MICHAEL DENNIS MOONEY -- new writings

The "Fracking" Of Dimock, Pa. In The Gas-Drilling Boom

2011-02-08T17:23:00.000-08:00

an essay by Michael Dennis Mooney

In recent times the rural town of Dimock, Pa. has been “fracked” by the environmental legacy of the George W. Bush administration. (Vice-President Richard Cheney was its czar of “fracking.”)

There are sixty newly-drilled shale gas wells in Dimock. Water from the town’s water wells is no longer potable, nor usable for anything. Water has turned brown, gaseous, and corrosive. Dimock is the “Love Canal” of the Bush-Cheney era. Values of homes and farms have collapsed.

This is just one town In Northeast Pennsylvania. In Texas, in Oklahoma, in New Mexico, in Colorado, in Wyoming, and in Louisiana water contamination has cropped up in drilling operations, many a fearsome public health atrocity appearing in local papers. The boom in gas exploration leasing of rural acreage has been going on in more than thirty states during the past five years, many of them far less vigilant than Pennsylvania.

That state’s Department of Environmental Protection has had to rescue the now water-deprived Dimock, at great cost, by ordering water brought in. DEP probably had never heard of the farming hamlet before its aquifer was fracked. Methane and drilling mud leaked through faulty cement well-casings.

Fracking? you inquire. Well, “a grotesque degradation” would be a good definition for this new item in our vocab.

“Environmental assault“ would be a good definition. “Rape of the land and the rural culture” pretty much says it. And Pennsylvania has had a long history of degradation, via coal mines, oil wells, iron-smelting, strip mining, and coalbed methane drilling. Now high-volume shale gas drilling is re-traumatizing the state. Poor Pennsylvania is like a streetwalker who has been assaulted yet again.

Fracking is the new mode of drilling for gas. It is literally the fracturing of the earth, at a depth of about one mile below the surface, to break open shale beds that hold trapped gas. It is a man-made seismic event. The ground trembles at this new technology of the peak oil era-- this is not a metaphor.

Fracking was spearheaded by Richard Cheney’s old outfit, Halliburton, a huge international drilling services engineering corporation. When the George W. Bush administration came to Washington, one of the Vice-President’s missions was to make way for gas drilling.

He had a vision. He sought to get the Environmental Protection Agency out of the drillers’ way, to promote a new era of “energy independence” via drilling for shale gas. He worked like the devil, literally, to get a new Energy Policy Act of 2005 passed by Congress. It exempted gas drillers from EPA clean water regulations. The drilling boom was launched. Bush and Cheney, Frick and Frack. Two ol’ drillers. Their hands on the levers of the bulldozer of power. Things like this were bound to happen.

If only Susquehanna County, Pa. had had a Sunni-style insurgency with which to repel the invasion. Frick and Frack had wanted to frack Iraq. You know they wanted to! But they had too much unexpected resistance on their hands. Not able to get away with it! Denied! An epic loss of opportunity! It would have been such fun to partner with the Iraqis in the energy independence business! (The Iraqi Sunnis didn’t think so. They’d wreck their wells and set them ablaze.)

Hydraulic fracturing is the pumping of many millions of gallons of slick drilling mud-- a slimy toxic slurry of sand, chemicals, diesel fuel, and water-- under high pressure into a well to break up the shale. This is called stimulating the well. When the well returns the gas, which is mostly methane, to the wellhead, about half of the millions of gallons of slurry returns to the surface, where it spills out into a pit.

The mess contains millions of gallons of water that will never be usable again. It contains sand, used to thicken the slurry and prop open fractures in the shale beds. It contains toxins like methane. It contains carcinogens, notably benzene, from the diesel fuel used to make the slurry more slick and penetrative. And the mud contains radium and radon from the earth. Yes, dredged-up radioactive substances!

(And these are only a few of the dozens of chemicals, many quite toxic, that are in the patented superslick “fracking fluid” which arrives on truckbeds, in containers labelled Halliburton, used by the Dimock drillers, Cabot Oil and Gas, based in Houston.)

This evil slime, the blow-back, is not the typical stuff you’d get at a water treatment plant. This is one highly poisonous fracking mess! What do you do with it?!

(And the other half of the mess remains down in the gas well! Leaking through fractures into the surrounding earth! Which is no small consideration.)

There is, also, significant air pollution at the drill-sites, methane fumes and hydrocarbon fumes that are burned off and vented into the air, truly the equivalent of a big city’s car exhaust emissions in tiny Dimock.

What do you do with it? When it returns to the wellhead, this Slime That Ate Dimock just sits in a holding pit and evaporates into the air. The workers near the pit are in full hazmat gear. It just sits. It is a barely contained spill, a disaster waiting to happen. Brought to you by Halliburton. Who brought you the BP disaster in the Gulf.

(Halliburton was supposed to have adequately inspected their cementing of the Deep Water Horizon well that collapsed and exploded, tarring the beaches of four states, and Halliburton was later found at fault by government investigators.)

And what else can you do with the chemical slime? You can put it back down the well when you’ve emptied it of gas! You can call this “the sequestering of waste.”

How does a nightmare like this, the tainting of the aquifer in Dimock, develop?

In Dimock, the people had tried to soldier on and use their well water for showers, yet methane fumes were so bad in the showers they thought they’d pass out. Kids in homes around town took showers at school only. Dimock residents tried to use well water for laundry, and the corrosive fumey water ruined clothing with splotchy stains and it ruined dishes, cookware, silverware-- and dishwashers. People had to have bottled water for cooking and drinking, of course. DEP ordered water be delivered to Dimock in large tanks, “water buffaloes.” A town turned into a third world disaster site. The people of the town are suing the drillers, and the state is fining them, but they’ve made a fortune.

How this happened? First of all, EPA’s eyes were taken off the ball. From 2005 until 2010, while the drilling boomed, the Freaks of Frack were kept exempt from clean water regulations by the new Energy Policy Act. The EPA was a Casey At The Bat wearing a blinfdold of Richard Cheney’s devising.

Now EPA is onto the problem. They began a comprehensive study of high-volume fracturing in 2010, and will issue a full report next year. They also acted in 2010, issuing immediate prohibitions against the use of the diesel fuel in the frack fluid. State and local officials are starting to catch up. But for the last five years they’ve been behind the curve. Indeed, they were thrown a curve by the drillers’ public relations offensive.

They were told, at public info meetings, hydraulic fracturing was an innovative technology. “Natural“ gas was an alternative fuel. There was plenty of it in shale deposits, hundreds of trillions of cubic feet. Enough to meet U.S. energy needs for hundreds of years. Drillers got a lot of “buy-in.” People wanted to believe America could be like a Saudi fiefdom, rich in an alternative petrol. Jobs would be created. American independence would be fostered. Prosperity. A new era. Progress. A boom.

(Well, yes, a boom in profits for drillers. The drillers took tens of millions of dollars in gas from the ground under Dimock. Linda Fiorentino, whose artesian well blew sky high in 2010, due to a build-up of trapped methane, had gotten about six hundred dollars for leasing her land. It is now worthless.)

Drillers, in their charm offensive, had portrayed mining for shale gas as a natural process. It’s mostly just “sand and water” which would be pumped into the gas wells, “more than ninety percent water,” they’d say. (It was eventually learned diesel fuel and benzene had been found in the blow-back all along. It was always part of the process.)

State and local officials, eager for the dream of cheap alternative energy, eager for new local jobs and tax revenues, would echo this poetic mythology. They’d flat-out vouch for the safety of the drilling process. Officials for Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Oil And Gas Managment said there had never been evidence of fracking causing water contamination. (Methane leaking into the Dimock aquifer belies these assurances, which were not true to begin with.)

The wellheads would be in out of the way rural locations, like fire hydrants in small isolated clearings. You wouldn’t know they were there. (Tell that lie now in Dimock, and you’ll get a bitter Ha! The drillers' big trucks, the derricks, the constant drone of huge compressors, the hazmat suits, the muddy several-acre dill sites, the pits of slime, the fumes, fairly dominate the landscape.)

The same lies were told in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Louisiana, places where there is no longer so much belief in mytho-poetic legend. The gas boom has now arrived in the East, in traditional mining states like West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

And it’s coming to New York. Chesapeake Energy, a big corporate player, is leasing lands throughout Appalachia. Chesapeake is leasing the gas rights to huge tracts of land in the Catskill Region, also in the Delaware River basin along Eastern Pennsylvania. The Catskill tracts are close to the aquifer that supplies fresh drinking water to millions downstate in the New York City region. Similarly, the Delaware River Basin supplies fresh water to the Philadelphia region.

Environmental groups such as the National Resources Defense Council want to keep drillers out of these crucial, sensitive areas. They look to the fracking of Dimock as a sentinel event that informs their cause, and they look to the award-winning documentary film, Gasland, as their mainfesto. The film by Josh Fox, a Pennsylvanian, shows the real life experience of fracked rural communities.

Here in New York State, where I live, the pitfalls are many, despite the warnings of Pennsylvania’s experience. A recent Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner, who resigned last year, gave the publc the same blanket assurances that there is no chance of water contamination from the drilling process. The state has often appeared eager, from the governor’s office on down, to reap tax revenues from allowing some drilling, as officials from other states had been in earlier drilling booms.

New York City’s Department of Environmental Conservation has called for a ban on drilling in the Catskills area. The state legislature and the governor have established a moratorium on drilling for several months. The state comptroller has joined a suit to compel Halliburton to disclose the exact chemical composition of its fracking fluid.

Halliburton has thus far failed to disclose the precise makeup of its formula, claiming it’s a trade secret, but it has been known to contain benzene from diesel fuel, and more than 50 other chemicals that help make it slick.

It isn’t only the drilling fluid that is slick.

The industry’s techniques for gaining “buy-in” from the public is rather oily. They seek to make the public nominal partners in their profiteering. They ask people to lease their lands for money, and for a defined period of time. They promise royalties to lease owners from gas finds. They seek to make everyone a stakeholder.

They tend to argue that if they drill on neighboring land they can take gas out from under your land too, whether you sign a lease or not-- so all the neighbors are in the same boat and might as well sign and get something. They create momentum for getting everyone into the deal. They portray holdout factions as anti-progress.

They villify environmental concerns. It’s not toxins that hurt people, it’s environmentalists that hurt profits. They hurt progress, they hurt the business climate, and for the sake of some endangered ruffed grouse that lives over the shale beds! Environmental concerns are depicted as effete, tree-hugging.

Drillers pay out thousands per acre-- and take out of the ground tens of millions in gas for the marketplace and for stockholders.

What the landowners do not “get” is how they could band together-- since they’re all in the same boat-- and they could buy up the leases and refuse to let them go to the drillers.

One of the more dispiriting aspects of the story nationally, and on state and local levels, is that the drilling industry is way bigger than the regulatory apparatus. There are far fewer inspectors than there are drill sites. The industry is expected to be largely self-policing and to report its own foul-ups. Only the biggest disasters, like Dimock’s tainted aquifer, get really scrutinized and shut down by regulators. Three wells in Dimock were shut down.

Information Resources On The Internet:

The amount of pollution that goes unregulated and unchecked is the focus of a special investigative project that can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/water

The best long-form reporting I’ve seen is Christopher Bateman’s article in last June’s Vanity Fair, “A Colossal Fracking Mess:”

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/06/fracking-in-pennsylvania-201006

The broadcast newsmagazine, NOW, on PBS, has a good introduction, on web-available video, to the film Gasland:

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/613/index.html

Propublica.Org does a lot of good up to the minute reporting:

http://www.propublica.org/article/frack-fluid-spill-in-dimock-contaminates-stream-killing-fish-921

HAIRY GOAT CHEESE GARAGE

2010-11-24T18:16:00.000-08:00

a "hairy dairy" story of "dumb young kids," and children too
by Michael Dennis Mooney

My dad is so weird! He's always popping in at the house, not to come home, but just to stop by when he's on his way somewhere, talking really fast. I can tell he's under pressure, trying to get a lot of things done, errands, that sort of thing. And do I want to go with him?

What? No! I'm in the middle of something!

I'm about to nail down the zillionth quadrillionth level of the Zoo Tycoon game. Or I'm making fifty drawings of every known kind of dragon-- scaly, winged, razor-clawed, red, flame-throwing, poop-dropping (wait, I didn't say that!)-- and the drawings are scattered all over.

And my dad wants to know if I want to go with him to get a haircut?

Uh, no! I don't think so!

So my dad came home this one time, and he said to my mom, "I'm just stopping in. I'm going over to Harry Gochee's Garage. Does Zachy want to go?" I was about seven years old at the time.

"Mmmm? Don't know." Mom was sipping her coffee, clearing the cobwebs, as she says.

Dad was talking busily about car inspection, and Mom was not listening. Dad was pouring himself a coffee, scanning the weather on TV-- flurries were about to fall on our daffodil shoots-- and loosening his jacket on a chilly Saturday in March. He was in a hurry.

I piped up. "No, Dad, I don't want to go. I'm planning to put my new Bionicles together." (Bionicles, you inquire? Think of Legos with moving parts that represent eerie alien life forms when assembled.)

"Mom, did Dad just say he's going to Hairy Goat Cheese Garage?" Mom was starting to balance her checkbook, frowning, not really listening.

"Yep. He did."

Dad was not listening either.

Heck, I myself never really listen. The whole family might as well be deaf! My dad has said that many times.

"Harry might call," Dad said. "I'll be on my cell phone."

"Huh? Okay," Mom said absently.

Dad turned to me. "Zachy, sure you don't want to go? We could go for pancakes at Four Corners Lunch? How about blueberry pancakes?"

"No, Dad. I want to stay here and play. I'll make Hot Pockets." I was always a real microwave chef. Press a couple of panels, watch the numbers tick down, and you're eating.

##

I snuggled my chair up next to my mom's, where she sat contemplating checks (and balances) and clearing cobwebs in her big warm robe while sipping "a bit of the fresh brewed."

Dad headed out the door, my dog Chocky shadowing too closely and sniffing at his sleeves and pockets. Chocky is a brown lab and "a pain in the posterior," my dad says. Dad eased out of the muddy, puddled dip at the end of our dirt drive and onto the road in his car, a dark green Jetta.

Then I began assembling a new Bionicle figure and I started to think. What a weird name that place has, Hairy Goat Cheese Garage!

Dad must have been kidding. I didn't picture it as a place here in town, like the Mobil station, all shiny and tidy, with rows of those cheesy crackers I love and a glass cases full of Pepsi in plastic bottles.

No, I pictured a very untidy place in the country-- with goats!

I daydreamed and daydreamed. Hairy Goat Cheese Garage.... was a place out in the middle of farm country, far from town and hard to find, along a winding and bumpy narrow road. It was a converted barn with a big old packed-dirt parking lot, a Coke machine out front with a metal bottle opener screwed to it. And goats.

There were goats, hay in their mouths and hay hanging from their scruffy beards, in the open bays of the garage. Goats wandering in and out as the mechanics there changed tires and jacked-up cars for lube and oil jobs.

In the office, next to an old manual cash register, there was a low refrigeration case with cellophaned packages of goat cheese for sale, cheap. You could get a nice big package for two dollars and a half.

The package label said, "HAIRY GOAT CHEESE-- from furry undisgruntled goats." Hairy Goat Cheese Garage was, as my dad would say, very "low tech."

There was a picture of a smiling goat critter on each package with a piece of straw hanging out of his mouth, wild beast horns curving back above his curly unruly hair, one sharp-pointed cloven hoof held to the side of his face.

He looked as if he were thinking. Whatever he was thinking, it was making him giddy, probably about head-butting someone. Or eating their Red Sox hat.

I was having a fine waking dream of a goat running away with the tire-change crowbar-- and then I was entertaining such questions and such wonders as...

Is Hairy Goat Cheese a cheese which is hairy? Would you, say, peel off the fur part, like a rind, then eat the cheese? Or is it dairy produce from hairy critters? I found the first of these, "cheese which is hairy," way more entertaining.

Then the phone rang. It woke me from my dreaming. Mom was in the laundry room, amid a static-y tidal wave of dried, unfolded clothes piled head high. I picked up the phone.

Hey, maybe it was Jeff. I'll tell Jeff about "hairy dairy."

The person on the phone asked for my dad and he said he was from Hairy Goat Cheese Garage-- just like my dad had said!

"This is Harry Gochee's Garage," said the voice on the phone, an oddly pitched, quavering, piping, crackle-y voice. Immediately I pictured in my imagination a gentle, distinguished older man talking. He sounded to me like someone who spent his time with frisky, gruntly goats. He sounded happy and relaxed.

The Goat Cheese Garage man wanted my dad to know his car was ready. The piping, crackle-y voice said, "Only needed a half a quart of oil." He sounded pleased. "Brakes, belts, lights, tires, everything is fine." He sounded happy the car did not need fixing.

Dad was going to owe him about $1.83 for the half a quart. (Hey! Maybe my dad would get a free cheese.)

I told the man my dad was on his cell phone.

"Oh, jeez, I've got to call the other number. See ya, young lad," said the Hairy Goat Cheese man.

I hung up the phone. Then I drifted into a daydream of goats.

Goats trying to climb trees. Not able to get their back legs off the ground. Then head-butting the trees.

Goats playing football with no helmets. Wearing numeraled wool sweaters like in the old days.

Goats like old professors, wearing goatees. Looking rather lost in deep thoughts and abstracted ruminations. Had they forgotten much of what they used to know?

Goats in wool coats, like bankers too rich to worry.

Goats in tap shoes going clatter-clatter in the parking lot.

Goats rolling tires, nudging them forward with their mischievous laughing snouts at Hairy Goat Cheese Garage.

Goats like rock stars too crazy busy and frenetic to fret about being ugly.

Young white chin-whiskered "kids" splatting in oil-puddles. Getting their wool really oily and dingy. Young goats the color of dirt. But really happy to be dirty.

