I Just Found “Osprey” on My Flipphone Wordsearch Game

                    

Is Fatboy Slim still making “triumphant comeback” albums?  He was never that good in the first place.  Really quite bowdlerized.  People were vaguely aware that Techno was “in” during the nineties.  There was at least an agreement among white Americans that this should be so but we didn’t really want the full force of being perpetually half-dead on hard drugs and eager to riot that came with real British club culture.  Prodigy were where that was at.

The thing about growing up on the edge of nowhere in the nineties was that we didn’t really get all of the Starbucks jokes on TV.  It was only on my trips down to Denver, walking through downtown, that I realized that Starbucks was indeed very big but not in the same way as McDonalds. They weren’t trying to put a franchise in every small town that had a halfway major highway junction.  Instead they were placing a Starbucks every three or four blocks in dense urban cores for the foot traffic.  I could have gone my whole life with the concept of businesses catering to foot traffic remaining ever foreign to me.  Once home in NP for a holiday I left my parents house, parked my van at some random spot and walked to a park or something.  My aunt saw me walking and called my mom in a panic.  My mom in turn called me breathlessly to ask if I was ok.  My aunt you see was wholly convinced that choosing to walk when you have a car right there was proof of extreme mental distress, and even my mom remained suspicious that this wasn’t the case.

There is a sincere assumption here that small towns and suburbs are known by universal genetic instinct to be the One True Human Habitat.  Their politics run from right-wing to moderate partly because they cannot fathom the city environment where different cultures and lifestyles blend matter-of-factly instead of being gracefully “allowed”.  A high degree of common background, life cycle and experience is their honestly lived understanding of How Society Works.  When I lived in Chicago and followed the standard practice of going downstairs to the corner grocery everyday for the handful I required for the next meal my mother snarkily asked me if I wished I had a car so I wouldn’t have to do that.

They are mentally aware that there are cities that outpopulate North Platte by 100-to-1 margin but again do not really grasp the implications. In their hearts they are assured that their environment is the universal norm and cities are deviant. Complete with the racial assumption that all big cities are eternally 1990’s Compton or 1970’s Beirut.   We would visit my walking-is-madness aunt in Lake Havasu Arizona, a venal orphaned cityless suburb with no sidewalks and an economy based on nothing but its own real estate growth. We would drive straight through for twenty one hours and this was as hellish as it was dangerous.  I would occasionally suggest meeting her side of the family halfwayish in Albuquerque but my dad wouldn’t have it.  “I refuse to take my family there” he righteously said. Mexicans you see.  Gangs and such.

There’s an all-night diner on East Colfax that I adore, and that I also know to be adored by other hipster/bohemians, (just who the hell are my greater in-group anyway?)  I should remember its name but I do not.  Good biscuits and gravy; coffee middling but more importantly endless. Same as a lot of places.  The new popularity of biscuits and gracy among my crowd is a bit jarring. This is my rural mother’s specialty you see. “Good hangover food” she has always said and so it is. 

Denver and even Chicago are still small enough to not quite never sleep.  They nap between three & six or so on the weeknights.  And in these hours with the quiet and the morning nature smells one can sense the layers of modern urbanity stripped away and feel the frontier outposts these places had once been; especially of course in Denver’s case.  I loved to step out for coffee in these hours either to a Starbucks or to a local place, keeping up my entrenched old man habit of reading mainstream newspapers hardcopy.  Ten minutes or so on the local and another twenty or so on the New York Times.  Strong coffee when you’ve been sleepless is like acid and orgasm both at once.

It occurs that the shape and physical size of Lincoln is eerily similar to the eastern half of Denver proper.  Replace Salt Creek with the South Platte and then like as like the railyard on the eastern side of the floodplain with downtown and the neighborhoods flowing out from there. 

I once had a friend named Gabe who made his living stealing lawn mower engines, garage door openers, things left in unlocked cars etc.  He did this both to have money for drugs (All of them) and to drive down to the Denver rave scene every weekend.  The first time I went to a party of Gabe’s his new puppy had somehow gotten out and took the underside of my car for a hidey hole.  Upon leaving I had crushed it quite to death before knowing it was there.  (Though it apparently lingered pointlessly in great pain for some minutes.)  I spent the rest of that night drunk-weeping alone in guilt but Gabe forgave me the next day.  He was actually a very kindhearted man and never once did he jack any of my family’s shit. 

