The View From Scranton

Been Awhile

2007-06-28T17:28:00.000-04:00

And I intend to keep it that way.

Nothing personal, but I prefer The View From Here Now.

The View's Here Now

2006-11-10T08:20:00.000-05:00

For all you great good folk who's like to know: The View's Here Now.

Happy Seeing.

On My Way (Yesterday)

2006-03-09T10:36:00.000-05:00

Wednesday. US Air Flight 4337. Seat 8 F. Hardly enough room for a last View, but room enough for me to see the end of a very ugly chapter in my so-called life. Goodbye Scranton. And goodbye Pennsylvania. We were decidedly not meant for each other.

The plane’s a twin-propped relic, straight outta Casablanca, ala Earl. As is the Scranton/Wilkes Barre International airport, without the mood or the funny. It’s also about the size of a suburban carport, only smaller.

One can only imagine where their international destinations lie.

In the air and face against the window. I haven’t seen sky from this height in forever. As you might suspect, the view down is an utter disappoint, unless you’re impressed by wasteland. Scarred nothingness, as if a devilish god came around, torched the ground, then sprinkled powdered sugar on everything before sitting down to sate. Of course once he got a taste of the place he probably spit it out. He sure as hell left a lot of nothing on the plate.

Au revoir, Scranton. We shall not meet again.

Philly International. At least it’s an airport. Unfortunately it’s also a victim of 21st c ninnyisms. In other words, no smoking, anywhere, not even in the bar. I’m not allowed a drink; at least let me have a cigarette.

There’s WiFi, but you gotta have an account or a credit card to log on, which kinda spoils the whole freeing of communication. Puts a damper on the bloggery too. The airing of it anyway. I guess getting back to Go Street is a good excuse to postpone a post.

And, Zeus-willing and Hood-be-doing, it’s the last excuse I’ll ever have to postpone anything. Wait as a mandate is no way to live, especially for one as impatient as I. From here on in there won’t be time for me even to listen for a knock -- I’m kicking the door in.

And with that I gotta thank each and every kind cool one of you for tuning in and enduring my pitted fits and dimwitted starts these past seven months. Knowing you were out there really made my dogged days. I'd also like to invite you all to therealjohnhood.com/bloggery, where I’ll be slingin’ a Hood’s-eye-view of a whole brave new wild world. Oh my View’s still gonna be skewed, it just won’t be skewed Scranton. Instead I’ll be skewing from a place where the visionary is unimpaired.

Let’s hope I keep seeing things.

(Bloggery begins tomorrow, 3/10.)

Nothing But

2006-03-07T10:38:00.000-05:00

There are some remarkable stirrings that I dare not remark upon till they're absolutely finalized; meantime I share this, spurred my way by the great good Kretzschmar.

Dig in:

Five Truths

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation."

William Burroughs

Symbolic Truth

The first truth is the symbol-word "Truth." The one spelled with a capital T. It is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is a thin veil of semantics used as a shield against reason, often raised in the defense of some ideologic somethingism. It is the blind truth, faith undeniable, the operating system of all religions.

It is that which attempts to rise above a simple grouping of alpha-numeric code, to shine in some god-granted light. It is an abstraction of an event or concept beyond any physical or perceivable reality.

This is the sovereign truth of all official histories.

Our Truth

The second truth is the truth we tell ourselves. It is the limit of our perceptions, it is a filtering of reality which becomes our story. It is my side of it.
It is the facts we build lies on, the memories we cherish, the life we lead. It is our hopes, aspirations and dreams. It is life and death in the modern world.

The second truth is rarely true.

Their Truth

The third truth is the truth they try to sell us. It is the same truth as number two but from different eyes. It is their side of the argument, seen through their history, their belief system.

Call it Propaganda if you want -- but it's still a truth.

The Hidden Truth

The fourth truth is the truth you won't tell yourself. It's your hidden secrets -- compulsions, anxieties, fears -- the memories we can't edit. These are the dark truths that are the foundation of the underlying self, the controller, the rational voice in the daily dialog of momentary indecisions.

The Final Truth

The fifth truth is the true truth, the absolute truth -- it is everything which is the truth is or could ever be.

The final truth is the fate of Universe itself. It is birth, life, death. It is the closing of a circle. It can only be experienced, never fully known.

The final truth is the most beautiful truth of all.

Urban Urchining

2006-03-06T10:09:00.000-05:00

If the Hollywood set city-slicking of Peter Gunn leaves me itchy for action, the actual urbanity of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn has left me a miss more than leaving itself. The walk-and-talk, the candor, the quick. The “forest of skyscrapers.” The “thirsty face.“ Even a dimwit doorman leaves me aching for New York.

And laughing for air. His uber hero, the Tourettic Lionel Essrog, is a gas. Light heady and vapored. And his spill on the doofus garbage cop is priceless:

"In fact, I hated Loomis… [h]is imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts -- his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world, his attention like a pinball rolling past unlit blinkers and frozen flippers into the hole again and again: game over. He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing -- so it was my duty to loathe him instead."

How did I miss this book?

Another Stain

2006-03-05T11:22:00.000-05:00

Another town. Another stain. This one a bit larger, milkier, muddier than the last just past. Greasy. Like the puddle left by a trashed vehicle that's sat for thirty years. Effulgent. Like the remains of a mottled corpse. It deserves a chalk-line but lacks the wherewithal even to note its own demise.

They call the stain Wilkes Barre and neither Wilkes nor Barre would approve of what it's become.

The town looks like someone came along and kicked the living shit out of it. With few exceptions, the buildings all have been capped at the knees. The few exceptions are entirely unexceptional. A Times Leader tower that shrubs. A Radisson that hedges. Something else that someone slow stopped at a sprout. Everything, everywhere, standing squat, stunted at birth, denied the necessary nutrients for growth.

The locals say that things were never the same after Hurricane Agnes hit in '72, when the levees broke and the water rose chest high. When hope ran away like so much silt. Mulch meat. Boo hoo. Leave it to the excuse-ridden to find an excuse for their own malaise, the die-slows to stick up for a town that won't stick up for itself. 33 years ago something wicked that way came, and they're still licking their wounds.

Let's hope the Big Easy won't play it so hard.

Chapter & Verse

2006-03-04T10:05:00.000-05:00

Music is somehow both further up in the sky and deeper down in our bodies than the other arts.

Jonathan Lethem

Alec Hanley Bemis conducts a kickass tete-at-tete with Rick Moody, Jonathan Lethem and John Darnielle in this week’s LA Weekly. If you dig music, if you dig books, and if you dig the points where they converge, this is a well-worth read.

Speaking of converging well-worthiness, The Mountain Goats have a version of Suede's Trash that might just break your heart.

If you've got one.

Medium Coolery

2006-03-03T09:23:00.000-05:00

More Gunn Clubbing. Specifically, Set 2, Volume 3 of Blake Edwards' increasingly enjoyable Peter Gunn. And these times our impeccably-groomed hero gets a humoured going over. I blog about Let’s Kill Timothy, which includes a jewel heist, a double-cross, some fisticuffs, and - get this - a seal. Really. On a leash, in Gunn’s convertible, and at the center of some simple-minded diabolics. Gives Craig Stevens a chance to stretch himself into a wide smile.

Further stretching the Gunn play is The Missing Night Watchman, which would be notable for having Mayberry’s Floyd as a protagonist but goes three steps further, with image and angle and shadow that evoke nothing if not The Magnificent Andersons. One expects a little Welles-like flourish in our big screen Noir, but to see it on the ’58 model boob tube is a surprise, and a delight.

And the edits! Lieutenant Jacobi’s door closing to a coroner pulling back a sheet off a corpse, an upper crusty creeps to a window and tears open the curtains to reveal not the expected intruder, but himself.

Brilliant.

And Herschel Bernadi's Lt. Jacobi, a man of infinitely even keel. He’s got a voice that reveals unsaid - and unsayable - great depths. And now that we see he keeps on hand an acoustic guitar, that reveal’s taken another fathom. Imagine the stoic Good Lt. sitting alone in his office, strumming to solve the hard crime on his mind.

While I’m celebrating medium coolery, I gotta give a way-belated RIP to Don Knotts, Dennis Weaver and Darren McGavin. Barney, McCloud and The Night Stalker, natch. You were three of a one of a kind, gentlemen. Inimitable and immortal. And the whole wild world was better off when you were around. Thanks for the stories.

The Sound of This Thursday

2006-03-02T10:00:00.000-05:00

With Wednesday’s Ash now gone to unceremonious dust, I dare not look to this day, Thursday, for the get-up that’ll permit me to go. There’s been way too many days like these. Better to look toward tomorrow, even if it never comes. That way I won’t be disappointed.

So today I’ve got Friday on My Mind, and that means Bowie and his Pin-Ups, particularly his immortalizing of The Easybeats. The slab, and the song, were an integral part of my youth, not just for Bowie’s take on things that were, but for his passion for those things, and for his reverence. After all, if it weren’t for Bowie’s tributation The Easybeats might have been shelved in the dustbin of Pop’s history.

Then I wonder which of the myriad songsters currently buffering my exile might too be shelved, or covered, or heralded, or all or neither of the above. And I figure I better spill a few words while they’re here, now, and while I’m here to hear ’em.

It’s the least I can do.

Each day, like clockwork, armed with my nifty new HP notebook I hit Northern Lights for some Free Trade roast of the day and a few good downloads. I’m only permitted an hour at a time, but in that hour I bitch and moan and groan, and I make the rounds of indie offerings, some good, some real good, and some even quite great. All made possible by the generosity of concerns such as Anti, Sub Pop, Vagrant, K, Barsuk, spinART, eenie meenie, Team Love and Fueled by Ramen.

There’s Eef Barzelay’s twanging through his Ballad of Bitter Honey, a ridiculously compelling twitter, from the voice of the ridiculously compelling Clem Snide, a personal fave, whom I’ve got on hand once with Fill Me With Your Light and twice with All Green, a double shot of unjust rewards.

The devout stirrings of Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, Melt Your Heart with it’s Fade Into You moodswinging (which coincidentally I first heard on Valentine’s Day), "Born Secular" with it’s Sunday schooling; the hip Lynn-like Clinings of Neko Case, and her sister-in-crime, Jessie Sykes, both of whom deserve their very own Grand Ol’ Opry, right in the middle of Manhattan.

The classicist groove of Living Things and Calla, the Collectivist trippings of Panda Bear, and their outta-this-worldly brother Ariel Pink, which segue nicely into the 10cc-sized revvings of The Sunshine Fix; Merle doing Hank’s If You’ve Got the Money after candidly Wishing All These Old Things Were New; Dashboard Confessional, who can either be blamed or praised for the rash of emo on the air; the pre-neo post wavishness of Jennifer Gentle’s I Do Dream You which could’ve been rendered by Plastic Bertrand’s niece.

Echoes of all and none the period piece Melt With You-ings of Mates of State‘s Fraud in the ‘80s, and the way the world is turned on its head and spun anew by The Fiery Furnaces' Police Sweater Blood Vow the winsome Smithsomeness of The Dears; and the new trad Melvinings of The Hold Steady, who‘s The Swish is positively delish.

“I came right over the counter just to kiss you.”

Some Tricky trippery, a Dimension Mix of Stereolab’s Mudra, the Foldsy Teenaramics of Apollo Sunshine, Koufax and The Hush; Frank Black and the Catholics bluesing through Nadine, putting on the Francis for a reductionary recap of Monkey Gone to Heaven, and the jungled relations of Bunky’s funky Monkey Song, and Low’s own knowing Monkey.

My groove is gotten with Spam Allstars and Mark Ronson’s reflooring of Radiohead’s Just (scroll to 2/20); my radio head is highed and realized via Nada Surf and Ted Leo and Starlight Mints and the Ageless Beauty of Stars; Iron and Wine and Smog provide the simple, supple sustenance my soul requires, as does -- different yet equal -- that dame known as Tender Forever.

There are The Frames, who first came to me, as most things first came to me the two years before my Scrantoning, over XPN. I can’t remember the track, but I do remember digging it, and when I stumbled upon Star Star I recalled why. The Frames have a way with song. Their Fitzcarraldo, inspired by Herzog’s heroic flickery, even makes me not mind a bit of jam.

But above all of the above finery there are three songs that have moved me to near tears and made me marvel that my belief in the power of melody is not completely without merit: Cat Power’s The Greatest, The Elected’s Greetings in Braille and A Girl Called Eddie’s Golden. I won’t say anything more about them here, ‘cause I can’t say enough.

I will say this: Just because I’ve still no View doesn’t mean I can’t listen.

2006-03-01T10:48:00.000-05:00

John Hood

The Lean Mean

2006-03-01T10:18:00.000-05:00

Meaning is arbitrary and without foundation. Translation: meaning doesn’t mean shit. Or it means whatever the fuck you say it means, want it to mean, need it to mean, mean it to mean.

You say you mean one thing, I take it to mean another; together we get something else. Something different. Something the same. Meaning. Is this miscommunication, or is it collaboration?

Both. Blessedly, beautifully so. Get to the happy place where accidents happen. And all it means is we both got there. At last.

We gotta get somewhere. Somewhere else.

The spur comes from Kalle Lasn’s soon to be unleashed Design Anarchy, an inimitable Adbusters offering. Dig the previews, they’re a gas. Lean, mean and keen. Simple, solid and elegant. And then some.

And Tibor. Lots and lots of Tibor. Evoked in mug and mood and spirit. Homaged in idea and angle. Adbusters know enough to know a master, and they know how to due things masterfully.

Now Feel This

2006-02-28T10:04:00.000-05:00

Fourteen degrees and I don’t feel a thing. No cold. No brace. No wind. I don’t feel empathy; I don’t feel compassion; I don’t feel hurt. I don’t feel like feeling at all.

I am numb to my skull.

Another Monday done. Real done. Real done gone. That makes, what, 200? Something like that. I don’t feel like adding ‘em up, ‘cause I don’t feel like punching myself in the face. Again.

No feel to be felt and no view to be beheld, I turn elsewhere. Not in, where I might find out more than I scare to know, and not here, where there’s nothing to be found, but beyond, to the world of image and angle and letter and be. A World with a View.

I turn to Nick Arvin’s Articles of War and I get pissed at the invertebrated cowardice of a grunt called Heck. What unmitigated whimpery, what foulful fear, what a despicable display of derring-don‘t.

And how cunning the reveal. Keen to lay way bare the deep, dark recesses of a soul shallowed with cower, to make of your hero a redeemless pathetic. Like M. Gira’s The Coward (which left me so mad I wanted to go out and stomp someone), Arvin’s Articles provokes a visceral stir; a boil and a hate yes, but more a primal promise to never, ever succumb to the horrors.

In other words, to feel. Almost.

Monday Almighty

2006-02-27T10:07:00.000-05:00

Monday Monday. Be good to me. Be damn good. Be right. I’ve done what needed to be done, and then some. Then I did some more. The dues have been paid. Thrice. So have the debts. Well, the big one anyway. The one that called for a fat chunk of my life.

Fifty-two months, less ten days. That’s how much a chunk I’ll’ve surrendered to this State if they spring me this very aft. Do the math. Or, better yet, don’t. ’Cause it might just break your heart.

I know it broke mine. Into a true million little pieces. No DUI guy I. Not even close. I went whole hog and fell full throttle. Which of course doesn’t begin to explain anything. It couldn’t, ‘cause this is the kinda it that can’t be explained.

Nor can it be healed with tears and woe and regret. Yeah, I broke my heart. Broke it bitter. But I didn’t break my spirit. Nor did I break my soul. Neither did the State, though they sure as hell tried.

So what? Do the crime… But my time here’s done. I’ve served. None too proudly and under a barrage of continuous hail. Now I’m a fellow well set. Ready for my Next Last Chance. All I require is permission to get back on the game board.

Monday, be damn good to me. You won’t regret it.

The Big Queasy

2006-02-26T11:08:00.000-05:00

I get queasy. Real queasy. Like some sap who can’t handle his sentiment; a cat that can’t stomach its quick. A hollow wells up from my gut and into my throat, craws to a halt, right where they say the frogs dwell.

But this is no frog.

It is reptilian. Where the frog broke off. Something elemental and blooded cold. A snap from evolution’s intermission. This must be what the dinosaurs felt thresheld at the exit, on the verge of no more, when every gasp was the last.

Watching Antione receive his umpteenth of Four Hundred Blows I catch my heart in my head, sneaking like the thief that it is. Poor, brave Antione. Wagoned away in a cage like some safari capture, another beast being led to the slaughterhouse. I know how he feels to know the next many minutes of your life will be handled by handlers who at best have perfunctory interests. I know how it feels to have to kiss the world goodbye.

Or Bernadette or Rose or Margaret sent away to fray with The Magdalene Sisters. Margaret ’cause she was raped by a cousin; Rose for abornin’ out of wedlock; Bernadette simply for talking to boys. How gruesomely ghastly a pogrom it was. Girls exiled in “secure accommodation” so as not to serve as temptation to the worst of Ireland’s men.

Obscene.

Intolerance 2

2006-02-25T10:23:00.000-05:00

In yesterday’s haste to get the blog out before my House-imposed deadline, I missed getting in a couple further developments in the Reign of Intolerance:

First, the caricature-blamed death toll in Nigeria now stands at well over a hundred, with the Christian Ibos (Igbos) now taking the lead over the Muslim Hausas in the repercussive killings. Seems mad members of both factions were looking for a convenient excuse to spill blood.

Second comes this unnerving nugget, again courtesy of the Grey Lady:

Millions Offered to Murder Leading Indian Artist
A militant Hindu activist organization has offered $11.5 million for the murder of India's best-known artist, Maqbool Fida Hussain, 90, Agence France-Presse reported. Objecting to what it called "obscene paintings" of goddesses, the organization, the Hindu Personal Law Board, said the amount would be doubled if the slaying was done by Yaqoob Qureshi, a Muslim politician who announced an identical reward for the beheading of the 12 artists responsible for cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. "We do not distinguish between Islam and Hinduism," said Ashok Pandey, the president of the board. Earlier this month, protests by militant Hindus prompted Mr. Husain to withdraw a depiction of Bharat Mata (Mother India) as a nude woman from sale at a charity auction. Similar paintings by Mr. Hussain have prompted protests in the past.

Guess something’s gotta galvanize a little Muslim/Hindu togetherness. Too bad it’s something -- and someone -- intolerant and reactionary. Quite clever for the Board to call on Qureshi to do the killing; makes ‘em look like they’ve got their arms outreached, when really it’s only their hate.

Finally, a Comment came through from one xradiographer, who chimed in with criticism of the West’s muzzling of David Irving. Now, like the X man, I’m no fan of the Great Denier, but I’d never in a million years deny him his right to deny anything, and I sure as hell wouldn’t jail him for his denials. The guy wants to be ignorant, let him be ignorant. To wring the words of another notorious anti-Semite: he is bunk.

Intolerance

2006-02-24T08:54:00.000-05:00

Crybabies. The whole wild world’s drowning in crybabies. Muslim mobs, all aroar over a misdepiction of Mohammed, cry ten dead in Libya, fifteen dead in Nigeria, cry threats and promises of more deaths to come. All because of a couple crass cartoons.

How strong your god if he can’t even stand up to caricature?

And now, cribbed from Tuesday’s Times, three -- count ’em -- more instances of crybaby oversensitivity: Roman Catholic bishops in New Zealand calling for a South Park boycott because a new episode depicts a statute of a bleeding Virgin Mary; Britain’s Hindu Forum denouncing the popular French comedy Les Bronzes 3: Amis Pour La Vie" ("The Sun-Tanned Ones 3: Friends for Life") -- which set a record for an opening weekend in France -- ’cause it shows images of the Hindu god Lord Shiva being torn up; and Cocuk-Der, a nongovernmental children’s welfare organization in Turkey, bringing suit to halt screenings of Valley of the Wolves — Iraq, a hugely popular Turkish film that depicts American troops in Iraq as villains.