Goats simply not caring if they will ever have a bath. Until maybe someday they get to roll in snow drifts. Or roll in pans of white paint! Or jump in a creek.

I went on and on.

Goats in bathing suits. Goats on a crazy tire-swing above that creek.

No! Goats skinny dipping in their bleached woolen underwear on a flurrying late-March day.

When my dad came home I said, "I want to go to Hairy Goat Cheese Garage."

"Next time," Dad said.

"Did you get any goat cheese?"

"That's funny," he laughed.

So the next time we went for a haircut my dad pointed-out the "Gochee's Gargare" sign, right there on the main street in town, a couple doors down from the haircut place. In fact, it was right next to the Mobil.

We went in, and I met Harry. He was a good-natured older gent. There were no goats playing silly tire-rolling games, there was no refrigeration case, and no cheese. It turns out Harry sells cars. "Auto sales and auto maintenance." That's how his sign reads.

"Harry's very old school." My dad approved.

"Old School? Dad, did Harry go to the old middle school when it used to be the high school?"

"You know, he probably did, in the 1940's. But 'old school' means schooled in the old ways, how things used to be done, according to honored customs."

One thing I noticed about Harry, he had a piping, bleating voice, and curly, wooly, unruly hair. But I didn't say anything about it.

And this is nearly the very long-haired hairy end of my shaggy goat tale.

##

But wait! One more part to the story.

Later in the Spring we went to the Four Corners on a Sunday. It was Mother's Day, and my dad was joking with the waitress. He ought to be serving her coffee, he said. She joked right back, took her apron off, plopped her pad and pencil down, and sat with us. And we all waited laughing til the other waitress came around.

Eventually, when they were done horsing around, Mom got the Mediterranean Momelet. Mom said the Mediterranean was "eggs, tomatoes, olives and feta." I said the Mediterraneans are awful strange. I got the pancakes, plain, with no butter, just maple syrup, and milk to drink.

Dad pointed to the "Chevre And Scallion Omelet" listed on the menu. "I'll have the goat and onion," he said. He is so weird!

So I said, "Make sure the goat's well done." I ate Dad's toast with jam, and he ate half of one of my pancakes. And he must have been hungry, because he ate some of Mom's potatoes, which she was leaving, because she was "not sure beeyooteeful glamorous Mediterraneans would eat home-fried potatoes."

And the stuffed moose on the wall above the perpetually unlit fireplace was grinning stupidly, as were we all.

BART GIAMMATTI CLEANS UP BASEBALL

2010-11-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

An October Ghost Story, The Sox V. Yanks, 2004
by Michael Dennis Mooney

DAN: Hey, Dan Patrick here. Tonight's shortened edition of SPORTSCENTER comes to you from historic Fenway. In about twenty minutes the Red Sox are about to contend against the Yankees they love to hate-- but a half-hour ago, about 7:30, a most unusual sight arose out of the gloaming and hung in the air above the big green left field wall, above the banks of lights, above the billboard ads, above the scoreboard filled with zeroes. There it is! [Camera pans.] An apparition of Bart Giammatti. He says he wants to address everyone before the game, the media, the fans here at the park, the players, the TV audience. He wants to discuss, quote, "a matter of much concern to baseball." We're going to bring in my broadcast parter Kenny Mayne. Kenny, what do you make of this?

KENNY: Hi, everyone. Yeah, Dan, this is creating quite a buzz in the stands. The game'll start at exactly 8:19, and Old Bart's just hanging there in the sky. He's not ready to speak to the crowd yet. That's what we're hearing. He's waiting for the seats to fill up. Now,...um,...Dan?

DAN: Shoot, Kenny.

KENNY: This might be stating the obvious--

DAN: That's what you do.

KENNY: -- But, correct me if I'm wrong, Bart Giammatti is no longer the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.

DAN: No longer, right.

KENNY: He's, kind of like, ...well, dead, no longer in the loop, really--

DAN: He's dead.

KENNY: -- And baseball already has a commissioner, I forget who--

DAN: Selig. Bud Selig.

KENNY: --Yeah, that's the guy! So, where does Giamatti get off holding a surprise news conference? I heard he requested to be on SPORTSCENTER.

DAN: We're going to interview him on tonight's show. You should pay more attention at the meetings.

KENNY: Now, this is really out of his jurisdiction. He's a dead dude. He has no juice anymore. No say in baseball.

DAN: You could argue that, but a revered former commissioner has arisen from the dead. Then people tend to sit up and take note. Thus Mr. Giammatti has himself some press coverage, and a public
forum.

KENNY: But no real say, no authority.

DAN: To use an overused phrase, he has moral authority.

KENNY: Okay, Dan. What do you think the old man's so worked up about?

DAN: He said, "a matter of much concern to baseball."

KENNY: I think it's going to be players' salaries. Bart's concerns aren't likely to be real up to date. He's been, like, dead for years. Out of the game, really.

DAN: Could be. A star player like Sammy Sosa gets fined for showing up late to a meaningless late-season game, and he gets docked more money than a working couple with "good jobs" and a mortgage can earn in a year. He doesn't even notice, it's only one day's pay.

KENNY: Hey, I got it! The commissioner has thought it over and he wants to reinstate Pete Rose.

DAN: No way. Not On ESPN. Not after we just aired The Pete Rose Story.

KENNY: Dan, what do you think Ol' Bartholomew's concerns are?

DAN: My guess is it's steroids in the game, but that's just me, the BALCO story is really breaking right now?

KENNY: Yeah. That interview in Sports Illustrated with "The Iron Sheff." Did you see that?

DAN: The Yanks' Gary Sheffield. He indicated the BALCO company could get you a "supplement" that would ostensibly be a vitamin--

KENNY: -- But it'd be Vitamin S!

DAN: [laughs]

KENNY: Big Red "S." Stands for Superman.

DAN: No, for steroids, you doofus.

KENNY: I say Bart's going to ban "Shef" from b'ball. Fact or Fiction?

DAN: Let's not get ahead of ourselves. No advanced word yet on Giamatti's plans.

KENNY: You know, if he did ban "the Sheff" it could really hurt the Yankees' lineup. "Sheff" has been banging the ball off the wall like he's on a squash court or somethin'.

DAN: He's been lifting.

KENNY: He is AMPED! Now if he get's banned the Sox will have a much bigger chance of winning. An announcement like that would send a lightning bolt through Fenway. They'll be dancing in the stands all week.

DAN: No, I don't think it'll be about just one person.

KENNY: I'm betting he smells what "The Sheff" is stirring with his big stick. And he doesn't like it one bit.

DAN: No. A "ban" wouldn't hold up. Selig is commissioner. He would say a Giamatti ruling could never be countenanced. Not one made in 2004.

KENNY: You gotta stay on your toes when you're dealing with dead ex-commissioners.

DAN: Truer words never spoken. Let's swing the lens over to Peter Gammons and Harold Reynolds down on the first base line.

PETE, HAL: Dan. Hey, Dan. [players in warm-up drills behind them, some players pointing up to the sky]

DAN: Pete, you've got sources all around Fenway. What are you hearing?

PETE: Dan, no official advanced word. I am, though, hearing from old friends of the former commissioner--

KENNY: -- Ones who are still alive, right?

PETE: Alright, real "alive" sources are saying that Bart Giamatti is actually concerned with the Red Sox. He has an issue with the Red Sox players, their comportment in public, that kind of thing. That's what I'm hearing.

KENNY: Let me get this straight--

DAN: -- What would be the chances of that?

KENNY: Pete, are you saying Giamatti's been, um, apparitioning, making mysterious appearances all around town? Appearing to your sources? Telling them he's not happy with the Red Sox players', uh, comportment?

PETE: Exactly. I'm not used to reporting on the activities of those who are long deceased. But, yes, there have been seances held around Boston all during last week's playoff series. At one seance (I was there and it was eerie) Giamatti's voice was floating in through air-conditioning vents to the darkened dining room of an Italian Restaurant. He was saying, "This is no way for pro ballplayers to comport themselves in public. This is no way for a biker gang to present themselves. Nor even a horde of pillaging Visigoths." Then the lights and the a/c went off!

KENNY: Sounds like you really got into the house chianti and candlelight, Pete. That apparition! He talks like an old professor.

PETE: He was president of an Ivy League school. Though it was only Yale. [snickers] And he was a Dante scholar. So he knows about the eternal damnation you get when you really screw up.

DAN: Pete, is that Stephen King? Behind you there in the first row? With the old Sox cap on?

PETE: Yes, it is. He's been down here from Maine for every home game this season, he's doing a book from a fan's perspective.

KENNY: The apparitioning of Bart ought to fit in nicely for King. Let's flip it over to Hal Reynolds. "HR," I say Ol' Bart's going to ban those dumb head-first slides into first base. Whattdaya accomplish when you do that?--

HAL: -- Kenny, Kenny! [laughing]--

KENNY: You feel like such an ass. And you end up hurting the first baseman's feelings when he steps on you. He could turn an ankle.

HAL: Kenny! My Mayne Man! Let's keep this in focus. [laughs] Baseball people I know around the league are saying it's about the Sox too. I think Pete's right. If it were about the Yanks Mr. G. would go right to "The House That Ruth Built." He'd confront the team right there. Kind of man he is. [players behind him pointing up again]

DAN: I think Peter and Harold are onto something.

KENNY: We'll find out in a few minutes. The apparition is leaning over the green wall. He's sort of "counting the house," I think, or he's looking for one of those sausage vendors.

DAN: You know what I think the Giamatti announcement will be about? This will sound silly but I'm sure of it. It's about haircuts. [grinning] The Red Sox are a team that needs haircuts.

KENNY: Nah! No freakin way!

DAN: Yep. It's about haircuts. The current Sox roster is not clean cut. That's what the apparition was saying in the
restaurant. This is about how they "present themselves." Now, in the old Roger Clemens era the Sox were clean cut. They looked sharp.

KENNY: Yeah. They cleaned up nice. Then they lost and came in second.

DAN: The current Sox are good pitchers and terrific booming hitters. But they have bad hair.

KENNY: Dan, jeez guy, is that all you think about? Hair? Hair care? ....

THIS SHORT FICTION PIECE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION ... MORE SOON

AYN RAND'S "OBJECTIVISM" DECONSTRUCTED AND DEMOLISHED

2010-10-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

I SAY HER "PHILOSOPHY" IS AN ODE TO EBENEZER SCROOGE!

an essay by Michael Dennis Mooney

"Objectivism," so-called, is an ultraconservative hankering and nostalgia
for Victorian Days when autocrats and oligarchs ruled everything, people
like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller (or in the late-Victorian era,
those like Ford, Edison, and Bell.)

Ayn Rand's objectivism was never a system of thought, nor was it ever, even
slightly, objective. It was the product of Ayn Rand's strongly angry
reaction to growing trends for social democracy in the early part of the
century, some of which went mightily awry (and murderously so with Russian
bolshevism) some of which went fairly well, as with evolving social democracy
in Britain and in Denmark, for example, and in the U.S. under Franklin Roosevelt
and the Democrats.

Ayn Rand was an ultraconservative who was uncomfortable with anything
that pulled away from late-Victorian values, her values. Values she'd
adopted from her headstrong tyrannical mother. The last social thinker Ayn Rand
agreed with was Ebenezer Scooge, pre-conversion. She was stuck in the mud,
like a Model T in a rainstorm. She was so antediluvian she was an embarrassment
to the right. She was, for example, eager to censor fellow screenwriters like
Dalton Trumbo, via her denunciations of them as Un-American during the McCarthy
Era.

She was understandably, of course, devastated by the revolution in Russia,
which had indeed confiscated her father's thriving business and her once-affluent
family's home.

Her advocacy of reason and reality are perfectly fine. She wanted ideas
which you can prove with an appeal to reason and to the facts of evidence. Fine.
But her conservatism, her longing for an old-school late-Victorian world of
earnest striving, long hours of hard work, careerism, achievement, and
success is merely her nostalgia. Neither reason nor the facts of reality
recommend to us her passionate longing for the good old days before the car,
the phone, and the electric light bulb, also the days before public education,
municipal hospitals, or pensions and health care for the elderly. Indeed, before
paved sidewalks.

Her entire system was one passionately incensed and bitter reaction, ultimately a
paranoid one, to marxist thought, some version of which she heard all around
her at the University of Petrograd in her late teens, and it surely left an
ugly after-taste with her. She was right to critique socialist states, especially
in their most totalizing idealogical manifestations, as in Soviet Russia and in
Maoist China. But she was wrong to see statist tyranny in the New Deal's social
democracy here: that's just Bircher-style conspiracy theory.

She remained essentially traumatized after she arrived in the West,
deciding that social democracy in general was merely a prelude to bolshevist
revolutionary mayhem. She had become a rather fully paranoid personality, a
reactionary, a rightist.

Her answer to marxist thought was an entire system of anti-marxism, and
that is what so-called objectivism is. Marxists claimed that industrialists
exploited the surplus value of labor. Randianism claims, countering, there
is a surplus of value that inventors and entrepreneurs contribute to a
product which is then exploited by the government's authority for taxation
and for redistribution.

Marxism claims workers are enslaved by low wages and subsistence
living conditions. Anti-marxism, in Randian analysis, says businessmen
are a voiceless exploited minority who are forced to pay for social
democracy, schools, roads, utlities like sewers and water lines,
municipal hospitals, public transport, regional airports, community college
job training facilities.

She fantasizes in Atlas Shrugged that the business execs should go on strike,
the ultimate anti-marxism, a "strike" by the capitalists, and the rest of us
would be mere incompetent shirkers who wouldn't know how to get things done
without the corporate VPs of this world, the Dagny Taggarts, directing us.
That is some fantasy! (Note for readers: Dagny Taggart was the central character in
Atlas Shrugged, dealing with enormous frustration as an executive, in not
being able to find effective employees and reliable suppliers.)

And that is some chutzpah!-- to think of businessmen as a poor downtrodden
minority. I'm sure the executives at Goldman Sachs, at General Motors, at Microsoft,
are telling themselves every day, I'm a poor exploited minority group waif! I'm
like a lil David Copperfield in the workhouse, saying, "Please, sir, can I have a
little more, a little more gruel, sir!" Actually, maybe at Lehman Brothers,
they are saying that (since the ex-Goldman execs who were insiders at Treasury
let them die like dogs in a blizzard, while Goldman got bailed via its exquisite
connections to the policy makers.)

Now, those who truly were a voiceless exploited minority in Old St. Petersburg
were the Russian Jews, such as Rand's father, who didn't have good legal protections,
as those maintained in Western countries.

Ayn Rand denied she was a conservative, but only because the
prevailing conservative editors and writers she met were too middle-road
and moderate, too relatively timid, to support her strongly felt
anti-communist fury. She couldn't affiliate with them. She was, in fact,
a paleoconservative, an ultra-rightist of a kind that conservatives found
too rigidly dogmatic. She wanted the role of government dialed-back to that of the
era before there were roads! She wanted an American Frontier type of
government, a national militia of some sort, municipal police forces, jails,
and courts. That's it. All else would be the province of the business
community, privately run for profit. Social concerns would be the bailiwick
of church groups, of philanthropic organizations, all non-governmental, no
public treasury monies involved.

Her idea of what capitalism is, or is supposed to be, in fact, never existed.
People with wealth and governmental officials with power always collaborated!
N.Y. Central Railroad under Cornelius Vanderbilt, e.g., literally "owned" every legislator
in New York State via an unpublished payroll. There was never any principled separation
of economic puissance and state power in the history of capitalism, and there isn't
now. But that is what capitalism is: it's an industrial system that has an unfair advantage
due to its capability for getting cozy with the state. So called laissez-faire, the
separation of state and economics, was always merely a theoretical model, an hypothesis
which didn't apply well to facts, by the time of the industrial era. It might have been
meant to apply to an earlier mercantile era, but I'm not sure it applied well then.

Ayn Rand's appeal to reason, also her appeal to the evidence of the perceivable
facts of reality, was not original with her by a long shot. So much for her
"objectvism" as a new philosophy. Her interest in rationalism, in logic and science,
in the objective "facts of reality," was only really new to cultish Ayn Randians,
semi-educated fans of her works, who had read one or two books, hers, fans who
hadn't the background to evaluate her in the broad history of human thought.

[Actually, all of her core beliefs date from the late 1700's and the English
Enlightenment: Laissez-faire and free trade (Adam Smith;) Rational self-interest
as a motive power for productive behavior (Adam Smith;) Limited government (John Locke;)
The perceivable facts of evidence (John Locke and all who came before him, back to
Francis Bacon;) also, Enlightenment Era Rationalism, that of Humboldt and others, who knew
that knowledge was possible and definable through science and good methodologies. Yet she
had no grasp of rationalism's application to twentieth century matters. The last time
she was up to date, philosophically, was in the time of Mozart operas, tricorn hats, knee
breeches, waistcoats, powdered wigs, and snuff. Also duelling pistols!]

Since the era of Voltaire and, following him, all the dozens of
philosophes of the Enlightenment in Europe and in England, there had been
a thorough-going rejection of the non-rational superstition-based thinking of
the church authorities, and a rejection of the birth-right authority of the
land-owning class, the aristocracy and royalty. This appeal to reason by the
philosophes, a group most influenced by Voltaire and Rousseau, created
our ideals of democracy, a striving for a greater equality of opportunity for working
people, it led to the overthrow of aristocracy and kings, to the weakening
of the church, and to the establishment of republics and the rule of law.

This is where reason leads, to greater equality, to opportunities for
industrious people and their families.

Ayn Rand was tempted to mis-use the achievements of the Enlightenment and
its dozens of thinkers. She wrote as if there were no philosophers
before her who recommended reason and opposed authoritarianism. She took credit
for what Voltaire, frequently writing from the Bastille, had done. (Every one
of his nearly 100 volumes was suppressed by royalty, he was often imprisoned,
always writing gay little notes to the king thanking him for the free bread and
water, such hospitality!)