By and by I started going with him on these Denver trips.  One Saturday we went to a rave that was pointedly marketed as ‘drug free’ but Gabe bought some E’s for it anyway.  He was going to give me some but got accosted by security and had to eat all eight pills on the spot.  The security man was no fool and we got kicked out.  Gabe took to the wheel of his car as usual; it never occurred to me to take the wheel as it was His Car after all, and we wondered through the northern half of downtown aimlessly for awhile while he attempted to swallow his esophagus and smoke with his left eyeball while insisting that Paul Atreides’ name was “Duke.”  The Denver PD inevitably pulled us over.  Gabe stuck his entire body out the window said “What no loves?” and asked the police where Nebraska was.  The cops laughed, knowing he was driving under the influence of something and not giving a shit.  (“Always the Nebraska kids” or something like that they said.)  It was white privilege  at its most; actually quite fantastically dangerous.  The cops pointed us toward the freeway ramp and we eventually found our way to I-76, rolling through the high plains at 110mph sometimes and 25 at others but making it back alive as so we remain.  Gabe now teaches boxing in Topeka last that I heard. 

Mens Hats Were Forbidden Until The End

My late grandparents house, now owned by their eldest son/my Ugly American uber alles uncle, lies along a colonial extension of North Platte across the interstate from the main body of town tucked between the rivers.  It has an elaborately finished basement that was complete with bar before granpa tired of my mother, aunts, uncles, and then older cousins siphoning liquor for themselves.  Though there are still remnants of that bar to this day so far as I know. A bottle of Seagram's gin and another of triple sec from the Kennedy administration or before; with the labeling near-identical to today's.  The South Platte river runs half a mile from the house, and I'm told that sealing the basement from water that was neither quite Platte or aquifer was a great expense. But hold it did, even against the fiercest summer storms. There had been a pool table until we grandkids stole all of the balls.  After that it was made a bench where Grandpa would complete 5000 piece puzzles in a matter of days; hacking at them for three hours at a time or more. In the rear of the basement were the laundry machines, accessorized by a chute from the main four that my four-year-old self had gotten stuck in trying to slide through. Next to that was grandpa's workshop, including a plastic sign business that he ran on the side. Next to this an ancient dead pinball machine that was gotten rid of at some point in the 90's; and next to that a fridge that held 30-packs of Beast Ice that would last for years, doled out in servings of precisely one to relatives of the senior generation when I came to visit. When I took to pilfering six at a time for myself as a teen this went completely unnoticed so far as I know. Granpa preferred bourbon, keeping up a homewrecker-per-week pace into his seventies, mixed with a flat 7-Up that no hell-fearing child dare touch.

The backyard was a full acre. It was the edge of town as I said and the neighbors always kept a horse or two. There were gophers, moles, discarded rattlesnake skins.  My grandparents kept several rows of corn and sold some too. There were many planted and eaten by my own hands and those of all the rest of us as well.  Also potatoes, always planted on Good Friday by old world Catholic custom though of course the date varies by weeks from year to year and the frontier between winter and spring in Nebraska is more arbitrary still. Still it worked. The potato crop always came through.  I remember it being unfailingly rawly cold for these Good Friday plantings and the strange appropriateness of this keeping me in the faith for longer than reason otherwise would have.

The front porch is about ten feet above ground; (as is the main floor, which became a sore problem when my grandparents became to ill to properly walk) The prevailing sound here in all seasons is that of interstate traffic and prairie wind blended as one. The sights are that of the trees that mark the property front, the hulking beast of a mailbox next to the slots for the World-Herald & Telegraph, the neighbors horses, sometimes towing a hobby wagon along the semi-rural street, the half-visible interstate with the trees of river and town beyond, to the east the hotel & gas station towers for the I-80/Jeffers Street exchange ramps, to the south the hydro plant and the rim of the valley, the short rolling grass hills that extend from this comparative hive of humanity for longer than most nations go. In the warm season Satanically large spiders where you reach uncarefully and cottonwood seeds from the river dancing about most anywhere you look. Grasshoppers as big as a grown hand, the singing barbs on their legs large enough to draw blood.  What you sense above all else on this porch is the smell of the Plains; earth and pollinating grass, wet grass, baking grass dying of thirst.