Of course Turkey has already garnered no small renown for it’s persecuting of its scribes, most infamously Orhan Pamuk, who should be considered a national teasure; and Naguib Mafouz in Egypt and Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands both ran afoul of the crybabies, the latter lethally so.

What gives? Are we getting too close for tolerance? Me thinks Johnson and Johnson needs to start sending out emergency shipments of Baby Shampoo so we might have No More Tears.

And no more Intolerance.

Gunn Clubbing

2006-02-23T11:11:00.000-05:00

Smokey and quick, like a split lip with style. With a cool jazz soundtrack, a swing and a sway that won’t quit, can’t quit, is unquiting and unquitable. I blog of one Gunn, Peter Gunn, habitue of Mother’s, object of Edie’s desire, infamous on high and intimate of low life everywhere. And unlike Moore as The Saint, Craig Stevens does his own ass-kicking.

Brilliant, despite -- or maybe because of -- casting Gavin McLeod as a crime boss (“The Kill”). Effulgent, like lensed crime itself. Gunn is how a Hollywoodic checkered past tastes and smells and looks and feels. Now if only all the wild world’s ills could be resolved in the span of a show time.

Perhaps they can. With The Strip.

Cookie, I'm stealin' your comb.

Before I go-go, I gotta backhand it to The Saint, or at least to John Gilling, the cat who put some of the words in his mouth. Yeah, Moore’s mild-tempered Templar had bad poofy hair, never did his own stunts and was cursed with patently fake locations, but he was stylized and mannered and well-tailored and at times storyfic. More he was rendered delightfully eruditions, as when alluding to Francois Villon in “The King of the Beggars.”

Now, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that Villon was known to me only in passing, but from what I glean he was the 15th c’s version of street lit. A cat who’d been bad, done worse, and scribbled it all down, in the hyper-colored vernacular of the day.

Thanks, Simon. I owe you one.

A Saintless Spider with his Quills

2006-02-22T13:23:00.000-05:00

Now I’m no Saint, hell, I’m not even a Roger Moore, but I know to what it takes to be unholy, and I know what it means to be a bad actor, or at least a mannerly imitation of one. Scanning early episodes of The Saint left me at once intrigued and asleep, with visions that lead me to believe I can do it leaner, meaner, even, perhaps keener. Now, in a whole wild new world.

If I ever get back to it.

And like McGrath’s Spider, as lensed by Cronenberg and portrayed by Fiennes, I shall ghost the delusions of my past and come to some kinda truth, no matter how bitter and brutal and ugly the reveal.

And, like De Sade, and as he’s so bedevilishly played by Geoffrey Rush in Philip Kaufman’s body-ripping filmery, I shall do it with Quills. Or, if need be, the blood and the shit of my soul.

Was De Sade a monster? Depends on who you ask. He was monstrously brave and unequivocal. He didn’t bend, he never wavered, and he could not be broken. A cruel irony that the proceeds of his liberating scribbles would be used to further confine.

That mistake shall not be made thrice.

Toil & Trouble

2006-02-20T08:55:00.000-05:00

It could be anywhere, any nowhere that is. Like right around the bend from here. The place of no station. The waylay of the land. Where life's just an interruption between the main events of birth and death.

It is that bleak.

I blog of Bubble, Soderbergh's well-chronicled foray into the belly of a beastly Middle America. No actor could portray such stunning inconsequence 'cause no actor could ever imagine such inconsequence lives, so Soderbergh let the lives portray themselves.

And what bland lives they follow. Fast food and slow motion, a yawn amid slumber. The color of straw and half as tasty, a third as nutritious, a quarter as eventful. Lives of no joy, no hope, no glory.

Which seems to be the dull point. Bubble blows one away. Not outta the seat, mind you. But like dust is blown across a parking lot. This is the way many we live now. For worse.

Know this.

Betwixt the Between

2006-02-19T13:06:00.000-05:00

Sunday morning coming down. Way down. Down to the last drop. Gone. The sun rises, high and bright, but still just enough to bright the bitter, to highlight the slippery spots. That‘s all the muscle it‘s got. I know how that old sun feels: Too distant for warmth, too seldom for belief, a cruel joke on a cold, cold heart.

The folk in these hills care for no such sun, for no sun at all. The few times it has shone of late they’ve cowered for cover beneath any available shadow. I expect today’s shining will provoke similar retreats. The frigid won’t help. Maybe these folk get their warmth elsewhere, or maybe, just maybe, they’re afraid of what a little illumination might wring.

Like in Polanski’s The Lamp, one of his beautifully shadowed shorts shot while at the State Film School at Lodz. An old man in an old shop with some old dolls. Digging in their skulls, tweaking their limbs, remaking the remodels, all by lamplight.

Then comes electricity, in with the illuminated new. So-called progress. The mysteries reveal themselves, ugly and dangerous and in no need of man-made illumination.

Careful what you shine the light on.

Preceded by the quick little kill of Murder, Teeth Smile, a study in peepology, Break Up the Dance, with its Derenesque frenzy, Two Men and a Wardrobe, which nods to Chaplin and Lloyd, and When Angels Fall, his thesis, and the inner life of an invisible

Post grad comes keen with The Fat and the Lean. Things can always be worse. Then
Mammals slaps ticklish, and leads sway to…

Knife in the Water, a concoction of character and claustrophobia, where the pesky Pole leaves the Great Dane Dreyer and puts Hitchcock in a threesome. Or something. Else. Man against man, and the woman knows all.

But of course.

Swellville

2006-02-18T11:38:00.000-05:00

An old young man, legend of a recent past. Just like J.P. Melville's Bob le Flambeur. A gambler, yes. A gadabout town. A gadfly in the ointment. Nervy and nuisant. Suited and slung low, in a sweet rag-topped chariot.

On the Strip I am It and It is me. Swagger. A dagger through the muddy crystalline. With a bip and a bop that won't quit. Can't quit. I wear the most confident mask ego can buy.

Feel the fond. Model bookers and club promoters, keepers of shop and saloon, petty thieves and gangsters, junkies and thugs, those who do, those who don't, none who won't, given the chance. They love me and I love them.

Only I love me more. Much more. And they don't love me half as much as I believe. If my handshakes and hugs have ulterior motives, my smile is a lie of the mind, stands to damn good reason that their moves too mean something else. A hustler's currency. Tricks of the trade.

All will be well in Swellville.

Something Urbane This Way Makes

2006-02-17T17:49:00.000-05:00

Lax even in my lapse, I let the Viewlessness get to me. Or worse, not get to me at all. I sit. And I stir. And I yawn for the day when I too shall be released back into the thick of all things.

And sometimes, even if I can’t see the city for the hills, something urbane this way comes. Today was that kinda sometime, when a bolt from a ‘burg far from this no home came my way. I blog of one Lynne D. Johnson, a dame who really knows how to make a Hood’s dogged day, however inadvertently the make.

Today Ms. J writes of Relentless Aaron, that most-fittingly monikered purveyor of street lit. Those of you in my know are aware of RA’s six-figure deal with Harper Collins. You’re also aware of my strong taste for all that’s grit in lit, and my extreme distaste for those who’d spit it down and out.

Like a certain hack named Nick Chiles, who’s Times piece sparked my own Pressing, much of which was whittled from an even more vociferous scolding (see below). Lady J was kind enough to cite my slighting, and I in turn shall be forever grateful for the citing.

Kudos and cred to LDJ, Relentless A, and all the others who don't wait for the door to open but instead choose to kick it in.

I hope Ninny Nick Chiles is listenin.'

Back on the Streets (Kinda)

2006-01-11T16:38:00.000-05:00

Well, cats and kittens. Looks like this Hoodlum is back on the streets of the Big Bad Apple. Not in mind, not in body, but in spirit. And in print. That's right. The great good folk at NY Press saw fit to run my rebuttal to Nick Chiles' weepy Times Op piece, which means, for this week anyway, my ranting will be on every corner you New Yorkers pass, joining my ever present thoughts.

May this be the first of very many.

Space did induce a little severing of the original, taste gave it some manners (Thank you, Mr. Siegel). For better or worse, the full rude rides here:

A Chiles Left Behind

By John Hood

Let's be brutally blunt: Nick Chiles is a crybaby. A full-grown, overblown bucket of woe. Weeping last week on The New York Times’ Op-Ed Page ("Their Eyes Were Reading Smut" January 4, 2006) his tears were a wail that might've been heard 'round the world had boo-hoo been something worth listening to.

It isn't. And he's not.

Why the wet? Street Lit. The Nowest nanosecond in books. Seems little Nickie went into a Borders Books down in Lithonia, Georgia and was "embarrassed and disgusted" to find the stand-alone African-American Literature section "overrun with novels that appeal to our most prurient natures."

Worse, the poor, poor pitiful penman was "ashamed and mortified to see [his] books sitting on the same shelves" with those of these "purveyors of crassness." This smut is not literature, claims the cry-it-all, and should not be shelved as such.

This from a man who (with his wife) has co-written such high literary classics as Love Don't Live Here Anymore and What Brothers Think, What Sistahs Know About Sex: The Real Deal On Passion, Loving and Intimacy.

The nerve of this hack. Apparently cliché-ridden self-help masquerading as fiction is too falutin' to be sided with tales from the hood.

Maybe it's your books that need to be moved, Nick.

Contrary to this naysaying Left Behinder, the new crop of crime stories coming outta the ghetto is an extremely heartening state of bound affairs, it means folk are reading and writing, that written words still have some life in them yet. For a writer, any writer, to bemoan a burst of books is downright shameful.

Heartening too is the tremendous entrepreneurial spirit that has placed those books atop bestseller lists. Sold first from inner city sidewalks, outer borough nightclubs and outta the trunks of cars, street lit has bootstrapped into a bonafide phenomenon, available everywhere. Selling like the hot properties they are.

It's called the free marketplace, Nick. And you’re free to cease and desist, or at least excuse yourself from the fray.

Back in the '80s there was but one place south of 125th Street to buy the works of the likes of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines – the Port Authority book shop; now anyone anywhere can walk into any bookseller and handily nab not just the Godfathers themselves, but their slew of screaming offspring as well.

So what if the works are a little steamy, a mite dirty, occasionally ultra-violent. That's the Life, Nick. And, for an identifyingly defiant too many few, that's Life. Not everyone gets to Cosby out in the 'burbs and fret themselves over relationships. Some folk are too busy living.

And writing their way ahead. Keisha Ervin (Chyna Black) was a teen mother, Ebony Stroman (The Game Chose Me) was orphaned with two younger sisters and an incarcerated husband, and Vickie Stringer (Let That Be the Reason) is an ex-con, ex-gang banger, who ran whores. Now Ervin's a minor bestseller with three – count ‘em, Nick – books to her credit, Stroman and her husband have their very own publishing house, and Stringer's Triple Crown Publications (named for the Posse with whom she used to run) boasts a stable of authors twelve-strong and a sales record (a reported 300,000 sold during a recent 16-month period) that'd make even the big boys blush.

Chiles claims all this action is "driving out serious writers." Well, discounting the presumption that these bold new fictionists aren't serious about their craft (Who's being crass now, Nick?), we'd have to allow that their very existence is putting a damper on writing itself. Sure street lit is supplanting some so-called serious fiction at the top of the charts in Essence, but it's not because the serious is selling less. It's because the street is selling more.

It’s doubtful Ralph Ellison whined about Chester Himes, and neither Slim nor Goines kept Eldridge Cleaver from delivering Soul on Ice. Hell, even now Walter Mosley seems to sling – and sell – along fine despite – or because of – all the words from the street.

Full disclosure: I'm not Black. But I am a decidedly urban veteran of America's ever-growing gulag, and after a decade-and-a-half of wordwork, I do know some things about books. I know they need to be written, and I know they need to be read. And every bit of writing that gets people reading is a damn good thing.

Even, yes, the writing of ninny Nick Chiles.

If Chiles has a groan, it shouldn't be about sharing shelf space; it should be about how titles are shelved in the first place. There's no reason why books need to be segregated, just as there's no need to segregate people. Fiction is fiction. Period. And should be shelved as such.

Perhaps bookstores should devote an entire section to what's Hot and Happening. Then Chiles wouldn't have to worry about sharing anything. He wouldn't even be there.

And Nick, you might wanna switch shampoos. I understand Johnson's Baby still promises No More Tears.

This Day in Hoodery

2006-01-10T18:22:00.000-05:00

5 A.M. Rise and dim. Pop a megavitamin, down a nightstanded glass of water, sheath my bunk. Dress. A roll of discards used explicitly for slogging. Normally I wouldn't be caught dead in such wear and tear; this of course is far from normal. Unless you consider half-life among a buncha half wits to be normal.

But a couple cats are cool and I'm still generous, even among abnormalities.

"Who wants coffee?"

Everyone in my room but one, who continues to snore unabated by our reveille.

"I got this."

Grab a can of House Dark and a filter, make my way through a hallway of morning steam to the kitchen. Already there's a crowd. Dead souls at dead rest. The rats and the skinflints have beaten me to the coffee makers. Both devices sit half-full of freshly-brewed need. Like the minds and the lives of those behind the make, it has been brewed weak, and it had been brewed selfishly.

"Who's got a cup o' coffee for me so I can make more?"

Silence. Nervous darts of beady eyes. The stir of uncomfort. I set sight; an entire room fails to meet my inquiry. Jittered and stingy, they follow a hollow commandment: Thou shall not share.

Four can't enjoy a morning cup o' Joe so that a single stinge can. Two single stinges. And lest the thirsty get any ideas, the duo guard the pots like dogs during wartime. Or like a Neighborhood Watchman after a natural disaster has taken everything that wasn't there, everything they never had.

Must be terrible to carve out a semblance of existence with such a dull knife.

The dullness seems to be contagious, though, infecting. I seem to be coming down. If, that is, there is a down beneath the bottom. My early rise was concocted in order to crank-out the long-delayed Pasting of the graphic compendium to the soon-to-be cinemad A Scanner Darkly. Last night I disced a headful of data; and last night I left the disc in a computer at the Library.

A cache of stored ammo that I can't get my mitts on.

Story of my so-called Life.

So this. A blast to prove there are still some slingable syllables in this here Hoodlum, still some wily words in me yet. Have I succeeded? Hardly. Will I succeed? You betcha. When my time is right, and not a moment before.

The View Goes Marching On... Elsewhere

2005-12-31T10:28:00.000-05:00

Greetings, fellow travelers, from your interminably stational wanderer. I trust all is swell and well out there in the wild world; I trust too that one day, some day, while a soon still exists, this exile, this internment, shall end, and I'll be there to share in the swellful wellness of it all.

Alas not right yet. As you may have noticed, I seem to have lost my View. Well, I haven't lost it exactly, but it has been obstructed, if putting a blindfold on a blind man who sits in a blank room can be considered an obstructing. In deference of my keepers, I've had to leave the House outta the picture; which means I've set aside the minutiaed itch and scratch of the noose that binds my scrawny neck. In deference to a town already beaten silent, I've kept my mouth holstered. I mean, why break a broken jaw thrice?

Worse, most, finally, my eyes have fallen sore from the strain of looking into a void. Either there's absolutely nothing to see here or I'm just not the man to see it. Little matter. With no insight, there can be no View.

Not that there hasn't been things to commit bloggery over. I could easily've waxed pathetic about Thanksgiving (turkey loaf with sex offenders), or Christmas (a brother's saving me from a day of cold cereal and Bergman), or the limbo which has so tired me of two-steps (do the yawn!). I could well've maxed ridiculous over the unsuitable slog (blue never was my collar), the thus far idle offering of editorship (Scranton will never be my town), or beat the banter about the last night of Test Pattern (for one brief shining moment, there was almost a there here).

There are the movies, which have taken me farther and further and wider than even my wildest imagine. Since the release of Domino (Where are you, my dear friend?), flickery has flown me to New Wave Paris (Bob le Flambeur, Breathless, Band of Outsiders), Depression-era Vancouver (The Saddest Music in the World), depressing Dublin (Intermission), depressible, unimpressible New England (The Stranger), postcard-perfect Kentucky (Elizabethtown), postcard-ruined Minnesota (North Country), feckless Florida (Monster, Sunshine State), feckle Austin (Slacker), the Persian enGulfing (Jarhead), the swing of London then (Night and the City), and almost now (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), the sun of San Francisco before (Thieves' Highway), and after (House of Sand and Fog), and near (Sideways), all over the road (Two-Lane Blacktop, Detour, Gun Crazy, Almost Famous), into the future (Minority Report), out of a past both wicked (Gosford Park) and delicious (The Hours), through a serio-comic crime spree (Sin City), to places that defy anywhere (Punch-Drunk Love, Memento, Spun, 21 Grams, I Heart Huckabees), in an airport (The Terminal), at a Bee (Spellbound), amid some sexed-up Indiana (Kinsey), a loved-up New Jersey (Garden State), where I witnessed fortuitous couplings (Before Sunrise) that have begot great conversation (Before Sunset), had popcorn good (King Kong), bad (Dukes of Hazzard), indifferent (War of the Worlds), and reliably, if middlingly funny (Fun with Dick and Jane), spared myself a suicidal Swedish threesome (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, Silence), brought Killer Bait to a Monster's Ball on Scarlet Street, a Blue Narc to Dogville, and, natch, tripped fantastic the coastal capitals of L.A. (Crash, The Limey, Collateral, Adaptation, Two Days in the Valley, Short Cuts) and N.Y. (Gangs, Birth, Coffee and Cigarettes, I Shot Andy Warhol, Party Monster, Two for the Money, Knockaround Guys, Deuces Wild), plus spent splendid days living entire seasons in a delightfully peculiar old west (Carnivale), a despitefully colder Older West (Deadwood), on the mean streets of Baltimore (Homicide, (The Wire), and Bergen County (The Sopranos).

And it is through the sights of all those sundry seers that I see.

Then I hear. Most notably the mad mellow triumphant of Elbow (angled about here), the rad tears of a crowned and marked Antony and the Johnsons (heard best here), a Dore-dripped slip of 16 Horsepower (witness "The Hutterite Mile" in the last Paste sampler), some uncommon clever cool in the Kings of Convenience (the video for "I'd Rather Dance With You" never fails to make me smile wide) and OK Go (ditto the dance of "A Million Ways"), and, now, with all my soul and my longing, Cat Power, who shall forever remain among The Greatest.

It is of course through these songs that I hear.

And, yes, I read, though not nearly as much as I should. Thrice fallen again for the infallible Elmore Leonard, (Mr. Paradise, The Hot Kid, and When the Women Came Out to Dance), two of '05's Besteds, one a bit thick (McEwan's Saturday), the other incredibly rich (Gaitskill's Veronica), and a very much-hyped de-serving of the very very (Lipsyte's Home Land).

But enough about others and what they so do to me; it's high hard time to do myself for myself, and, if I let luck leave me duly diligent, for me to do what they do to and for others as well.

It is in such spirit that I proudly pronounce a new hot spot in cyberspace:

therealjohnhood.com

Yep, you read correctly. A site of my own, at long last. Put into play by an kind, cool and ever-auspicious Aussie named Brent Airey (a cat I've yet even to meet but feel as if I've know forever) and placed at the world's mercy by yours too truly, it will be the place to go for me, what I know, what I don't know, what I've seen, done, and what I've gleaned from the collisions. There are still a couple kinks to be sorted, but the site's up, I'm up, and I shall see again.

Watch.

Iconoclast Hucksterism (The Fast Gab)

2005-11-02T12:48:00.000-05:00

I got a gift, a gift for fast gabbing. The Fast Gab. If pressed, I could sell McNuggets to a chicken, a Whopper to a cow. Take an intrinsic interest, and I can con you into going against it. Quick.

So it's no surprise that I can talk people outta their freedom. Somebody nominated you to be locked-up on such-and-such a date at such-and-such a place so we'll be picking you up at such-and-such a time. There is no question. I get an immediate Never Happen, I move on. I get a pause or a laugh and you're going away.

For Good, as they say. That ol' Good Cause.

