Balls to you

I worked one night in a golfball factory, in northern Ohio. In Elyria. It was snowing. I parked in the slushy early evening gloom, walked up the concrete sidewalk leaving the only footprints in the new snow, entered, produced referral paperwork from the Job Center, and was introduced to some circle of purgatory Dante left out. My job was to take these little core things from one treatment to the next: first, they had to be sand-blasted. Bucketloads of the buggers went into some rotating hopper thing, after which I was to verify a certain volume of sand, and then push the green button and set the timer for 12 minutes. Not 15. Not 10. Twelve. Oh, by the way, there's a dustmask...if you really want to bother. Problem being, it hung on the wall inside the door, and one might possibly inhale more from putting it on than not. I pushed the button, and was immediately met with a powdery, lung-rending blast owing to leaks in the overall containment capabilities of this decades old device. I noticed that my footsteps, which were registered on the floor in the dust, had soon disappeared in a new caking of white soot by the time I left the 'containment' (ha!) room. Next, these blasted balls had to be taken to the acid wash. Similar, except this time the hydrochloric fumes almost knocked me out, and as I was gagging outside the door, some of the other workers found this amusing, and told me where the water fountain was, if I wanted to wash my eyes out. A pitiful stream came from the spout, sputum and some sort of fungal growth in its basin.
My father golfs, and I cursed him, and Arnold Palmer, and everyone with too much leisure time and nothing better to do than whack off a Titleist. A combination of fine powder and hydrochloric fumes...I'm thinking lawsuit. My girlfriend back in some comfy dorm-room giggling with her friends over the sexual innuendoes in a Nabokov book. Why did I drop out of school? Oh, that's right. Because I hated it. But this is even worse than having to sit there while some academe tries to impart his alleged wisdom, meanwhile said wanker ogling the freshly scrubbed nubile in the front row, she gnawing her pencil. Make it all go away. And finally, on this little trip through a mundane amusement ride of demeaning production, we have the rubberband girls. OK, there were these skeletal finger things that looked like a spider on its back, which rotated the cores in a random (?) vibratory fashion, while the RBGs (that's rubberband girls, again) assisted the process, sitting there at their stools and station, by helping the core to reach spherical fruition by feeding the rubberband thread and coaxing the core to reach its mark. God knows what volumetric determiner meant a full ball. They had ragged and bloody bandages on their fingers from where the machine had bitten them. Bloody ball strokers, mummy finger wage slaves. I needed sleep, and a pharmaceutical. As for the women and their wounds, perhaps they spaced out from the low rumble of the machines, or fell asleep and were awoken with a mechanical spider's bite, on the Nightshift from hell that belonged in the 3rd world. Leaving at dawn, I noticed no footsteps on the sidewalk. Just like inside the sand-blaster room. I forget if I ever picked up my check.

Hammerball

Mugsy a.k.a. the Groover and I were best friends. Before we had cars, we would smoke some pot, go down to Howard’s which was more or less a K-Mart and play pinball (Gorgar - will EAT you!), eat some Bar-B-Cue pork at Jerry’s (was it?) buy a superball for a quarter, and go bouncing it back to my house. If we did not lose the ball, we might end up in the basement where we invented hammerball®, played as such: The pitcher would deliver the ball, with one bounce to the batter. The batter would take the hammer, holding it sideways-ish to maximize hitting area and deliver the swing, hopefully hitting the pitcher in the gonads with the ball. Once, when the ball was lost (common occurrence), I located a golf ball and decided to use it instead…I pitched it to Groover and he hit it perfectly – at my head, with some serious velocity, some Arnold Palmer shit. Never substitute a golf ball for a superball when playing hammerball, words to live by.
Later, we would use hockey sticks for air guitars listening perhaps to Guns on the Roof...
Groover and I were walking through the snow one day stoned on the dried-out “Columbian” we thought was the good stuff, often more seeds and stems than anything, seeds that would explode or drop off hot and leave suspicious holes in upholstery or clothing…so it was a snow day, when they cancel school because no snow plows exist and who needs them when 3-4 inches is a blizzard, but the snow had thawed a little and refrozen, so the top was a layer of ice and when you walked it would support you, until you put your full weight on it, then you would go through. A little hard to describe, but it was like walking on another planet. Well, then one of us looks down and sees a little patch of black fur, which we investigated and discovered was a frozen little puppy. Being pubescent boys, and little stoners, we laughed until we peed our pants, holding it by its tail and making it walk. It’s…it’s…a Pup-sickle!! It ended up in the Kreidler’s mailbox, I believe. There is karma, for this episode and for the frogs and for the gerbils and for the crayfish as well. The crayfish I poked with an unlit firecracker, which it grabbed, which I lit, and they called him Lefty after that.