When there was a tornado warning it was the standard policy of all family branches to drive across town to the grandparents mechabasement. If worse came to worse there would be something like food in the fridge and a radio telling us of the outside world. Grandpa's electric would hold for as long as there was any electricity in the town at all. My first tornado memory that sticks is from 1986 when I was four. It was aunt someone-or-another's birthday and the extended family was in Grandma's living room watching Ghostbusters on VHS. They of course had already a lifetime of tornado memories. The great Omaha tornado, the one that had zipped up 72nd street like a lost outstater looking for Wendy's and was the nation's most expensive natural disaster until hurricane Andrew, was only a decade past; and that in turn was only eight years past when my grandparents had white-flighted the family out of Omaha into the west. Anyhow on this day in 86 my grandfather Knew that this summer storm was especially wicked. So he went out to that porch to watch the western sky and I, a big boy now, went out to join him. And it was here that I learned to Know the signs that he Knew; the smell of ozone, the strange cinematic clarity of the air, a sudden absurd iciness to the June wind, the subtle drug high of dropping barometer, the animal body sense that Something Is About To Happen.  I learned all of this on that afternoon and every tornado since has in many ways been the same experience repeated.

As I stood out there with Grandpa my mother said something or another about finding this adorable. I'm sure it was.  I was in fact a cute motherfucker when I was little. It was a few years later when I was still quite a young child that I realized that this was in fact a futile gesture on my Grandpa's part. He wasn't going to shoot the tornado or warn it against trespassing. I realized that it was actually an empty show of masculine protection, that all such gestures or nearly all were empty shows. I at least had been four years old and wired to emulate adult behaviors. My grandfather had no such excuse and now I faced the problem at nine or so of growing up in western Nebraska fully aware that the very idea of Strong Protective Manhood was a God damn fraud with all these affectedly gruff hambones about me.

Nothing came of that tornado. Or actually it may have hit a ranch somewhere to the southwest and killed some bulls. Town remained safe. We retreated to that basement for half an hour or so and my mother passed around her rum to fellow adults; that cough-syrup Captain Morgan shit that she drinks to this day; and that was all there was to it.

My uncle Dave inherited the house as I've said before.  He and my Aunt Gail keep house terribly, dirty clothes and dishes scattered about the place, my grandparents crucifixes and Marion pictures replaced by angry eagles superimposed on flags and related army shit, the magnificent garden left fallow for dogs as overweight as my uncle to flop around in. There was a family fourth of July in the backyard a couple of years ago.  My uncle had forbidden anyone from a family branch not his own from entering the house but I went in to use the bathroom anyway. "And you're here because?" he asked me, pure sarcastic anger. Asking me to state my business in the house where I'd slept in a cradle, where my single mother went to when we needed shelter and knew we would have it, with the dining table I'd help to set, the carpets I'd help to vacuum, and the grandparents I had help to tend to as they very slowly died. I looked my uncle in the eye and it was the only time in my adult life that I wanted to hit another person. As it was I told him I was going to take a piss and walked right past him.

I've only ever been able to think of two motives for getting rich. One is to travel ceaselessly until whenever I drop. The other is to be rooted in home. To one day own this house for myself. to have the prairie smell and the wind and a small plot of earth to touch and to farm and to be of. Leave me heedlessly barefoot in the sharp summer grass with the snakes hiding somewhere and I could be happy at seventy. Yet then again it is past. I have willingly made my life elsewhere and what after all could any white person on these Plains really know about loss of history or home?

I happened to be home a week before my Grandpa died of cancer, and Grandma also on her way out from the Alzheimer's that would take her six months later. My Grandpa's pain and humiliation at a ruined body had led him to scream in rage whenever he woke up and learned that the last drift wasn't It. He spoke frankly of his anger at God to the nun who brought his communion every day and this was unthinkable five years before. Grandpa was the Pope. On one afternoon I returned Grandma from a doctor's appointment and led her into his dying room.  He was facing away from her towards the wall; not by choice but because he had lost the strength to turn himself and screamed in pain whenever someone else tried to turn him. Grandma said some half-sensical nicities to him and then left. Leaving Grandpa to scream "Oh God why can't I move just enough to see my wife?  Shirley, Shirley, I love you."  Grandma kept moving oblivious to this. Sixty years of love and nearly a hundred in-laws and descendants had done them nothing to protect them from facing death with no company except their own broken selves.     