Why did she act as if Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesqieu, St Simon,
dozens of others, never wrote their pamphleteering attacks on authoritarianism?
And she was aware of the French language and literature, it was one of her
languages from childhood on. Why?

Because these thinkers wanted to promote increased equality for all people.
They weren't rightist rearguarders fighting against change, but she was!
She was essentially a proto-fascist, a highly intolerant reactionary hate-monger,
a shoot-from-the-hip-ster, someone who'd be glad to see the public's concerns
go to hell while industrialists reaped trillions via the laissez-faire tradition.
The BP disaster, the coasts of the Gulf states despoiled to the tune of tens
of billions in damages, that is what laissez-faire is.

The ultimate "junk shot" to shut-up the spewing BP well would be a boatlload of the
Atlas Shrugged volumes, 1300-plus pages each, that the Ayn Rand
Institute sends out free to the schools. I'm sure there are enough copies
of the laissez-faire new testament in a warehouse somewhere to choke that well forever.
It would be that rare instance of Atlas exerting a benevolent influence!

The Professor Of Desire (And Geriatric Hypogonadism)

2010-09-23T08:47:00.000-07:00

A History of Viagra
by Michael Dennis Mooney

Today, on the broadcast, we're with Bobby Levin. We call him the "nutty professor," because his specialty is human gonads, the functioning thereof, also the malfunctioning.

Good evening! Great day to be alive! Specifically, I'm a reseracher in Geriatric Hypogonadism, which is sexual dysfunction, basically a lack of normal erections, in older males, and the relief of the problem with medicine.

Bobby, honestly, you seem younger than Springtime, yet we understand you're retiring next year from the College of Pharmacy. How is this possible?

You're as young as you feel, Charlie, and I'm in Viagra research!--

Do you treat yourself with that stuff?

--Yes! And I'm feeling like a very frisky 30-something, one that goes for hikes up hills, one that stays up late, ahem, stays up, and fools around. Life is good!

Retirement? For a young fellow like you?

I'm 66, a few months away from 67, and eligible for full benefits, so I'm leaving the Pharm! I'm done with the College of Pharmacy and teaching at the end of the school year. But I'll still have my research grant at the hospital.

We'd like to hear about Viagra. What has been learned about it so far?

When we first discovered this formulation, we were researching its potential as a medicine for lowering blood pressure. It didn't do so great in that area, except in mild hypertension cases.

It was a bust?

Yeah, we were prepared to write it off as unworthy of development. We were wrapping things up, finishing our notes, we were asking all the research subjects to bring back their unused supplies of Sidenafil. That's what it was called then.

I see where you're going with this. They wouldn't return the samples?

We found they'd grown quite attached to their little blue pills. Wouldn't give them up willingly.

And the reason? As if I didn't know!

The men, we noted, were, "having sex a lot more," , and it was, they reported, "THE BEST THEY EVER HAD !!!! " We realized we might be onto something. Lightning in a bottle.

These were not necessarily old men, am I right?

Correct. They were middle-aged, thirty-somethings, also 40's and older.

Most of us have thought this treatment was more for the elderly married man.

You see, blood pressure problems and erectile dysfunction both tend to hit the human male, and require treatment, at about the same time in life, in the post-35 age range, in middle age. So we were treating the right age group, but, in a sense, the wrong set of symptoms, with this medication. So we simply changed course. We had a new med to treat a problem no one had ever treated medically, not like this! So Viagra was born.

So, Bobby, you can treat younger people with the Vitamin V!

Yup! Charlie, it won't do anything for a 20 year-old, obviously. He'd just be wasting his money. But anyone in their later 30's, or 40's, 50's, etc., anyone who's been woefully noticing some inability to become erect while in a good stimulating lovemaking situation, will find this med makes quite a difference. You know, it will work better for a 40 year-old with a relatively small degree of impotence, than for, say, a 90 year-old, as there is, in the younger fella, way more potential to work with. Yes, it's for younger people, and it makes them feel even younger.

How does it do this?

Simple. It causes an increase in circulation to the erectile tissues! All it takes is just a small amount of increased blood flow, and VOILA! This drug is a vasodilator, it creates greater amplitude of flow.

Bobby, indulge me, here's a favorite joke of mine: Doctor says to the pharmaceuticals sales rep, "I have a complaint about those Viagra pens. They only work about half the time!" Ba-Da-Bim! But you're saying, this medication, though, always works, and quite reliably.

I take it (believe me, I knew I needed the help) and it has never not worked.

Well, now we know why you have such toothsome grin. And how long have you been taking it?

All through the late 90's and the 2000's, up til now, 2010. Two to three times a week. It's good for about 48 hours or more. You figure, you take one mid-evening on a Friday, the dose is less than 24 hours old on Saturday. On Sunday, you're still good.

They call it the weekend pill?

That's right. 'Fact, I'm going to take one right now, as it's Friday, and it's cocktail hour.

Bobby, what are you doing? We're on the air!

So report me, uh, to the F.C.C. or something. Here, I'm taking one right now. Plus, I've brought along this big cocktail shaker with O.J. and ice, I'll pour in a few shots of vodka, there!, and I'll have my ritual Friday evening DOUBLE SKA-REW DRIVER!! That'll get the "Vitamin V" going. Later, I'll go home and screw around some. First, though, I'll prepare a little barbecue for my wife, the lovely and sensuous Sheila Levin. She likes a grilled tuna steak with teriyaki sauce, I like a nutty and garlicky pesto on mine. And then I'll let her take advantage of me. We NEVER have anyone over on a Friday. 'Less I've taken the day off and we've been fooling around already.

Bob, sheesh!, you can't do stuff like this on the air, drink and combine it with a drug.

Just did. Can't undo it exactly, either. Hey, count this as one of your Public Service Announcements. You could make a video cassette, and show it once a day.

Bobby, you're the devil. Put that drink down, and get that canary-eatin grin off your face.

You should get yourself an O.J. sponsor, I'm drinking the true juice of youth. It's good for ya.

Bob! Get rid of that plastic cup!

Okay, I'll pour it back in the shaker. But I'll be sipping it through a straw all the way home. In the streets. Since I'm an outcast here.

You walked here?

I walk everywhere, to the store, to work. To a restautant in the evening, with my Sheila. To the movies. Heck, we like to walk half way across town for any reason at all, just to walk. It's all the same idea. Get the blood circulating. Only place I drive to is Connecticut. Why do you think Walt Whitman, for example, was such a notoriously horny guy, always writing about free love, about freely loving women, one woman and then another?-- and men! He walked everywhere, he walked all the way into Manhattan from Brooklyn. Like it was nothing. He was a vigorous old sage, and a horndog. Get yourself a good pair of hiking boots, young man.

Bobby, I'm sixty! I get my insurance from AARP!

You're a young man to me, Charlie. "Sixteen and Sixty are the same." That's from Karl Shapiro, the poet, he's saying both ages are ones of a great, exuberant idealism, and a disposition to rebellion and independence.

Okay, tell us some more about the early days of investigations into Viagra.

I remember our first international conference! At the time, Viagra was only legal here in the U.S. The F.D.A. had just approved it. We had all these foreign doctors attending, practically every hotel in the city was booked-up. These foreign docs were getting the American docs to write them Viagra scripts.

I can see where this goes.

These international doctors wiped out the city's Viagra supply. Every pharmacy, way out into the 'burbs, as far as Pennsylvania and Delaware, had run out of it by the second day of the convention. Friday was still three days away, and there was no Viagra to be had. Pfizer became aware of this, but there was little they could do to make more, not on the spot like that, not enough. It was the one Viagra-less weekend in the city, and Viagra became a smash hit around the world. Global buzz! Quite a thing! A true story.

Tell me about Pfizer. They making money? I bet they are.

They've sold more Viagra tablets than all their other medicines combined, ever! They're doing okay. They did a billion in sales the first year. They fill a new script every few minutes.

Do people abuse this stuff?

Sure. A very funny-- also a not funny-- story! A true story! The first Viagra death...

Keep it clean.

...This fella, you'd have to say he was morbidly obese, he'd contracted the services of a little lady of the evening.

And who knows what else he may've been contracting?!

So, as he is very heavy, several hundred pounds, he is used to taking extra-large doses of some medicines, like Ibuprofen, say, because he has to compensate for all that body tissue to get the effects of the med. Well, he took, I think, too many Viagra tabs. He was having sex with her-- and he died right on top of her. Hey, at least it enabled him to have a fling at making whoopie. 'Course, she had her arms around a great big problem.

My god!

Now, if she were one of those girls who ALWAYS has a cell phone in her hand, she might've gotten rescued a lot quicker. No one discovered her 'til the next day. The bed wasn't very firm, and she was just pressed right down into this squishy soft old mattress like a bug smushed into a wadded-up newspaper. She couldn't budge him. When the maid came in to clean the hotel room the next day, it was eventually discovered there was a live lil call girl, uh, sex worker, under the huge corpse.

Phew! We're going to take a pledge break for a few minutes. We'll be back in five with our guest, Bobby Levin. Are we off the air? Bobby, pass me that shaker. Bring us some mugs, please.

##

We're back with Bobby Levin!

Charlie, this is some great coffee your producer makes. 'Course, I like to sip mine with a swizzle straw. A lil plastic umbrella would be festive in my cup.

Ahem, we were talking about abuse. Will there ever end-up being, say, a 12-step program for Viagra abuse?

It isn't an addictive substance, so no. But anything can be abused, so there are cases in which this medicine has fed into an already screwed-up life, one with lots of unhealthy behaviors and anxiety-driven compulsions. Also, there are new studies showing that Viagra has really changed the pattern of adult development in old age, which we define as life after 60.

That's a powerful thing, it can alter how people typically grow older?

A man used to retire to the life of a typical old-school grandfather, he'd stay close to where his kids live, visit with the grandchildren a lot, do house-repair projects, work on the golf swing, volunteer at the fire department, do the crossword puzzle, ho hum, take naps, listen to Benny Goodman records in the garage, etc. But now there's a new older man that is taking his Viagra Rx on the road.

What do you mean?

He might acquire a girlfriend of about age 40, or even younger, someone who's really peaking, a ripe middle-aged woman, and then move away from the family to be closer to the hottie, the babe!

Now, in old-school days, the kids and grandkids would expect to be his heirs.

Yes, but not now, the sole heir can, perhaps, be his new babe toy. She has a powerful say over what happens. I had a friend, Mackey, his name was, he went way out into the Midwest-- well, to Buffalo, far enough-- he left his family here, and transferred to a job out there, at an age when he should've been, by old-school lights, settling into a retiring mode, one of just being in the background of his son's life.

He shuffled off to Buffalo. He met someone.

Yes, he did! On the internet, as they exchanged blog posts. Pretty soon they're on the phone every day. In no time, he's traveling to meet her on his August vacation. In a few hours, they're shacked-up, in some god-forsaken, rundown, ghetto-y Buffalo neighborhood. He's 59, she's 40. They are an instant item. They spend weeks together, never apart, a sort of wild joy ride of a first date, she's a divorced woman, a grad student-- a divinity student!-- with the summer off. A couple weeks out there together, then they spend a couple more weeks back here. They set the copulation record for a first date, as they remain together every day for a month or more! Alert the Guinness World Book! He then resumes working evenings in the hospital back here after vacation, he's in nursing, and they fool around all day,'til he goes to work at 3 p.m. She then stays home and plays with the computer, watches her soap, reads her grad school books, talks on the phone, orders-in Chinese. He comes home from work at midnight, and he doesn't sit down to a lonely beer and late night TV, 'cause she's calling out to him, "Get that ass in this bedroom!," real playful, and they do some more minky pinky. And again in the morning, right after coffee, some more. And this girl babe of his-- Mairlie, he called her, she is a Mary Lynn-- Mairlie herself is pure human Viagra, as she likes having sex, and she likes having it a lot, I mean, frequently, she's always wanting to mount his lap while he's just sitting there playing with his, um, laptop. You'd have to know Mackey to know how this transformed his life, he's one of those big hefty working class Irish, 250 lbs, six foot two, a body made of beer, beef, and buttermilk, but now, with Mary Lynn, he's exercising every day, walking to work two miles like it's nothing. He's a changed man with a smile on his face.

Your friend is a new kind of senior citizen!

Yes, he is!

So he leaves his family and the hometown area.

Yes, he transfers to a hospital out in shabby hairy old icicle-hanging Buffalo. Same job, same pay, a better-run facility. He rents a house there, a good one, and at a great price. The first thing they do is fool around, right there on the carpeting of the new place, with the still-loaded UHaul in the driveway. They christen the new house with their sweat, their bodily fluids, and their ecstatic cries echoing mightily off the bare walls. Things are going gangbusters. Well, for the moment.

This is the new horizon available to grampy!

Believe me, there can be some dazzling sunrises on this horizon! So, then, many months later, (Mackey told me this story in tears) they had some squabbles about their new domestic arrangements, then a big angry blow-up. She left him! She would NOT speak to him. Now, what is he left with? He's in this strange town on the foggy, polluted shores of Erie, he's hundreds of miles from his son, from family members, his sister, his mom, he even misses the ex-wife, who, at least, was a friendly woman who would talk to him. And winter is a-comin' in, it's late November. Then comes the first December arctic blasts, single-digit temps, and lake-effects snows. He's depressed, anxious. Can't sleep. Starts drinking too much. It's the holidays, it's his 60th birthday in December, and he's living in desolation. He gets in some minor scrapes. He hassles someone he thinks is dating the babe. He is extremely remorseful and self-blaming, the way depressed people are. He has no life there in hoary depressing Buffalo, yet this is how far away he got from his life, via Viagra. Eventually, he finds his way back here and gets rehired at the old job, but he comes back here in pretty rough shape. He goes into therapy, hoping to find answers. So these setbacks can happen, by way of overly compulsive, well, "womanizing," I'd guess you'd say. This particular fella was not a sex addict, you know, not a maniacal conqueror of one woman after another, but he certainly took a big head-first plunge with a woman he didn't know. He had a good time, but paid for it with a lot of heartache, and he hated himself aferwards for being a fool. This could've been much worse, if he had been dealing with multiple substance addictions, like, say, cocaine and tranqs. As it is, he spent a lot of his savings, which might've gone into better things. But you know, if she phoned him, he might do it all again. That's what he says. He still refers to her as "my baby." (And, in fact, she's exactly the right age to be his offspring!) If he could see her again, he'd, of course, approach the matter with some caution, he would not so swiftly merge his life with hers. This was a case of "Sixteen and Sixty." Our Mackey was a teenager again, at 60, pulled into a vortex of desire for Marvelous Mary Lynn.

This medicine helped wreck his life for a while.

Yeah, but at least he didn't use Viagra, as some older men will, to be with nineteen different girls in a summer season, only to end up with syphilis, perhaps. He had intended to marry the hottie. They both intended to be happy together, and happily erotic at that.

Bob, we're just about out of time.

I always end my talks with a little proselytizing moment. I take out my prescription bottle, there!, and open it up, there!, take one tablet out, here it is, and put it on the table. Then I turn to my interlocutor, and I say, "So, any questions?"

Look at that silly grin! Get out of here!

Any questions, Charlie?

Yeah! Can I have one?

Take it with your coffee, and have yourself a weekend, my boy. Just don't end-up in hairy-assed Buffalo.

Wi-Fried In Albany

2010-09-16T23:28:00.000-07:00

A Guide To The Hot Spots And The Not So Hots ~by Michael Dennis Mooney

So many of the supposed WiFi Hot Spots here are Not So Hots. (Examples: Breugger's, Panera, Uncommon Grounds, Borders, and Muddy Cup all make my short list of the lukewarmest, the posers, the formerlies, the not reallys, the notsa hotsies, the seriously inadequate.)

I am a person who lives by the keyboard, it is always at hand when I'm getting coffee. So here is my WiFI guide for the perplexed. You new students in Albany, all you new law, med and pharm hands on N. Scotland, new social scientists of Western Ave., new engineers of Troy Hill and of Union Ave, new accountancy and computer freaks of Loudonville, new rosebuds of Madison Ave (and rosebuddies!), future directors of nursing from Sage and new rock and roll musicians of SUNY Schenectady CC, listen up. First let's clear the psuedo-hot from the field:

Uncommon Grounds on Western, hard by SUNY Albany: You're on your screen at around 1130 a.m., with coffee and a rich bagel sandwich, delish!, and you think you're getting work done. You go to transmit your work to a net site and the "idiot manager" (I have called him this to his face) has turned off the router. He is encouraging the WiFi users to leave before lunch starts in. This ain't hot. (Not cool neither.) Good deli, lousy WiFi. Uncommon is a "formerly." Once hot (got too hot for the manager) now not hot. They turn the router back on later. too late to matter.

Uncommon Grounds on Broadway in Saratoga remains hot 365-24-7, even at the height of the August track season, even at lunch, an hour before post time. Exemplary hotness. Enlightened management. Go figure! Who knew? What were the odds?

Breugger's, the entire chain, is so far behind the curve, it is just plain utlra-pseudo. They have a marketing campaign, but no real WiFi. You're working on your screen and almost starting to experience some WiFi contentment and your screen goes off. What's this? It's a commercial interruption, just like broadcast TV!, and it's a new screen full of corporate-speak about "Relax, and have another cup of coffee," etc. WTF!

Meanwhile just try and find the edits you made to your work, edits you thought you posted to your net site. All your work has been lost. Very Breuggerly in a NOT RELAXING sort of way. Your work has been lost, because your net connection was cut-- WiFi interruptus!-- and the chain is now, in its very psuedo-service-oriented way, inviting you to log on again. With service of this kind, who needs fraud. Let's have the authentic article. WiFi.

Panera is the same. The little corporate-speak message comes on, and with it the slowly dawning horror that your work has been eaten by Panera's policy. Great baked goods, pseudo WiFi. Both Breugger's and Panera do this timed interruption of your work (actually a cancellation) at about the time they figure you should be clearing out, and to make it real sporting they do this without warning. So now you're warned. Don't trust the bastards.