Coupe Sudan

Suicide Pack, 52 in all. Plus Jokers of course

17, 1982

Friends, this shirt lasted with me til I hung it up on a gallery wall in SF '01(?). {dadafest Somarts}. They were all using the hangar-type art gallery as an excuse to have public sex and did so in weird little performance whatever, whatevers. I hate performance art, and I'd need triple condoms with these jankbottoms. And, I'd just gotten married, but the 'fuck machine' was pretty um, mesmerizing, yeah, and green: it was pedal-powered. So the shirt, some bastard stole it - tellin' you it was bleached by wash, shrunken, shoulder held up w/ safety pin (!) So whatcha see is 1982. I'd wiped better cum than you twaddlefucks even know. Love you, Susie Q (the q as in question, always).

Ha ha, ha.

We had a boat, a green little tri-hull thingy with a 80-horse outboard (not lime like the Pinto, but a little kelly) we put in a muddy little pond called Lake Cherokee, made by the TVA, and part of the Holston, when they flooded farms and burial grounds and what not.

Steel Pole Excellence

Zapruder reenactment from Gordie Howe on Vimeo.

Interpret as you may

A home movie shot in the mid-seventies.

Traditional Wedding

When I start rollin, I be rollin West.
Won't take no Greyhound, be rollin in the best
Goddamned 'merican car I can find

In ever Dairy Queen, y'all in ever podunk town
I find some honey to show me around
(Jus' the quiet spots, darlin' if you don't mind)

Don't like to brag, y'all an' I don't like to boast
But I'm gonna spread my seed honey from coast-to-coast
Be a hunnert little rug rats runnin' round with my last name

Barefoot and pregnant now she's my pride
You turn 16 honey I'll take you for my bride
Our love is true, baby, got no reason to be ashamed.

Bruce Miller, 1987

The Fort

Kenny and his friend George (aka Chuck, not the other George) built a fort in the back yard with borrowed materials and decorated it with appropriated street signs and such. It was two-stories, fully carpeted with a tar-paper roof, total height maybe eight feet, having a rear annex with an angled roof in the back, with a bar. Just like dad. The upstairs was plastered with Hustler, Oui and Penthouse. Occasionally we little kids would spend the night below while Kenny and his buds would stay up top, with a hinged door closed between us. Later I inherited the fort when Kenny got a car and had better ways to be a menace.

Spiders were a serious problem as was the potential for fire, for arachnophobia was somewhat alleviated with a lit candle. “D” cell flashlights would last for only so long, usually dimming to a sickly yellow after a while of looking at smut. Smoke from waxy smoldering carpet would sometimes wake us in our sleeping bags, which along with the smell of Black Flag permeated our sinuses. The candle-under-the-bug-spray-nozzle flamethrower was in full force. We ate raw cookie dough purchased at the 24 hour Kroger across town and, good reader, I am getting nauseous describing these sensory experiences. The bug spray/toxic smoke/refined sugar moments we all savor. We would spend the night and go off on nocturnal exploits which sometimes made the paper, this not difficult in a town where tobacco prices make the front page.