I Rap Better Than Beran

"Endowing common sense with papal powers of infallibility isn't commonsensical. Truth defies our immediate intuition sometimes; and while it is to our benefit to find the truth this is not to say that the truth is there "for" us.  It is not. Thus whether truth is simple or complex is a matter of chance.  It has no inclination to be either."-Me

I've watched a small bit of the new series about the OJ Simpson trial.  It's good dope. The fact of the matter is that Mark Fuhrman has probably jailed several innocent black men with glee but OJ of course wasn't one of them. The paths of a racist white cop and a black man who was indeed guilty of 'savagery' happened to cross and there is no force commanding that they shouldn't have.  Crooked timber and all that.  The series amply demonstrates how the American ideal of impartial justice is often hypocritical or willfully ignored but more fundamentally it is just that; an ideal. Coldly detaching an individual incident from one's larger understanding of society and the world is just not how the human brain works. The human brain seeks patterns and narrative and strains to find evidence that its presumptions are correct.  It is thus impossible to quarantine any justice system from prevailing social biases. Or from attempts from victims of that bias to fight back for that matter.  It is also quite bittersweetly funny to have my teenage concept of the nineties as a New Dawn of Hip revealed as no such thing at all; as no more than the backwash of the eighties really.  But that's neither here nor there.

Without looking it up I know that Nebraska had a governor Thorne or was it Thorn at some point in the middle-distant past. For whatever the fuck reason I dreamed last night that he had been a semi-dictator from the thirties until the fifties; a great man who single handedly willed the Sod House republic into the modern age.  I know of that is the least bit true and I have no idea what this dream "meant".  I know that no one is wholly innocent of the fascist impulse or prevailing bigotries and of course I count myself among no one. A strong man who puts our doubts to ease and is always right by circular definition because truth is defined by the man strong enough to win the title of Father.  Sometimes people wake up to the fact that their 5-year-old perception of a world safely controlled by Big People with Big Minds much greater than their own is not actually how the world works' nor has the world ever "worked" in any way at all.  Others never wake up to this because it is scarwy.

I do know that there were Nebraskans living in soddies until well into the 1970's. I know that in Valentine the Norfolk Daily News is still more widely read than the North Platte Telegraph (though North Platte is a full hour closer) because the N/S highway for NP was not paved until the fifties and Norfolk is the nearest large town along Valentine's beaten path to Omaha. I know that the body of Nebraska is to this day that of an octopus; with multiple corridors filtering into the OmaLink and contact between these corridors being much more likely to come through Omaha's mediation than through direct north/south travel. (McCook is still faintly more foreign to me than Kearney is.) I know that the ether of grass between these corridors does effect our character greatly all the same. Makes the mindset of even our comparatively large towns and cities a bit more rural; a little more beefy, sourkrauty, light beerier, cattle tank canoeier. I am few generations removed from farms in that ether and so are many of us. There are a pack of Berans in the Ord/Burwell area; though in most cases the common ancestor is distant enough that we could legally fuck if we wanted to. It may even be as distant as Joseph the first American Beran who dodged the Austro-Hungarian draft and settled abouts Taylor.

My grandfather recalled the eight hour, 150 mile drive to Omaha in his father's Model F or whatever it was.  To this day my relations and I follow Grandpa's secret shortcut from NP to Grandma's Lutheran folk in the Sioux City/Falls area; a Byzantine staircase pattern through narrowly paved state highways and county roads.  It is faster than the interstate as a matter of fact though now that I think of it this largely depends on one's will to take advantage of 1 cop per 50 square miles country & hit the fucking peddle. The route could I suppose work the same for Denver-Minneapolis traffic just as well; and whether I am boring you with all this trivia or giving you something you may find useful I've no idea.  RIP Thorne.

We Came to The Party to Kill The Fucking Party

The first time I heard system of a Down sing "Aya Fit Da Hey Vah!" it was a true political awakening. The first Kottenmouth Kings fan I met was a man named Keith who liked to huff duster in the absence of other drugs. He'd moved down to North Platte from Laramie where he had meth partied with the murderers of Matt Shepard among others. My girlfriend at the time was from Laramie too. She had known Keith from there and admitted to having a crush on him because of his piercing eyes, self assurance and 1999 special Slim Shady cigarette butt dye job. One day Keith got drunk at a festival in Hershey, (the first village westward) and parked some antique tractors on the railroad for amusement's sake. The combined damage was somewhere between half and a full million as I recall and Keith went to jail. My girlfriend and I turned his empty trailer into a squater's love nest for about a month.  I was there alone and high one day watching an NET documentary called "March of the Cranes" which was climaxed by ten minutes of a man in a bird suit doing his own interpretation of this dance in downtown Omaha. There was no sound but the urban ambiance while this man acted the runaway from Parliment-Funkadelic and it was one of the most enthralling experiences of my life. Since then I've made no small effort to find this scene again on Youtube etc. but to no avail. All thrill of new experience is dead to me now. I could have a child and see this thrill secondhand but even then it would still be someone else's. BB King died eight years after I would have guessed but he is dead even so. My ex-girlfriend for her part tried to ditch North Platte several times but failed. She lives on the north side now with a man named Reuben not far from her parents trailer.

