, was his wife’s hairdresser’s cousin, a ‘screw-missing’ probably Trumpf-wanna-be named Morton. Now it’s difficult to remember in these election-season dystopian latter-days how public discourse was once the provenance of reasoned logical thought. Mea culpa; I had no premonition of how ‘Mort’s ‘traitor among us’ crude sign blaring the message “SANTA is SATAN BACKWARDS!” could so quickly foment a sea-change among the purported fans in the crowd. These are ostensibly normal citizens, with jobs and a high-school diploma, albeit living in 2-room row houses with twice as many Velvet-Elvis pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary on the walls as electrical outlets.

I’m tempted, but will resist the temptation, to detail the micro-course of mob-mentality over the three-hour event here. Culminating in ‘Santa’ being helped into his Volvo sedan, knees a bit shaky, and my own incognito but shaken exit, having pretty much declared failure. Whether I will be paid for this fiasco is only a private concern; no, the greater message is that one un-principled bozo-idiot-charlatan can destroy ‘life-as-we-knew-it’ in this low-info climate which we had plenty of warning was on the horizon.

The vote at City Council in November on the store is pretty much a lost cause at this point.
And I’m left ‘twisting on the bed‘ with this cyclic ‘backwards-or-forwards’ Mantra running endlessly through my sleepless brain:

I PUT SANTINO ON IT, ‘N A STUPID ‘EXTRA’, ‘MORT’ X-ED A DEXTRO-MART. X-ED! I PUT SANTINO
ON IT, ‘N A STUPID…
You ‘normals‘ have no idea what it’s like to hear this on ‘Repeat’ at 3AM.

I also ponder whether anyone in fact ever reads my ‘creations’.

I do work hard to make them coherent, captivating, and instructive.

But ‘any major dude’ will probably tell me I’m doin’ it for me-self alone. Like with my last couple posts. At least it’s documented on my ‘permanent’ record./ JS

Liars Begone ! The Song

Y’all probably think that writing, performing and recording ‘great, great ‘ songs is a piece of cake.

Just stand up in front of adoring low-info white fan-boys and de-claim: “I write the best songs, really, great songs, believe me; you’ll get tired of how great my songs are! I got hundreds of ‘knock ’em dead’ tunes, ready for Day one, but I don’t want to show ’em to the enemy ahead of my coronation. Even my coloured friends are gonna buy ’em; what do they got to lose? Lemme tell ya, sitting there picking only the best great lyrics wasn’t easy. It was my ‘Viet Nam’. And the music? You’d have to be a Mexican rapist or a supposed ‘war hero’ or his bereaved father not to agree that I am God’s song-writing 2016 messiah.”

That said (ugh):

Do take a second to listen to this short but cute imitation bar-song. The ‘conceit’ (kinda apropos here) is the classic paradigm of deductive logic:
A) All Cretans are liars
B) ‘Donny’ is a Cretan
(C Therefore ‘Donny’ is a liar

I’m proud of the internal rhyme, etc. You may neither note nor long remember it…
My dream is to add/ over-dub the voices of readers to the chorus, to enhance the ‘drunken-crowd’ motif. And we shall do just that, as soon as I assume the reins of the American Presidency in November. I mean, how hard can that be? Probably the same deal as the nuclear weapons; click ‘Send’ and watch the bad guys fry on CNN or Fox.

Enjoy! (And vote, early and often.)

LYRICS:

A famous quotation, from the Lower Cretaceous:
“All Crutons are Liars” now appears to be true!
A critical study was published discretely
In the Cretan Edition of ‘Crouton Review’

Cho:’The Cretan edition of ‘Crouton Review’
The author, a hard-pressed prestigious ex-Prussian
Worked in his pristine and precedent-setting..
back-yard with like crate after crate of car-routons
And rigid criteria which had to be met!

Cho: He had rigid criteria which had to be met!

With a litany written by a colleague in Britain
He assailed each with a salient question or two;
Have you stopped getting soggy? yes or no.. und so weite (German: ‘and so forth’)
Till each one confessed and was thrown in the stew.
Cho: ‘Till each one confessed and was thrown in the stew.’
Scrutinizing this glutinous massive indictment
This ‘saga of soggy’, by a modern-day Newton
The proof’s in the pudding:
If the Man is a Liar
And all Cretans are liars
Then he must be a crouton

Cho: All croutons are liars
And this one’s for you…

Help! Busty & Dusty’s band: “B ‘n D” is in a BIND!