Yep, huckstering for Jerry and his kids is a cinch and I talk knots. Only the knot feels like a noose cinched around my scrawny neck. The faster I talk, the better I am at persuading, the tighter it gets.

Yesterday I almost strangled myself with knottedness. Fake cheer and a little white lie. Over and over, again and again. Till I was literally pale in the face. My pulse quickened to a stampede, my breath shortened to a single syllable gasp, and the sweat on my forehead sheened like the slime I'd become. So bad were the effects of my jive, I thought I was gonna pass out.

No one nominated anyone for anything – the names come from a list. And I am decidedly not happy to be conning to you.

Maybe it was the sugar. One of the office's women (and they all are women) brought in a bucket of Halloween candy and I indulged copiously. Maybe it was the coffee, I made a massive pot of extra-strong and slunk it down thirstedly. Maybe it was that fact that I hadn't eaten anything but a mega vitamin all day. Maybe it was all three. And maybe, just maybe, it was my conscience reaching up from my gut to prey upon me for preying upon other people's consciences.

I mean, who am I to fast gab people into giving to charity? I don't give. And I wouldn't want some slick in a suit telling me to do so. When I give, it'd be because I felt giving, not guilted into giving. Why should anyone else be any different?

I would welcome a position that called for marketing angling, something akin to the gentle art of persuasion. But this isn't it. Not even close. This is angling the telemarket, the hard sell of the cold call, and no matter who it benefits, it is not nice. I get people on the phone and lie, and at this point in my half life, I wanna be past that. Well past that.

This morn I bussed myself to Taylor, a town that exists in name only (there truly is no where there), and tendered my resignation. I can’t do this. I won’t do this.

I am cleansed.

This Saturday I restart the slog.

Lock-Up & Lock Jaw

2005-10-31T22:55:00.000-05:00

It all began last Thursday. As always, I awoke to a jugful of water and a vitamin the size of my ego. Dressed, brushed and signed-out for the slog. Through the door and ‘cross the street to the courthouse square and wait. And wait. And waited some more. Tuesday I'd posted forty minutes in the wet and the cold and no one showed. A call told me I'd be picked-up Wednesday. Wednesday came and so did the same result, sans wet, half again as cold. A message wasn't returned. So when Thursday rolled around to yet another rerun I figured it was time to slog elsewhere.

Bad enough I gotta rouse myself for penury, the least penury could do was show up.

So I pro-acted. Grabbed a Count of Lackawanna Transit System (COLTS) bus up to Dickson City. The Mall at Viewmont, which is not much of a mall, in a very nothing vale, and has no view. No view I could see anyway. Got off in front of Penny's and trudged, through a parking lot, up an off ramp, and on to the inaptly-named Scranton-Carbondale Expressway. I thought expressways were expressively for expressing. This four-lane, stop-light ridden thoroughfare is expressedly no such thing.

But there is traffic. Minions in their cookie-cutter sedans hitting the cake bake strip. Wal-Mart. Target. Home Depot. Circuit City. Toys-R-Us. And all the tell-tale retail parasites that latch on to such chichainery (sic).

Plus, up about a half-mile or so, adjacent to a Tuxedo Junction, lies Manpower. Since I've been reduced to half man and relieved of all my power I figured this'd be the perfect place for me to apply. Perhaps I might re-up. Or at least provoke a more suitable down.

Inside the temp agency's office I am like no other. Silk in a sea of denim. Groom in an ill-wash of unkempt. A hard-boiled egghead among the savage brute. Looking not just for the best way to keep the wolves at bay, but for a way to take over the pack.

Terminal tested, I am Exemplary. Of course. When a test consists of given answers how could anyone be anything but? Okay, speed counts too, and accuracy. And I am all about a speedy keen out to this mess I'm still inexplicably in.

Expect a phone interview tomorrow. Pass that and you will start Monday.

Then Friday morn shows the slog.

You wanna work?

Not that kinda work, but I could use the loot. I wouldn't mind getting' outta the House for a spell. I got a phoner at 2:30 though.

Not a problem.

2:30 rolls around and I phone in to the MDA. That's right, the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The folk who handle Jerry's Kids. Seems along with the Telethon they've got another fund-raising racket: The Lock-Up. Yep, The Lock-Up. Where they entice some of Northeast Pennsylvania's most ne’er do bad citizens to go to fake jail. Really. They come in a limo or a de facto paddy wagon, handcuff and drag 'em away. The bail goes to the MDA.

I was lockjawed, too aghast to tell 'em I was intimately familiar with the concept. Prison as a promotional tool for the disabled? Tomfoolery of such a hurtful subject? Had any one of these fund raisers ever spent a single day in real jail they'd never dare such a stunt. Never stick pins in the eyes of the nation’s small country of incarcerates.

But I bit. Told the slog I’d have to beg off Monday. Then I spit it out. Told the slog there’d be no way I’d call and ask people to go to jail. For charity or not. Then I bit again. Philosophically, diametrically opposed, I still might be able to do some good for someone.

Wouldn’t know until I took a little look-see.

Well, today I got a good look-see. On video, the kids are as brave and as bold and as beautiful as you’d expect. Courage I couldn’t in a million years muster. The kick though’s about as corny as it sounds. Intrude on some hapless good citizen and tell ‘em they’re on the Most Wanted List, ask ‘em if they’d like to be locked-up, wear stripes, photo-op behind fake bars, and dine out on a meal of “bread and water.” All for a good cause.

C’mon, it’ll be fun.

I don’t think so. As much as I’d like to be of civic assistance, it doesn’t do good to make a mockery of America’s gulag. Yeah, most cons belong down, the longer the harder, the better. But grinding their faces into the cement in the name of charity isn’t the answer. Good works don’t get better with demean.

So tomorrow, I’ll rouse dark and early, and make my way back across the street to the square. Let’s hope the slog’ll have me back.

The Moosic Noose

2005-10-26T21:35:00.000-04:00

It is a stain of a town. Nestled in a hedge of underwhelming hills and trimmed with a frost of sixth growth forest. You'd miss it if it were there, but it isn't so you don't. A splotch of roadkill, sheltered beneath a canopy of pure slate. An island of cloud parked right on its head. God's carport. Leaning awkward and leaking spit and blood in some sedentic trailer park.

To hit the town you must first traverse a highway lacking in even the requisite repetity of fast food amenities. A Mickey D's every, say, 30 miles, rather than 5. A truck stop but once between fathoms. Nothing else. No more. Forget hotels. There are none. Why would there be? There is no reason to stay, overnight or otherwise.

It is that chartless. Not uncharted, mind you. Chartless. People have come here and gone again. Some gave it a moment, others gave it a moment more. None lived past the moment they surrendered. All surely regretted the struck seconds of their lives. The shops and the taverns and the diners are shuttered, those that aren't are filled with ghosts. Drunk with despondence.

The town, if it could be called a town and it can't, is named Moosic. It is a hundred-plus years old. A hundred thousand tears cold. Its flame-keepers claim to be experiencing some population growth. If so, it is a growth the size of a mite's tumor.

To bring newfound glory to the town I propose the Moosic Noose. Think about it. The place is already known as a place of the dead. Why not make it the place you go to die? Euthanasists. Assisted Suicidals. Kervorkian's kids. All those at the end of their tether could go there for enough rope. Rope, alas, twined into the trademarked, patented Moosic Noose.

It would be a hoot. It would be a holler. And it would be a start to the end of an absent history.

Now, what's the number of the Moosic Chamber of Commerce?

A Song of Laughing and Forgetting

2005-10-16T19:47:00.000-04:00

We read ourselves into things. I do anyway. Sometimes I read the wrong things. Sometimes I read the right things for the wrong reasons. Sometimes I just read it all wrong. But for some humdrum reason, it's always me at the core.

Like in Elbow's Forget Myself. A read of a telling tells me I was way off; it's a Friday Night bit of a fright song about a cat making the prowl around Piccadilly. Seems said cat's got a lot to think about, specifically (I think) his kitten. He's a bit desolate, despondent almost, and he cranks a rankled eye-view of the punters as a result.

I got the last part, the think about, and I ran. I felt it, I walked it, I wore it. And I guess I got it all wrong. But oh how right it did feel. Still does. Maybe even more so.

To me Forget Myself is more than just a Friday night fright song about a cat who goes prowling, I take it as a song about laughter and forgetting, or, perhaps, laughing about the idea of forgetting. Beneath the smirk and the smile lies a reveal so close to the soul that I can't help cozying up to it. At the library I Yahooed the video to a constant, then a coincident in Paste allowed the same at the House. Play, play and more play. Till there is no play left in me. Then I play some more. And each and every time I'm struck by a chorus of resound:

No, I know, I won't forget you
But I'd forget myself
If the city would forgive me

Right, bright, and brilliant. And, to this bull’s-eyed soul, rightly, brightly, brilliantly on target. So damn simple it hurts double. I get that sinking feeling a lot, the clear and ever present memory of a face I can't forget, a regret that I'm doomed to remember. Miami, New York, Chicago, London, even Buffalo – I've hurt and burned and crashed and double-crossed 'em all. When you wrong an entire someone you scar; when you wrong an entire city, you've gota go for complete and utter forgetting and forgiveness.

I’ve done both. Of course the wrongings have a face, faces, or, in my case, many, many faces. I won't name names – they've suffered enough at my scarred hands – but I might name instance. Instances. Not so quiet thefts, not so clever lies, borrowings and burdenings and all around baddenings. Twofold. Thricefold. Tenfold. Twenty. There comes a point when counting just doesn't add up.

Elbow’s angle sticks in the crook of my maw. “Look for the plot where I can bury my broken heart” is to me, for me, a tear that still streams. “Are you falling in love with every second song?” is a question I answer with Yes. I’m still looking for the plot of gold, and I’m still falling in love, every second song or so, even if it is from a distance, with a distant. There’s not much laughter, and seldom any forgetting, but I’m getting there. With Elbow’s angling, I’ll be getting there tunefully.

I'm All Logic

2005-10-13T12:31:00.000-04:00

If, as the Stoics hypothesized, logic is bones and sinew, and my bones are brittled and ill bore and my sinew is ached and torn, I'm all logic. I gotta be. Why else here?

Again with the Auster. You gotta be here. Fully in a place. In place. Fully in a time. In time. Fully in the moment. Doesn't matter where, so long as you're there. Here. Completely.

But my here is incomplete. Mind wanders, soul shifts, body aches on impulses even it didn't know it had. Half life. In a perpetual half time. The throngs are all at the concession stands feeding their faces while I sit stirred in a locked dressing room, my swagger on a hanger.

I'm ready to resume play, Mr. Demille.

Today again with the rains, not as spitting as it has been, but nonetheless wet. A cloak of nature's tears wrapped around an ingrown cry baby. The slog gets called on account, I get giddy. Thank some lucky stars. Perhaps today will be the day that I get to make my play.

So Paste. A surprisingly splendid offering of smart pop arcana. Yesterday was the first time I've been in a bookstore in almost four years. Not for lack of trying – many are the days that I've tried to bribe and cajole a ride – but for geography. There is no Borders, no Barnes, no little indy in downtown Scranton, and it's a long, long way to Dickson City. Yesterday I made my way, for minutes, minutes enough to find that Paste might just be the place.

It was a stewful few minutes, the wash and the rush of the rash of titles nearly overwhelmed me. Stoked some faraway flame. I wanted to spend hours, days, cracking covers and delving into stacks upon stacks of the written. Even with the occasional mail drop (thanks Craig), I still do so miss the written. I miss its browse, its spur, its contagion.

Yes, there is the public library, that blessed Gothic fortress which has become my defacto office. If not for them there'd be for me recently no Auster, no Berendt, no McCarthy. No On Bullshit. Yet, good and great as it is, the library cannot replicate the thrill of an at once all new.

The rest is lining-it as I can. The quick cyber fixes at the aforementioned Albright Memorial mostly, and, if I'm feeling particularly pocketed, Northern Light, the kinda cool coffee klatchery where two Site Kiosks allow timed email checks and a semblance of surfing.

There is too the some small public access provided at University of Scranton's Weinberg Library, but the three ancient, weathered, Word-free terminals assigned non-students are hidden away in a closet that can only be accessed by passing through battalions of spanking new work stations which of course are off limits to the common folk. Like this half world, you must make it through a maze of can't-have before you get your morsel.

Morsels I've learned to find fulfilling. Tidbits of food, thimbles of drink, slivers of minutes. Pieced and parsed properly, they can almost sate. The Big Almost. It's not quite, not because I like too – I'm nothing if not interested in the quite – but because I'm mandated to. Because it is.

So I let the Bacchanals commence without me, Dionysus dance in another sphere, and I tow the Apollonian line, it is my burden, it is my joy, it is only logical.

Sulking Toward Bethlehem

2005-10-09T17:19:00.000-04:00

The rains came Friday – blessed, glorious torrents of team – and with them almost went what little was left of my resolute. I'm talkin' 'bout strength, dig? A little big thing called fortitude. A Stoic's great good grace. The solid in my ever dwindling mass. One minute it was there; the next it was gone. Long gone.

Long done gone.

The Sophist says the capacity to act or be acted upon is the mark of real existence or ‘that which is.' If so, then I ain't. Isn't. Aren't. I am not permitted to act. I am not permitted to be acted upon, unless you count the daily dalliance of humiliatings. Instead I'm held in a place between stages, a stage between places. Linger. Limbo. Lull. Calloused, bruised, exhaust wrung, does not make me real. It only makes me vivid, livid. Vividly, lividly unreal.

A Fool.

So I sit, stirred to a sullen, sulken, silent, the ass-end of another dog day refurbishing a house that I don't own, a house that I won't own, a house I wouldn't own, a home not my own, in a town that can't have me, cursing the vivid lividity of it all. My feckless, reckless plightedness. A steam swamps my soul, a hiss of unreason and ugly, wobble and woe. With all the ire of anger, I am consumed.

The Stoics held that uglies like fear or envy, or, I suppose, bitterness and anger, were false judgements, that the sage would not, could not befall them. Later Stoics took it a good step further, believed the sage to be immune to misfortune. That a right course made for a right soul.

Boy, did I steer sagely wrong.

Perhaps if I could grab hold of my own wheel the road wouldn't elude me. Maybe if I didn’t have to come back to a Houseful of malignant ghetto hillbillies I wouldn't wanna run over things.

Take Little John, the Oompah-Loompah Old Head. A pipsqueak tweak with a crack chip on his bony shoulder, he’s nasty, rude, vindictive and deluded. Weighing in at what must be 175, arising to a whopping 5'3" in his padded bobo's, the creature is all stomach and skull and stupid. Coon-eyes popping from a popped top. Sneak ways slithering from a scaled skin.

He's without idea, stuck in some seventies slow jam of weepy sorrow and monster rock promise, and he's utterly without ally. If I burned bridges, this idiot torched the world. What meager world it was. He must've. I mean, he has one of three sisters and a housing-homed dad and that's it. No friends. No connections. No nothing. This is the guy's hometown and still he's gotta temp it. In fact, he had to temp it twice; the first agency fired him after he feigned a wrist injury, then, when given an office position, spent his days sorting promotional golf tees. Really. He didn't step up, so he was pushed out. Down. Usually the only people who get canned from a temp service are the ones who don't show up at all.

Gimme my hometown and I'll make it mine again. Or else.

But enough patheticry. It is what it is until it isn't and I'm a fool to fond and fret the could'ves, would'ves, should'ves. There is a worse. A much worse. I just came in from a smoke where a man who lost both his parents while away said today he'd be visiting their grave sites. For the first time. He'd been down thirteen years, couldn't attend their funerals, couldn't be by their bedsides while they were ailing. Now he was going to see them and they were dead. Hard as it is to fathom after all the funk and fetters and frustration, but I got it half good.

Wrong Eyes

2005-10-03T21:59:00.000-04:00

I found it. Some of it anyway. Or something close. It was pitch as pure white, clean as all mud, crazy and kooky and candid and truly cool. It didn’t come in a box. It didn’t come in glassine. And it didn’t come to me. I had to go get it. Specifically, to the the Scranton Cultural Center, an old Masonic Temple here. ‘Twas a suitable place, for a surprising find.

I found God.

Okay, so I didn't. But I did find myself falling fond of those who believed that they have. I'm talkin' Pentacosts. Strictly Southern charmers (of a sort). The tongue lashers, the shakers, the healers. The closest thing the cracker has to voodoo. The stuff of story. The stuff of legend.

This eve I saw Andrew Douglas' Searching For the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, one of the brightest little road trips I may ever have been taken in on. Sure it was a vicarious in, and sure I was a mite late. But I’m still a ward of the State. Half state, but nonetheless State.

'Twas damn good to get way away for awhile.

Scripted by an inspiring Steve Haisman, tripped by the charismatistic Jim White, and tracked by he and a few of his finer friends, such as Cat Power, The Handsome Family and David Johansen, Searching is a story about story, a tale about tale, told and sung and spilled from the outside. Spilled because "stories [are] everything and everything [is] stories."

That's Harry Crews talkin' one of the many truths he gets to telling. The quipless quip comes while walking down a desolate clay road and recalling the days when he and his kinfolk made up stories to go with the perfect people in the Sears Robuck catalogue. His kin weren’t perfect. Far from it. They were missing fingers and limbs and eyes. They had lesions and sores and the crazies. In a tale tarnished with character, the tallest teller is the star. Harry Crews is that bright. Grizzled, acute, sinuous, wise. The man knows things, things most of us can't even guess at.

Or get tripped up in the guessing. Flashback 1989. Maybe '90. I can’t be sure. Crews touring to support Body, another muscular trumping of the spineless competition. What am I saying? Crews has no competition. Never has. Ever. Maybe O’Connor. Maybe Faulkner. But their long gone dead. Anyway, the wisest old codge of the swamp and I were scheduled to meet, in a publisher-appointed suite at The Royalton, all so I could plug him in Paper.

It was meant to be one of my finer moments.

Of course meant-to-be's rarely are, and this was no exception. On the appointed day I arrived in The Royalton lobby eager early. Zeus knows I didn't wanna be late to meet the master. I also wanted to be braced. And I know more than a slew of the 44 bartenders who’d comp me the bracing. Since Crews was a notorious drunk as well as a formidable mind, I wanted at least a shot up.

So I hit the bar. Two neat Jack's with a black cafecito back. Before noon. It was a brace alright, braced the words right into a near slur. Not good. Another double-o joe later I was ready to meet the man. As ready as I'd ever be.

In his suite we shook hands and the lordly one asked if he could get me anything.

What are you drinking?

Coke. I quit drinkin' liquor four months ago. It was time.

Oh.

And there I stood two drinks to a slur.

But I went on instinct and the tete a tete went down well. Better than expected even. I pitched increasingly faster; Crews came back with increasing economy of speed. He was open, clever, cagey, on. A raconteur from way back, who knew well how to rack a tell.

Then came the printed nightmare. My last question was Would you yourself kill given the chance? He answered: Of course. When the interview ran however the words were flipped and instead read Would you kill yourself given the chance. Not even of the same frame. His Of course not only made all the nonsense in the world, it made him look both cowardly and suicidal. As if he were too scared to take a chance on taking his own damn self. Stupid. And it made me look like an idiot.

I was incensed. Pissed purple and rage red. Still am. To some small degree. It’s not enough to be dwarfed; I gotta be shamed too? Uh-huh. Not this here Hood. Seeing, hearing, feeling Harry Crews again brought it all back. Then the road took it all away. There are so many greater things to concern myself with, so many deeper hurts, so much more to tacit. All it takes is a fevered faith. Like the blind intuits with the wrong eyes. Ya just gotta believe.

Poison Oak

2005-09-29T21:24:00.000-04:00

It begins with a whisper. A quiet rasp back to a childhood, to a childhood hero. The kid who dragged. The kid who dared. The kid who turned away from a no place. The kid who slammed the door on a fallen face. The kid who stole and forged and left.

The kid who got away.