I suppose that Hillary's core problem is that she is a deeply conventional person and that just doesn't gel with the Idea of a revolutionary BIg Fucking Deal first woman. She's so conventional that she'd probably need a grander reason for burning a US flag beyond fire, drugs, 'it's the 4th of July let's burn a flag in front of the fuckin Normal's kids FTW'.  The old problem I suppose of social minorities needing to be 'twice as good'.  Hillary is simply not amazing in the way we half-consciously expect groundbreakers to be. She isn't even so much "good" really, more like mall food made tolerable with Sriracha doctoring. In an important symbolic sense she is the mall; and not one of those absurd new "town square" malls one finds in the exurbs but one of those busted old malls one finds in inner-ring suburbs that aren't that sub anymore. Hillary is Crossroads Mall and Applebee's is on the fade. There are to be sure the more straightforward sexists who cannot stand any woman being more powerful and admired than themselves; and I remember the 90's when they rorschached  themselves into seeing a radical Druid priestess of some kind when there was really just a thoroughly standard white middle-class suburbanite grooving to Jackson Browne. This trope has dried out a bit over time but is still very much out there.

Those who rail most fiercely against the evils of cultural relativism or political correctness are the ones who are most in thrall to comforting non-truths.  If a perfectly neutral Vulcan summoned by Dennis DeYoung came down from the stars and scientifically proved that our own culture was superior the real no-nonsense response to this would be 'So fucking what?' now wouldn't it? What terrible danger or hardship are we needlessly subjecting ourselves to by not agreeing to presume ourselves superior?  There is none and you know this. What glorious good are we needlessly denying ourselves by not presuming we're the shit?  There is none and you know this. Oceans of ink expressing very serious concern for the survival of True Western Values. It is very serious bullshit. A lust for effort-free ego juice wrapped in the gloss of patriotic duty.

My community college history professor had his own Geocities site. Red text on black, MIDI Verdi. On his office door he had posted that bullshit story of General Pershing dipping bullets in pigs blood to put down "Muslim Terrorists" in the Philippines. When of course these people had not been moved to fight by any religious motive at all. They were Philippine independence fighters who happened to be Muslim fighting alongside the Catholics who'd been fucking backstabbed by McKinley's decision to "Christianize" them. Neither were the rebels subdued by hellfire fears of dying with pigs blood in their systems, nor as Snopes points out was Ireland kept forever British through regular Friday steak bombings.

I've read that cooking pork smells similar to burning baby and if you've read Judges; well there are certain social conditions that lead to this smell becoming common knowledge. Beyond that I've my own religious heritage of dietary laws and you have yours. 'Cultural relativism is evil' right right. But I say again that I know you don't really think so. The blind spot in our thinking isn't necessarily that their dietary laws aren't superstitious and silly, but in presuming that our religious rules are wise and good Traditional values because I am good because I am good because I am me.

The Norfolk bank murderers are Latino.  Their victims were of course white in keeping with the local demographics. The victims were "us" in this way. Teachers, plantworkers, the mid-level office workers of a prairie market hub transforming crops into finance. It seems clear that the assailants originally intended robbery and no more but they were high something panicked them and they took to slaughter without distinction leaving no one alive enough to hand over the money. There was something in Nebraska's execution guidelines requiring proof of 'special malice or depravity' or some such and so the local DA felt compelled to argue that mass slaughter had been the end itself all along. My dad expressed manful rage at the mere possibility that they wouldn't be executed some three or four days after they were arraigned.  He had little more to say on the matter as of course there was no controversy over this being a bad and evil thing; though I've no doubt my dad strained hard as he could to imagine such a controversy.

I've heard that the killers are illegal immigrants, so that if only not.... fucking Clinton...  I've also heard that they are actually citizens born and raised.  It does not matter. What I do know is that they had all been raised in Nebraska since at least toddlerhood and are in fact 'from here' in all essentials. I know that the killers are fundamentally American and fundamentally Plainsmen; instilled with our own regional iconography, our scenery, our seasons, our own particular ideas of manhood, money,  control, fond of the same drugs beloved by rural Midwesterners of all shades.  I know in other words that the Norfolk killers are in all ways "We" and so do you. You may tut about what violent rap lyrics have to say about "Their"culture.  You may insist that the exotic values of those who live on the other side of your own same snow bubble town makes "Them" uniquely prone to violence. You know it isn't true.  You know that I say nothing outlandish when I say that Evil Is We, that if you insist on "believing" that evil is necessarily or at least inclined to be exotic than you are not 'strong' and you sure as fuck ain't no God-Damned Realist. You are a fool for whom lying to yourself is your existence entire. You are an obnoxious childling who play-acts at slaying dragons while covered head-to-toe in your own sour-milk smelling lunch.