Yes, I still get calls for help…in my vowel-bizness. Just last week a fellow wanted to re-spell the name of that un-funny clown, Donald ‘Tweezer-hands’ Tr*mpf. I told him not to over-worry; the ‘great-great’ orange scourge is doing just fine, unassisted, shooting himself in the feet, one after the other, like a self-harming centipede.

But today’s crisis is also perhaps beyond simple vowel-replacement.

Background: That Duo you lately can’t stop hearing on the radio; (and also can’t turn it off quickly enough; where’s an old-fashioned counter-clockwise knob when you most need it?)   they fancy themselves today’s Sonny and Cher. To the point that their first hit, ‘I got a ‘U’ Babe’ was so close to the  original that their publisher must be either sound-asleep or deaf or both not to sue their producer,’Interconsonantal Ltd‘

“An’ if we call ourselves ‘Sunny and Share’ , that’d be ‘fair use,’ right?”

Meanwhile Busty and Dusty are stuck in their gaily re-painted school-bus ‘FARTHER” pushed into the slot on the front for ‘Destination’. They were BOUND for South BEND when, slowing down at a possibly ‘engineered’ traffic jam, the bus was ‘BEANED’ by at least a hundred distinctly non-fans. With the windshield hopelessly spattered by gooey ‘missiles’, they had no recourse other than to kinda hide inside. (As opposed to the definition ‘hide: a cow’s outside’ which often provokes the response: “So, who’s afraid of a cow?”)
This is, of course, not the pair’s first brush with danger. Less than a month ago at a slaughterhouse across the street from their venue, both Busty, who somehow fell onto a moving belt, and Dusty, who, trying valiantly to save her, underestimated the ‘slipperiness’ of the excrement-coated mechanism, was himself drawn closer and closer to the knives. Yes, were almost DE-BONED. Grabbed at the last second by three fans, they had to, hard to believe, ‘negotiate’ their survival, being pulled to safety only after promising one hundred tickets-for-two to an up-coming concert. (A bargain they then un-wisely ‘forgot’ to up-hold, which, in today’s social-media echo-chamber was likely the impetus for their S. Bend ambush.)

Up-date: The duo was this morning reluctantly allowed to leave the scene, but only after signing a ‘surety BOND’ promising not to enter the city limits for 6 months. A pitiful sight: an imposing but clue-less police officer, big-BONED and every bit a ringer for a German Bund fanatic, serving a warrant for what? For ‘disturbing a Face-Book mob’? As if it’s not enough disgrace for the singers that their CDs are so quickly ‘cut-out BINNED’, sitting there collecting dust at Kresge’s?

Ok, with a tale like this already a fait-accompli, what hath I to offer?

Piece of cake, lemme tell ya. Um… drop the ‘n’. With B and D as stable book-holders the options are mostly all optimistic:
BADE, BAD, BEAD, BED, BIDE, BID, BODE, ‘BOD’, BOOED, BUD, BOUYED, BOWED, and BAUD. And that’s just with-in the first ‘hundred bucks a day plus expenses’ proposal I gave ’em.
I’ll most likely get the job; not a lot of competition in this racket, an’ they need me like a guy trapped under a car begging for a hammer and being handed a hamster. Nice work if you can get it.

Schroedinger’s Chicken(s)

They never mention the Owner of the lucky/luck-less cat.

But I have the Papers on the Bird(s).

Background: my sweet neighbor Rina  enlisted my help in re-stocking her ‘egg-bizness’. After selling off the 40% roosters in her herd, who’ve had an idyllic life inside the giant geodesic dome I built once as a ‘thought-experiment’, she was ready for a change.
Hmmm, for me, a ‘thought experiment’ is when I do something odd cuz it might be ‘fun’ or ‘interesting’, and only later think: “What wuz I thinking?!”

Anyway, the purchase went smoothly, and the crates, each with four ‘inhabitants’ in an open-screened enclosure arrived intact. Long shall they live and lay!  Nice chickens, albeit a tad boring; all ‘white-American low-info Leghorns’ (like at a Trump rally)
But since my name was on the deal, I shortly got a letter informing me of my ‘complimentary-bird(s’. (That’s as good as I can do translating from Hebrew.)