The brave one. The one with enough guts to inspire. The one with enough guts to provoke. The one with guts enough to put his life at life's mercy. Simply so that he could live. Simply so that others could live with him, through him, after him, beyond him.

We all have those kids in our pasts, even if we are those kids. We all have those kids within us, even if we don't dare to bare their soul. Some of us still are those kids, risking and itchy and foolish and true. As a child it's considered imaginative, at adolescence it's called flighty, for a period between late teen and early twenty it's celebrated, past that it's deemed irresponsible. Unless past a certain age, when it becomes eccentric.

Here it's celebration. Love. Always. And there is no age limit. There is no limit. Are none. Possibility does not allow for such small. Ever. It takes real resolve to remain rash and reckless in this world; the rash and the reckless are this world's real resolute. Taut. Like the wind. Honor.

Awe. At the feet of such great he's but a particle, dust, aflutter. Alit by recollection. The hiss of a drowned moment, the singe of swallow's last gasp. Where once there were flowers, dreams, hopes, now there is mud. Tears.

Sheds, words evaporate. The steam of reason. Inspiration's ether. Seeps into the skin, spreads, that rash again. The body gets covered, coated, hived with chilled warm. And all that love and awe and cry breaks. The voice cracks into a know. Connects. This is just what the witch doctor ordered.

From then on it's nothing but freedom. The statuette crumbles, the elixir flows, piano keys reverse the way. Down is the new up. Sad is the new happy. Transcendence. From the bottom of a welling unwell.

He calls himself Bright Eyes, his song is Poison Oak, and it is anthem.

Scrapping

2005-09-27T21:21:00.000-04:00

My fingers are thick as pickles, dilled, dulled. Swole, as they say. Swole to stiff. The skin dry, scabbed, cut. The joints null and unresponsive. As I type my hand must hover and aim, consciously recalling what it is to do. What I do. How I do it. Like some enfeebled bird of prey who's lost the facility of instinct. I know I must attack; I just can't unencumber the wherewithal to do so.

Worse, I'm wasting my half life slingin' about slogs, frettin' the despicables, sweatin' the all encompassing small. 'Cause this half life they've designed for me to lead, I've deigned to let 'em make me live, is but a still stall burden of small. Sisyphean by day; by night a crush. One interminable load of meaty toothpicks jabbing into my battered back.

And nary a truth to be told. Rereading Auster I see what I'm missing, I get a feel for what I've missed, and, nevertheless, I'm weakened by the strength of his seeing, feeling. The Invention of Solitude makes me dizzy with despair, thrilled somehow with the agony of my defeatism. Citing Lull and Fludd and Bruno (is it a coincidence that the three are bisected by "u"?), I remember when I too was wondered by their genius, their nobleness, their belief. All is linked, everywhere, everywhen. And I tear knowing that I've not listened their lesson, had not even thought their names, in a tangent's age.

The way the knowing rolls off Auster's tongue shames me. Jonah to Descartes, Crusoe to Lycophron, Stevens and Augustine and Holderlin and Hegel and all that is and can be known forever. Not just who they are or were, but what they stood for, how they still stand. Knowledge dropping, spewing, careening, on and through and around. Rain, geyser, ricochet. If he's a font, I'm a cipher. Tidbits of know stolen by night and stashed in the marrow of my soul, never to be heard from, learned from, again.

I sit. I stir. I devalue. What value a man who does naught? Then I strap on the boots and kick myself, take off the gloves and smack myself sillied, sully, tear the very hair from my disgrace. And I sit again. And this time I stir up trouble, old trouble, but trouble nonetheless. Deep blue sometimes trouble. I call it Penmanship: The Biography of a Murder Instrument. It's a big idea that came to me way back when, back when I believed exile could be licked. It's a big idea that's come to me all over again, and this time it'll kick an ass other than my skinny, scrawny own. Instead of scrape, I'll scrap, thank you. And those bruises, those black eyes. Those will be the marks of victory.

First though an Austerian pause: "He cannot be anywhere until he is here."

Hard time I was here.

I'm No Chippee

2005-09-25T18:00:00.000-04:00

The blisters, the cuts, the bruises, the abrasions, the burns, the burn lines, the strains, the sprains, the fatigue. It's not me. I'm not it. If I'm to be in the sun it'll be under an umbrella. If I'm to sweat myself silly it's gonna be for sheer pleasure. I'm a thinkin' man. My game is ideas. Words. Angles. Or at least I thought so.

Once again I guess I thought wrong.

I do know this: I'm not built to build buildings.

In Australia, my pal Brent says they're called chippees. Here in America we use a few less complimentary epithets beginning with redneck. Whatever you wanna call ‘em, call ‘em someone else. Not me. I'm no chippee. And I'm no red neck. Never was, never will be. Don't much wanna be either.

Worse, seems the little long hard time I've spent slogging on slogful construction sites has already caused me to lose an assignment. With Paste. Seems they need a wordslinger with time enough to pay attention to wordslinging, especially the details that make all the wordwork possible. I don't blame 'em. I can't. A professional organization requires professionals, not some mad ex-con fake-ass laborer masquerading as a professional. I wasn't on top of the publisher; the publisher (Wiley, thank you very much) didn't get me the book. In fact they never even responded to my request. Twice. Guess they got enough hype in their life.

Wonder if Joshua Greene, the scribbler whose book was set to be covered, feels the same way?

As if embatterment and hacklessness weren't enough, now I might be in trouble with the House. See the woman on whose home we were slogging yesterday put out a dynamite spread of fresh meats and cheeses for us stinking, sweaty slogs. Among the layout were rolls, big, fresh New York-style rolls. So ravenous was my appetite I didn't even notice that the rolls were liberally sprinkled with poppy seeds until the seeds were taking root in my stomach. We're not allowed to eat poppy seeds, of course, might make for a false positive. Or excuse away a true one.

So when I report to my counselor come Monday, I’ll be reporting my inadvertent transgression. I’ll also be requesting that I tender my resignation; looks like it's time for a new slog.

Whoa Billy (In Its Entirety)

2005-09-22T23:05:00.000-04:00

(Note: This week's blessed Electric City runs with my take on a Live Idol; thing is it's not all there was to it. Oh, I'm not averse to the cutting (Zeus knows I get a lot windy at most times), but two semi-salient points -- Billy doing Randy and Steve doin' dumb -- need to be mentioned, if only right here. So, right here it is, Whoa Billy in its entirety.)

Whoa Billy

By John Hood

Where do old punks go once they've passed their primetime? Well, if they're Billy Idol, they go back, way back. Back to when then was now. They go for all the gusto they got left, all the gold in the wild world, the brash rash of rank and redolent glory. They go for the throat. The hustle and rustle and stink of the road. What they know and what they know will make 'em go.

They go to the crowd.

Onstage at The Kirby last Wednesday night, Billy Idol went to the crowd and the crowd went wild. Goosey goose bumps tingled the mass of "Flesh," choraled choruses echoed the chanted "Yell," and fisted fists raised hang 'em high for all that mad, glad "Mony."

As if it was 1985 all over again.

Idol raucously concurred. Malcontent to the core, the peroxide punk trashed his laurels and came out swingin' anew, with the Velvet Ramone crunch of "Super Overdrive," stab one of slab now, Devil's Playground. For a so-called has-been hit man, comin' off longshot was a gutsy move. And it proved beyond the shadow of an ol' roustabout doubt that this ionic Idol would be a whole helluva lot more than just some dumb carbon of that Idol.

And what well-defined guts he's got. Lean if not leaner than even his leanest mean (Is there an L.A. trainer in his house?), the Idolized-one packs a sinewed-six of pure unadulterated gall. Fit, furied and tuned like a fine classic, he revs, he rumbles, he glistens and he gleams.

"Overdrive" kicked into his first overground hit, "Dancing with Myself," from the animystic [sic] days when Generation X defied their onanistic own. "Dancing" in turn twirled the crawl of "Flesh for Fantasy," a click for all the chicks and each and every those who dig them.

The gimme-give and shimmee-take continued apace with "Body Snatcher" (dedicated to Dime Bag) and "White Wedding" (cited circa Danceteria), "Scream" (predicated on fellatio) and "Eyes without a Face" (eradicated into Eros). A frisky, risky four-step between all the now that then can muster.

Settled, if a sweat-soaked steam engine could ever be settled, Billy strapped-on an acoustic and Hollied his way through "Sweet 16" (nodded to right-cool Ed of Homestead's immaculate Coral Castle), "Plastic Jesus" (a sort of accidental protest song), and "Cherie Cherie" (where Idol does Diamond one rung sidewise).

Then, in an uncharacteristically-charactered act of unadulterated candor, Idol let the steam stream into the hurt and the heart and the heavy of Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927," a remarkable song that marked a remarkable moment. In fact it was the high point of a peak performance – mountain deep and deft, and not in the least bit spoiled by the cribsheet Billy had a helper hand him. (After all, who wants to get those words wrong?)

Had he followed with either "Lady Do or Die" or "Summer Running," the two new tracks of tears that near Newman's greatness, we would've lied happily ever after.

But he didn’t. Instead. Billy took a breather and left in his spotlight a void of stale air -- or, rather, hair. We mean of course the monumentally coifed would-be guitar god Steve Stevens, who chose to strip Billy's bout of poignance with a flaring glare of pompous virtuosity. The six-slinger's histrionic interlude might've been masterful, almost impressive even, but it was unnecessary. Doubly unnecessary was when Stevens went inexplicably Zep. We bet the Bromley's were spinning in their exile.

But null lulls can last only so long and this null lull was no exception. "Rat Race" explained it away to a Steppenwolfing "L.A. Woman" (suitably recast as "PA Woman"), "Evil Eye" brought the "World Coming Down" to a smashing crash, and the die-hards got their hard on the old school favorite "Ready Steady Go," (though they might've softened by the soporific guitar solo).

Then it was nothing but a barrage of Monsters -- "Rebel Yell," "Kiss Me Deadly," "Mony Mony,"— done-up in arena drag and marred only by some strange Molly Hatchett-like guitar boogying. For a minute there we thought the meatiest Vegas bar band on Earth had posted up in the cut. It was that rockist.

The crackerjack laughs though gave it away -- this was all good cartoon fun, a none too serious display of none too serious stirrings. The better to beat you, my dear. Best was Idol himself – aglare, aflutter and aglow – with a dynamite-eyed smile that never once left his bedeviled face, even when smacked into that patented snarl. He was happy. He was hilarious. He was enjoyful. As if he himself was surprised he's still here to hero. But here he was. And right there. For some two hours and fifteen minutes, the hardest working punk in show business was at it and at it again. The old boy couldn't help it; it's in his blessed bones.

An End to Sloglessness

2005-09-21T23:16:00.000-04:00

Well, it didn't last long. Yesterday morn I walked off one slog, this morn I'm back at another. See this cat called the House last night, asked for some laborers, and one of my, er, colleagues told me about it. Curious, I went to the Monitor, asked if it were true. He countered with a question of his own: Was I sure I wanted this kinda labor? Sure thing, I replied. I'm Johnny Labor.

Boy am I. Not. This general labor stuff. It's not me. I mean, I'm not that kinda good with my hands. I'm not a good man with a hammer. I'm not a good man with a drill. Hell, I'm not even a good man to have on site, unless perhaps you're looking for entertainment. I can fight, I can write, and I can gesture. But the fight's all bluster and the write's all wrong (thanks Joey G). That leaves gesture. And there's only so much a man can do with gesture. I was given a drill; I broke the bit. I was handed a saw; I broke the blade. I was asked to hold something still; I let it unstill. Thrice.

Then I got wise. Turned down the sound in my head and just went with it all. Sure, I still made mistakes, but they were less and less noticeable, of less and less consequence. Best, the mistakes began to be outweighed by no mistakes, the pitch went from squeal to hum, until before I knew it, I'd helped to finish an entire deck. Okay, so it was a nothing deck affixed to a nothing house in a nowhere place. Still it was some small accomplishment. A tangible result of something coming from my hands. Something other than hyperbole and boil, that is.

At the end of the day, sunburnt to beet, scratched to shred, bruised to purple, I got in the truck and looked back at that deck and smiled, a little less impressed with myself, but impressed nonetheless. I'd constructed a thing, a touchable durable. It was almost cool. Just so long as I don't make a habit of it.

The Monitor was correct, it's not my kinda work. It's work best left to men of such habits, such strengths. I know my place, and it is not on a construction site.

My place is the story, and this could be some story. The company's called Good Cents. I know, the name's unfunny; the man behind the name though is a riot. Broken of nose, square of jaw, loud of mouth, and manic of manner, he's cartoon incarnate. Pulpy. Peppery. Profane. I tell ya, talking to him's like a nonstop bop with a well-connected townie who wants nothing but to make you blink and think twice about it. That's if you get a blink in edgewise. The cat's a natural, a natural rascal, of some ill-repute. Smart. Sharp. And unafraid to stick and jab. In other words, my kinda guy. If I don't have to last too long in the slogging, it might make for a slingable story.

Slog Free

2005-09-20T20:53:00.000-04:00

On Sunday I was a sap. Yesterday I was a scold. Today I'm slog free. Well, not entirely. I'll be slogging again elsewhere come Monday, but right now I'm off the slog. Straight outta UG Hell, the slog of all slogs. And it feels delicious.

This forlorn morn they had me bent up on a rickety electric scaffold and propped in the top of a steel bin the size of a soccer mom's mini-van, head down, elbows askew, fists wrapped 'round a filthy instrument of disruption, scraping away weeks of caky caulk and pourable concrete. The fossiled remains a hundred and one production runs. It was a crushingly filthy sweat, requiring muscles I never knew I had, never knew I had to use, muscles so reticent they turtled. A daunt made all the more petulant by the noxious, toxic fumes steaming from the solvents required to break down the industrial crust.

I'd had it. In fact, I've long had it. And I'd said so, again and again and again. I said it to myself, and I said it to others, each and every day of my slogsistence, including the very first. It became a running joke among some of my cooler co-workers: What time you leaving today Hood? At 8 I'd say 9. At 9 I'd say 10. And so on, through the dog day's droll of hellsome hours. Each idle threat met with a rejoinder: You ain't going anywhere.

But today I decided to kill the idle. Make good on the threat. Do something. Today I was going somewhere. Somewhere else.

Of course I first had to get permission from my counselor (don't want a little thing like a walk-off to send me back rivering), and of course at first nobody believed I'd do it. I don't know whether it was 'cause they couldn't, wouldn't or shouldn't. I know they never had. And they couldn't fathom someone who would.

And did. I made the calls. To my EC editor: She can't promise me more work but she'll try. Good enough. Then to the counselor. She says stay. I say no way, it's toxic. She says okay. Then, just like that, I go. Pick up my unread New York Times and walk UGL right outta my life.

I can still feel the disbelieving faces. A little bit haughty (he can't handle the work) and a lotta bit green. I was doing what they'd wanted to do forever. Thing is, I just had the guts to do it. Had they and their forebears done likewise ages ago, there'd be no need for me – or them – to do so now. They'd be making a fair wage in a safe place, respected and fed. Instead they make pennies, still, and the place is a menace. They're disrespected and fed up. I don't blame 'em. I was too. That's why I walked.

I heartily recommend it to every indentured someone.

The Rub

2005-09-19T21:13:00.000-04:00

Forget the slog, that mind-numbing, bone-boiling, soul-strangling drudge of a so-called job. Forget that the toy store is the only place to buy a cool gift for someone. That there's no place to get shoes (unless you like Dockers). No place for sneakers (unless you like Foot Locker). Forget that the multiplex only updates a quarter new (hence my sapping bout with Just Like Heaven). Forget that I'm in a House where ill-repute is a prerequisite. Forget that there's no train. Forget that I can't plane. Forget that I've no automobile. Forget that there's no bookstore. I can handle all of the above and more, and I have, for seven swayed weeks. I mean, next to the gulag, these are but minor inconveniences.

What I'd rather not handle is incompetence. The complete lack of professionalism in those professing to be professionals. Or those supposedly on their way to being so anyway.

Like my Be Hear Now, stab one at an Electric City cover. The turnaround was short -- a weekend -- though to be fair it's long been on the agenda. No matter. I'm mouthy, brash, and full of rant. I can bang out two thousand words on drywall in two hours, much less the same about music in two days. That the subject was college radio made it all the better. I listen to college radio. Religiously. And I owe it. Immensely. It was college radio who played me way back when; it's college radio that I play now. It's half of how I stay on.

So I was understandably excited when I landed the assignment. One more generous stroke from my incredible Editor; one more solid next last chance. Covering cool radio would be a cinch. A delight. A pleasure. And I commenced at once, Googling-up the coordinates, bathing in some of the stream, and electronically alerting every kid at every station I could find.

But these days seems some of the kids just aren't with it. Oh, they're with it sonically, I guess, and I'm sure their fashion sense is very au courant. Sound sense and found style though can only go so far. You gotta get wise. Wherewithal. Wherewith.

No, they're not with it with civility. The basic tenets of good manners and common courtesy. And they're not with it with the way of hype, exposure, connectiong the dots that make digs. If someone emails you re: coverage of your concern, Reply. At once. Don't dawdle. Don't drag. And certainly don't ignore. Don't wait three days to inquire. Don't wait five. And don't be disappointed when your wait has wrecked your world. The ball was in your court, you didn't even pick it up. The onus was on you, and you were off elsewhere.

So what? No skin off my skull. You wanna play pause I'll press another play. When I'm given a deadline I meet the deadline, regardless. If the kids wished to operate with such reckless disregard, they'd be disregarded. Or at least regarded how I best saw fit.

And I saw fit to give them all the benefit of doubt. Their silence wouldn't stop my shouting from the rooftops about all that was good and grand and going on the airwaves of this region. I spilled and I spilled liberally. I gushed and I gooed and I plugged and I pulled-for. Till there was no more overboard left.

Then I come to find that one of the stations is wrongly-repped by a six-year old renegade site and I got the dish all dirty. That's right, the number one Googled-up entry is a six year old joke. A hypester's cyberparty prank. Okay, so it might not have been a joke then (the site actually looks pro cool), but it's sure a joke now. And it makes the station a ridicule. Yet it remains ruling the ether.

Worse it made me look clumsy. I'm a lot of things, but I'm not clumsy. I fall, I don't stumble. And I never drop a ball. I may throw it away. Let out the air. Kick it. But I don't drop. Unless of course the drop's on me. Or I get the drop.

And there's the rub. I don't get the drop. If I put something in your hand, hold it. When I toss a lob over the plate, hit it. Outta the ballpark. Into the rafters. For all it'll ever be worth. Don't just stand there when someone's helping what you do to do something. Do something.

Ugh. I just spent the entire day endeavoring to get the right data to the right place at the right time and all I got was an "I'm shy." Really. That was a Reply. To two calls and three emails from two different people. At least it was a properly-spelled and -constructed sentence. A subordinate couldn't even muster that. A college kid. Who doesn't know the difference between are/our and couldn't get the right order of letters in the word here. Unbelievable. 6:13 and I'm still waiting for the promised update to match my promised pluggery. I wanna put these kids names in print, and they can't even pound out something printable for me to cite.

It's enough to make me hit Skip.

But I won't. I can't. I'm too much the fan of real radio. I'm too much the fan of youth. And I'm too much the fan of next last chances. I shall plug away. Maybe they'll get it, maybe they won't. But I shall do my best to ensure that their best is heard. Loudly. Clearly. Nowly. And one day, some day, in another place, another mindframe, one someone might realize what more they could've done, then they'll do so.

Sappery

2005-09-18T19:37:00.000-04:00

I'm a sap. An unmitigated sap. Jelly-hearted and teary-throated, like all the other sad saps out there in Sapland. Yes, me. The long hard ex-con. Who's stood up and got over and made due with some of the nation's meanest, ugliest incarcerates. The man of back alley brawls and club cons and fist-in-the-face candor. The cad. The cadge. The cat. That me. A sap.

It's downright pitiful.