Now for the inadequate. You walk past the sign saying Free WiFi and in the door at the Muddy Cup on Madison, and (unsuspecting fool!) you do not know their signal is so weak, well, it is too weak to defend itself. You end up realizing you'd do better just visiting someone you know across the street, which is also what the other customers are doing, they're logging on to whatever's nearby. Great open mike nights. WiFi that is too weak to live. Muddy management focus. The night atmosphere is way better than the daytime, especially when St. Rose and SUNY Albany are in session. The day atmosphere there is as bleak as the jobs economy, in fact that is who's here, the marginally employed. Hey, why am I here? Fortunately, the new owner there has just gotten a divorce-- WITH NO ALIMONY!-- from the Muddy Cup chain of franchise operations, and he has made it a priority to have the WiFi back-up and running. So at the new ... Ta-da! .... Drama Cup (that really is the new name) the spot is hot again this September. Log on to WAVES. (Get it, microwaves?) And the Cup that was Cold is now Steeemin! The new owner has also refurbished a bit with new couches, and he should have a great fall and winter season, with or without my vote of confidence, because his WiFi is now sparklin'. No longer muddy.

Muddy Cup in Schenectady has a fine WiFi system, it's in the Proctor's box office atrium on State. Log on to Proctors Visitors Rob Alley(code: showhouse.) And you're doing work, and in a comfy chair! Plug-in receptacles everywhere in the electric city atmosphere. It's more electric in the evenings when theater crowds are on hand. In the day it's bleaker, more of a welfare state atmosphere. Street people getting a cup of consolation. Bomber's Burrito Bar, other side of State, has a great huge space, wonderful food, good beers, great sports on TV, a way overworked staff, and it has WiFi that has a headache and doesn't feel like it. Fuhgeddaboudit!

Bomber's in Albany on Lark, no problem, just log on the municipal WiFi, AlbanyFreeNet and you're getting work done while crunching those deep fried tacos. Pass the guacamole.

##

Now that we've cleared the major posers from the field, here are the really good places: fewer details are needed, as the WiFi works in these places. Let's start with a corporate one: Starbuck's, I think, is doing quite well, especially when hosted by a Hilton, such as here on N. Scotland, or by a big book barn behemoth like Barnes & Noble, both at Colonie Center and Mohawk Mall. At the Hilton Starbuck's you log on to Hilton Honors (any one who is sitting there is a guest.) And you'll never have to cringingly await the interruptus. Here you can relax, 'cause the WiFi works, and you won't get, um, cut off. Also in the Hilton's bar and grill, the Recovery Room, same deal. You can really feel yourself getting better, as you sip a beer, munch a snack, and rock the net. In the books department, I find Border's at Crossgates, where I practically live, can't get its act together, intermittent WiFi just ain't doing it for me. When it goes down, and it always does, you call an 800 number and speak to an outsourcing Fillipino who is just not grasping your nuances. Really inspires a lack of confidence.

##

Envelope please, Best local WiFi places:

The best coffee house in Albany is one of the very newest. Midtown Tap And Tea. A coffee house from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Then it turns into a restaurant. Original art on the walls, including a Warhol. $1 coffee, free refills. Right next to Stewart's and The Fountain on N. Scotland. A roof-covered patio with outdoor plug-ins for your laptop, an Indian Summer idyll. Their staff, Melissa The Barista and 'em, are the most gracious crew, so far in front of the curve they've destroyed the curve, blown it to bits. And the Tap and Tea is also the finest space for a coffee house in Albany, roomy, beautifully and stylishly appointed, tremendously ambitious new construction. Miss Meliss is also a savvy gourmandizer who wants to make you a great breakfast or lunch in her newly built kitchen, egg dishes, bagel sandwiches, salads, cheese plates. For WiFi, log on to Coffee House Guest (code: Coffee.)

Also truly great: Ultraviolet Cafe (which has a well-organized cost-free book exchange!) next to Spectrum Theaters on Delaware; Also Java Jazz (I write this while jazzed on about 40 ounces of their Italian Dark Roast.) And Perfect Blend. Both are on Delaware in Delmar. The Blend is now run by very good bakers and their coffee is now better than the old Perfect BLAND (what I used to term it) and the Blend is one of the real centers of community activity in the village.

Easiest place to get a coffee with WiFi, oddly, is the Dunkin Donuts, Lark and Madison, because of the municipal free Wifi, AlbanyFreeNet, which lights up most of the places along Lark. Best WiFi along Lark, besides Daily Grind, (log on to lynksys in their upstairs room), is almost anywhere!, the Wok, the Tandoori, Elda's, your friend's stoop, your car, if your just sorta pit-stopping in front of the Dunkin. Daily Grind in Troy is the beating heart of that city's cafe district, and it's pulse rate is permanently high, it's a way roomier room than the Albany store, more comfy, and good Wifi. Also try Spill the Beans.

Best multitasking play in the Lark neighboorhood: log on to the laundromat WiFi at MadLark, put your wash in, and after transferring it to the dryer (the atmosphere is already way warmer than Bruegger's) saunter across to the Lionheart's Indian Summer patio setting. Your WiFi connection still works, you're getting work done, you're having a Spaten Optimator, you're optimating the possibilities and feeling the spateneity! Now that's relaxing! I told the beeeeertender there, about the Spaten, THIS STUFF IS REALLY GOOOOOD! He quietly explained it was about three times as strong as the Miller Lite twaddle I am used to. I am completing my education here: three for the price of one is a no-brainer, a triple play, and my wash is getting done, so that's a home run or something. Boy am I going to need a good nap later, plus some aspirin.

A distant second, but great, is the patio(s), front and back, of Cafe Hollywood on Lark. Log on to Hollywood Hotspot. Just another day in Hollywood. Don't hate the glamor! Put on your shades and WiFi away in the front sidewalk cafe with a $3 Schmithwicks's at happy hour, 3-7 p.m. You're sitting there in your shades at 3 p.m. and every schlub that drives by is envying you. What? Is that Mooney guy retired now? Yes, he is. A gentleman of leisure on the stroll.

Best breakfast in a bar with WiFi: Quintessence on N. Scotland, where the early bird special is less than $4.50 and includes scrambled eggs, potatoes, toast, juice, coffee, with the lovely Alicia refilling the cup (a pharm student and future millionaire.) Log on to Quint. Also log on there during Blues Night, Moday at 830pm, German Night (sauerbraten!) on Wednesday, all the other nights, Mexican, Italian, et alia.

Ice cream hot spot: Emiack and Bolio's on Delaware. When I was there, I bought an ice cream cake for my kid's birthday, cosmic purple buttercream frosting over an ice-cream cake compounded of "Serious Chocolate Addiction" and "Almond Joy." My son is a teenaged guitarist, so they wrote YOU ROCK! on his cake top. Totally worked. Their cafe, set back behind their ice cream store is the sweetest little hobbit habitation, cozy, comfy and pleasing as eating ice cream and drinking cappuccino should be. And their WiFi is perkin'.

A great tea place: Lil Buddha Tea on Lark. I'm not very adventurous-- you should have the chai! you should just chai it!-- so I had the plain black tea in a pot with lemon and honey. I again wasn't brave enough to go for the spinach and sweet potato frittata, so many densely nurtitious dark greens and oranges!, so I had the fruits and cheeses. AlbanyFreeNet works great there, though I piggybacked on Cafe Hollywood, 'cross the street. I completely re-edited this entire text there, while all teed-up, so to say. (And Hollywood Hotspot never faltered.)

Italian eatery hot spot: Mercato's on Delaware in Delmar. I like to bring a chess set and embarass my son with my doing chess problems on their checkerboard tablecloths. I like to go at lunch time, it's not busy then and the prices are less at that hour, and the lunch waiter is a terrific kid, a good server, and actually from Italy.

Diner hot spot: Latham 76 Diner on Rte 9. Not many places to plug in, though. Ask the busboy where the vacuum cleaner gets plugged in

Noirish pizza hot spot: Side Door on Western-- Don't go in the front door, neither! You'll rune the atmosphere, ya gavoone!-- where WiFi, pizza, cute indifferent bartendresses, beer, even karaoke, can be quite a play on the possibilities. It's great when a plan comes together.

Phew! I am exhausted. This research is too much fun. Who needs public libraries, not I, when there are Hot Spots with Spaten!

Ooh, almost forgot, best alternative to Uncommon Grounds: Mobil Mart, right next door, coffee,chairs and tables, WiFi, 365 days, 24 hours, no pretense.

P.S.: McDonald's, the behemoth of behemoths, is starting to use free WiFi as sort of amenity. Believe me, though, there is no guarantee you'll have it your way. I was at the one on Western near Crossgates, and there is not a single plug-in receptacle available to customers in the entire store. Posers! This is just a dealbreaker for a WiFi fan. I may never have a double cheese again. Well, maybe "to go."

##

Michael Dennis Mooney is the author of a book of light verse, "Midcentury Man, New Century," available from John Chapman's Broadcast Books, Michael Mooney, 55 So Lake Ave, Albany 12203. His website is: http://jcbcast.blogspot.com

Ole Massa Doan Want Me Heah No Mo!

2010-08-19T06:41:00.000-07:00

Or OLE MICAH'S CABIN

a 2010 slave narrative by "Ole Micah" Dennis Mooney

Udda day, I say ta Miss Vicky, "You know, I be leavin."

Miss Vicky say, "What you believe in? Y'always believin somethin." She laugh.

"No, I be goin down de road. I be leavin dis house. I gotta go fine some udda house to slave in."

"Oh!...My!" She get mo serious.

"Ole Massa, up dere on de third story, he doan want me heah no mo!"

"What?!"

Den I tell er all about it.

##

I say ta him, "Wassa matter, Ole Massa?"

He say, "Ole Micah, ya GOT ta go. Ya doan know how ta be wid dese peoples no mo. If ya eva did. Heh."

"Micah," he say, "ya bad fo de 'human-relay shuns.' Ya doan know how ta ack."

"Ack?"

"Ya know, how ta be-have."

"I ain't bein a hayve?" Miss Elsie come in wid a cuppa tea for me, I say, "Thank ye, Miss."

"Udda day," he say, "one dem young hellcats, damn brat, she try ta punch ya real violent-like, and ya just sit er right down wid one swift grab a her arm."

"Well, Wassa matter dere?" Say I.

"Dat de 'brew-tally tea.' Ya know ya jes suppose ta take it. House Rules. Or duck, step back, somethin. Take a dive. Hell, fake ya own death."

"So, Massa? May I call ya Mista Rafey, suh? If she knock me right out, so I layin in de field wid a bloody face, dat okay wid de rules?"

He doan say nothin. (I known him since he practical a chile, an he a Ralph, so we all call em Rafey.)

"Din't I stop de violins? An end de dis-quiet? I prevent de mayhem. Dat what I do."

Den he say, "Ya gotta go."

"Wait! In dis work, I head up de groups in de fields, Ole Massa, an I been punched in de head 'nough different times I seeing spots still. Doc, he call em 'floaters.' Dat why I grab er arm. I 'de-mobilizen' it fo a quick New Yolk second."

"Cain't dat be in de rules?" I say

"We doan want any dat. No 'man handle.' "

"I been kicked, an in awful tender places. Been ruptcha'd. Had fingas broke. Dis one time Ole Doc hadta puntcha ma finga nail wid a red hot 'caught-yer-eyes-in' needle, ta let de blood out. I din't e'en say ow. I had bones in ma face cracked like a ole plate. 'Swhy I so funny lookin. Bet ya wonder 'bout dat, huh?"

"Never seen such reports," say Massa.

"Ya doan heah hardly nothin. Ya up heah in ya study."

"Been bit," I say, "Got a scar on ma right forearm, look like a shark snack on me. De scar, it white, all tore-up, like hard scrambley egg whites, an it doan tan in de sun. It look sick."

"Me, I jes take it! Get hurt," I say, " Doan even file a report, mose times. I like one dem no'then ice-hockey playas, go right back in de game."

"Tell it ta de judge, Micah," Massa say, "Down ta de courthouse. Maybe ya get a settlement."

"I e'en got a scar on ma behine, Massa, where one em get 'round behine me, as we rasslin em down."

"Go tell it in de courthouse." ..." Please."

"Got dese teeth marks on ma behine dat all purpley nasty--"

"Please."

##

He say, "Ahem.." He look out de window an take a breath.

"Miss Clementina," he say, "who run de house real strict, she got de 'in-form mints' everywhere, ya know--"

"Y'ain't joshin dere. Dat Lil Missy Rick, over ta Cabin G in de fields, lil boyish thing, she turn me in ever chance she get, jes ta show she a better man dan me."

" --An Miss Clementina, she say dere's many times y'ain't bein propa an nice."

"I suppose."

"She say one time, some scraggly sleezick stole ya stuff, an ya wasna, ya know, a 'pro-pree-yate' to em."

I say, "Okay. Well, should he be stealin? Huh, Massa? What say ya, suh? "

He ignore ma 'torical-type query.

"Doan I have a right? Say, a right ta re-snatch ma stuff?"

He ignore Ole Micah some mo. He lookin away.

He say, "One time dis supercrazy person try ta clime right inta bed wid anudda just-sleepin person, ya pull her right out, an ya maybe bruise er wrist."

"Den I should be nicer, mo polite, to dem molestas an dem whaddycallits, 'hypersexuals' an freaks? Doan we draw de line nowhere now, suh?"

He doan say nothin.

Den... "Sorry... Ya gotta go, Ole Micah."

"What else ya got?" I say. He lookin at "a list from Miss Clem," he call it. An it a long one. Sheesh!

Mista Rafey, he say, "One time dis Ole Lady, she start sluggin at ya, an ya jes standin dere, stead a backin away. Ya shoulda gone back away, dat what we want. Why dis defyin?"

"Well, I musta been tryin ta stand er up straight a somethin. Cain't just drop er, ya know. She a 'gerry hat-trick.' "

"Miss Lawnacre say, no, ya slappin back at er."

"I deflectin! Like in de rules!"

"Miss Lawnacre!" I say. "Damn! She got slappin on de brain! Dat Miss Lawnie, she watchin too much 'Lawn Order, SVU.' "

I say, "She got photographs, de 'ever-dents,' or she think she do. Hell, maybe finga prints! Who know? She want ya ta think dat. She all over de scene. She Miss Lawnie on de spot! She gotta problem! And it ain't me. It HER."

Den I say, "I think she an 'abuse-mint victim,' an she see it in everythin. Fact, I certain."

(My real thinkin, she a Halloween creep, a walkin dead who'd turn yo head white if ya look right at er. She a freakin scary zombie who neva smile, 'cept in de rishun and bitta-ness. Yeck! Ole Lawnie, we call er, she look like she came right up outta de 'ternal lawn at de mouse-leeum.)

##

Mista Rafey, he say, takin his deep breath, "Now what we have in mine fo ya, Ole Micah, is de re-tire mint."

(He ignore what I jes done sed about Ole Scary Lawnie!)

Ole Colonel Yancy, de field massa, he sittin dere, an he say, "No, it don't make ya breath better, de re-tire mint. Heh, heh." He maybe Yance a lot when he lil. Known him fa-eva. He also dance a lot, prance a lot, nance a lot, fancy shmance a lot, back then. He tone it down some since. He always try ta tetch me on ma knee when we sit an talk at tea. I call dat de "perverser tea."

Mista Rafey, he say, "Ole Micah, ya hearda de 'social secure tea?' "

"I hearda chamomille. I doan get around much any mo."

"Dis special 'gum mint secure tea,' now dis give ya money, a lotta money, fo NOT workin."

"It welfare," he say, "but dignified. Ya know, fo de ole folk, like ya self. It give ya money fo de ressa ya life, Ole Man. Ya 63 now. It still give ya money at 93!"

"Shoot! Sign me up!" I say, "My Momma din't raise no idiots!"

He say, "Ya go down to dat Leo O'Brien Fed'ral Buildin on Broadway in de city. Ya tell em I sent ya."

Yancy, de overseer, say, "Ya go down dere, sign up, an dis whole list from Miss Clemmie, it just go away. Ya heah?"

I say, "Huh?"

He Yancin over ta da sideboard fo some tea. My! I glad we in public, among uddas! Miss Elsie comin in an out, bringin de tea fixins, some cakes, some cream, sugar cubes, spoons, napkins.

Ole Yancy add-in somethin. "Ya try ta hang around heah, try ta keep gettin by on ya looks, an dese complaints from Miss Clementina jes keep on comin, like a infantry chargin suicidal up a hill."

"Whoah!" say I.

He drop-in thee lumps an stuh, real wristy. "De battle's over, Micah," say Ole Yance, "tho no lethal shots been fired-- yet! Ya flag's full a holes, ya position's overrun."

Wow, he musta been a veteran a some kinda war. Well, he do work heah, I say ta ma self.

In my heart, then, I jes surrender, I plum give up.

I take my purchase on de table an push ma self up ta standin. "Mista Rafey, suh, I be headin de crews in dese fields fo 26 yeahs. Dat a long time. I ain't harmful. Ya know dat. I ain't neva done harm."

"Not what it say heah." He tap de list of complaints. He look up at me, dat tired look in his eye.

(Ole Rafey, he ain't got a 'vital function.' He doan know what's doin. An he ain't doin nothin! 'Cept actin like a 'thority figger. Figger head. He good at it, though, figgerin. I think he figgerin he got me where he want.)

"Ole Massa," I say, "I so gentle, slow and easy goin, de ducks doan skit away when I go by de pond. Dey think I maybe a tree, barely movin, but somehow closer. I say, 'Mornin Duckses,' dey say 'Whack,' an dey doan stir a'tall, 'cepta dry dey feathers. I like dat willer tree dere, out de window. I big, rooted, swayin weary-like in de winds and breezes."