You know that the Syrian refugee is neither less or more a potential source of harm than any newborn John Smith.  You know there is no magic of rational civility in driving on the right side instead of left, miles instead of kilometers, football instead of football, one faith that declares itself universally mandatory instead of the other, beer instead of wine, baseball caps instead of lip plates, Law & Order SVU instead of naked news, cottage cheese instead of curds in the raw. You know that there are billions of complex minds humming at the same time, all of them the central character of their own stories and judging you from this perspective; perhaps unfairly, perhaps negatively with good cause. What you will never know with the certainty you would burn the world to have is that you and all who are comfortingly familiar to you are good.  The sidewalk evangelist asks me if I know for sure where I'm going to go when I die.  The answer of course is no. Maybe Wyuka if there's a plot in view of the Capitol. Or next to my mother instead, who made a truck stop hashers bastard and thus made me free.             

God Made Trump

I would guess that few if any people are ever truly comfortable with the fact of being both mind and rectum.  I suppose that the misogyny & hostility to sex within religion is more reflection of a disconnect that had always been there than inventor of it. I've seen dogs express embarrassment or something that looks like it when they shit.  I've no idea if wolves who've had no contact with human attitudes feel it or not.

The Kama Sutra is as pompous ponderous sexist & pedantic as the Book of Mormon tell truth.  Dan Savage I think catches undue flack from unfairly heightened expectations; a sense that a gay progressive who discusses sex publicly must be the great liberator in all things; superhumanly free of all bigotries and blind spots. The fact is that anyone who wants to give advice for a career is necessarily prone to some level of dogma and essentialism. Nonetheless Ann Landers spent decades subtly encouraging less restrictive social mores from behind her propriety pearls.

At a hotel in Mason City IA I was propositioned by a closeted local man while I was having dinner. I'd been drinking moderately and it was an unusually delicious Casey's pizza, taco supreme. So I told the man to come back in ten minutes if he still wanted to blow me because I was eating really good pizza.  He took offense to this or got cold feet or whateverhow changed his mind.  I most likely would have put the pizza down for effort-free sex with a woman.  Or maybe not.  That's where I fall on the Kinsey.

There are so many who presumed that Marxism must be the One True Cure for colonialism. This invention of a European man who assumed that the Smartest Motherfucker Of All Time must be a European Man instilled with a Eurocentric education; who assumed that the one "scientific" model for all history everywhere was not just the exceptionally predatory 19th century West but Victorian England itself. I would guess that there were so many communists in the 20th century mainly because there were so many communists in the 20th century; the idea of immense global-level power in numbers for people who had been starved of power. Castro for example has been quite open about his old-school tribal motives among others; about seeing the Soviet model as a vehicle for at last attaining a unified Latin America equal in power and prestige to the US.

Che Guevara was an asthmatic medically dependent on adrenaline. What's more he had grown up watching his parents argue to the point of violence over politics and thus intuited that politics are and should be a basic source of vital or even erotic passion in life.  He was never going to be any sort of abiding moderate and that's fine in itself. Neither am I. Still it's been said that he failed in Bolivia because the locals were brainwashed by the priests, the Yankees, the capital-controlled media etc.  The truth is that brain-washing is nowhere near as common or as powerful as people think. The prospect that we have the shit world that newborn babies want need not be cause for paralyzing despair. We are not babies anymore and we can adjust both ourselves and the world outside.  But anyway.

Che was of course an Argentinian.. The Argentinians are as Europeanized as we are and are if anything more guilty of fucking with Bolivian affairs than we Yanks. So one day here comes this culturally Caucasoid Argentine leading a Cuban armed force telling you that he's there to Messiah you from foreign domination. What would you think if you were a self-respecting Bolivian on that scene, knowing yourself to have a fully aware rational mind whatever your education or lack thereof?  'Fuck off doc' is really all that they could have said isn't it?