Yes, click ‘Accept’ on the site, choose a breed, and voila, receive a free gift.
Looking at the mass of choices on the web-site: “Country of origin: Greece, Iberia, Scotland…?” I just gave up and clicked on ‘I feel lucky.’.
And so, in my back-yard as we speak, is a thin-plywood sealed box with my shipping details still stapled on the side. The ‘Important!’ note there-attached informs me:

“Your purchased specimen/specimens were determined to be in perfect health before shipment. They have been patially sedated to minimize trauma during transit. Please place them for 24 hours in a cool quiet place before transferring them to their final enclosure. / Regards: Schroedinger Farms Poultry, Ltd.”
Question: Do any among my sparse readership here (since the death of Xanga) know what it feels like to stare at a box… and a clock cluelessly?
And no, not you, Niels!
Niels Bohr, that heartless Dane whose adamant loyalty to a policy of ‘Ya can’t say it if ya haven’t seen it… yet’, he’s kinda wetting himself at the keyboard.
“Your bird or birds are presently in an undetermined quantum-entangled state, describable only by the cold numbers of the Schroedinger equation.”

I put my ear to the box: no clucking, but then, neither is there that ‘screams of the damned’ yarp for which doomed fowl are famous.
“Famous?” “Yer Mama’s famous!” I don’t even know who I am anymore. Damned pigeons, the suspense is killing my mind, and me with it.

Hey, who knows, there may be a mechanism within the box which releases a ‘merciful-death(?)’ gas into its air if?/when? a sample of some unstable isotope ‘decides’ to undergo beta decay and emit a goddamned neutron. Well fuck them; I hate neutrons! They don’t even have the balls to decide if they’s positive or negative. Infertile drones! Killing my innocent beloved chicks! .’I’ma gonna open the box this minute, I tell ya!’ The hell with Bohr and Planck, and Heisenberg, and all those fossils who never met an egg they couldn’t analyze into in-edibility!

So pray for me, readers, at the Hour of my Death. amen.

OOPS! The “Punchline”:

Yeah, the only reason I even wrote this was to inform y’all that:

“I OWN AN IONIAN AND/OR ANDORRAN chicken.”

Was it worth it? Ask Niels, that know-it-all.

So… is this the ‘Beginning of the End’?

“Mouth 1/3 open, tongue protruding just a bit, ‘exiting’ on the left-side just under and in contact with the upper lip” Is this what I need to Google?
Ok, self-documenting dementia is best started before executive function flat-lines; ie, while the ‘victim’ is still capable of describing his/her symptoms and still remembers the ‘base-line’ for comparison.
I previously discussed here memory-loss (mainly short-term) in a rather Erma Bombeck-ian semi-humorous style. But as the signs of *something* happening slowly pile up like in a fore-cast snow-storm (“Stock up on bread, milks, candles, and… ‘puppets’?”) my life-long ‘junior-scientist’ streak swings into action: “Document everything!”
I’m reminded of a wag’s comment: ‘I don’t fear Death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens!’
Ok, the subject of this short piece is my sudden (started maybe a month ago?) transition from 67 years of being a solid RTF: ‘Resting Thoughtful Face’; the classic default gaze of a normal man; alert, eyes wide-open and mouth ‘wide-shut’, awaiting any future need to speak, …
To the present, new, and worrisome posture I catch myself in, and attempted to describe above.
Last evening’s “Night of the Living Dr. Google” on the subject of Alzheimer’s-like symptoms added tons of new ‘warning signs’ to my DEW-line database. (‘Distant Early Warning’, for folks who already forgot that Cold War installation)

So… whass-up with this new Johnny-face?? Since deciding to understand it a couple days ago, I’ve caught myself red-handed (‘red-faced’?) a hundred times. The new ‘Me’, (just now finally checked it in a mirror) looking, who knows?, ‘quizzical’? ‘puzzled’?, ‘West-Virginia in-bred’?
Theories:
1) Mouth-breathing explains it all. My hard-won emphysema requires me more and more lately to maximize oxygen into the lungs; thus, my nose is no longer adequate as an ‘input-port’.

Or:

2) The whole thing is ‘all in the head’; a new ‘face to the world’ which shines-forth my age-induced diminished bravado: (“No, guys, I give up on having a clue what your problems are; and please do delete me from the ‘go-to’ list of messiahs”)

One last question is: should I try to ‘strong-arm’ this new development into submission? Like Nixon said “We could do that; no problem… but ‘it would be wrong!”

My dear father, ‘alive’ on a rented stretcher in our living-room for 3 weeks after a massive stroke at 92, had a very similar facial expression.
I recall, to my total amazement, watching him effort-lessly ‘pick his nose’… and wipe his ‘rudder-less by then’ hand on the bed-sheets.
We have miles to go still in understanding the inter-play of body and brain.

But for now, I shall insist on ‘being there when it happens’. Until my posts become word-salad, that is. I count on dear readers to give me a ‘heads-up’…. /JS