I neva done say 'nother word ta Massa-- I jes go, take ma leave, close de door.

An dat my farewell, it my "valid diction."

Like in de big story by Mista Chas Dickens dat Miss Susan done read to us in de evenins by de campfire at harvest.

(Ole Missy Elsie, lookin extry-fetchin, she comin in an bringin Massa a Ole Grandad julep, an it comfort Rafey, when he sittin on he arse all day an lookin out de window a his compute-uh. He dreamin a de Carib-bein, where he wish he a bein.)

Yance say, "Now, like dat willer, ya sho could use a haircut, so ya look less, uh, shady. Heh heh heh."

De overseer, he walkin out aside me, ole Yancy-ass. We all call him Nancy, 'hine his back. He an ole faggot with yella-dyed hair, lookin like he think he Gen'ral Custa.

He proud a his "rapey-er wit," an he "wheeled it" like a soljah.

An I exit stage right, I "purse-sued" by de over-bear-er. Jes like dat Tale a Shakespeare dat Miss Sue read ta us also. (She stop an explain de words a lot. She hasta. Or it hardly make sense.)

##

So, Miss Vicky, she heah dis whole story a mine. She say, "Can ya get by, Ole Micah, on de 'social secure tea?' "

I say, "No, not truly, Miss Victoria, 'less I real careful an buy everythin at de Dollar Store, or Save-A-Lot, or A.J. Wright! Or dat Wally Mart bullshit! Plus I gotta young son who want ta go ta school. Tho he ain't nothin but a chucklehead. And school cost plenty."

She say, "What ya gonna do, Micah?"

"I'se a type who doan need much. I doan e'en listen ta de radio, I just hum. I amuse ma self, say, jes sittin on a bench, kickin de 'egg-corns' around while 'scussin de world's prob-ems, or smilin at de sun dat shine on de muddy waters where de river bend. I jes go fo walks an stop an visit wid who eva turn up. I doan need no Mercedes, nor e'en a bike. Jes a ole fishin pole." She smile at Ole Micah, she so kindly-like.

Den I say, "What I need from ya, Miss 'Toria, an all dem udda house slaves an field slaves on dis heah god-fo'saken fuckin plantation, an Lord knows dere's a whole big passel of em, I need a letter from ya's recommendin me to some udda house. Maybe some place where dey ain't so over-strict like heah, wid Miss Clementina."

"She a right crazy sour bitch," I say. "Course, I doan know er. Thought I did."

##

An I go on, 'susual:

"In de letter, Miss, ya should talk about me bein real nice, tho we all know I got my 'limitations,' as Miss Mariah says. (Her 'rizon's endless, tho, cuz she work like de devil hisself to get us in de hot water. Always cookin somethin up-- an it us!)"

"Ya should talk about me bein real energetic, a real go-getta, tho I may a slow down a step a two in de 'motivatin' department of late."

("Missy Nicky, she say, 'He only really do what he want.' Well, what she know anyhow? She wet behine de ear. Practical boan yestaday.")

"Ya should say I'm real organized, efficient-like, e'en downright fussy, if ya must say so ya self."

"An I could bring one a two 'fine assets' to some propa well-set-up-type 'organ-eyes zay-shun,' not like dis here."

"I'm a get-er-done kinda fella, tell em dat, Miss."

"I gotta supplement dem special secure tea monies wid some under de table cash a some kind. Some kinda hustle!"

##

Dat what I say, an Miss Tory, she so sweet, she smile. "My! Oh, Micah!" she say, "The way you go on!"

##

Disclaimer: All the actors in this pantomime are caucasian, suburban, managerial types. It is a memorandum of my being persuaded to retire in 2010 after 26 years of service in a psychiatric hospital. (No black workers of the psych facility are portrayed in this writing, nor black patients.) This is a story of organizational politics, of managers pushing a worker out of slavery-- of course he doesn't want to go!-- and into the freedom of "de re-tire mint." After writing this I realize, Good God Almighty! I am free at last! ~MDM

##

THE BLURBS ARE IN!
Reactions to Michael Dennis Mooney's new story...

"You done lost yo beautiful mine!" ~Dean Lee-Ron Squabell, St. Augustine Community College, dept. of lawn maintenance technology : "Yo mine done 'sploded all over de four walls a Uncle Tom's Cabin, which use been starin at too long! To take a leaf from Rhett Butler, baby, I doan give a freakin flyin f-stop if use re-tired. You ain't cool. An I'se disinvitin ya ta go raftin on de Missisip! It's too late ta 'pologize! Nah, doan say ta me, Sure, Lee-Ron. I tole ya doan call me Shirley-Ron! I doan like it! Cain't y' eva be jes a lil bit nice? Would it kill ya ta be nice?"

"Somehow your writing has become more distinctly offensive than usual." ~Pamela Natnyra Hottentot, adjunct in anal-explosive expressionsism, Russell Sage College. "If this is literature, well, then I'm a Hottentot."

"Is it lit? Is it not lit? These ain't no questions for lit crit! Of course, it's lit, 'slong as it's AHN FIAH! ~Mackey D. Maroney, founder, The Blind Art Critics Association.

~Bee Du Pre of Keeseville Central High School (condemned): "I like how you used everyone's real names to 'protect the innocent.' "

"Typical. Blame the victim." ~Bruce B., recently freed northern slave.

~Zack De Clerk, hospital disinfotech services: "Look, sport, keep your whining out of my in-box, 'kay, and, hey, no thanks for the night shift OT duty I had to pull in deleting this garbage from 400 other in-boxes before Clem got to work in the a.m. I'm glad you're retiring. And don't bother to respond, your e-mail privileges are cancelled..."

"Let me know if you are going to need bail. We don't want Mom to worry." ~Mark Mooney

~Drew Kurtin, Central Florida Univ., dept. of logical positivism and tree surgery: "Whatta they gonna do?! Fire ya?!"

~Ms. Jewely Jules Shining Eyes Great Girl, Sioux Reservation Charter School, Bismark, S.D.: "My sixth grade class plans to do this as a Parent's Day drama skit, 'SUBJUGATION IN THE FIELDS, THE STORY OF AMERICA.' But we want to take out the reference to 'Law And Order, SVU' if you'll permit. (We don't approve of postmodern pastiche in our presentations, as it confuses the young.) We're also thinking of cutting 'welfare,' 'hypersexuals,' --of course, 'bitch,' also the f-bomb-- plus the confusing reference to 'dat Wally Mart b.s.,' etc. You know, call me, because I feel sure I have a children's publisher that will make this into a play script for the schools. Residuals! Who knows, maybe income for life...?"

"Mike, we can't have you come into the building any more. Just turn in your keys and ID to the safety officer at the front desk, mail in your time sheets. Use up your vacation leave, and we'll send the paychecks to your place." ~Ellen Bernier, human services.

~Dr. Fairleigh Kronik: "Michael, I got this e-mail address from your ex-therapist, Gene. I think we could help you with a little prozac, some tranquilizers, and impulse regulators, maybe a lot of the latter at first, to, you know, cool your jets. I know you're used to seeing Pepe Alarcon, but we feel you'll need a stronger guiding hand. You could go for a 28-day stay at the place in Vermont you like, with the clay courts, the fireplace in the reading room. Brattleboro. Soon it'll be peak season! (For leaves, I mean, not mania). And your insurance covers."

"You people's crazier than, I don't know, wolverines or something. Damn!" ~Thompson "Machine-Gun" Mitchey, emeritus of the advanced studies colloquy, Institute for the (Very, Very) Nervous and Inadequate (INI).

On An Internet Scam

2010-08-13T07:40:00.000-07:00

In the city of Lagos, Nigeria
Finance is just way superior!
There they have the rarest of banks
(For which we must give our thanks)
That will wire you a nifty eight mil
You simply follow their drill
Give them your bank account number
Remain cool as a cucumber
Awaiting further instructions
Authorizing wee smallish deductions
To cover the interest, you know,
On your lovely eight million to go
There'll be collect phone calls and faxes
More deductions to cover the taxes
Wait! If you do this you're noggin's number
Than the two guys from Dumb and Dumber
MDM

On August 12, 2010, NYTIMES.COM weblogger and op-ed columnist
Ben Schott gave us a peek into a criminal gang of Nigerians who account
for much of the phishing and scamming e-mails on the net.

The Comparison

2010-07-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

Shall I compare her to winter in Alaska?
What could be more an idyll? Now I ask ya!
She's bracing, like that truck stop in Wasilla
That has such great hot coffee! Killer!
At that depot, along the commercial strip,
Everything tells you, Wasilla's worth the trip.
Come by dogsled, snowmobile, or Piper Cub,
By semi, tractor, or by Russian sub,
And see Wasilla is like her beauty!
We come to praise her, as is our duty.

She is like unto a sunlit glare on icy highway,
Brilliantly impactful, and not in a shy way.
She stimulates, ah, like the smell of diesels,
Perfume to Northern painters at their easels.
Her smile is very like that billboard!
Oversized enough to drive you off the road.
So spellbinding are her powers of speech,
Hairs do stand, as at a truck's hydraulic screech.
And she is, as yon pipeline, conduit of crude,
A link, a rusted one, to all our gross ineptitude.

Michael Dennis Mooney

Recently, former Governor of Alaska and former Mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin, compared herself to Shakespeare. Yup! This came up when reporters criticized her for using the non-word, "refudiate." (AP's "word of the year for 2010," it has sparked the most googling.) Quote: "English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words, too." Okay, Gov, we misunderestimated your linguisticacious-type persipacuity.

This verse appeared as a comment in the NYTIMES.COM weblog, The Caucus, for its post of July 18, 2010, "Palin, Shakespeare, And The Ground Zero Mosque."

Off Shore Drilling

2010-07-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

We should drill giant holes in the earth
for burying our carbon waste

We should cap the holes
with tree plantings

We should live near work
and walk to work
thru a nabe we've made liveable

We should commute by bicycle

Or by way of good boots
like Whitman strolling into town
across the bridge from Brooklyn

We should journey by kayak
like the Inuit

We should forget
about drilling
MDM

A version of this piece was printed in the NYTIMES.COM opinion
section as a comment on the editorial, "A New, And Necessary, Moratorium"
(about stopping deep sea drilling in the Gulf of Mexico) on July 14, 2010.

Socrates In A Hammock

2010-07-09T12:49:00.000-07:00

for Simon Critchley

When Socrates did kick the bucket
He kicked it quite on purpose
He cashed his chips, said fuck it
Drained the prescribed hemlock
Laid down in the golden hammock
Of a philosophic death
As if on vacay in Nantucket
MDM

Vespasienne

2010-07-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

a public pissoir in France, named for the emperor
who first taxed lavatories (A.D. 69-79) Vespasianus

Vespasianus! He was such an anus!
He made lavatoriums pay-toilet emporiums

Since a child they'd called him sphincter
Ole 'Spasianus was such a stinker

Inevitably he'd be an asshole
He believed in giving us a hassle
MDM

Dunch

2010-07-09T07:17:00.000-07:00

Tween dinner and lunch
We have linner -- or dunch! --
From three to five
We munch and munch

Now with lots of wine
We have lots of leverage
For a very light dunch
(If a robust repast)

And with candle light
To enhance our beverage
We have incredible lightness
-- Tho a radder dim linner
MDM

Twixt Spring & Summer, Sprummer

2010-07-09T07:15:00.000-07:00

Sprummer, Sprinter
Sprall and Spring
Now we have names
For everything
MDM

No-Fault

2010-06-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry, dear, but you got fat
I could not put up with that

Your eyes got blear and hair got grey
They were as clear and bright as day

Once you tripped the light fantastic
Now your gait is slightly spastic

Once you looked like Christie Brinkley
Now you're merely old and wrinkly

Once you were spicy, fresh and hot
As appetizers, now you're not

Which brings me to my point perforce
I must have a no-fault divorce

It's not your fault, don't you feel better?
We'll be going by the new law's letter

Michael Dennis Mooney

Note: This month the New York State Legislature was featured in the news for finally considering the
no-fault divorce law California passed in the 80's (the other forty-nine states had enacted it.)
This piece appeared as a comment in the NYTIMES.COM weblog, Room For Debate, on June 18, 2010.

One-Off Dates at Keeseville High

2010-05-29T12:59:00.000-07:00

Cheri La Mar was a bridge too far.
How to go see her without a car?
She decided to stay in town at Peg's
Where I could go get her on two legs.
A schoolboy question: How to date her?
Well, I took her to the movie theater.
There we watched something in the dark.
Her bright hair gave off a golden spark.
Next day: Did you go all the way?
All the way where? Yeah, I walked her home.

Christine Sobol was ideal and noble.
We sat and watched TV on her sofa.
We caught the news on Huntley-Brinkley
Before we went out, her pert nose wrinkly
In consternation at perplexing matters.
This led, I'm afraid, to no talky patter.
We went for a walk in the warm Spring air,
A slight breeze stirring her ash blonde hair.
Then: Same dumb question: How to date her?
Same dumb answer: the downtown theater.
We watched something so censureably stupid
It nearly put her to sleep. It was insipid!
We walked up the hill home. She suppressed a yawn.
She went in and, I'm sure, passed out 'til dawn.
I failed the test of how to date her,
I arrived at a method to sedate her.

With Lucille Blouin, I might've been a shoe-in.
She could've helped a green lad clue-in.
A boy like moi, who was not the smartest,
Might've learned a lot from this make-out artist!
No, put your hand here. No, kiss like this.
But I got no chance at one button on her blouse.
Her father kept her locked-up in his house.
Once when we arranged to meet, furtive,
On the back porch at her friend's, my motive
Was to relieve myself of ignorance -- with bliss.
My God, Lucille could kiss! I stayed an ignoramus.

Julie Anderson, merry eyes handsome
Over freckled nose, her smile gladsome,
Norman Rockwell pigtails, raven bangs,
Loving gazes, a voice that rang
Like a tinkling bell, she was a dream
Sweeter than ice cream. I surely miss her,
Though I never had a chance to kiss her.
We once went to see Sen. Kennedy.
("Bobby," I think, was even shorter than Julie.)
When he did speak, in a high-pitched squeak,
Of ideals of service --this pipsqueak
Who was planning to be the President--
He flashed us his smile, all Pepsodent.
Julie and I smiled back, then we went
For cokes and fries at a luncheonette.

There were others.
That ginger kid, Cathy Burns,
Who went straight where the road turns.
One taught me to dance, Kathleen Young,
So I could take her to the prom.
Mary La Fountain, IQ high as a mountain,
Also a prom date, we stayed up so late.
Once Lil Jill Blaise took me to her place
Where we sat to schmooze and chat.
We babysat the cat ... And on and on.
There were a few others, names I can't remember.
The theme of these one-off dates is ... Nothing!

Nothing happened. 'Cept inside my pate!
There I imagined I'd be suave on dates.
One day I'd be a sophisticate.
I'd pour wine. I'd dress for dinner.
I'd talk of fine things. I'd be a winner.

Now that I am out-of-date,
Soon to be sixty-three,
These reminiscences re-occur to me.

Michael Dennis Mooney

The Keeseville Central High School Class of 1965 had its 45th annual
reunion on July 17, 2010.

What Do Tea Baggers Want?

2010-04-16T06:12:00.000-07:00

I'm with Richard Hofstadter
What the Tea Baggers are all about
Is the paranoid style of American politics

These are the same people who buy a gun
You know, in case they might need to shoot
A minority group member
MDM

"Tea Baggers" appeared as a comment in the Room For Debate
weblog of NYTIMES.COM's post, "What Do Tea Party Backers Want?" on April 15, 2010

Sexual Tensions In The Woods

2010-04-12T14:07:00.000-07:00

for Olivia, an evolutionary biologist

Large male oaks are spewing pollen
Saying Frankly, Scarlet Tanager,
I don't give a flying f-stop!

My eyes are big and rheumy
With the sex tensions in the air
MDM

Alan Sees A Ghost

2010-04-08T13:49:00.000-07:00

Greenspan consults the ghost of Ayn Rand
She goes galumphing through the flat
On stiletto heels, in furs and winding sheets
(His wife would like the place exorcised)

The Ghost of Halloween Past!
It is smoking furiously
A long cigarette holder
The scary angry scowls
The haunting dark eyes
The Sunset Boulevard stares
The spooky Russian accent
The smell of sulphur
(You know she went to hell)
Yes, it is Ayn Rand

She says in her sepulchral voice
Alan, you know you did the right thing!
You allowed the finance markets
To become thoroughly deregulated
You helped bring about capitalist ideals
And the markets regulated themselves

Thus, in a seance, all the lights out,
Is the work of economics done

"You can take the boy out of the cult
But you can't take the cult out of the boy"

Michael Dennis Mooney

Notes:
Alan Greenspan was one of Ayn Rand's co-authors
for her collection of ideological essays, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal."
The famous concluding quote here is from economist Paul Samuelson.

"Alan Sees A Ghost" appeared in the NYTIMES.COM Deal Book weblog
on April 7, 2010, as a comment on their post, "Greenspan Hearing Goes Dark."

As I Lay Dying

2010-03-31T21:55:00.001-07:00

In the richest country on the earth
In the richest country of all time
Still there was a health care dearth
Still there was the party line
Of the corporatists and capitalists

As I Lay Dying
I still had no health care

MDM

Militia Movement

2010-03-31T21:43:00.000-07:00

Militia soldier in the woods
Firing-off live ammo rounds
Defender of our neighborhoods
No need to be underground!

Let us know of your services
So we can come and evaluate
Soon you will be nicely housed
Where you can make the license plate
MDM

"Militia" appeared in the Room For Debate weblog of NYTIMES.COM
in the March 30, 2010 post, "Government And The Militia Movement."