Like this glad aft at Just Like Heaven. First off, the fact that I even went to see Just Like Heaven should tell you how much of a sap I am. It's peddled as sap. For saps. And I went anyway. But I didn't even make it through the previews before I started sapping out. It happened during the trailer for North Country, when Charlize and Sissy and Frances stood their ground, and father Sean broke down and stood his too. And it happened again through the view of Elizabethtown, when Orlando Bloom gets with Kirsten Dunst. I welled. Not into a weap, mind you. Nor even a tear. But a welling that could've been a hair trigger from either. Both. It had that much swell. I tell ya, had someone said pull, I would've lost it.

Yeah, that sapped.

I get why the sappery might of happened from North Country. It's causal, and I do still so wanna be part of a cause greater than me. I mean, it'd sure beat being the cause of all wrong. And I kinda understand (though I'm a bit reddened to admit it) why the sap happed in Elizabethtown. Kirsten reminds me of Karen, my gal of once upon a Chicago, and I do still so secretly want a next last chance. I hurt her. Hurt there. Hurt. The well helps the heal.

But getting and understanding in now way mitigates the sap. I'm too close to the surface, my laugh and my cry and my smile and my sigh are too near reveal. At breaking's tipping point, at collapse's door. Submerged in The Singularity.

Makes me wanna take a sap to my head.

And yes, I dug the movie. Not that it was named for a Cure song (though there is that), or that Katie Melua did a credibly cinematic job of covering it in the opening credits (though there is that too). No, I genuinely dug the flick. The quick cut character reveal, the slow creep of closeness, the warm and fuzzy feel of it's fullsomeness. Script-slingers Peter Tolan (Analyze This/That, Rescue Me) and Leslie Dixon (The '99 Thomas Crown Affair), and lenscrafter Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) did a swell well of a job with Marc Levy's If Only It Were True. And if the sappy Happy Ending was a given, it can be forgiven.

In Every Way (Revisited)

2005-09-15T23:21:00.000-04:00

(Note: In this original post, I gave too short shrift to the world, to Billy, and to me. Curfew had beckoned and I had banged a little too rashly. A lot too unkeenly. Zeus-willing this'll make up for it.)

Every day, in every way, I feel I'm coming closer to a world. I'm not sure what world it is, or what that world is, and I know it's not yet my world, but it is a world. I know to that it is a world of my choosing, even if I have no choice. Taut. Tangible. Tagential. A world that sidles astride with each and every do, each and every maybe, each and every communique.

Like the Idol, a harried piece of hackery if ever there was one. Oh, I'm not saying I did a hack job, or that I don't appreciate the opportunity to hack. But Billy Idol? What more could possibly be said about such a bygone phenom? What more could possibly be added? And why? Well, turns out ol' Billy's flipped the script a bit. Still has something to shout about. Sure he's still all leather and fist and snarl, and the Forsey/Stevens re-collaboration ensures he's still real Billyfied, but Billy wouldn't be Billy if he were not him. More tautology I know, but nonetheless true for its tautness.

Take the unworthily-named Devil's Playground, his Spiky One's recent bid to re-emerge. There's a moment or three there when the grown kid kinda quiets, his voice gulps a crack or two, and he reveals himself. What he reveals himself to be I've no clue. But there's a reveal there -- especially on the Caved and Cashing Lady Do or Die ("it takes a dog to cry... misshaped before my time... I wonder what it takes to free someone") and the slung-low Summer Running ("There's always the world you know") -- a reveal of haunt and hurt and harm's waywardness that is -- yes -- candid to its core. It's a small consequence in the grand scheme of all things, still it's nonetheless consequential for its intimacy. Hell, the intimacy might even make it more of a consequence. More consequented. Whatever. The point is I wouldn't, couldn't have experienced such surprising nuance if I hadn't been assigned the hacking.

Color me grateful.

It's not an unusual color for me, this grateful, in fact I've long known it's hue. Now though, in this place that's not my place, at this time hat will be my time, the color's becoming me more and more. It's a hue I can taste. A hue I can touch. A hue I can live with.

And it's a hue that's becoming brighter by the days. Today I hacked my way to what I hope will be the first of many first Electric City cover stories. The piece Be Hear Now is some small testament to this newfound appreciation of the what-all wherever I find myself. There's gold in every hill, sometimes it just takes a little longer harder effort to dig it up.

Last night the dig was a near cinch. Billy Idol came to town -- well, actually, the nearby town of Wilkes Barre -- and he came in all the glory and all the gusto a formerly angry young man can muster after lo these many many years. More. Different. The same. Reliable Idol. He played the hits, he played the latest, and he played it with more heated heart than a certain-aged ex-junkie punk should. Cetainly with more than any certain-aged ex-junkie punks I know could. And though Billy mostly played it rock hero safe, he can be forgiven for the histrionics. The guy was just having too much fun.

No, he did't play Summer Running or Lady Do or Die, but he more than made up for the miss by pausing to breathe Randy Newman's brilliant Louisiana 1927, a strong, sad, terrible and terribly hopeful song who's time has unfortunately come again. And there, on the stage of the old Kirby Theatre, alone with a piano man, Billy Idol broke into hue, broke into heart, and broke into hurt. And something inside me broke too -- the big bad break of gratitude.

Call Me Hood (No Such Luck)

2005-09-10T00:23:00.000-04:00

Eddie's one of those perennial also-rans who never was, never would, and never will be. Less than almost, far short of not quite, and not even in league with maybe. He's at most a spec on the windscreen, at least an ignorable blip in the corner of the eye. At worse he is what he is: a devout UGHell boy without portfolio. Without position. Without props. Without even a liveable wage.

That means of course he's with a lot of anger and attitude and orn.

Too bad for him.

My word for him: Whatever happened in your life, buddy. I didn't do it. So leave me out of it.

Eddie, though, can't take know for an answer. Bitter 'cause he's again and again been passed over for promotion. Bitter 'cause the bosses still consider him disposable. King-comed Edward's bittered himself right outta his battered mind. That leaves him the mindless, thankless, thoughtless tasks of the tradeless. And since he's been left deep-breathing toxins and bullshit for lo these many moons with no even unreal reward, not-so-Fast Eddie takes it upon himself to be both toxic and full of bullshit.

To the help.

That of course means me. Me and the temp brethren brought in by the Agency from the State halfway houses and County work centers of Scranton. Since we're all being kept on very short nooses, none of us make even the slightest of contrary moves. After all, even perceived contrarity could ring our necks back to the panoply of pens from whence we came.

I too tend to keep my eyes to the grind and my big mouth shut, 'cause I too wanna remain at large. But sometimes even a noose isn't enough to muzzle me, and I just gotta speak my piece.

So yesterday, when dead Ed said: You, go get me a handtruck. I went and got him a handtruck.

Then I replied: Call me Hood. Call me John. Call me J Hood. Call me JH. Call me any name you want. But I am not You.

Wrong said Ed of course didn't get the crack, let alone the cut. And took the whole thing into his outta conscious.

Are you picking on me?

No. I'm merely stating the obvious.

Well, it's obvious you don't have to work here anymore.

And I smiled. And I grinned. And I thanked my lucky stars for all the unlucky idiots in the world who'd let a little nothing get me outta nowhere. And today when I woke and walked to the job, it was with a decidedly skippery step 'cause I expected to receive the papers that'd leave me walking elsewhere. But No Such Luck. For when I got to the job my time card was there among 100 other time cards and the big boss standing by the time clock didn't give me The Nod. In fact, he didn't even give me a nod, that's how inconsequential I am. And apparently that's just how necessarily inconsequential I am to the company. The company of fools.

So There

2005-09-07T22:47:00.000-04:00

I could no longer bite my tongue. It was bloody. And it was, as they say, swole. Like some long hard con's biceps. Swole. So swole it opened my big mouth. Wide.

The pudge had been giving me shade long enough. Ten years in at UG Hell. Four packing boxes, and the last six feedling cans into a conveyor belt. Day in. Day out. Like some trained seal. And he thinks he's better than me.

I don't think so. In fact I know. I'm mandated to slog in this pit -- what's your excuse? I can see a down-at-the-heels reflex enlistment. I can see start-of-life working-your-way-through-school positioning. I can see end-of-the-life coasting. I cannot see every day all day for the prime time of your life. I just can't.

But pudge not only can, he does. And oh does he do it so much better than anyone else ever. Posed and poised he stands, three empty cans in each hand, a thrice-greatest match to his hollow head. Feedling and feedling and feedling a Lidditious machine. As if the whole mild world depended on it. As if he were the only one suited to the task. The thoughtless, thankless, ridiculous task of a thoughtless, thankless, ridiculous so-called man.

Like I said, he's been giving me shade, acting all uppity and over just because he's got time in. I've seen it in men who've time in -- in prison, time in in life, but not time in in a filthy nothing factory. Boast and brag and beam all you want, but back it up with something.

And don't shine your lite beam on me lest you wanna get beamed right back. Heavy. Full Full on. Full on spot in front of your pitiful place.

At 4:10 the gaggle adjourns to the outdoor alcove to smoke. The greasers and the hippies and the fogies and the unpleasant one of the two girls and me. And pudge. He's beaming his barren bask my way and finally I just let go:

Did your Mom once tell you that you were cool and hard or something? Huh? Well, she was wrong. Way wrong. You're warm and soft, like a muffin. A mealy-mouthed muffin. If I were you I'd move outta Mom's house and get a second opinion.

The alcove went still. Silent. Pudge, after all, has gotta be pushing forty. Fat, natch. Stupid, ditto. With the kinda stupid smirk you just wanna wipe right off his smug pudge of a face. There was no smirk now. The want was wielded and the wield did wound. And all that smug pudgery went leaking out into the ether like so much stale hot air.

Seconds later the silence was broken by a man who knows something about breaking silences: Damn. That's gotta hurt.

I hope it did hurt. Not because I'm such a bully, but because I'm not. This man had made many other men feel weak and inconsequential, when all along it was he who was weak and inconsequential. I gave as I saw. I gave as I saw fit. And if tomorrow he's back to his usually fake-ass, dumbass swagger, I hope it's with a tell-tale limp.

So there.

Downtown Saturday Night

2005-09-04T18:55:00.000-04:00

I make people nervous. They watch me from the corner of an eye, flinch when I say Hello, shy when I inquire. Maybe it's the suit; a suit suited more to a city of suits. Maybe it's the mug. I am a strange face, from a stranger place. It's gotta show. And maybe, just maybe, it's because I haven't been around civilians for nearly four years. None, except the far-flung family and friend. And they know me. Know no qualms. The cons in the joint knew me too, who I was, where I came from, what I meant and what I mean. And if they didn't know someone told 'em. Ditto the wild world before my fall. People always knew me, the better for worse.

Not so now. Here. I come without entrée, without introduction, without reputation. Even a bad reputation would add some perspective to my being here; perhaps even earn me some respect, 'cause all that badness would come contingent upon all that was good, or noteworthy, or at least noted. No reputation on a block braced by two halfway houses bursting at the seams with just-released bad guys means No Good. Period.

Such was the sorta sordid story last eve at Test Pattern, the only venue I've seen where once I would've hung, where I once would've been welcome. A storefront gallery, much like the storefronts of the East Village ‘80s, particularly Civilian Warfare or 101 St. Mark's, though with a peculiarly Chicago bent (this, after all, is America), the Pattern is ramshackle and charming and honest and most importantly, it's there. A haven and a showplace for Scranton's indie artist set.

But even among Scranton's most open minds, I was suspect. Heads turned and just as quickly turned away. Nerves jangled at my approach. Like a ring of keys held by a hand in a hurry. Like a haunt. Who is this unmasked man? Even a lone figure, pony-tailed and standing forever alone in the center of the gallery, chose to point me to a card rather than answer my simple question, forcing my gambit to fall flat on my face. Egg all over again. Of course I could get the artist's name from a flyer; I'd prefer though to get it from a human being.

Then Conor McGuigan, local gadfly, roustabout and proprietor of the joint, dashed to hide the tip jar near where I inadvertently happened to be standing. I hadn't even noticed the thing till he had it in his hands. By then I was mortified. I've done some mortifying things in my days; but nothing quite so scummy. And nothing quite so struck me. That I'd even be considered so below low was tantamount to a tarring. I wanted to tell the cat that I robbed banks, not galleries, especially not cool little indie galleries struggling to make their way through the morass.

But I didn't say any such thing. Why would I? I can't blame the guy. He doesn't know me from Badam. I'm just some slick in a suit lurking around the fringes of his center. An intruder in his midst. He's right to be wary. Who knows what evil might be lurking within.

And who knows if I'm even accurate. Nervy, I might’ve just nerved to a situation that never existed. Conor was nothing but a gentleman throughout my brief, suspicious stay; I, on the other hand, have yet to fully regain charm's favor. He had me as his guest, and that itself is a welcome. For that I am truly grateful.

As am I to the crafty Cassie Rose Kobeski, Test Pattern's artist in residence for the month of September. Her show, 'Nobody Kids On Me,' is a hodgepodge of cleverly assemblaged knowing, equal parts Belmar and Johns, all parts on display. These are the stirs of our souls. Beth B would approve, as would Marie Kennedy, two wily women artslingers of equally explicit strength. Since I'm of a more literal mind, I kept thinkin' of Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, and all the other knockout narrativists I dig so much but fail too often to recall. Kobeski triggered the recollection. Her work is that potent. That imploreful. Her show a wondrous welcome blast back to a place where a future exists, a future made to mean, a future with a vivid visual core.

And a future that surely would've been aurally compounded had I been allowed to stick around to watch and listen to Kid Icarus and the three other bands on Test Pattern's basement bill. This is the true underground, a place I used to know all too well. And this is where under gets over. Unfortunately, curfew killed my getting anything more outta what would've undoubtedly been an even more remarkable evening. Too bad. I would've luv'd to have stayed. Swayed. Spoken. Let the cool good people of indie Scranton warm up to a cold hard ex-con.

Presence

2005-09-03T12:26:00.000-04:00

I am not here. Okay, so I am. Here, that is. But only just. Even when committing bloggery, supposedly an act of utter presence, I am somewhat removed. Whether excused to the craft or blamed on the guile, I remain wrapped in faraway thought. Wrapped up. Thinking about what I was thinking about to write. Thinking about what I was thinking about to say. Thinking about what I was thinking about before I was thinking about thinking. Taut.

I am not there at the job; if I were I'd be basketed. The grueling numb, the repetitive hum, the hollow drum of thoughtless, thankless tasks. Many of my co-workers must think me a moron I am so not there. I don't talk. I don't inquire. I don't pay attention. I don't care. And so I go elsewhere.

In prison I perfected the art of removal. Removal of myself, that is. I drifted. I darted. I deployed. As if being absent would save me from the absence.

At the hillbilly jail in the County of Bradford, I walked counterclockwise laps in the pipsqueak gym and imagined myself in London, New York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, depending on the time zone, the unstruck mood. I'd picture whatever city, its traffic at that any given hour, and immerse amidst. In better words, I'd go there. I'd be there. Swinging and strutting and scheming and clocking. Wherever it was I wanted.

In State, once the fall had kicked in, I had no such compulsion. No such talent. Instead I walked the gravel Yard and pictured all my wrongs, catalogued. I'd pull 'em all up on an imaginary flat-top, put 'em in pityingly-named folders like Jerk, Dumbass, Idiot, and, yes, Scumbag, then scroll through, again and again and again, till my numbskull cracked from the shellacking. Reliving every ugly minute. Believing every fisted insult. Wallowing in each worthless, unshod tear.

That didn’t last long. It couldn't. Otherwise I wouldn't be here now not being here. One can only smash one's soul against the wall for so long before it splatters. Eventually you gotta clean up the mess.

At Mahanoy, stop two in State, I came to my nonsenses and kicked 'em outta my ever smalling world. I mean, there wasn't room enough for me, let alone some humdrum pity. I'll admit, at first the bareness hurt -- there's something tremendously comforting in a blanket of down wallow -- but it hurt a whole lot less then it should've. A whole lot less than I wanted it to.

There, with a Yard big enough to almost get lost in, I turned inside out, to books, and the stories they held, the promise they proffered. This list is relentless -- some 500 titles in 44 months -- and to single out a single one would make me a singular fool. I've been fool enough, long enough. Let's just say I read the books, walked the books, thought the books, and I became a part of the story.

And I talked the books. Oh, not to any of my con colleagues -- the few times my mouth lit into a title I got some seriously wrong looks -- but to my correspondents, the far-flung faithful, who's cards and letters I kept as trophies, keepsakes, links to my own peculiar elsewhere. And of course I talked the books in Bully. Blessed, blest, Bully.

Sometimes the books talked back -- a pal had read it, a plugist had plugged it, a writer who had written it. Sometimes the books talked trash -- why aren't you in it, why haven't you lived it, why hadn't you written it. Sometime the books didn't talk at all. They didn't have to. Their silence and their still was plenty.

At Chester, State stop three, the Yard was a lot, literally, so I took the book talk inside, to my cell, where I had a con's eye-view of the Delaware. I took it in to myself, where I was trying to look. Since everything I said was overheard, I said nothing aloud. But I never stopped talking. The French call it thoughts of the stairwell; I call it thoughts of the jail cell. All the things you should've said and done. But didn't.

Yet still I wasn't there. And except for the odd few times when I felt seriously in danger (more later), and the too few times I was blessed with visits (ditto), I remained elsewhere. At large in a little place. It was instinctive, something hard-wired into my thick head. It was expansive, something larger than me. And it was existive, something that made me feel alive.

Now I can't seem to shake what I learned, what I fell to. I walk these Scranton streets, still silent lest I be overheard, a good three paces off my stride, and I'm elsewhere. Unmindful. All that chatter, all that matters less and less. Occasionally I'm caught without thought, beyond thought, but that occasion is seldom. When it does occur though -- at the foot of a building, in the face of a humor, on the line of a missive, that chat with Rube -- I rejoice. So this is what it's like to be there. To be somewhere. To be here now.

Bails and Boxes

2005-08-31T23:05:00.000-04:00

The sky was spitting this morning, a steady, static spitting, interrupted only by the occasional spew. Perfect walking weather, if you're walking a gangplank. Or if you're going to a place you don't belong. Perfect weather anyway, especially after forty-four months of no weather at all.

So to the job. I figured I'd enjoy the wet while it lasted. Skip Frank's and stroll the scenic route. Save the Times a wetting. I could get the paper once I topped a few hills, at the inaccurately, unoriginally, obscenely named Price Chopper. I needed some things anyway.

Over no river and through no woods, past houses well past their glory, down streets well past their prime. A hospital here, a diagnostic center there. Something ugly being built. Something beautiful being torn down. A man in a Today's Man suit. A woman walking her beagle. An unstraight line of footwear before the door to the Cambodian-owned market. Walking in Scranton, with a skip in my step and a song by my side.

That the song was All the Things I've Done by The Killers should make perfect sense. Not just for all I've done, but for all I haven't done. All I've killed. In me. In the world. I am so much older than I can take. Indeed.

It's a great song for strolling 'cause it promises everything and nothing all at once. Just how it should be. We gotta make do with our own promise. It's got a great video too -- a kinda kooky Good, Bad and then some as would be done by Russ Meyers. The song, and the scenery, substituted nicely for what wasn't in my heart, what wasn't in my path.

Before I knew it I had crested the last crest before the plateau parking lot. Two miles is really not very far; two miles is forever. Like I said, I needed some things. And I usually know exactly what I need. It may not always be right. It may not always be proper. It may not always be good. But it's known. I suppose. And I suppose I needed cereal, that new three berry deal, some salad, like the bagged organics, and some cheese, preferrably semi-fresh mozzerella. On impulse I bought a bag of mini Krispy Kreme cruellers to share with my, er, co-workers (none dare ever call 'em colleagues). Might be nice to be nice for a change.

Then I remembered the Times, the main reason for the visit in the first place. The Times though was not there. Was not anywhere. Seems they had sold their single copy just before I arrived.

Guess I'd just have to talk to my fellow UGLers; after all, I'd already bought 'em donuts.