And as for brainwashing being overrated it isn't necessarily so that ethnic bigotries are manufactured to give cover for economic dominance. The Anglospheres  glorification of wealth and material things, for example, is not inventor of but invention of the old school-tribal beef between England and France. (or perhaps the greater Germanic north vs. Latin south beef as well) Early modern England had a bit more commercial wealth and a bit more complex technology than France, and so it became Common sense that these traits were the True universal measure of superior civilization.  It could have been anything else they may have had a perceived advantage in; and once this conceit was established well there are always and everywhere those who need to "know" themselves to be respectable, and will not tolerate reminders of the fact that social ideas of respectability are random and artificial.

The need to 'know' is the thing. Though myths of ethnic or cultural superiority are not necessarily smokescreens for consumptive greed there can be a deep correlation to be sure. A unifying desire to believe that there is a means to objectively know that one is living exactly as they should be, that one is the best possible version of themself they ever would have been. Not everybody has the poet's gift to self-doubt flamboyantly after all. For most people doubt is a sudden panic of agony that needs to be fucking dumped; anywhere and anyhow one is able to right now. When done in isolation this thing is harmless. When done by thousands in the same way at the same time it may still be harmless.  It may plausibly bring about a very great good.  It may not implausibly lead to five million dead & another fifty million enslaved too.  The building is never apparent as it is happening.  Nor as everyone is born within the building's normal will it ever be.                 

The Right Stuff

You can make a necklace out of your massacre victims freeze-dried cocks and name yourself the Horsegod if you want. There are places you can go and live that way if you have the charisma.  The fear of prolonged peace as womanly and decadent is as common in Millard as Mogadishu. Mogadishu draws in artists and eccentrics from hundreds of miles around same as any other million-plus city. I read of a micro-organic chef who moved back home there from Europe to start an upscale restaurant. It gets bombed for its very being every two months or so by the local factions and they're especially low tolerance for bouge. Rich kids discuss Kanye in the Mogadishu suburbs. Mogadishu DJ's make the people bounce while lasers dance upon burned-out Toyota's with mounted AK's. 

There is some truth to the slippery slope after all.  As I know that there is no devil and no hell the plain fact of it is that once I pass fifty or so I wouldn't have a thing to lose by murdering liquor store clerks for cash and I know that.

It's hardly my business to comment I realize, but Russel Means took an odd pride in following the old Lakota faith more purely than thou.  And I do know enough about it to know it has never really worked on 'purity' terms.  There is no pope of northern plains animism and no minute pretense of one true literal text for it. I know that their religion and ours both have skinhooks. It has been suggested that early humans were far more likely than not to have been eaten by predators before thirty; that the trans-cultural idea of sacrifice as good-in-itself flows from this somehow, that racism may have its origins when contact with different beings was in fact necessarily hostile. At least until we invented good weapons.  A state of being as only either the master or the meat as the plain fact of things.  "War of the Worlds" was written as an anti-colonial fable, and quite obviously so if you look at it.  Now we tell alien stories for assurance of how righteously fierce we'd be against unambiguously evil Strangers.

I once saw an interview with a man who took to murdering his wife and robbing banks so he'd have cash for nightly karaoke and prostitutes in a small Florida panhandle town. That was the dream he lived closet-normal through youth and middle age to keep hidden.  No passport, no ocelot no treasure hunt just the golden hits of Neil Diamond.  RIP Wife.

Russel Means also stated that claims of Aztec human sacrifice were a European lie meant to slander his indigenous.  There are many such but not this one. The Aztecs did indeed sacrifice the motherfuck out of lots of fucking people all the fucking time.  It was like an overripe satire of religion the way the way they carried on wasting motherfuckers just because it was Friday.  They were in fact "guilty".  They totally did do all that, is all that I'm saying.  RIP Motherfuckers.

And why knee-jerkingly defend them as part of "us" anyhow?  The Aztec Empire was exactly that; an urbanized, high-technology nation-state that preyed upon the actually indigenous as we do.  King David was a sex trafficking usurper warlord if he even ever was. Joseph sold his coat to be a totalitarian lackey.  The modern Israeli must surely know that they have more in common with the Muslims 'cross the wall than with vague patriarchs from a trillion yesterdays ago.  A dead Constitution. The intelligent embrace of bullshit for the idea of a transcendent We. The pitiful delusion of We. Every person must be our own spouse family nation and world but not of course are own eternity.  Of course they'll be none of that through any means at all.