Mike Bloomberg's Commandments

2010-03-28T16:35:00.000-07:00

(for the restaurant industry)

Thou serve'st thy patron too much salt
His hypertension shalt be thy fault

Thou sautee'st his meat in fat
Thou couldst end up in court for that

He spillst hot coffee in his lap
Thou art takin the hit for that

So much sugar in his donut sprinkles!
Thou art liable for his belly wrinkles

He sliced himself with too sharp a knife
Thou couldst soon be doin life

Thy customer's grown fat and squat
Thou has not fed him as one ought

He turnst ugly, way unfashionable
His lack-a-mojo is now actionable

All he canst do is dream-n-snoozeth
Desire for the wife hath been removethed

Now all he wisheth for is food
(Only thing that lifts his mood)

If thou hadst served brown rice and peas
Thou wouldst not be on thy legal knees

Michael Dennis Mooney

"Mike Bloomberg's Commandments" first appeared in the NYTIMES.COM Freakonomics
weblog, on March 25, 2010, as a comment on the post, "As A Part of New Healthcare Law,
Calorie Counts Go Nationwide" by Stephen Dubner.

Fe Si Bu Ke: "Too Feeble To Live"

2009-12-15T20:54:00.000-08:00

To a Facebook Friend

Sorry, you have been unfriended
Your conduct could not be defended
You flooded my page with Facebook spam
You can be so self-important, man
Hey, I was only a Facebook friend
Not like I had any cash to spend
On your trashy and egregious art
Don't take my critique to heart!
But, of course, one knows you wouldn't
As to your talent, you're so deluded
MDM

The Chinese use the phrase, Too Weak To Live, to make fun of Facebook's perceived effete quality.
Also, a group of lexicographers this month named the new verb, to unfriend, word of the year for 2009.

"Facebook Friend" was printed in the Schott's Vocab
weblog of NYTIMES.COM on December 26, 2009.

More "Irish Terrors"

2009-12-15T20:29:00.001-08:00

for Lance Pigeon

L.P., these are two pieces written impromptu
for a woman whom a friend and I met at happy hour one evening:
Her name is Rhonda, she drove a Honda, and she had
driven it here from (the benighted Montgomery County
village) Fonda. So we had our rhymes, ready-made.

Was a woman named Rhonda
Drove a Hybrid Honda
It didn't go vroooom
It went click-click-click
This caused her mind to wanda

My friend didn't like this effort of mine, "You've
totally violated the rhyme scheme!" Says Moi, "I'm okay
about it, I'm fine with destroying the rhyme." So he offered
his idea on how to limn Rhonda:

Was a woman named Rhonda
Drove here in her Honda
She comes from a town
Of lesser renown:
No one's fonda Fonda

I had to hand it to him. That was pretty good. ~MDM

The Renup

2009-12-15T20:29:00.000-08:00

Tiger, Tiger burning bright
In the sex clubs of Orlando
Guess it's time you took a break
And lived with far more candor

Must've been weird, your secret life
Never an unserviced erection
Shouldn't you, though, have taught the wife
Some proper club selection?

No way, in that lie, an expensive driver!
She coulda hacked with a wedge or putter

Now, how to get the wife to, soldier-like, re-up
For another tour? A more remunerative pre-nup?
A healthy chunk of cash up front, ka-ching!
And a great big pink diamond re-nup ring!
You should go big with the forgiveness bling
MDM

The renup is a renegotiated prenuptial agreement, or prenup.
It is hoped this gives the wife much incentive to re-up, to soldier on.

"The Renup" was quoted in a March 17, 2010 article in The Bygone Bureau
on writers of light verse who send their writings to NYTIMES.COM weblogs,
"The Comment-Box Poets of the New York Times."

The Bygone Bureau is an online journal of cultural commentary:
http://bygonebureau.com

A Post Card To The White House

2009-11-24T15:49:00.000-08:00

President Obama, you have found your Waterloo,
I'm afraid.

It's name is Kandahar, the Taliban region of the
Afghan hinterland which you want to pacify.

Like Lyndon Baines Johnson's Vietnam,
Like George W. Bush's Iraq,
You've found yourself an unpopular war to push for.

You're proposing a big increase in occupation troops,
And a plan that will keep us there for years.

And you had been on your way towards becoming a good president.

Interesting, and you'd just won the Nobel Peace Prize!

Now that futures in missile manufacturing will spike on Wall St.,
I guess you can give the Nobel committee's medallion back.

I voted for you, Sir, but I'll vote for a third party next time.

We need a working families who sends their sons to war party.
And we need, as you had promised, to bring the troops home.

Michael Dennis Mooney

Our Warm Novermber

2009-11-19T15:39:00.000-08:00

So far, I'm enjoying global warming.
I'm looking forward to seeing palm trees in New Jersey.
I'm going to buy some Hawaiian shirts.
Later, when seas engulf the higher ground,
not so much.
MDM

Ayn Rand, the tell-all

2009-11-09T14:00:00.000-08:00

In the first week of November, 2009, two new $30-plus bios on Ayn
Rand (1905-1982) were brought out.

First of all, what is ethics?
Why do we need ethics?

A little ignorance can be a dangerous thing,
Especially when promoted in a bestseller.

You will not learn a thing on ethics
Reading Ayn Rand and her Neitzschean code.

You might learn a few things by reading the life
Of this writer of some execrable bestsellers.

##

You will learn, derivatively, of Neitzsche's longing for pagan days,
When Alexander sat, for a hot disracted minute, at Aristotle's knee.

Then he laid waste to the world
In the name of Athena and the elite in power.

Alexander, it appears, was insane, manic-depressive
And alcoholic, but nothing if not "individualistic."
Nobody would question him. He ruled the world.

He loved a good fight, and bringing death to Persians,
And, moving further East, death to Asians who did not surrender.
Most of them promptly did, as his reputation had, ahem, preceded:
Basically, they'd been getting in his goddamned way!

None of this was Aristotle's fault.

The first great philosopher, A.,
Taught the first great bad student, A.,
And A is not A.

##

Ayn Rand 's "values" were the Neitzschean ego rampant
And behaving abominably!, the more badly behaved,
The more outrageously so, the more "individualist."

Neitzsche's ideal was the classical world
Of the few wealthy powerful men,
The small aristocracy in power,
And let the rest, the people, the masses, be damned.

As we know, ethics is the opposite of this.
It is because of "elites" and their misdeeds that we need ethics.

Neitzsche was mentally ill, obviously,
Organic brain damage, via syphillis.
He wasn't wrapped too tight to begin with.

##

Ayn Rand was just the most recent
Of all of Aristotle's, well, not-so-great pupils,
She had little intention of being much good at this;
She intended to promote herself, her books,
Her late-Victorian prejudices, nostalgias,
Her reactionary abhorrence to mid-century change,
So she advocated Aristotelian reason.
So what?!

She'd learned of Aristotle while studying math ed
At Petrograd U. She was just an average cuckoo.
She also looked remarkably like Hitler in a dress.
(It was always Halloween at her house.)

Diagnosis: Narcissistic personality disorder,
Plus its attendant paranoia and substance abuse.

She never met a stimulant she didn't like,
Caffeine, nicotine, bennies (amphetamines.)
Sex.
Hilariously, she had quite a thing for young men.

She ended-up with heart disease, lung cancer,
Benzedrine addiction, depression, and a marriage
That drove her husband to drink.

Further Dx: The eminent psychologist, Albert Ellis:
"She's a big fucking baby!"

These items are not part of the official hagiography
From The Ayn Rand Institute.

##

So, there's more:
Hitler in a dress was married to an out-of-work actor.
She met a nineteen-year-old who was tall and virile.
He had a great idea, a lecture bureau. She'd make a mint in fees!

He moved to New York to set it up.
She (married, remember) moved to New York to follow him,
And she moved from a beautiful California home.
She ended up in freakin' Murray Hill in pursuit of his booty.

He, the kid, set up the lectures. Voila, she turned into a celebrity!
An eminence! The leader of a movement that has the answers!
(The "movement" consisted of his cousins, in-laws, acquaintances.)
She lauded the kid, encouraged him to settle, marry the girlfriend.

##

Then Ayn Rand beds him!
"Oh, sweet mystery of life, I've found you!"
She lets her husband know, she lets his wife know:
They will simply have to tolerate
What these two Neitzschean bigshots are up to.
He is twenty-five years younger,
She is 49, he 24.
She just wants what she wants.

Though newly married, he's tied to the moneymaker that gives the lectures.
Then, for relief, he enters a relationship with a model who simply likes him.
It's a good thing everyone is so busy with appointments, lectures,
Publication deadlines, graduate courses, theses, lacy lingerie sales.

He's now in a parallelogram!

(The original triangle was a stretch - his wife was utterly elegant!
Svelte, a blonde, and a treasure, a devoted love. Ayn Rand was a crone.)

Ayn Rand condemns him for not taking "values" seriously,
For not taking reason, the intellect, seriously, and ethics.
Ha!
She drums him out of the lecture bureau business.

##

We can take all of Ayn Rand's "teachings,"
The thousand-page books, etc.,
And we can compare them to this story.

And we can ask,
What is ethics?
Why do we need it?
What is philosophy?
Why do we need it?

What we don't need is this pretentious fool, Ayn Rand.

We don't need the $30-plus bio-tomes!
Wait til they're remaindered for $3.95.

Buy them on Kindle, and save all that paper.

Michael Dennis Mooney

##

A note on Ayn Rand's development: she studied math, logic, philosophy,
and history in St. Petersburg (which had become Petrograd, later Leningrad.)
She was fascinated with the rigor of mathematics and its essentially Aristotelian
logic: A is A, B is not A, etc. She later came to assign every paranoia-tainted
and hate-filled opinion she ever formed to the realm of the "logical" and "rational."
And she was obsessed with demonstrating her "logic" with long trains of
deductive argumentation from entirely spurious premises. (She was the Evel
Knievel of leaping to conclusions, as one of her friends said.)

Thus her advocacy of Neitzschean egotism was "rational" self-interest,
(but Neitzschean values are, at their heart, brutal, callous, grossly irrationalist.)
Her pro-business advocacy presented her as a "new intellectual"
for capitalism (not a mere hot-headed, reactionary crank.)
Her advocacy of a romanticist sensibility in literature
(though romanticism is known for its brooding emotionalism, its Byronic heroes)
is presented as "serene" and "joyous," even "realistic." Her "philosophy" was a frankensteined
patchwork of contradictions, and you could see the really bad stitching
everywhere. She was a piece of work. Her "philosophy" was propaganda,
pure and simple, for the self-interest of the business culture, and though it
was often eloquent it was not literature, it was mere good, slick propaganda.
She was a Hollywood screenwriter, an image-maker, at heart. She was all Hollywood,
plus much ultraslick Madison Ave. She was the laureate of the self-involved self.
Which also makes her laureate of the teen-aged, deludedly self-important, self.
Grownups do not, cannot, read her.

Her writing style was, oddly, all about oratory, because all of her prominent characters
were speechifiers. And in her life she was known to hold forth endlessly.
Her Saturday "parties," attended by followers in her Manhattan apartment, were all about her
seminarizing and debating until dawn. These events were reportedly dreadful, listening
to this debate-team bully on benzedrine who was convinced she was the answer to
all questions, as she drilled arguments at devotees with over-strenuous attempts at
syllogizing.

I saw her "lecture" one time. When she was walking out afterwards, in
an ankle-length mink and a black dress and heels, a young student asked her
a question politely. Rand denounced the student in a furious rant
for having asked a question that challenged Rand's thinking. She looked
exactly like Hitler in a dress, angry, dark eyes, dark hair, hateful, spoiling
for a fight. She spent her youth in one of the first totalitarian states of the
20th century, so perhaps she can be forgiven her anger, hate, and paranoia,
as her family had been deprived of their prosperous business and their home by the mob rule of
the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath. She had little understanding of the Western world,
except that we love a good communism scare, as did she. MDM

The 21st Century Proverbs ~ Michael Dennis Mooney

2009-11-04T07:00:00.000-08:00

The meek shall inherit the earth
when the arrogant are done despoiling it.
(The BP disaster.)

##

A fool and his money are a friend indeed.
A friend in need should get a bank loan.
(The Goldman Sachs scandal.)

##

A profit has no honor in mortgage-backed securities.
In his own time, a prophet cannot be heard in the din of prophesying.

##

Absolute power is a joy forever, and a thing of beauty!
Constant opinion polling corrupts absolutely.
(Cheney and various Neocon Machiavels.)
##

All work and no play makes Jack a John D. Rockefeller.
John D. Rockefeller has servants throw parties for him.

##

Behind every great man is a codependent.
(Eliot Spitzer.)
A woman's place is in the driver's seat.

##

When a star falls an angel goes to hell.

##

When a star falls in Hollywood he goes to rehab.
From there he goes straight to Spagos in a limo for a three-picture deal at lunch.
(Robert Downey, Jr.)

##

The new broom knows not of what it sweeps.

##

A stopped clock and Glen Beck are both right twice a day.
And Beck is having a stupid argument with the clock.

##

Rock stars give passes to girls who're fun lasses.

##

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a stupid question.
(Bush's Iraq policy)

##

A penny saved is worth about two birds in the bush.

##

The old saw no longer makes the cut.

These "perverbs" originally appeared on October 23, 2009 in the NYTIMES.COM
Schott's Vocab weblog, as contributions to a competition on proverb-mashups.

My favorite proverbial sayings from recent decades:
Dorothy Parker was challenged to say something funny on horticulture and...
"You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."
Also Woody Allen's phys ed wisdom is a fave: "Those who can't do teach.
Those who can't teach teach gym." Lastly, S.J. Perleman:
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog,
it's too dark to read."

On Mt. Oulipos

2009-10-29T06:48:00.000-07:00

On Mt. Oulipos Harry Matthews
Is depicted in his statues
Wearing laurels on his bald head
A collar and a tie

He's inspecting an expensive vintage
A marble glimmer in his eye

His carven slacks and coat are bulging
Over massive shoulder and thigh

Many a weighty tome is found
On deep and sturdy shelves behind

Italo Calvino, Surrealistes
Old Andre Breton, in embossed leather
Perec, Queneau, men of letters
Stacked-up wide and high

At his feet (in marble Ferragamos)
Are chiseled tablets -- and they're missing
The letters O and A! -- luckily, he could use an E
He was also allowed a U and I

"THUNK YE, SHITE'S VIECUB ~ HURRY MUTTHEWS"
Graven text reads cryptically

Michael Dennis Mooney

Notes: Harry Matthews, the sole American "Oulipian," was
recently lionized in a NY TIMES's "Schott's Vocab" feature.
Ala Georges Perec, who notoriously wrote a novel without
the letter E, Oulipians write their way around certain self-imposed limitations.
How Perec listed his name on the title page is uncertain to me.
Perhaps P*r*c, G*org*s? MDM

News Haikus

2009-10-11T15:07:00.000-07:00

all the news that fits in 17 syllables

NEW VOCAB

He's hurled from wi-fi cafe,
He'd squat for hours with steeped tea:
"ABSQUATULATE!"

##

CAN I HAVE A SLICE?

Crowed grey financiers,
"TARP worked! Staunched the starving!"
Hey, um, I could eat.

##

POW WOW

Chief McChrystal, he
See far, want heap big war surge.
Prez: Thanks for your views.

Michael Dennis Mooney

Confusionisms

2009-10-11T14:08:00.000-07:00

Got up 'bout noon,
day off, on a fryday

Smelt the fish
cookin in the fat

Why have coffee?
So I had the decapitated

Just for the smell of it,
the creamy arf & arf

But I felt like my head
was a foot above my neck

Wrote haiku parodies
for the contest in the paper

Then another & another,
can't do just one

They're like the chips, salty
fresh from the deep-fry basket

I was on the tip top pinochle of excess
I was in the chips, also in the smelt

And on the net

Michael Dennis Mooney

"Confusionisms" was printed in the Schott's Vocab
weblog of NYTIMES.COM on October 9, 2009.

Kompromat*

2009-10-04T13:57:00.000-07:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer,
Once an Organized Crime resister,
Succumbed to the hook
Of a call girl, helped cook
The crime ring's books
With small wired payments to a dummy corp.,
Yet he never got his day in court!

The Feds booked the appointment-booker
Who'd booked his trysts with a comely looker,
Yet not the Gov. nor well-paid hooker!
Feds had just enough legal juice
In interstate commerce statutes
To prosecute the escort service
But not "prosecutor" nor his prostitute!
Neither this John nor his Jilly!

Oh, when he faces Kompromat
It gives a Gov. the willies!
Now he is a "prostitutor,"
It gives a Gov. the willies.

So the Gov. has to deal with Silda Wall.
She surely could have killed em all,
The Gov., the whores, the perverts.
It's enough to make a wife nervous.

Poor willowy Silda gets to see the "cute"
Face and figure of the hot-eyed prostitute
On the cover of every paper and mag,
While she dutifully stands by her man.
One has to assume she could kill him.
Being paparrazed is such a drag.

Still, the former prosecutor,
Now a notorious prostitutor,
Helped fell another crime ring
With his, um, peccable timing.
Pay cable might've met his needs nicely.

He teaches, now, at City College,
He shares the great depth of his knowledge.
"He didn't screw me!"
Say his new students, duly.
"He'd make a fine senator, truly."

(*Note: Kompromat is compromising materials, e.g.,
the bank records of his wire transfers to a crime ring.)

"Kompromat" appeared on NYTIMES.COM as a comment on the Fashion and Style Section
article posted April 7, 2010, "Eliot Spitzer's Long Road To Redemption."

Sesquipedalian Vocab

2009-09-22T15:23:00.000-07:00

Higgledy-piggledly,
Fierce Andrew Carnegie
Bought-up Great Mesabi,
The giant iron ore range,
Then told the economists,
"Cut out the middleman!"
Disintermediate!
Was the word they then used.
MDM

"Sesquipedalian" was printed in the Schott's Vocab
weblog of NYTIMES.COM on September 18, 2009.