Ha. Ha. Ha. The donuts they did not want and the talk we did not have. Oh, I offered. And I tried. But the sweets were a harmful superfluous to a well-balanced meal (or so I surmised), and the talk was of less consequence than the cold shoulders that carried its weight. Its weightlessness. One man explained in detail the wattage system of his home's lightbulbs, then copped to needing a nightlight. Go figure. Another exchange involved some mutterings regarding a bar, a brawl, and a "broad." I've heard enough of those to forget them all. Most talk though stayed right where it was seated, and right where it would stay: on the job.

Pails and bails and boxes and skids and mixes and of Glazol and Whatall and End-it-all-now. We were on Glazol (Better Than Putty!), and Glazol was on us. All over us. It is unclean. And boresome. Boxing Glazol is the industrial equivalent of bagging groceries except it takes ten times as long and half as much smarts. Nothing can break. Nothing can crumble. Nothing can get smashed. Therefore nothing need be considered. I boxed Glazol, all day yesterday and half the day today. Then I bailed one-gallon cans. Bails, in case you don't know (I didn't), are those thin metal handles that come affixed to things like paint cans. Someone puts them on, one by one, before the cans get shipped and sold. That someone was me. Try stretching a yawn to it breaks, then quintuple it. I was half fine with it all till the machine stopped expending and I had to expend it by hand. Now that was unpleasant. Ever milk a machine? A monstrous, massive machine that squirts out 200 degree milk? Don't.

And don't try to be what you're not. A gentleman e'd that to me this aft, and it's an excuse that I'll endeavor to live by. I am not them; I shouldn't try to be them. So there.

Some Small Rudeness

2005-08-30T23:05:00.000-04:00

I should've listened to my gut. A few weeks ago I stopped for cigarettes at this so-called Smoke Shop up on Washington and New York. It was of course a simple transaction: I request, you provide, I pay. But even in the simplest of transactions there's a modicum of civility. A Please. A Thank You. Perhaps a Have a Nice Day. At this place, from this proprietor, there was no such thing. Not a whisper. Not a smile. Not even a grunt.

So I vowed to cross off him and his stupid store. I'm not given my hard-earned change to some mannerless lank of a man.

Then last week, when I was made late for the job, the ever-clinging Kenny and I found ourselves with no other option. So we went in. For coffee. They had Green Mountain and I like Green Mountain enough. They didn't have any of the fancy flavors available, but they had Our Brew. So I bought it. The coffee was good. The lank behind the counter was halfway civil. So I decided to give him and his store the benefit of my doubt.

I added to my habit. Instead of just a quick stop for the Times and some smokes every morning at Frank's (a real old-fashioned corner stand, where all the men are polite), I now swung also by this Smoke Shop for coffee. It was my reward for walking two miles in under fifteen minutes. And as I became more of a regular, Mr. Lanky seemed to warm up a bit. He did though always cast an aspersive glance at the Times under my arm.

Since it was spitting this morning, I decided I'd feed my mind all in the same place. I don't smoke or drink while I walk, and it'd be a shame to ruin the paper before I had a chance to really read it. So the Smoke Shop it was.

When I arrived though something was awry. I could smell it. Lanky was his usual lazy self, propped up against the counter talking about nothing; his pal though -- a true blue regular -- was big on the once-over. I didn't care. I've been around too many blocks to fret a blockhead. And anyway, I'm in stained chinos, scuffed combat boots and a wounded black tee; so what's he gonna once-over? Back at the dispensery I find I'm at the bottom of the urn.

Do you know these guys are out?

Oh.

I took what was left and prepared to wait. A sigh from Mr. Lanky and a look from Mr. Once Over prepared me to leave. I capped my cup and approached the counter. Then I looked down for the paper.

No New York Times?

He looked at me like I was shot outta Mars, then swivelled a No.

Damn.

How 'bout Camel Filters soft, please? He wordlessly produced the pack. Enter, add, enter, add. $6.15. I couldn't believe it. He'd not only charged me for a full cup o' coffee, he added $.60 on to the price of my cigarettes. It may not sound like much, but that's my lunch. Who the fuck is this lank to take my lunch? And why'd he have to be so rude about it? Of course, I didn't say anything. I couldn't. One foul report to the authorities and I'm back up the river with no nothing.

I did though consider a reveric past. See, in another time, another place, under a different circumstance, I might've called the Baseball Boys to come in and teach the man some manners. They'd have made him say Please, made him say Thank You, made him say Have a Nice Day, then they would've bopped him in the nose and Polaroided the proceedings for a reminder. They'd've told him it's not nice to be rude, and if he continued to be so then not nice things were going to happen to him. Repeatedly. Instant manners, at then blunt end of a baseball bat. It was a fond stroll down a distant path, where correct used to be determined through reasoned fists. And it was about as violent as I'll ever get to be again.

I hope the rude man felt it.

High Hopes

2005-08-29T22:28:00.000-04:00

I fed an ant today. Sat on a concrete slab out by myself where the toxic used to run off and broke bread with an insect. I was having what these days constitutes lunch -- a Soho Rootbeer (23 oz's for $.50!) and an insulting-sized bag of Famous Amos (.99) -- and I suppose the ant was looking for hers. I say her because I can't determine ant gender. Never could. I will say that it's a magnificent creature -- graceful, inquisitive, wily and incredibly adroit.

She was doing that particular ant dance, you know, one part jitter, two part jerk, and all parts crazy-cool. It's done either for rain or from hunger. Probably both. I figured the rain would take care of itself; I'd would help with the hunger.

So I broke off a crispy crumb of cookie and placed it in her path. Of course she was skittish at first -- in fact, if I'm not mistaken she actually turned up her antennae at the offering -- but she quickly came around. And around. Sniff. Feel. Bite. Bounce. Circle. Bite. Sniff. Mount. Bite. In that order. Then, like every other girl I ever thought I knew, she bolted, with every gift I gave her.

Unlike the dead-of-night cab rides or the early-morning-while-I'm-away sneak-outs that I'm used to, this chick carried her burden in full view. She wasn't embarrassed. She wasn't afraid. She wasn't uncomfortable. She was proud. Proud to carry a crumb thrice her weight. And leave this crumb behind.

It was Sisyphus with a happy ending. Some great good myth gone well. nd it brought to mind Camelot, The Rat Pack, and the high hopes we place upon the myths of our creation. If I'm not mistaken, Sammy Cahn wrote High Hopes for JFK. Or maybe he just wrote it for Sinatra who sang it for JFK. Either way, it was written by Sammy, sung by Frank, and used as the theme for Jack's run for the presidency.

We don't have myths like that these days. We don't even have the mythics. There's no one with the guile to believe that a simple song could help alter the course of history. There's no one to believe in simple songs, let alone history. The truly gifted songslingers are marginalized outta the marketplace; the truly gifted history-makers have no voice. Yet. I'd like to believe that there will one day once again be a song in the hearts of all women and men so simple and so beautiful that history itself will bow, to the pressure, to the pleasure of our myths.

A Reprieve

2005-08-27T12:27:00.000-04:00

I don't know what it is. I don't know where it came from. I don't know who sent it. And I don't know how it got here. But whatever it is, wherever it came from, whoever sent it, and however it got here, I'm glad I landed on me. Now I wanna bottle it, wear it around my neck. Forever. Keep all the ugly away.

Yesterday, when I returned to the House for what I believed to be the last time, a gaggle of Parole Agents swooped in and snatched-up another Resident. Apparently the man had told someone he'd rather go back to prison than go to MinSec (I told you it was that bad), and just as apparently said someone told someone who told someone else and that someone told the staff. The staff was all too happy to oblige. A crack like that makes a cat high risk. And the CCC doesn't dig high risk. I don't blame 'em. Regular risk is risk enough. To make bad matters that much worse, the man had a hot urine. Two strikes when even one means you're out. So he left, shackled, handcuffed and led away by a belly-belt.

That left me. All the drama had created a bit of a logjam at the desk and I was told to sit down and wait. I do what I'm told. Or else. The wait stretched, yawned, stretched some more, then was stilled by my counselor. Come in the office, John.

I was prepared to petition for Philly. To ask for what little money was on my books and a trip to the bus station. I'd be outta here and outta their hair. For good. Most importantly, I'd be in a whole new elsewhere.

Yes?

We did some figuring, and the director made a phone call. If parole comes through for someone tomorrow, you can stay.

So I won’t have to go to MinSec?

You won't have to go to MinSec.

Could you repeat that please?

You won't have to go to MinSec.

If I was shook before -- and I was -- this took the shake right outta me. My little so-called life was for the moment still half mine. My tomorrows would still be half-lived. The light, however dim, was still lighted. Might not sound like much to you, but to me it was the closest thing I have to being free.

I pinched myself; bombarded her with Thank Yous; took a half-deep breath and went upstairs to lie down.

It had been a crazy day. I woke at 6, as I always woke. Though this time I didn't slurp down the thawed coffee on my bedside table and cram my face with a cereal bar. Nor did I follow up the ritual with a pilfered hot second and a cigarette. I couldn't. I was scheduled for a battery of blood tests at Moses Taylor Hospital, tests that required me to fast.

So, no caffeine and no nicotine. Not an easy wake for one so brutally accustomed. But today was the day of my Electric City debut, and I'll take a byline high any day. Thus charged, I made my way up and over a few of Scranton's infamous hills to my appointment.

I hate to be poked, and I hate to be bled, and I hate hospitals even more. Add what's subtracted by the fasting, and I'm down to below zilch. I mean, even a byline high only lasts so long.

Thank Zeus for the good folk at Moses. A receptionist directed me to a series of rather welcoming sofas where incoming are told to hold for processing. Ever the Boy Scout, I'd come prepared, with a freshly-inked copy of the day's Times. But before I could even crack the Metro a woman poked her head out of a windowed cube and summoned me in.

Is this your first time here, John?

Yes, ma'am.

Do you have insurance?

No, ma'am.

Don’t you worry. We'll get this paid.

Thank you, ma'am.

A few perfunctory questions and answers later I was off and up to the third floor lab. Even there the wait wasn't much of a wait. I'd just started checking the ho-hum latest on the boresome Democratic candidates for NYC mayor when I was called.

Then it hit me. Or rather, she did. Hit me for six diabolically-sized test-tubes of my once precious blood. My head evaporated. My heart reared into reverse. And all that tough guy stuff I'd been pretending with went the way of the Hula Hoop. A bygone spin. I thought I was gonna lose it. And if it wasn't for the plump young woman loudly complaining in the next desk chair, I might've.

But my falling-on-the-floor-in-public days are over. So I steeled myself. Then I steeled myself some more. Turned blue and tried to hide the wane in my face, the gulp in my gut. All done. The sing-song voice came from another dimension. Done? Yes, except for this. She held up an all too familiar plastic jar. Right. You got my blood, now you want my bladder. Heap it on, baby.

It was all downhill from there. Literally. I choked down a few smokes, grabbed an over-priced cup o' iced latte and made my way to the blind for some glasses. Really. Scranton's SafetyNet, once proud providers of replacement specs for the broke and needy had told me they no longer provided. Now that particular task was in the hands of the blind, the Pennsylvania Association for the Blind. Go figure.

If I had my hat in hand at Moses Taylor, I now needed my eyes on a platter. Seems getting reading glasses from the Blind is like listening to Mozart with the deaf. It takes some doing. Like 3 pages of application worth of doing. And a prescription. And a two-week wait. And $30. If I had all that I wouldn't be here. Yep, no matter what you've heard, the Blind do not help you to see.

I was too a twirl to care about the cruel logic of the irony. The fasting and walking and the poking and the letting and the bylining and the caffiening and the nicotining had left me giddy. I was just glad I could see my way out.

An hour later I was at the library boasting about my completely unboastable feat of Meating; two hours after that I was back in the same place sobbing through my fingertips. Shook. Shaken. Stirred. To such an extent I let the wallow wail along to Coldplay's "Fix You."

Coldplay, as everyone knows, are master of the grand, sweeping gesture. Since I'm occasionally a fan of grand and sweeping, I'm occasionally a fan of Coldplay. This was one of those occasions. At first I thought "Fix You" was an unpardonable conceit. Who the hell was this cat to fix someone else? Then I listened a little closer, and between the grand and sweeping gestures lies a nice little hurt. This cat had made a girl cry and now he'd do anything to make her stop. That was the fix.

What really struck me was what was left unsung. "Tears stream, down your face, I promise to learn from my mistakes" is a gentle act of contrition, especially in Coldplay's patented sonic context. But when the "And I" trails off into the ether the hit is all heart. This is the netherworld of our imaginings. The all that's unsaid, unspoken, unspeakable.

It made a nice set-piece to my pain. I looked out the library window at the crests surrounding Scranton, the sun slipping on, the sky slating into slumber, and I thought about the women I've made cry. Not because I was so special, but because I wasn't. I thought about what I could've done to fix them then, to fix them now, to fix me. And I came to a very simple conclusion: Get the fuck up off my moan and face it.

The Plot Worsens

2005-08-25T18:12:00.000-04:00

I just found out they're moving me this aft to a filthy, rundown hole-in-the-soul across the street called MinSec. I don't know what the acronym stands for, but if the rep's to be believed, it stands for sheer unadulterated Hell. Really. Fights. Thefts. Rattings. And, if rumor holds, no time out during the week. None. There goes the bloggery. There goes E. City. There goes what little I've rebuilt of my so-called Life. I'm shaking I'm so upset. Literally shaking. And I'm not by nature a shaker. I thought this House would be my last stop before some kinda home; once again I thought wrong. Way wrong.

They don't make it easy. They don't make it smooth. They don't make it nice. I've done every trick my keepers have asked. And then some. Back flips. Somersaults. Ass-kissing. Genuflecting. Politesse. You name it. And what the fuck did it get me? Shipped across the street to a cesspool. Had I been bad they'd've kept me. Had I been real bad they'd never let me go. But I was good. One Good Hood. And I get baddened as a result.

That's what I get for having my tail between my legs. Coward. And the cowardice won't stop here. Not if I'm to stay even halfway at large. It's sickening what a man's gotta do to breathe even a little. To walk even a step. To think even a thought. Take your soul and swallow. You will not thrive here.

Bastards.

Of Locks & Mandates

2005-08-24T22:59:00.000-04:00

At the House, they lock us out. Not in, mind you. Out. There's a lock on the door to the upstairs residents' quarters. A lock on the door to the dayroom and the sign-in/sign-out desk. If we wanna come in. If we wanna go out. If we wanna go upstairs to eat or sleep or loo. If we wanna make our way to the lot-cum-lounge and smoke. We knock. Or, if we're bold and stupid, we ring. And we wait for the monito to unlock the lock. Some say it's 'cause a man came into a House in Harrisburg and gunned down another man. Others say it has something to do with infidelity and threats. I believe both, neither, refuse to conject. It is what it is.

This morning I stood in the vestibule corridor for twenty-five minutes and waited to go drudge and droll. It's not the first time I waited. It's not even the first time I waited that day. It is however the first time I waited so long. And it the first time I was made late to go to a place of mandate.

Not that I missed anything. If there's one certainty in this rigid world it's that I won't miss anything where I drudge and droll. Anything wouldn't miss me either. Seriously. A monkey could do what I do better, a machine could do it better still. Better yet would be to have no one do it at all and rid this town of much much sadness.

Yes, I guess the hill people are beginning to get to me. Oh, we're not close. Not even close. But I mind them less. Even find a comaraderie of sorts. There's a bond that only common toil can forge. Though our talk is limited to shop and trash, it is talk. An elemental exchange between beings stripped of their sentience. I'd like to hit the bar with a few of 'em, see what happens when their hair's been washed, how they breathe outta the fumes and the dust and the stupor. That of course is outta the question. My mandate is to be there, to be here, and not to drink about it.

23 Skedaddle

2005-08-23T23:15:00.000-04:00

I couldn't let the date go by. After all, it was once upon a time my surname. 23. Yep. 23. Those who know me longest know I was known as Johnny 23. After Burroughs of course. The Godfather of all.

The name, and the story, comes from The Exterminator. This cat Johnny can't cotton the kinda idiosyncrasies in people that don't add up. It's not the quirks he so dislikes -- we are talking Bad Bill here -- it's humdrum oddities that aren't at all odd. The bothersome. The things that make people stupid, or dull, or clumsy, or rude. This irks him, so he does something about it.

He creates a virus -- B23 -- that when administered makes everyone well-mannered, well-disciplined, of a higher intellect. Just like him.

It's a wonderful story, mostly 'cause it does what many of us would like to do: fix what ails us in others. That the fix comes from the penultimate fixer, means the fix is in. Our heads. Our hearts. Our very beings.

I quick Googled my favorite number and found that it's a natural. It is the sacred number of Eris, goddess of dischord, and according to Principia Discordia, the number of the Illuminati. Like 13, my birthdate, it is sometimes considered lucky or otherwise significant. I say it's most times. Much times. All the time. If you look, 23's are everywhere. In events personal and public, in the very order of things. If you don't look, you won't see.

If you don't believe me, go to http://en.wikepsida.org, the site where I copped all this dirt. Then dig.

Crush and Crash

2005-08-22T21:34:00.000-04:00

I could sit and watch Rachel McAdams for the rest of my life. I could sit and watch her walk, sit and watch her talk, sit and watch her watch. I could sit and watch her sitting and still never get bored. She's exquisite. The smile in her eyes; the sway in her strut, the sparkle in her laugh. She knocks the wind from me.

This weekend was the first weekend that I've had more than three hours to myself since forever. Instead I had five. Five hours to do with almost as I pleased. Since I'm in Scranton, and since I'm in a halfway house, there really wasn't much pleasing to do. I did what I could. The library. A movie. A movie. The library. It was at that first flick where I first saw Rachel.

Talk about firsts. It was like a first crush. A first kiss. The first time. I couldn't keep my eyes off her. Or my hopes or my dreams or my fears. She was that much. Not too much, but much. Just enough much to slay me.

Yeah it's corny, yeah it's cliché, and yeah I'm cracked. That's the beauty of it all. When a fella cracks with corny clichés he's on to something primitive, something primal, something organic. Essential. She's got the kinda got that gets you. Gets to you. Gets.

I better shut up before I start to walk the stalk. She's far too very for something so mundane; and if anyone dared -- and I do mean anyone -- well, I'd just have to knock the mundane right outta them.

Ahem.

Oh yeah, the movie. The Wedding Crashers delivered as reported -- a hefty dose of dumb adult fun. Vaughn & Wilson were ridiculously adroit, the script emphatically ridic, and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute. Mostly I enjoyed Rachel, but I think I've already well covered that.

Maybe it was the fact that I hadn't been in a cinema for four years. Four years since I'd sat alone in the dark with my eyes on elsewhere. The cool, the color, the volume. Just the coming attractions were a delight to rebehold. I even dug Kanye West's semi-sacred soundings over the quick-cut clips to the coming Jarhead and I do not dig Kanye West. But there, then, he was appropriate. I bet it's the only time he's ever been accused of that.

Sunday's Four Brothers returned to me the city grit that I've so long been missing. The dirty, ugly, dangerous side of a dirty, ugly, dangerous place. In this case the place was Detroit, and I dug deep all the dirt and the ugly and the danger. It's not that I wanna go out and play with guns; but it might be nice to once again be gliding through places where there’s a little gunplay. There's a sense you get in such places, a knowing, a mortal feel that's about as close to the gods as we get. A sense that can't be felt or known elsewhere. Something singular.

On third thought, I'll opt outta that action. Been there. Done that. Paid for it. Dearly. From here on out I'll leave my slinging to words. Maybe find a way to spell the feel that can't be known. Or something. I will though be tracking down The Notebook. And this weekend I'll be taking Wes Craven's Red Eye. There's no way I'm gonna opt outta Rachel.

Choosing Choice

2005-08-21T19:52:00.000-04:00

It started as a monologue. Some hairy-faced bald guy in an uncharacteristic moment of insight. He was going on about warriors. How at 18 they can fight and kill and die, but they're still too young to drink. About how the law's gotta change. How unfair it all is.