Stop building statues of anyone for any reason. (I'm not a very big fan of headstones either tell truth.)  Stop naming anything for any person who physically was. Stop putting anything at all on money save the denoting digit itself. Stop treating the prospect of apocalypse coinciding with your own lifetime as if you are special for realizing the obvious.

I do not want the we that has been invented for my behalf but that doesn't matter.  I can join the Trotskyites or the tree spikers or the guerrilla farmers but I cannot unjoin The Illuminati.  I rarely bother to argue politics with my dad.  On one occasion when I did it was about restoring voting-rights to ex-cons; and it soon became clear that dad did not and would not examine this thing on its own terms.  That he instead chose to view it through a lens of crime being bad, therefore any arbitary hardship imposed on criminals being good, and support for this arbitrary pain as a character test of being really truly and purely against crime at all.

It occurs to me now that those who view being Tough On Crime in this abstract identity affirming manner have never really been concerned with the practical problem of minimizing crime. They needfully presume a steady and inexorable flow of crime; an eternal stream of Thugs to measure their own courage and righteousness against. It also occurs that those who keep this attitude do not have a democratic understanding of social rules; they do not see the rules as things that we are all to some degree both subject to and makers of. Those who punish with zeal do not see themselves as imposing rules upon themselves but as imposing rules on Other People that they see themselves as personally ruling. That's where the man at the bar who supports Guantanamo torture and rails against the tyranny of motorcycle helmets is coming from.  And it goes without saying that when my dad envisions himself as bringing down the fury on this murderer or that rapist he does not envision this murrapist as an aging blue-collar white man from the Pacific Northwest. And perhaps he is not completely wrongheaded in this envisioning after all.  The Karaoke man is a white male but he's from Ohio or abouts if I remember right.   

Apocalypse Spring

My great dream is to play Pontius Pilate in a Native American/Ghost Dance themed take on "Jesus Christ Superstar."  I would rock the motherfuck out of that blue-eyed  devil shit and I fucking ay know it.. That's what I can do for the movement.  At Occupy Lincoln I  was the only one who could cook at all.   There was a Lexington Latino fresh out of prison who labeled me "Custer".  My first experience with K2 was with a man newly paroled for drunk-driving a stolen semi along the railroad abouts the Havelock yards.  He handled me "sunshine."

I am a white man; liberated, educated, so totally not like my bellowing racist family men at all.  It occurs to me only now that I say or think "I" far more often than I do "we" but this is coincidence surely.

The little junction town of Nebraska City was so named with the intent of being exactly that; the future state's socioeconomic window to The East. Such was also the goal of Bellevue, Blair and even the now -prettified tourist trap pseudo-village of Brownville. If you follow the long line of WASP male territorial governors in   the north hall of the Capitol you shall happen upon an Oberyn Martell looking fellow named Thomas Cuming. Cuming had personal links to Omaha business interests on the one hand and also to generals congressmen surveyors etc on the other. Bribes went to the right places so that the UP railroad began at 10th and Dodge. And now Omaha is Omaha while Nebraska City is a Wendy's on the way to Kansas City.  Minneapolis folk made bribes to the right people too; making sure that all rails in both Dakotas had to lead to Minneapolis.  And so Omaha is only Omaha and not Minneapolis. 

As I recall is was around this age, the postwar 19th century, that those of the New Guard began to use "FUCK" in a way that meant "I have contempt for ______" and not a literal command to have sex with all members of an ethnic group, all constables the world over, the corporate entity of Whole Foods, the conceptual ideas of warfare, capitalism, proposed landfills, the corpses of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ayn Rand, Hubert Humphrey, Carrie Nation, Charles Dickens, Frederick Engels, Andrea Dworkin, the Muslims, The Muppets, those scurvy fucks across the tracks, Every Last Motherfucking Suit along Lake Shore Drive.

I ask for nothing except a lover who takes obsessive pains to hide both our relationship and my own physical existence. Who insists that Bright Eyes 'First Day of my Life' is about joining ISIS, who frees me from the world with thirty years of apartment jail except no, not at all.

The truth is that I'm a highly internalized fellow but also a vital one with a deep need for stimulus.  The truth is that I have never taken as much joy in sex as from the year's first smells of thawing earth and pollinating yard. The truth is that I have been intimate with Nebraska City. I nighted in my van there after Mother wired me several hundred dollars to smuggle in Missouri fireworks for The Fourth. It was the death summer of 2012 with the Wyoming look of eternally blasted plains reaching all the way to the Mo River. when it was still 90F at 2AM I could hear my land screaming with thirst so I gave her some Franzia.