Intermovies

2009-09-18T08:36:00.000-07:00

I miss intermissions and such things.
Intermovies, I don't know.
I do like intermittent wipers, though.
MDM

Intermovie refers to a film within a film in current cinema.

Boychik

2009-09-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

On CNN he was feckless
Now on FOX News highly reckless
He without reck
Also no feck
We refer, of course, to Glen Beck

Beck called Obama a racist
Now advertisers are racing
To join in a boycott
Of this noodlehead boychik
His accountant works just with erasers
MDM

Health Care Sinks Again

2009-09-17T10:21:00.000-07:00

Senator Max Baucus is
To Health Care Caucuses
As Bud Lite is to Beer.
By the time our Maxie
Has pulled down a draft
It's too watered down
To bring us much cheer.
MDM

"Health Care" was printed in the Schott's Vocab weblog of
NYTIMES.COM on October 2, 2009.

My Dear, It's Pronounced Bouquet!

2009-08-22T17:18:00.000-07:00

(Hyacinth "Bucket," the sitcom character)

On vacay in Nantouquet
Worthy Hyacinth Bouquet
Caused a whale to hightail it
When she fixed her gaze on it
He raised flukes, dove, and said F-l-l-louquet! (blub)
MDM

"Bouquet!" was printed in the Tierney Lab
weblog of NYTIMES.COM on October 5, 2009.

Lament Of A Red Sox Partisan

2009-08-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

Oh, no!
Say it aint so!
The Yankees won
four games in a row!

They beat the Beaneaters
from up in Boston
This Summer's season
will be exhaustin.
MDM

Psalm twenty-three-and-a-half

2009-06-22T14:31:00.001-07:00

Wellness, thou art my Lord and Shepherd, and I shalt not want. My stamina shalt be likened unto that of the camels, as I runneth in the sun. Thus shalt I be able to work long hours, never tiring, and make six figures easy.

Wellness maketh me to jog through green pastures along a path of asphalt. He leadeth beside the still waters of Poland Springs. I wouldst pour the healing waters over my head, whilst perspiring profusely. It drippeth down my shirt, it trickleth into my shorts, and, yea, I shalt rejoice.

Wellness leadeth me in the ways of the 3k, also the 5K, and I aspireth even unto the marathon, though the triathalon is for the cuckoo.

Yea, though I mayst trod aerobic mid the valley of the shadow of the pot belly, I shalt fear no snacks, nor even the evil french fries, for now I partaketh not.

Wellness, thou art with me, the carrot stick is my rod, the celery is my tender stalk, and they comforteth me. Though not like a nap after loaded nachos, as in the days of the Gomorrah Club.

No wonder, I doth aver, the Sodomites there didst turn to salt, as their diet verily didst bear so much of the sodium molecule.

Wellness, thou prepareth a table for me in the presence of preservatives. Thou heapeth it with pomegranates, rich in antioxidants, also the lycopene of the dark blue berry. My cup runneth over with green tea, and, lo, it leaveth a nasty ring upon thy table.

Thou annointest my greens with oil of the olive branch, whereupon a little salt of the sea goeth a long way, mixed with fresh cracked peppercorn and vinegar of balsam, maybe some tomatoes dried in the sun.

Surely Wellness and Prosperity shalt follow me all of my days. I shalt live in the mansion of the gated community in Northern New Jersey for all time, or until a subprime mortgage crisis followed by a Democratic administration.

Michael Dennis Mooney

State Worker Rap

2009-06-17T19:16:00.000-07:00

Roll outta bed
get in to work late.

Don't have to be on time
cuz I work for the state

I'm a state worker
MDM

Wm Shakesp Tweets

2009-06-15T19:09:00.000-07:00

U R 2 me
a 4 branched
flowered tree
of cherries ripe
& not 1 canker
pure delight
MDM

Dese Heah's Some Dem Tweeps Fuh Youse

2009-06-10T14:29:00.000-07:00

Ah heah how you gots one dem whaddycalls-its.
You knows, wheah dey jams da whole message in, in a few woids...

Hey, Ah heahs youse more busier den a one ahm paypuh-hanguh
Wid da prickly rash. Ya doan have time to antsa no phone!...

So peoples dey gotta send da message wid text
So you can READ da phone youse 'salready yappin on...

Sorta takes da joy outta it, 'swhat Ahm talkin bout, whadda youse tinkin?!
Dis idda phone yer already yappin on, already readin on, already messaging on...

Also already takin voicemails on, like twenty of em or more,
Deys stacked up like da jets hovering or La Guardia...

An dis is why peoples gotta WRITE to ya on yuh phone!
'Cept you gotta tell em, Domebeezetoopid and write a book...

Hey, doan write no Great American Novel, willya,
Ya Gavoone! Hey Ahm onna phone ovah heah!...

Den dey gotta write brief-like, hafta send dem tweeps,
'Slike em olefashioned tellhergrams. I sent dese heah to yo Bum Berry...

'Cuz ya still a Bum. ~ Ahm still ...Yer Brutha, Mikey...
('Course I doan do brief, eggsackly, so, me, Ah send you nine.)

Michael Dennis Mooney

##

[Notes on Common Slurvian Words: heah=hear, dey=they, youse=you is, you are, or yours, Ah=I,
paypuh=paper, doan=don't, antsa=answer, tinkin=thinkin, Domebeezetoopid=Don't be stupid,
Wheah=where, Ahm=I'm or arm, idda=is the, dese heah=these here, onna=on the, tweeps=tweets,
and tweets can be choips, twoips, tweeps, twerps, twips, twits, eggcetra.]

How Does She Menage?

2009-05-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

"This week on New Urban Lifestyles Radio we interview
sex-expert Marian Aspell-Clute on the new gelatinous dildoes;
does she recommend them? Radio, plus imagination."

##

For one Marian Aspell-Clute
Few things are absolute.
She's so relativistic
She's slob-solipsistic,
Jump-the-shark narcissistic to boot.

Not content to be just homosexual,
She's also latently heterosexual; Right!;
Give her time, troop detachments,
Door knobs, tool attachments,
None, none!, will estrange her affections.

Sheep, goats, cats sans claws,
Beef tongue, rabbit paws,
Insistently vibrating cellulars,
Cylindrical vegetable cellulose,
All, ah!, will be part of her cause.

So sex-expert Aspell-Clute,
Sipping OJ and Absolut,
While dining out at brunch,
Said, I do like to carpet-munch,
But I'd, too, like to toodle a flute.

So she got her new cute Mr. Clute,
Her latest menage recruit;
Then boyfriend and girlfriend both "faced" her,
And she had a child by a turkey baster,
Quoth Mr. M. Mooney, Poetaster.

##

Envoi:

Marian, how do you manage?
With both a hubba and a wife?
Said she:
I manage menages by giving massages,
Also by serving Bordeaux et Fromages,
Thus softening the tension and strife.
La, la,
Quieting tension and strife.

Michael Dennis Mooney

Very Like A Meadow

2009-04-17T17:51:00.000-07:00

Yes, she is like a meadow,
Soft as fresh green grasses
Lit with dappled sun,
Cool, under leafy boughs,
Redolent of flowers,
Fragant of fresh air,
Sweet as the rushing stream
Fallen from the hills,
Quicksilver of thought
As the stream's darting trout.
She's very like a meadow,
She who was named Lea.
MDM

hokkus

2009-04-11T11:16:00.000-07:00

Blossom torn from bough,
a blown-away umbrella.
Spring. Torrents of rain.

##

A Rothschild counting money,
Ones and quarters, stacks.
Office of the laundromat.

MDM

Colonial Conditions

2009-02-12T11:14:00.000-08:00

Islamabad
Is not so bad.

Pashtunabad
Is veddy bad.

Peshawar's
In civil war.

Karachi's
Hot and scratchy.

You know I'm not a quitter,
But I quit if I go to Quetta;

The market crawls with jihadi,
Perfect place to hide a Quaeda.

Though, what a fun job
To go to work in Punjab,

To which Lahore's
A fragrant open door!
MDM

Special Ambassador Richard Holbrooke had just
returned from a comprehensive tour of Pakistan in February 2009.

Mr. Bush Is Back In Texas, 1/21/09

2009-01-23T12:50:00.000-08:00

Mr. Bush is back in Texas.
He'll write a book. "I cut the taxes."

(Well, not yours. The corprate honchos'.)
He's never read a book, my hunch is.

But he'll write a book. "I saved freedom."
Oil fields, under Hussein's thumb, he freed em.
MDM

He Writes A Note to His Hostess

2009-01-09T10:17:00.000-08:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

A thank you - Oh, thank you! - for Momma Lou Who,
Who in making our feast knew just what to do:

Thank you for crescent rolls, buttery and yeasty,
For roasted red beast, nice and rare, extra beasty.

For hot smashed potatoes volcanic with gravy,
Rich lumpy beast gravy so thick that it's wavy.

Pearly white onions and sweet baby peas.
I'm allergic to vedge, but I'll have some more, please.

I'll ward off reactions with morsels of something
With gravy. Steaming forkfuls of stuffing!

I'll wash it all down with sparkling grape juice
And kiss your sweet fingers, dipped (of course) in au jus.

You know, each tasty mouthful would be a real loss
Without bright piquant relish of cranberry sauce.

Plus, thank you for photos of MeMe and MaMa,
Of bald Uncle Nerkle, Baby Cricky and LaLa.

For Christmas Feast music, for candles at table,
For wide screen TV that's hooked to the cable.

Thank you for gifts. (Also, thank you for socks.)
For ranks of dark chocolates arrayed in a box.

For bored games and whirlies and gadgets and widgets;
They'll keep me distracted when I get the fidgets.

For laughter so merry, ululations of joy
That I have not known since I was a Grinch Boy!

After Gilbert And Sullivan

2008-07-13T14:51:00.000-07:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

How much food should a lifeboat load,
should her mother-boat sink at sea?

She should pack enough hardtack
for a week on the water;

She should also carry water,
'cause we can't drink pee!

And be provisioned with chocolate,
so we don't go crazy;

Ditto jam and powdered milk,
and we must have tea!

When the sun is blazing hot, we will brew our tea!

A Letter To My Prospective Therapist

2007-11-13T21:57:00.000-08:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

Dear Judith,

Here's what I did on summer vacation.

I pretty much ruined someone's life.

Well, that says it all, I think. Details,
Though, are what you will want.

So, I met this truly lovely woman.
And on the internet! - she wrote to me!
Friend of hers knew me, told her to write me.
She was so brave. Told me all about her writing.

I didn't know what to make of her.
She was planning to visit my town
To meet our mutual friend's plane,
So I phoned her to discuss the plan.
I wanted to meet him with her, I said.
We started talking, I found I liked her
For her warmth, her being "a friend to man."

We talked everyday on the phone.
Our friend's plans did not work out.
He was too busy, he never did visit.
Meanwhile we sent e-mails by dozens,
She phoned me every day at work.
I phoned every night when I got home.
We talked and wrote all through July.
Finally, I said I had to visit her.

Could she put me up on the living room couch?
She trustingly, but carefully, assented.
I could visit, but her place was tiny.
August, her upstairs rooms would be an oven.
I said I would just cope with her little place.
We'd go out, she said, do outdoor things.
The beach at Lake Ontario, bike trails.

We wrote and phoned for another week.
We started to sense we were in love.
She sent me a photo of herself. Beautiful.

I must say she looked brave, and yet afraid.
That photo broke my heart, I quailed at going.
But I set out in my car across the state.
We had tea and crackers in her little kitchen.
I joked about her "Hobbit habitation."

We went out for Asian food at India House.
She so delicately had me serve her food.
We talked about everything we'd been saying
In e-mailed letters and late night calls.
We fell in love in person. I fell in love.

We spent the next three weeks together.
I joked we should alert The Guinness Book.
The World's Record Longest Date!
(Which included sensationally long kisses!)
After my few days' stay, she came with me
And lived in my house, while I went to work.

Finally, the end of August, she had to go.
She had to resume her "gradual school,"
Another joke, an allusion to "Garp:"
She's "gradually studying everything."

Still we saw each other. I drove to her
On my days off. She came to me by train
When weekly seminars concluded.

She met my son. I met her mother.
I met her friends, Lynda, Mike and Cindy.
I met her neighbors, Rachel and Ethan.
I met her landlady, Donna? Bonnie? I forget.

So then I decided I needed to move close.
I got a job in her town with much inquiry.
I rented a big house, over the phone!
I showed up at midnight, all I owned
In a UHaul truck, and my car in tow.

We entered soon a new phase of the moon.
And this is where you come in, Dear Judith.

We were no longer "seeing each other."
We were living together in my new place.
There's an art to living together, yes?
And it must be said, I haven't learned it.
I wasn't bad at whispering sweetnesses
Under the glow of the bedroom skylights.
(To hear her tell it then, I was a great lover.
I take no credit. She's a great responder.)

But after a long day at the strange new job,
Or an anxious slog though my mounting bills,
I wasn't exactly, well, Mr. Sensitive.
The romance started to grow paler.
I got moody, preoccupied with worry.

We were still frantically trying to get high,
Trying to get high on her, on me, each day.
Trying to get just as high the next day too.
We didn't create ways to pause, take time,
To take moments for ourselves, and get away.

Our mutual friend said our love was like a rocket
That rose straight up to the sky and kept rising.

One horrible day we'd had a skirmish
Over comments I'd made unthinkingly.
She'd brooded about it all day, I could tell.

When I came home I sensed her icy reserve.
I tried with all my wits to resolve things,
But we ended up in bitter arguments,
And I told her, "Shut up!" I told her, "Leave!"
I hurt her. I scared her with my anger.
I bellowed, "Just shut the fuck up!"
The rocket, still rising, exploded into pieces.

I have not seen my blue-eyed angel since.
She refuses to answer when I call.
Judith, tell me, what can I do?
How do I tell her I did not know
I was causing fear in her brave heart?

The summer is over and I'm still here
On the chilly shores of Ontario.
Soon I will see its legendary snows.
They'll be blowing in off Erie too.

I haven't a friend to tell this to.
Tell me, Judith, what to do.

Tell her you can perform miracles
In therapy. You can perform, indeed,
A personality transplant on this curmudgeon, me.

Mirror

2007-11-11T07:41:00.000-08:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

In your face
I see my face.

In your felicitous grininng
I see that I've done well.

In your head thrown back,
That I've made you laugh.

In your lightning blue eyes,
That I've accelerated you,
Your wishes and dreams,
With my full of shit brown.

In your serenity,
My acceptance of your folly
And my own.

Lung Function

2007-11-08T10:50:00.000-08:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

My father's lungs,
when it came to the end,
were a ragged glory,
a failed flag above
a defeated fortress.

Just sitting in that chair,
he breathed like a runner
running up hills,
but he could not keep up
with his inner runner.

He breathed his last
when every inner runner
in every cell in his body
collapsed and sagged at once.

A flag that can find no wind
is wrapped in a cloth, buried.

A pale, perspiring runner
sets out in the ghastly dawn
to alert overweening battalions
bristling with armaments
in the rear positions.

She Tells A Story Of How They Met

2007-09-19T09:54:00.001-07:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

I have always believed
love is a journey,
not a destination.

When the Purple Space Shuttle of Love
landed in my city, my face went slack.
I knew it was coming for me.

It touched down on the Thruway, near Exit 45.
Later it was seen taxiing up I-490 West.
Though it was rush hour, few drivers seemed to notice
it rolling forward in the long streams of traffic.
It went up the ramp at Exit 17,
like a prefab house on wheels, Wide Load,
taking up two lanes, no one tried to pass.
It took a left on Goodman, a right on Caroline,
a left on Seager, and pulled up in front of my house.

The pilot got out, he was taller than I had guessed
from our correspondence. I had him come in.
We had tea and crackers on the uncomfortable futon
of first acquaintance. I could tell from his shy happiness,
as he looked longingly past the fronds of the peace lily,
he'd invite me to travel to his world,
and, until he could secure a job here,
we'd shuttle back and forth on weekends and days off.

Dying Alone

2007-02-08T20:24:00.000-08:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

When our friend Tom suddenly died
It was oddly dignified.

He died like an Indian in a forest alone,
In his chair, mid his forest of books, at home.

He got home from the grocery store,
Sat in his chair, then keeled to the floor.

Complaining of deathly pangs, quite ill,
He'd been subsisting on antacid pills.

Receipts in groceries rotting on the counter
Say he lay there longer than he ought to.

A mouse sniffed Giant Tom when he died,
A toppled monumental Buddha on its side.

His cat did mew, his puppies cried,
When their gentle, jolly Thomas died.

He was their shade, their shelter.
Now he's felled, they're helter skelter.

Our long delayed winter was transmogrified,
As snow fell by the inch, the foot, the yard.

Tom was a writer. He would have said,
It looks like my rejection letters stacked.

February in upstate, and snow blew and blew
Off Erie and Ontario.

Season of Reunions, 2006

2006-12-26T16:27:00.000-08:00

leaves from Grandma's photo album

by Michael Dennis Mooney

I
Sarah Spinner and Brendan Murphy

Now that it's the season of reunions, news
Of kids, their creeps and crawls, their coos,
Their standing with assists, their chews
On solid food, indeed their very snooze,
Is all the headlines. Such trumpetings of pride!
One thinks childbirth hadn't yet been tried.

Congrats to brand new grandma, Joan,
Also new great grandma, Mary.
I write in silence, sitting here alone,
That never was such loud joy!, nary!,
Than when new Mamas Chris and Kary,
One in September, one in February,
Borned their new bairns -- such felicity! --
Sarah J. Spinner, and one Murphy, Brendy T.

She's so possessed of her grandkids' glories,
Grandma revels entirely in their stories;
And at Christmas, as she deals out the pelf,
You'd think she gave them birth herself.

Congrats, too, to grand pop, Michael Arthur,
Of Murphy's All, the original, the author.