Then the bald man went on to include kids who kill. How most of 'em get prosecuted as adults. Get the same treatment. The same sentence. How the prosecutors say they're old enough to know what they're doing. Still they're not old enough to know alcohol.

Or to have an abortion without a parent's consent. They know what they're doing when they fight or kill or die, but they don't know what they're doing when it comes to abortion. Can't decide for themselves. Utter hypocrisy.

Then a wiry scumbag child offender chimed in.

I think abortion should be illegal anyway, for everyone.

Baldy shot back.

That's you're opinion and you're entitled to it.

No, it's not an opinion. It's a fact. It's a life and that's that.

Till then I'd been silent, keeping my cigarette and my thoughts to myself. I could be silent no longer.

What about the kids you molested? Weren't those lives too?

The table went still. The scumbag turned red. Blue. Purple. Couldn't look me in the eye. Couldn't face me. Damn sure couldn't come up with a response. Rose and stormed off, ridiculously.

Who the fuck is this piece of shit to tell anyone what they can or cannot do?

And who the fuck is he to tell me. I know all too intimately about choice. See I've made the decision. Twice. Rather We made the decision. Twice. And if I know the women as well as I think I know me, the decision will remain one of the most difficult decisions of their lives.

Shannon would be about twenty-one now. I don't know why I call her Shannon, me and her would've-been mother never discussed names. It just kinda came to me. Other names have come to me too -- Tallulah, Eudora -- but none of 'em came to me then. We never considered a name because there was never a name to consider. There was a decision to make and we made it. Our choice was no choice.

And thank Zeus we had it to make. The woman already had three kids of her own, was nearing thirty, and still somehow managed to juggle a career and an aspiration. I was young, dumb and selfish, and in no position to take care of myself, let alone another. There was no question of what our decision would be. Should be. Was.

So we chose. Chose not to bring another life into a place where it couldn't be properly cared for. Where it wouldn't get a fair shake. Was that responsible or irresponsible? I don't know. I still don't know. Surely a child would've been a burden to us; and just as surely we would've been a burden to the child.

Veronica would be about thirteen now. Maybe fourteen. I can't remember the year because I can't remember the year. It's a blur. A blotch. I was a mess. I couldn't wake without a wake-up, and I couldn't get a wake-up 'cause I couldn't get outta bed. I spent the mornings waiting for a pal o' mine who was too high-pro to cop for himself; evenings waiting for my girlfriend to return home with money enough for two. She was a waitress. Then a bartender. Then a waitress again. And she always came home with cash.

When she got pregnant we both cried. What the hell had we done? I was a wreck in a whirlwind; she'd been dragged along for the ride. And the crash. Seems those days we did a lot of crashing. And it was me at the wheel everytime.

Again our choice was no choice. No way in the world would a child benefit from coming into such an ugly world. That's just mean. And cruel. Much more selfish than not. Who's to say what our desperate proclivities would've wrought?

When the scumbag from the House made his righteous crack it was like pouring a pound of salt into a gaping hole in my life. I've got a past; I try to keep it buried. It doesn't always work. But I try. And when I let it rise I try to do so with reverence. With respect. With some kinda semblance of dignity. Zeus knows there's been too many time when I've been without any and all of the above. But don't be wrong and tell me what's right, and never get between me and my hurt. I won't stand for it.

Some say that a child would've changed my life. They're right. It would have. Without question. With a child in tow I might not have pissed off the world, set it aflame, then laughed while it burned. I might not have had to face the fact that the world I burned was my own. I might not have gone away. And I might not now be worming my way back. But what if my change was insufficient? What if I only half rose to the occasion? I'd like to think I wouldn't, but I can't be sure. I certainly have a spotty track record. What if I brought all that ill upon an innocent? That would be inexcusable.

This morning I helped a man try to regain partial custody of a daughter I'm sure he loves dearly. His face cracks when he says her name, his eyes cloud when he tries to picture her face. See this man has never met his daughter. Never. And he's not nearly alone. I just left a place where men had 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13 children, and all those kids were out there somewhere without thier fathers. Many didn't even know who their fathers were. Are. Some would never know. I'd like to believe I wouldn't, couldn't be those men; then I'd always believed I'd never be in prison with those men either. Neither is in any way manly. And until I am a man, and I do things manly, I will not subject a child to my world. I just hope I keep enough kid in me for the kid that's sure to be.

Water & Paper

2005-08-20T16:03:00.000-04:00

(Note: This post was supposed to post last eve. I had it all verbed out. Then the 30-minute timer on the Northern Light computer cut me off. Guess it wasn't meant to be. Then. Call me adamant -- relentless? -- but I still hate taking No for any answer. So I go again. And, if I have to, again and again and again. No cotton-picking time frame's gonna keep this Good Hood quiet.)

It did not rain on me today. I wanted it to, but it didn't. It spit a bit. Shed a few tears. Drooled. Then spit some more. One big glop of tease to the forehead. A smattering of dribble on the day's Times. That's it. And I did so wanna get wet. I wanted sheets, buckets, torrents. A deluge. Something to remember. Something to recall. Something to to wash that gray right outta my mind.

The walk to the job is like any walk to a place where you don't belong. A gangplank, with no refreshing end. I'd take an ocean full o' sharks before a factory full of hill people. Here comes the flatlander they say as I trod up the last crest. Here comes the man who's been everywhere but here.

I read as I walk, keeping up with the events of the world. The pullout in Gaza. The magnetifications of the MRI. The rebirthing of William Weld. Keeps me kinda in touch. Even if it's only pretend touch. Keeps me occupied while I slog past projects and used car lots and houses older than the hills upon which they perch. Keeps me elsewhere. I mean, it's not as if I gotta watch for traffic.

Just once did I run into a cross. Some drab lady in a stupid bronze SUV honked and hollered: Why don't you watch where you going, asshole! I think it was a question. A little hypotheticity that came over her in a sudden rush to some dumb judgement. I can't be sure. And since I wasn't sure I said simply: Thank you very much.

Was that wrong?

At the job I revel in the cigarette. There are two scheduled ten-minute breaks -- at 10 and 2:30 -- plus a half-hour lunch at noon. On every hour in between though one of the line workers spells another in turn till everyone gets their nic fit fixed. Yes, despite the hazardous chemicals and the toxic dust and the dizzying exhaust from the battalion of forklifts, everybody smokes.

On my 9am smoke break a torn and yellowed slice of newspaper kept me company. A sliver of the classifieds. Left to do no good. I watched it smack around the alcove, buffeted about by both wind and noise, and I knew what it held. Job listings for short order cooks, warehouse workers, nurses for a few of the many assisted-living facilities that dot the region, a mechanic, a janitor, a CDL-licensed driver. I wondered who'd take these jobs, what their lives were like before, what they'd be like after. Would any of these bring them closer to fulfillment. And I wondered about those they'd be replacing. How long they stayed. Why they left. Where they went. Did they have some way of knowing when leaving or staying was the right thing to do.

I pictured a man, four payments behind on his ten year-old truck, a wife at Wal-Mart, two kids in cradles, another on child support, with rent overdue and cupboards sorely lacking. He once worked at the foundry, a union shop, his father once worked in the mines that made the union. He made a living wage. I picture this man, trucker cap in hand, applying for a job that couldn't feed one let alone four and a half. I picture him having little choice in the matter. Someone somewhere somehow decided that this is how too many, many people will live. How they will die. I don't have the courage to ask why.

Not Seeing Things

2005-08-17T21:13:00.000-04:00

For a cad with a view, I can't see a thing. Out the window from where I sit lies a hill much like every other hill in hilldom. It's hazed and horizoned and peculiar to nowhere. Here in the swale it looms large, like a bump in the order of things.

In the country of the flat the one-hilled cat is king.

Or not. Here, and especially in the surrounding so-called hills, I'm what's called a flatlander. An outsider. An intruder. Unfamiliar with the hilly ways. Without a hill of my own. My beats are where streets have numbers and the avenues have names and that makes me wrong for this land. Where I come from you can walk from one end to another and feel as if you've gotten somewhere and still never reach a conclusion.

Here the streets slope, steep, sway, look at you sideways. Stop. They know you're gonna be on 'em but they really rather you weren't. Rather you didn't bother. Rather you left 'em alone. They've taken a position and it doesn't include you. Or me. Like the welcome caress of a fist.

Or a cold shoulder. Before this place, this time, I thought shoulders got cold 'cause they were above everybody else. That they were for those with shoulders to square. I never had to much suffer them -- then those that could wouldn't dare -- but I've seen the feeling. Now I think I know it. The nudge of a distinctly low blow.

To be fair to this fair town I haven't been fair. I haven't been out. I haven't been about. So I haven't seen whether or not there's anything on offer. When you're colleagues are limited to cons in a holding pattern you kinda lose perspective. I take that back: You never get perspective in the first place.

So you see I see nothing. Not the forest. Not the trees. Not the bee's knees. I sure as all hell can't see myself. Can't see myself remaining without an outlook. Without a view. Perhaps it's time I looked into it.

Here is Not Elsewhere

2005-08-16T21:43:00.000-04:00

It took a minute. Two. Then it took a minute more. And still I wasn't out of the House. Like anything you don't wanna do, it takes time. Sometimes less. Sometimes more. Mostly more. Like leaving. I gotta skirt the skels, sidestep the cigarettes, click through and back and through two locked doors, stand at attention, give my destination, sign my name. Same procedure every time, morning, noon and night.

I mean, eve. There are no nights. No nights I see anyway. Back in at 9, and that's something. It began at 7. Got bumped to 8. Now I'm a Niner. With a five hour weekend window to work with.

But even the evenings feel different. My first night out past 7, I saw a new sky, tasted a new air. My last past 7 was in a yard the size of a carport. No sky to see, no air to speak of. Tasted like purgatory and defeat, 'cause it was. Now is now. You'd think an hour here or there wouldn't mean much. That thought would be wrong. An hour is a whole new world.

Now that I've got till 9 to play with I'm almost giddy. Not that I've made it out that late yet. By the time I get back from slogging the day way I've such a yen to do something, say something, I split well before 6. Since I only have three hours of my so-called own, that puts me back before curfew. If I wasn't so itchy I'd wait a half hour longer. But itchy I am. And only some electronic conveyance can scratch it.

So I hit the library. A wonderful place. 19th century grandeur and 21st century technology. I use every permitted hour I can to be here. Every permittable day. It's the next best thing to swinging elsewhere. And I do so dream of elsewhere.

Ditchings and Diggings

2005-08-15T21:53:00.000-04:00

Ditching Kenny was a cinch. In fact, I didn't even have to try. I'm going to the Linden Market for cigarettes and a paper, said I. He kept walking. The way I taught him to walk. The only way he knows. Expecting me to catch up. Linden was closed so I hit Frank's and took another route. So long, sucker.

Kenny slogs where I slog. Lives in the House that I live in. We're both mandated, it's just his mandate is a bit stronger. And a helluva lot more severe. I didn't want him to work where I work 'cause I knew he'd wanna walk with me each morning. Wreck my solace. A soundtrack for my crawl over and up hill upon hill to a place that I don't wish to be.No thank you. I don't wanna hear about the House, the people in there. I don't wanna hear about the job, those people either. And I sure as all fuck do not wanna hear about Kenny. Ever again.

Kenny just maxed a 1-2 for soliciting a runaway teen in an Allentown park. I don't know what he said or how he said it, but the boy wasn't having any. Now for the rest of his life Kenny'll have to register under Megan's Law. Make no move without the state's permission. He's not allowed in parks anymore either.

Kenny's currently on parole for burglary. Or so he says anyway. Everyone in the House lies so much about their lives, their crimes, you don't know what to believe. Kenny though is probably being relatively truthful. I mean, he's freely spilled everything else about himself, including the episode in the park, why would he lie about a burglary?

Or a compulsion to burgle. This isn't his first fall, this is like his 6th. Or 7th. Or 8th. I lost track in the too long telling. I did try to calculate his time away. Came up with 16 outta 20, with a long of 2. Yep. Kenny's been down 16 outta the last 20 years, and has never been out for more than 2 in a row. That's time.

You can see it all over his face. Kenny's not an unhandsome man. Strong jaw, square head, jailhouse-solid build. Mediterranean, I'd guess. His ears stick out too far but we can't have everything. When you get to the eyes though, there's trouble. They don't know where they wanna be. What they wanna do. What they're thinking. They're the eyes of the institutionalized. Looking to be told where to settle. Reminds me of Jack Henry Abbott and how he didn't know where to buy toothpaste. Locked up so long he lacked even the basics. That's Kenny. Kinda.

So like I said, I sprung for the paper and walked alone. Beautiful. Not the walk, the paper. Last time I had a NY Times in my hand was in the Bradford County Jail. I used to have Sunday's delivered if you can believe that. Make the thing last a week just so I was never without. Today though I pictured a more pleasant place. South Beach. Particularly The Crescent on Ocean Drive. I had a pad there for awhile. Got the Times on the doorknob every morning. And when I'd come home after a long night out I'd quick-change into some cabana wear, grab a smoothie from the downstairs cafe, and make my way across the street to the sand and the ocean. A club kid I knew ran the beach chair concession, always saved me a seat, and nearly every morning I took it.

The Atlantic wasn't lapping at my feet this day, and the sun was without any tropical fervor, but the Times didn't disappoint. I wanna get mad about exurban sprawl outside Tampa (and I did). I'm glad to know the Gerbers are teaming with Maxim (now I do). I'm inspired by the billionaire feats of Jack Ma's alibaba.com, hard-wired by the can-do cats at Judy's Book. Just having the paper at hand made me feel closer to the world. And trust me, I am nowhere near.

I swung to the same sensation last week with The New Yorker. Everyday I carried it to and through slogville, and every 10 minute break and every half hour lunch I devoured it. I even copped a peek during smoke breaks but got dirty looks for my effort. In fact I got dirty looks all around whenever I broke out a New York anything. Still do. You think you're better than us, they scowl. Uppity ex-con. I'm not mad though. They're right. I do think I'm better than them.

So there.

Some Nerve

2005-08-13T18:45:00.000-04:00

I never used to get nervous. I could stroll into a room, a bar, a club, step up on a stage, strut into any city, its projects, and know my swagger would steel the day. Even among nerve-wrackingly strong women I remained resolute. I've had fists to my face, knives to my throat, guns to my head and still all I gave was a shrug. I had some nerve.

Before I surrendered, I threw a little going away party for myself at some then-trendy eatery on Avenue C and 9th Street. There were 9 of us and I was a wreck. I had two kinds of bundles in my pocket and a mad desire to completely eliminate both by night's end. I did. My friends were remarkably understandable, as they always had been. I couldn't understand a thing.

Early the next morning I woke in a Bartonsville truckstop. I'd been there before. Thought the dwarfs and the amputees and the three-fingered preacher man in the cross-bearing Truckers for Christ trailer would make a good story. Even submitted a bogus job ap so I could go undercover to write it. This time though things were different. I was the story. And it was about to end.

I spent my last thirteen dollars on a cab to the State Police barracks in Swiftwater. The fare was twelve and I apologized for the meagerness of the tip. That's all I have, said I. It's more than I expected, said she. You figure her figuring.

I told he uniform behind the bullet-proof glassed vestibule that I had come to surrender. He looked up. He was on the phone. Then he wasn't. Excuse me? I said I'd come to turn myself in. I slipped my identification through the slot. Hold on.

I stepped outside and lit a last smoke and took in the barren sixth-growth forest. So this is what I'd come to. Here is what I mean. I had no idea what I was doing there. Surrendering. Do real outlaws ever surrender? Before I could answer myself four state troopers burst outta the barracks, threw me to the ground and cuffed my hands behind my back. Easy gentlemen, I came in on my own accord.

Now you're going away on ours.

They dragged me back to a chair and chained me to a railing against the wall. I knew enough to know there'd be a lot of waiting and that cops didn't let you have books while you did it. They would let you have a Bible. I'd bought one the night before at the B. Dalton on 6th Avenue and 8th Street. It was gilded, like a hymnal, with those tissue-paper pages that make you feel kinda sacred. Can I have my Bible? Oh, baby wants his Bible, they laughed. Not that way, motherfuckers, I thought. Thank you very much, I said.

I forgot what I read. Some fire and brimstone hypocrisy and spite I'm sure. Whatever it was it kept me distracted while my now-heralded captors did the paperwork for my arrest. My mind wasn't on the Bible anyway. It was on attorneys and bail and how long it'd be before I'd get both.

When they took a look at my past and wouldn't let me go I wasn't worried. They always come down hard in the beginning. Put a little fear of God into a fella. When they still wouldn't let me out after a week, two, a month, I stayed steely. I can take whatever I'm dished. When months became months upon months and the sentence looked like double digits I began to worry.

But I wasn't nervous. Nervous makes you shake. Gets you jittered. Worry makes you stir. Damn good practice for one who's about to be put to the stir test.

No nerve wrack when they sentenced me. In fact, I was kinda relieved. Sure it was a huge hit, a low blow, but it was over. Now to stir. I wasn't nervous when they vanned me down to four-thousand strong Camp Hill, ground zero for incoming cons in the Pennsylvania system. I wasn't nervous when they trussed me up and shipped me to Mahanoy, where I got a too close-hand look at the baddest and ugliest and meanest among so-called men. Men who killed their families. Men who killed their wives or their girlfiends. Men who killed their kids. Men who hurt kids. Men who beat other men into comas so they could get another hit of crack. Sheer ugly hate. They creeped me out and pissed me off, but none of 'em unnerved me.

Chester didn't make me nervous either. It was ghetto, yeah. And it was dirty and stale and dark and overcrowded and there was no yard but So what? I could handle being warehoused in a modern dungeon and all the dinge that went with it.

Now I think I've lost my nerve. I leave the library and I see police walking by and I wonder if they're looking for me. A plain white caged van screeches to a stop at the light and I jump. Some moron swipes twenty dollars from UGL and I cringe. Lose the job you go back. I look over my shoulder. Especially in the House. There are men there, vindictive, petty, putrid little men, who'd drop a counterfeit dime on a cat just because they don't have a quarter. You don't have to have done anything at all. And the 8-10 evenings are an eternity. I can't sit still till the second shift monitor leaves and I know they won't be coming for someone that night. That they won't be coming for me. And just in case I forget where I am, there's a D.O.C. van out in the parking lot to remind me every time I step outside for a smoke.

Maybe I should quit smoking.

And get back some nerve.

Local Discolor

2005-08-12T20:58:00.000-04:00

He's pint-sized. Bulging eyes and an I-don't-give-a-fuck stomach. His feet are the size of my hands. His mouth is bigger than my ego. He wears sandals. He bitches and moans and lies and cries. He's sneaky and sulky and stupid and crude. I think he "found" my "lost" money 'cause even though he says he's broke he never fails to have a box of Newports in his faded khaki pocket. I bought him bread. A Pepsi. Lent him bleach. He never paid me back.

His name is John and he is one of my rommates at the House and I don't like him a bit.

There's more. Or, I should say, others. Like the third John. He too is extremely vertically challanged. I should say short. He tries to compensate by horizontalizing. He overcompensates. He's got waist-sized biceps, Popeye forearms, and a head that resembles a shrew. No, I don't know what a shrew looks like. His clothes are tight, his wallet is tighter. And I can't understand a single word he says. I don't know if hillbillies are taught at birth to mumble vaguely, but he's an expert at it. Either that or he's got no teeth. I'd say both. 'Cause where he comes from mumbling through gums is a given.

Then there's Troy. Named for a fable he'll never be able to comprehend, Troy, in his own small town way, was once probably cool. Now he's just pathetic. With a scumbag junkie mentality, a Why-me? way of blame, a limp and a cane to go with it. He neeeds a crutch. He says he fell off his bunk upstate. I say he never should've been there in the second place. He's already had one shot. Now he's bitching 'cause they haven't tailor-made for him another. Like I said: Pathetic.

These are my roomies in the House and I am so damn glad I'm not them.