The Smell of a Dead Mouse

I used to have a knack for smelling them out at my Mom's house. Move a few boxes in the linen closet and voila c'est ici, so I can tell you there's something rotten in Denmark. But how do you say to Society that the spinach or fennel stuck in its teeth makes you sick when it smiles, that it reeks?

You can offend it if you like (see below), but you cannot shock it. Its resilience and absorption surpass even the finest paper towels. The mediocre poet Baudelaire compared Society to a man bowing with flourish to an ass. Woe to he who tries to change it. Woe to you and me. And whoah! to you and the ass you rode in on, Jackie O.

You can do whatever you want. You can HAVE that decaf double cap with low-fat as a matter of fact. You can give yourself a Hitler moustache get high off the fumes and go goose-stepping around Safeway. But then some overzealous Zionist will throw blood on your lederhosen, which costs a fortune at the dry cleaners.

You can have sex with a dog, but remember the age of consent factors 10 and not 7, except in Alabama. You can say fuck. Lenny died for that right. Who's a sick comic? Who's sick? We're sick. And we keep killing the medicine men. Not the MDs of Marin, Over Insured Land Rover land. No, the guys with the cure we keep tacking up or shutting down. Why? Because your mind is real estate. Think of your mind as Cuba. A little, annoying fly-infested dungheap that just bothers the PTB.

Dig: Castro is your ego, and I guess that makes Kennedy your id. With your finger on the button, you go "Ten, nine, eight..." and the palms are sweaty, all ready for Armageddon "five, four, three..." Armistice! Fuck Armistice. Abort. Let's just leave it where you are under a sweaty palm tree, like Castro, smoking a cigar, prefer bicycles to cars. Havana good time. Wish you were here.

Invest in Nordak

Long term investors know that the future is in waste. If you want a sound investment for the twenteens, put your money in a landfill. Reasoning: the more we produce, the more garbage we will have to get rid of, and consumption is here to stay. Recycling offers a good sideline interest too, with the promise of many returns. No shortage of homeless people to redeem their self-respect being productive either. Trickle down does work. A-lu-min-i-mum wage.

The real money, however, is in Specialized Disposal. Sounds cool, huh? That's when you take something somebody desperately wants removed, and put it somewhere else. It's a little tricky at first, because you have to figure in the EPA's role in the demand curve. Icky chemicals, scary toxic goo, and even weird radio-active stuff is no problem for the dedicated Specialized Disposal Engineer. Nordak, a division of Specialized Disposal Services, owns a goodly portion of several barely inhabited and Southern states, where these nasties can be taken so no one ever has to experience those unsightly mutations that can occur. NAFTA and GATT have opened many doors to the world of garbage as well. More later.

The problem with waste is ignorance, and fear. Society, in its potty training, began to stigmatize its excrement, and never learned that these by-products may not smell particularly pleasant, but are nonetheless natural and deserve a certain amount of consideration. We must not turn our backs on waste, and like a dog, leave it for someone else to step in, but must, cat-like, bury it out of decency and sensitivity. Nordak was there when the Great Dane of Three Mile Island took its mighty dump. Parts per million down to almost zero!

The future is in waste. This is undeniable. Big things lie ahead for those with the forebearance to shun society's infantile disgust, to brave the tides of public opinion. For example, shining in the night sky, there lies our next challenge. Yes, the moon. As a thing of beauty and inspiration, it is without parallel. As real estate, it's useless. No air, no water, nothing. If we could but find a way to transport our waste there, what a magnificent benefit to mankind would result. This world would become a veritable Eden, and when we pondered the lovely orb circling o'erhead, we would, as did our ancestors, pay homage to its reflected light.

Yes, I am a dreamer. But society without its dreams would retreat into barbarism, like those hordes who invaded Rome, with its own aqueducts and marvellous sewers. (And what rich history must those canali have carried!).

Waste. Think about it.