From Dust to Then

2005-08-11T22:27:00.000-04:00

It's dirty. It's dusty. It's toxic. It's Drylok Fast Plug and I just spent the day helping to make sure the stuff spreads around the world. Stack, fill, weigh, lid, box, stack. They put me smack in the middle, on lids, which was the perfect for someone who's flipped his own a time or three. Oh, the boredom. I tried to get the Hood's-eye version of the hippy-dippy Zen trance Jan Michael Vincent worked for himself in Tribes. Didn't work for me. Maybe it's cuz I didn't have some girlfriend-in-the-flower-fields to fall back on. Or a drilll sergeant screaming in my face. I had only the unseen Man.

And the blaring music of my youth. For some dumb reason the Rock-of-the-'70s is as ubiquitous now as it was then (more later). Foghat's "Fool for the City, Joe Walsh's "Rocky Mountain Way," Rick Derringer's "Rock 'n' Roll Hootchie Koo." C'mon. That shit was hip when I was a kid. Sure, they were great. In their day. I know, I saw 'em all at the Miami Jai Alai Fronton. Listening to 'em now though is little joy. Listening to 'em while I slog poisons is no joy at all. Kinda makes me feel like a teen paying a grown man's debt.

Speaking of teenstuff... Believe it or not, I used to be a bit of glam boy. And No, there are no surviving pictures. I saw to that myself. Anyway, as I say, as a kid I was all glam, as in Pretty Things, Mott the Hoople, T-Rex glam. Yeah I was a few years late; this was Miami in the late '70s and everybody but the cocaine cowboys was late. Late didn't impinge upon my thoroughness. Or my, er, flair. The scarfs, the platforms, the satin, I gladly, madly wore it all. In fact so good was I in my get-up that people used to say I looked like a rock star, specifically Paul Chapman of UFO, who were then the reigning kings of pretty boy metal. UFO was one band I hadn't seen except on record covers, and the live images there were just murky enough to lead me to agree.

So then UFO was coming to town. An old barn of an arena way out in the swamps called The Hollywood Sportatorium. I not only had tickets; I had backstage passes. Better yet, I had the gall to be them. The week before the concert, at the very same arena, appeared The Moody Blues. Now I was never a big fan; they were always a little too much pomp and not enough circumstance for me. But even in those days I went to everything and this was something to go to. So I went. And I approached the backstage entrance on the side of the building: "Elo," said I, in a transparently fake Cockney accent. "I'm Paul Chapman of UFO. We're playin' ere next week and I thought I might take a look around." It was preposterous. Then this massive lug of a man looked me up and down and up and down again, wiped what I thought for sure was disbelief outta his eyes and opened wide the gate. Sure, sure. Come in. Then he called over a few friends who were hanging around and introduced me as if we were old friends. This is Paul Chapman of UFO. He's playing here next week. Take care of him. The ooh's and the aah's were exceeded only by the amount of liquor and narcotics they proceeded to ply me with. When I say copious, I mean more. So happy were they to have a supposed star in their midst they never even stopped to question whether or not the star was real. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe it was me. Maybe it was Miami. Now every time I hear "Night in White Satin" I wonder if they're still talking about that night too.

On Truth

2005-08-10T21:43:00.000-04:00

This needs no elaboration:

I know they's a lot of things in a family history that just plain aint so. Any family. The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. But I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it anymore than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is. It's the thing you're talkin about. I've heard it compared to the rock -- maybe in the bible -- and I wouldn't disagree with that. But it'll be here even when the rock is gone. I'm sure they's people would disagree with that. Quite a few, in fact. But I never could find out what any of them did believe.

From Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men

The Wrong Brochure

2005-08-09T22:11:00.000-04:00

Another dull day of drudgery. I don't know how guys between 25 and 55 do it; it's a job for kids and old men. People on their way up or on their way out. This is no place for a lifetime. I suppose there's some small honor and dignity in labor, but the meniality has gotta cancel it out. Perhaps there was such a thing in the toil of their forebearers. I mean, I can see a certain nobility in mining coal -- those men were building a nation; what kinda honor and dignity though can come from manufacturing products that fill in the cracks and paint over the surface of the nation your forebearers built?

I wonder.

So I spent the first half of the day loading the constantly firing gatlin gun, the second half catching the bullets. What wrath did Ford wrought. Being on the receiving end of an assembly line has gotta be the closest thing to torture the industiral age ever devised. It is, simply, enough to make a man mad. Bend, lift, repeat. Over and over again and again. You can't daydream, 'cause if you wander you lose your place and the line drags. And you can't think, 'cause then the line stops.

No, definitely not a thinkin' man's job. Even a thoughtless thinker like me. But since I never let thought get in the way before, I most certainly wasn't gonna start now. Regardless. So I thought, and I thought, and I thought some more, about all the times I thought about my release. I thought about how I'd be released to fanfare, about the suit I'd be wearing when I got there, the hat I was gonna tip when I entered. I thought about the sorely missed, and the way I'd smile wide and hug each and every one of 'em, and about the way a smile and a hug would feel after all the hard time of neither. I thought about the swagger, I thought about the sway, I thought about the streets. And then I remembered the intersection of the factory where I stood thinking: New York and Jefferson. Manhattan and Miami Beach. Then I thought about how far away I was from both. Some great distance. This was not like I pictured it from the pen, not how I promised myself all those nights after count, nowhere near what I believed. Guess I got the wrong brochure.

Capping Caulk for The Man

2005-08-08T21:42:00.000-04:00

For those of you who don't know -- and I hope it's every single one of you -- halfway house living is but a half life. Forget what you did or what you know or where you did it or who you knew, when a con gets halfway sprung, he's in for a world not his own.

The big thing is a job. Not work, mind you, and definitely not The Work. But a job. A con gets halfway out and it's off to the temps. No, these aren't the kinda temps that send a fella to desk duty; these are solid, soiled, blue collar temps. If you're like me, you hit a town and try to ply your trade. But even if you get a hit, as I did, if it's not a full-time hit, you're temping. Or else. If your freedom's dependent on a job, any job, you land a job.

So this morn I hit the hills for the half-hour walk to United Gilsonite Laboratories. They make paint, spackle, the odd solvent or three, and caulk. They've been making it since '32. And they make quite a lot of it.

I arrived with four other temps: a mullet-headed slouch who's just gaga over Disturbed, a small-town version of a Brooklyn bad boy with Cali cred and Gurnsey dreams (really), a mild-mannered old man about I don't know what, and me. I wasn't the only ex-con, but I was the only one with a curfew. Anyway we get assigned, and I get the caulk line. Specifically, running the caps. This entailed my standing atop an electric scaffold and feeding thousands upon thousands of white plastic caps into a Dickensian machine and watching it spit out fours of finished tubes. Imagine having to load a gatlin gun one bullet at a time for eight hours and you kinda get the idea. And I wasn't the only one ammo'd up: three different workers took their place beside me, and three different workers didn't last. Funny how much you can tell about a man when he works. The first took slow, stuttered footlong swipes to load each and every cap and nearly keeled from the effort; the second piled 'em in fives and pummeled 'em through like an impatient with other things to do; the third kept his swipes to a minimum, but they were erratic and off-target, as if his mind lived somewhere else. I call 'em stupid, shrewd, and sensitive. Me? I applied Burroughs' time-tested Disciple of Doing Easy. Economy of movement; economy of energy. And the job gets done. No sweat.

I take that back. Much sweat. The sweat of a man clocking time. I felt like Morton Spurlock would feel if he had to do it for real. Let's hope I too get an FX cushion to land on, and let's hope too it doesn't last more than thirty days.

Some Go Home, Others Go Back

2005-08-07T17:36:00.000-04:00

They took another man away the night before last. The second this week. Seems he went out and got himself all liquored up. Then he had some bad words with the local folk at Sal's. Rule #1 for halfway housing parolees: Don't Drink or Drug. Rule #2: Don't piss-off the locals. Someone says something wrong to you, walk away. Otherwise you go away. Back. Guess the liquor kinda dampened the man's senses.

Now he's got at least six months of stir to do nothing but think about it.

The first con went to parole for his lie detector test and just never came back. See the cons who fall under Megan's Law gotta strap on the polygraph every once in awhile. This must've been one of those once-in-awhiles when truth got in the way. Or got away. Whatever it was he didn't get away with it. Bad for him. Not so bad for me. Or the community. I mean, even a con's gotta have a set of standards, right? And anyway, I didn't have to see him go. Didn't much care either.
Last night's case was different. Not because I cared all that much (truthfully, I didn't; we come alone, we leave alone), but because it happened right in front of me. When you hear the sound of shackles, cuffs and bellychains, then you see a man trussed up and taken away, you're heart misses about half of that long hard minute's beats. Maybe more. Breath stops too. Right where it started. Gets a cat to thinkin' about how tenuous this freedom really is.

And how stupid some people are for re-losing it. It's not like they don't know how bad it is to be locked-up; they do, and then some. Yet still some gotta go out and waste their precious personal time drinking with their buddies (who by the way remain at large), arguing with the locals (ditto), or, like one particularly filthy rotten apple, scouring the playgrounds and the parks and the internet for more victims. Good for them. Let 'em go back. And rot. World's too crowded anyway.

On a brighter note, one fella did go home. A Korean/Irish cat named Sam, who has the simple grace and good humor of those born cool. Talented too, with a penchant of the louder among louds. I tell ya, if not for drugs and geography, he coulda been a contender. Might still be. Now that he's been given his next last chance. Good luck, brother.

Long Gone Days

2005-08-06T12:38:00.000-04:00

I hate wasted days. It makes my heart hurt, my head ache, my soul sag. Another 24 bites the dust. What have I done? Where have I gone? What have I learned?

Of my some 1344 days away every single solitary one of 'em was a waste. Every one. Despite the fact that I did my best to bide my hard time wisely. There were the daily correspondings, to the allegiant fifty (which made for 1344 hours wasted waiting for the mail bag), and they only left me longing for conversation. There were the scriptings and the stories and the notebook upon notebook of journalings and jottings. There was blessed Bully. To keep current with events I rose to NPR, then made believe that what happened in the world made a difference to me where I was. Or wasn't. To keep current with culture I read and reread The New Yorker (thanks Chris!), then imagined I was at whatever galleries' and museums' and cinemas' events were duly noted for the week. To keep current with soundings while down Philly way I tuned into Penn's excellent XPN; up in the mountains it was all Sir George Graham's big and brassy Mixed Big on VIA. To get operatic or symphonic or jazzed I mooded over to Temple's-own RTI. Each in turn made me close my eyes and see just what I was missing. Everything. No matter who I lettered, they still weren't there. No matter what I wrote, no one could read it. No matter what I learned or thought or felt, there was no one to tell. And no matter what happening, it happened without me.

Without Bully, and the kind, continuous correspondence, it would've been nothing but the sound of one man flapping, in the stale, windowless wind.

You get the picture. So when yesterday ended-up wasted it all came back to me -- the hurt heart, the aching head, the sagging soul. Worse was this was my first day of three-hour personal time. You read correctly: three hours. Till now I'd been allowed nothing but hour-long increments to myself. As always, I planned my time 'round that of the library; unfortunately I was misinformed about the library's time. One of my girthier colleagues told me this; the library did that, and I got stuck outta the blogosphere. I blame only myself. I've passed through the library's gates enough to know the times; I've been told wrong by cons enough to know what time does.

Off to Northern Lights (with permission of course), home of the only terminal available at that ghastly hour. There I waited. And I waited. Then I wrote. And I wrote. As fast as my feeble mind and crooked fingers would allow. By then my precious three hours were almost over. And when I was done I got hit with a surgeless surge of absolute ether. No post. No signal. No back. That left all that I'd spilled over Mike Albo's deliciously vicious The Underminer gone in the dustbin of memory and all that I did for the day done gone. Long done gone. Does doing get done when there's no done in the doing? I wonder.

From There to Here

2005-08-04T20:31:00.000-04:00

More digression.

So we were off, away from Chester and all the ugly it represented. Driving on some of Philadelphia's filthiest thruways. It was rush hour, but it seemed the rush hadn't caught on yet. Leaving ugly through more ugly. The roads were beaten and poor, the traffic foul and unpleasant, and the drivers looked mean and miserable in their dime-a-dozen sedans. I didn't care. The misery-soaked 'burbs of America's seventh city meant nothing to me. I was sprung.

So we drove. And we drove. And we drove. The a/c on full; the windows on wide open; the smokes hooked to a chain. I wanted to stop on the side of the road and pick a flower, feed a duck, roll down the embankment. Do a somersault. It'd had been so long since I'd been allowed to do what I wanted to do, I wanted to do anything.

We hit a Dunkin' Donuts. Four years of Coolatta ads and I was gonna have one. Seemed the whole damn world had the same idea. 13, 14, 15 fatso's in line for what they obviously didn't need. For some dumb reason they were all in shorts and very bright shirts. Had something happened to the world while I was away? Yeah, it got fat.

I had a five dollar bill in my hand. Just the feel of currency made me giddy. The last cash I saw was in the fist of a prison kitchen blue shirt (supervisor) who was trying to impress the convict help; the last cash I touched was what brought me jail. This was neither stolen nor someone else's; this was mine.

So I ordered. And it took a minute. Then it took a minute more. And I started to get impatient. These are my minutes now, baby, don't you dare waste one of 'em. When the cool, coagulated concoction came though it was as refreshing as I'd wished. One problem: it was served in plastic, and I had been forced to use nothing but throughout my exile.

We next hit a kinda suit warehouse I'd seen advertised on Philly TV. Amazing. Within mere minutes I had picked out a deliciously suitable black suit, a scrumptious white shirt, a Hood's eye power tie, and Hollywood-perfect shades. Killer. What struck me most was that I still knew what I wanted without looking.

That struck would be stricken anew when we hit the chain-store CVS. The array! I had not faced so many choices in forever. Six kinds of Mach 3's; nine styles of combs; fifteen baking powder toothpaste selections alone. Now I was dumbstruck. In the joint you have one, possibly two choices on the commissary list, and cons spend hours upon hours deciding on them. Here I'd made a trip to bountiful and couldn't decide on a toothbrush. Fortunately they had Clubman after shave; now that I'd never have to think thrice about. I figure it took me forty minutes to buy forty dollars' worth of toiletries and still I wasn't done.

Before my brother came undone though, I settled. Then I stewed some more when the cashier crawled through the transaction. Do these people not train? Or are they taught to keep a customer waiting in the hopes they'll buy more? Whatever the reason, there's no reason for it.

Now we hit Scranton. At first glance it's kinda like a trailerpark without wheels, set a little bucolicly perhaps, but set on blocks. It was that immobile. And immobilizing. Everything's stripped and ramshackle, and the people seem worse. Thankfully the first impression was wrong. Once you get into town the shackle gives way to an almost immaculately preserved collection of buildings all built by King Coal. In other words, aged. Like a big brick and mortar Mayberry done by Dickens, or Our Town with a past. I tell ya, it was a tremendous surprise. Snide and snotty me thought the only preservation was done in the big cities; now I know better.

Sweet.

Food of the Gods, the State, and the Army

2005-08-03T10:15:00.000-04:00

I may not be the first person to eat Zabar's out of a dumpster, but I bet a bundle I'm the first person to do so in Scranton. Yep, G-Girl sent through the Big Bad Apple care package yesterday, and stupid me threw away the best part. See the box comes with a trayful of bagels and mustard, and at first glance it would appear that that's all there is. That first glance would be wrong, way wrong. After I trashed the box in the dumpster, I returned to eat and noticed something seemed to be missing. So I flew back outta the house and did a little shallow diving. Unlike George's famous eclair -- thankfully -- my food didn't have a bite out of it. Like his, though, it was sitting on top of the other garbage. And inside the trash-straddling box was a bulky white envelope that bigly boldly said: Open Immediately. Do Not Discard. Perishables.

And here I thought it was only dry ice.

Like I said: Stupid. But none the loss for stupidity. Even after pulling, packing, shipping, delivering, receiving and trashing, all was superswell and good. I gnoshed and I gnoshed like a gourmand, on smoked salmon, hot pastrami, kosher salami, bagels and rye. I did have to give up the poppy seed bagels, as well as the amoretti cookies; seems either could leave me testing positive for drugs or alcohol. But I dug the rest. And hen some.

In fact, yesterday was a feast all around, which was a welcome relief after such a long hard famine. Earlier in the morning I made the trek 'cross the tracks to the local food warehouse and stocked up on the state's dime. See they've got this emergency food program for ex-cons (and the otherwise bankrupt), and though I'd swore throughout my whole life that I'd never welfare (it wasn't till the third trip that I actually applied), this felt different. I mean, I gave the state nearly four years of my life, the least they could do is buy me a couple steaks.

Sure beats borrowing more money.

As if that humbling experience wasn't quite enough, I was sent over to the local Salvation Army for clothes and food. Now I've always dug the Army's gear and over the years I've spent loads and loads on diggables, so I had little problem selecting a few comp garments. A food handout was another thing. Take this backpack, said one of my more conniving colleagues, and they'll fill it up. So I took the it, and they filled it, and I stumbled back up a one of Scranton's longest hills with a a backbreaking load of food I'd never in a million years eat. Spam anyone? No wonder a poor felon can't think straight, he's been poisoned with sixteen tons of nitrate-laced canned goods.

So, I gave it all away. Better them than me.

Leaving Ugly

2005-08-02T17:10:00.000-04:00

In order to catch-up to myself, I'm gonna have to digress:

8 days ago I walked away from a very ugly place. They didn't make it easy. I was allowed to shower, but the guard made me stay in my cell till I was called. When I wasn't called, and I wasn't called, I went down to the dayroom with my television and sat. And stared. Then paced. Then stared some more. There were no sighs (a sigh can get you smacked in prison), but the sighs were lurking. Finally my impatience got on her nerves and she called down to property for me.

"You can go now."

They were the four sweetest words I think I've ever heard.

In property the guards were wondering what happened. "Your family's here," said they. "What took you so long?" Nothing. "Was it the block guard? Which block guard?" No one. This was not the time for me to interject myself into some internecine rivalry. So I just smiled and said it was all okay.

I hated to keep my mouth shut though. After nearly four years of complete compliance (read: silence), I wanted to speak my mind. The bitch wanted to keep me under her thumb for a few more minutes. That's what she does. That's how she is. Ad infinitum.

Of course I said no such thing. An audible observation like that can get a cat's paperwork very lost.

So I dressed ("looks like he's going to a disco"), and I smiled some more ("he sure looks happy"), and I waved goodbye to all that. And when my brother William opened the door to his truck I knew I'd never be back. Tah tah you useless institution. Hope you had your fill of this Hoodlum, 'cause you ain't getting another bite.

Inside the truck was like taking a nicotine bath; my brother smokes and smokes heavy. So I smoked too. It was stupid. And it was delicious.

Key. Gas. Shift. We were off. This way and that. I didn't even mind the wrong turns. The last time I was in a moving vehicle I was shackled and handcuffed to a belly chain. When we wronged turn right back past ol' Chester though, my heart broke into a roar. This was where I'd been caged? What utter ugly.

I'd never seen it from the outside.

Thank Zeus Almighty

2005-08-01T18:29:00.000-04:00

Free at last. Free at last. Thanks Zeus almighty, I'm free at last. Greetings, all you good good people of the wild wild world, this is your Hood here, coming to you from sunny, slumberful Scranton. That's right. No more hokey pokey for this Hoodlum.

Instead a house of halfway. Seems Control wants to keep this cad on a short leash. At least for the short time being. So what? I'll fetch their fucking morning paper if it means me staying outta jail.

The town, as I say, is a slumber. Thing is, it's in an almost immaculately-preserved state. Guess the powers-that-be this burg like things just the way they were. Good for them. Why go to the 21st century if the 21st century won't come to you?

I jest of course. There are some rather tasteful additions to the rather low-slung skyline. Where they come from I do not yet know. I plan on finding out though. And posting the results right here on theviewfromscranton.

Stay tuned. I know I will.