II
Christine and Bryan Spinner

Also news in 2k6,
Chris has come to live here in the sticks
Of Darkest Albany, specifically Clifton Park,
Where daily she would rise up, in the dark,
And head off, in her lab coat, to fight crime.
(Also, you know, white coats keep off grime.)
Fresh from the city with her new credential
From Johns Hopkins, she's snagged both residential
And career positions, and dragged along her Bryan,
Who is so employable, I'm not lyin,
You could drop him down in Istanbul --
He'd start a Turkish computer school.

III
Brian and Karyn Murphy

Now that he's in a relationship, married again,
Working two jobs, in possession of a minivan,
My guess is Brian's sold his Mitsubishi.
So keeping up the sporting look's not easy;
His new Tiger Woodsy growth of beard,
Though on a white boy it's a little weird,
Goes nicely with a Nike cap,
(With bouncy Brendan sittin on his lap,
It just does the trick!) Plus, admiring Karyn,
Smiling at his side, the soul of caring,
Lends him, by osmosis, airs of glamour,
Her Athenian looks so much the eyes enamour.
She, all day, works with bad boys from the hood;
Then comes home to find her two boys so good.
She gets quite wearied in her role as counselor,
Then dearly needs someone to counsel her.
Which prompts the question, "What About Brian?",
Title for a drama, it's about a sensitive man.

IV
Chris Spinner and Brian Murphy
siblings, close in age, twins in spirit

These two are like a mixed doubles team!
Just try to get a shot in the space between --
He's quietly stepped through it with a volley
Or she has cranked a two-fister up the alley.
And now that they're both living here,
It's the geographic center of our sphere.

V
Pam Hollinde and Jack Mooney

Also at the center, here in Smallbany,
Pam and Jack, who mean it all to me,
Are engaged in off center undertakings
Of all kinds. Taking trips, making paintings,
Studying Tai Chi meditation, karate,
And generally anything rather arty.

Jack's now such a big kid at fifteen,
A nearly six foot eating machine.
He's gaining real competence at school,
Getting 90's and high 80's as a rule.
An honor roll kid, now that's my boy.
I'll get him the new X-Box for a toy!

Vi
Paulie Paul and Monkey Moe Mooney

Last year they went to Harry Potter town,
And crossed that London Bridge of great renown!
Never found Diagon Alley. They're still proponents
Of British fiction's magic, against all opponents.
This year from Hawaii they sent coconuts
To grandma, shaved, painted, mailed, addressed:
The mailman was surrealistically impressed!

Paulie dressed for Halloween in a duct tape suit,
Complete with top hat. His newly lanky body cute
In a silver attired Tommy Tune on Broadway way.
Maura, dressed as a boy, a more than average cutey,
Could not disguise her flaming teenage beauty.

Both violinists, Maura's in an orchestra,
Paulie does fiddling gigs in a local bar.

VII
Barbara Goldberg and Mark Mooney

Mark found himself 'tween a hard place and Iraq
When Barbara decided to get up her back
And veto further adventurous glory,
Though he was getting many a good story.
She'd rather have her kids' daddy back.

Now he's back, he's interviewed for TV,
Which, if you blinked, alas, you didn't see,
Thus is fame's cruel, chill inconstancy.
(If you need to see it, I've got it on DVD.)

Then real peril, a brush with the big CA,
And an equally perilous surgery.
(Phew! Glad things turned out okay.
He can trot the globe another day.)
Meanwhile Barbara handled inquiries
Like a PR pro, and put our minds at ease.

Dere is Joy again in Joysey!
Let exultations be truly noisy!

VIII
Dick and Theresa Santor
a little footnote from the Adirondack foothills

Dick and Theresa are moving back to Plattsburgh.
Perhaps they found the mountain lakes too Placid.

IX
Mike Mooney and his keyboard

Back at the center, the old kook
Who sits here in this writing nook,
Laptop flickering 'gainst his glazed look
Of absent concentration, took
A leap this year, put out a book
Of lyrics. Doubt they're worth a look.

L'Envoi
a christmas wish for all

Hey, no pressure!
This holiday season,
Expect heaps of pleasure,
Warmth of greetings,
Loving letters,
Convivial family meetings,
A fantasia of greed,
Complete with shopping mall receipts,
Conversation that truly meets your needs,
Also gratifications gastronomical,
And at prices not too astronomical.

##

A hint, stock up on red wine.

If you're feeling blue.
Have a glass of red,
Pretend to read,
Slink off to bed,
Pretend to read again,
Then pass out.
Hey, pretend you're dead.
Maybe someone
Will be concerned.
When you get back up
Watch the football game,
Or what's left of it.

You'll have something to discuss the next day.

A Meditation Upon Jeanne Ruid

2006-12-14T20:46:00.000-08:00

the retirement of a mental health colleague

by Michael Dennis Mooney

Jeannie, we hardly knew ye.
Now, upon the New Year,
We'll have to do without ye.

Focusing relentlessly on service
With dedicated selflessness,
We'll, in spirit, still have you with us.

Now that you're off scot free,
Having separation hilarity,
Amid your grins, ha has, tee hees,
Please say a prayer for us
And our anxieties.

Upon you we'll meditate.
Thus we'll have some serenity.
We'll be calmer, soon and late,
As we contemplate your Buddha's smile,
Its quiet modesty.

The Execrable Scottish Verses

2006-10-26T17:24:00.000-07:00

[Disclaimer: No Scots were harmed
in the making of these wretched,
indeed quite pitiable verses,
for they were paying no attention
to the concerns of others.]

I. This Is A Bill

We here at John Chapman's Broadcast
Might wish to start a poetry podcast.
Certainly we'll publish poetry on CD.
But how to do this whilst in poverty?
Now our man in accounts receivable
Is telling us something unbelievable.
You've failed to pay for our book of poetry,
Despite its fine, cadenced ebb-and-flow-etry.
This kind of thing makes our funds kaput
And up with it we will not put!
Hhmmph!
Please send promptly your check for 13 dollars.
Plus, should you need more copies, give a holler.
And, when you're stuck on your holiday shopping list,
Remember our books make lovely Christmas gifts.

II. This Ith Not Therapeutic!

Mary S. Robinson, SW III,
Licensed practitioner of therapy,
When will you be
Responsive to me
And pay for my book of poetry?

III. Danny Clark, You Still Owe Two Dollars

I usually charge a dollar thirty-five
When I have to hassle people for payment.
Keep it! You need money more than I.
And keep the book for its entertainment.

Hang onto that dollar
'Til your hand gets cramps.
You could need penny candies,
Hey!
You might need stamps.

You know, when you pay bills.

IV. Collections, for Laurie McCann

Missy McCann,
Now listen to me.
You may think
You got off Scot free,
But you haven't been chased
'Til you're chased by me.

V. Mr. Stone, an unryhmed verse

Mr. Stone was busy today
Giving Blood. You know, to the Red Cross.
(I know, it's a likely story.)
And he was busy advancing science.
Also giving interviews to the papers.
Various other noble things, as well.
For example, he visited his kids.

So he had no time to pay your bill,
John Chapman.
He'd no time to pay your bill.

VI.Pammy Lou

Oh, Pammy Lou,
Your eyes are the hue
Of the highland skies,
Of seas off Hebridean isles!

You got your acquisitive
Hands on my books,
Yet paid for your copies
With your good looks.

Or my memory of your looks
In auld lang syne.

I met you, my bratty dear,
On the eve of a new year
In days gone by,

That midnight kiss
'Neath fireworks
Has done me in.
And for all time.

Michael Dennis Mooney

Who Are These People?

2006-07-17T18:31:00.000-07:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

Who are these people
filling a vast great hall,
on a humid July night,
under a thunder shower's
clamor and loud patter?
They are smiling bravely,
dutifully wearing name tags,
at the school reunion.

Who are all these old people?
I went to school with young people!
I am feeling agitated, as I say it.

Who is this haggard woman,
her hair grey in streaks,
her face scrubbed to a blank,
excoriated with worry,
careworn with lack of peace?

She could not be
the classic Irish beauty
of flawless ivory skin,
glossy black hair
-- her merry, easy smiling
ever fixed in my memory --
that her name tag says she is.

She was not vain
when she was beautiful.
Now her sleep-deprived,
hypervigilant eyes stare out
at a disappointing, woefully
burdensome world
through the plainest black-framed
glasses. She is still slim.
Also, still graceful.
Still clever, though so wearied.
Still acerbic when she disagrees, quick
to trounce me, turn my jokes on me.

There are lots of bitchy Irish females here:
Helen The Crank O'Donnell, her impish cousin Madeline,
Karen Ryan, the Stout Mayoress of Small Potatoes, N.H.,
Maureen (No Longer) Young, and
Mary (Nevermore) Burns,
though once she did, and on a whim,
with little pretext, I can tell you.

All of them are perfected,
these poised bitches,
in their anxious defenses.
This one, once serene, Delia Coyne
(her name tag says she still is "the same")
was blessedly beyond them in her youth.
Now she is, too, dragged down inevitably
by the injustices of growing old herself,
while seeing her father demented,
anxious to grasp her hand, to know where he is,
while seeing her mother dying,
preserved like a corpse by chemo,
with just enough time left to say goodbye.
And her husband, thankfully,
is in another state somewhere
these past five years,
pursuing her classic beauty, perhaps,
in someone else.

Indonesia

2006-06-04T19:24:00.000-07:00

by Michael Mooney

A tsunami caused the world to cry;
Within a year, an earthquake did the same;

Now a volcano rumbles, hurls up clouds of ash;

While human to human transmission of avian flu
Comes from people who, apparently,
Have been sleeping with their chickens;

This may begin a world pandemic.

Indonesia, though, is a vacation paradise.

young michael and his gallantry

2006-03-09T12:18:00.000-08:00

by michael dennis mooney

thanks for forwarding some of the

"flavor" of what's going on with

the fob's and the eod's

[forward operations bases and

explosive ordinace detonations, no?]

i love young michael's gallantry:

they picked up a "few things"

[nearly a ton of ordinance]

-- like they were out shopping? --

and had a pretty good day on the j-o-b, etc

i'm going to send those guys

the sports illustrated swimsuit

issue, after carefully reviewing it

for appropriateness, as is my

civic responsibility; hmm, this could

take a while; maria sharapova, fey,

sweet tennis goddess, is right here,

in this good readin' book,

lying in the sand, in a special s. i. feature, um,

spread; i might better get an extra issue

for the guys in baghdad

##

i read with interest your note that dean can

carry concealed in 50 states after training

with the 9 mm pistol; hey, he could work in baghdad, too,

providing security for the corporate contractors;

it wouldn't be much like a nice peaceful retirement,

but he could probably make tons of money, enough

to have you there with him in the hilton as his re-load moll,

hot in a bronze colored dress, blonde "do," and bare feet

-- the girl hates shoes, they say --

or just plain hot as the air conditioning fails again

and there's nothin but deep space nine reruns on the telly

to relieve the bombarbment of facts from cnn

my guess is dean enjoys keeping current

with the technology of police work,

'cause after all he's a technology buff;

and pistol use is a sport, a recreation, too

[my mother, when in her seventies, could not get over

how computers were completely replacing

all the older technologies of secretarial work,

especially the typewriter

and the steno pad; so, as an ex-exec sec,

sexy and high-tech, she just had to get a computer,

though she had little need for one

(eventually she gave a couple computers away)

she had to see what it was all about; now, god bless her,

she wants a laptop and a chrysler lebaron convertible,

-- is she cruising the coffee bars? --

and she'll be 84 in september; hope i'm so long-lived,

i want to get all my fica contributions back,

one pittance at a time, just out of general spite

towards the federal taxation authorities.]

##

have much fun on your journey to georgia,

the northern wilds

bring an l. l. bean quilted parka, for sure

##

you closed with "stay warm"

we are having a global warming winter,

or an el nino one, which might be more

accuweather accurate

we have had no snow, none, in february, green grass;

nor in march;

tommorow we're supposed

to have a rather balmy 50-plus day:

i'm determined to be out on the court tommorow,

practicing a nine-fingered two-hander on the left-hand side

-- the one achy-breaky

finger left off the grip -- and i'll try a lefty serve;

i used to be able to pitch lefty

when my dad and i'd play pitch and catch,

and i still can when jack and i throw the ball

most important sign of spring:

the guy who operates the tastee freeze here

is cranking up his machinery today

and cooking a humongous pot of chili

[for the chili dogs, you know]

he's opening officially tommorow,

though he'll serve you today, 'cause the machines

have to be crankin' anyhow, and it's a good chili day,

blustery and wet; i've got a heckuva cold that's settling in,

starting some nasty chest congestion

(i usually don't get that);

so i'm breaking out the mucinex and sudafed,

and i'm ON DRUGS

but you could tell that from the run-on sentences

and the loose associations

Gertrude Stein's "Rose is a Rose..."

2006-02-24T10:20:00.000-08:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

Cunning linguist that Gertrude was,

And, as well, a master debater,

Rose was, I think, the name of a girl

Gertrude loved with her cunning tongue;

And rose was the color, the shape

Of her pussy when Gertrude ate her.

Rose, I think, was a girl who was sweet

And plump and roseate,

And a pink rose slowly opening

Was her pussy that Gertrude ate.

Get your nose right in there, Trude,

Inhale the musk that beauty, youth exude!

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."

This Rose was perhaps more than we suppose.

forgot to tell you of barbie's dilemma

2006-02-16T23:38:00.000-08:00

by michael dennis mooney

a few years ago
barbie broke up with ken

this was arranged by mattel's
department of stupid publicity
to stir-up sales

kids would need to buy more dolls

they'd need a ken doll
for barbie to break-up with

they'd need blaine,
an austrarlian surfer doll
in shorts and tank top,
for her to hook-up with

these men in her life,
they were "accessories",
just as were her shoes,
gowns, handbags, her pink mustang

but now ken is back

and he has his own
stupid promotions department

he looks like he's had a little work done,
a straighter, smaller nose, a firmer jaw line

word is he's been bumming around europe, broadening his
experience of life, becoming a lot deeper, and saner

he's been studying buddhism, staying in the moment, not
rushing anything, not anticipating the future

and he's learned to cook, the man can take care of himself

he's looking good, he wears cargo pants and a black leather jacket,
this rugged but sensitive thing is a good look for him

barbie's different, too

seventies hair is back, she has long straight gold-blonde hair
down to her mid-back, also long bangs, very girlish and flirty

her hair's straight as a broom but glossy and well-conditioned as her
smile

barbie is going to have to break-up with blaine, for sure

Women Answer The Question

2005-12-14T19:45:00.000-08:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

The Wife Of Bath's immortal question
Was more recently on the mind of Freud,
What do women want?

It was answered by the women of the Seventies.
Women want equal rights, they want equal power,
And protection from the loss of these.

Well, the answer is too simple,
Too entirely clear.

The men of that time, and the older generations,
Would perplex over this another thirty years.

Issues Of Race

2005-12-14T19:01:00.000-08:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

Issues of race aren't about race.
They're about money, property,
Who has it, who has plenty.
Who has power, good lawyers,
Who has plenty, who has little, none.

Who wouldn't want money, property,
Plenty of it, more coming in all the time,
Lawyers on retainer to protect it?

Issues of race are about class lines.
Who travels first class.
Who takes the bus. Who has to hoof it.
Who rides a bike in winter
To carry groceries from the Korean store.

Race is an arbitrary distinction.

Might as well make all red-headed people poor,
Blame it on Howdy Doody freckles, Jughead ears.

There is one race, the human race.
The gene for red hair, the gene for black skin,
There is less that separates us genetically
Than identifies us with one another.

There is no black race. There is the human race.
There are poor people from the agrarian South.
There are refugees from the South in urban ghettos.
Their dark skin no more defines them
Than your suit bought on sale defines you.

There is, in us all, the human brain,
The human spirit, the common hopes of our race.

On An Internet Scam

2005-12-07T11:31:00.000-08:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

In the region of Central Nigeria
(Where the thinking's distinctly superior)
They have the rarest of banks,
For which we must give our thanks,
That will wire you a nifty eight mil
If you simply follow their drill.

Just give them your bank account number!
Then remain cool as a cucumber,
Awaiting their further instructions
Authorizing some little deductions
To cover the interest, you know,
On your lovely eight million "to go".
Now there'll be collect phone calls and faxes
And more deductions to cover the taxes ...

Wait! If you do this, your noggin is number
Than the two guys from "Dumb and Dumber".

Anniversary

2005-12-03T22:34:00.000-08:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

Barb and Dean

are sweethearts

going steady

since their teens.

In those decades

each day accretes

a drop of dew.

The snowflake

it becomes

is unique and new

and crystalline.

my dear em el one six four eight

2005-11-22T21:34:00.000-08:00

To: ml1648@atown.net

my dear em el one six four eight
i know you don't appreciate
my scathing-er attempts at satire
(my writing now goes over like a flat tire
on a refurbed, shiny delta eighty-eight)
but dearest em el one six four eight
who but me would know how really great
your loving heart is, how sweetly delicate
your sensibilities? -- alas i am too late
to reach you, you've fled from me in haste
the mike you once could tolerate
is now the mike you love to hate

-- a poem by michael dennis mooney

Our Heroine At Seventeen

2005-11-09T07:02:00.000-08:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

Our heroine at seventeen
Loitering upon the stair
Outside the church
On French Church Hill
Waits for Father Miller there
A lacy kerchief o'er her hair

Looking rather Italianate
She is quite a fashion plate
And though this is way upstate
It might be a district of Milan
The way her bag, her blouse, her skirt,
Her shoes all match with such elan

For when one goes to worship God
It's needful to be quite well shod,
Scarved, coiffed, and dressed, don't you agree?
Least that's how it seems to me
Her mother was a Celtic girl
Thus her eyes, her skin are fair
And, under lace, her sleek blonde hair

Here's The Soap Opera Behind The Poem

2005-10-17T05:32:00.000-07:00

a story in e-mails
by Michael Mooney

Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 10:48:03 -0700 (PDT)
From: mackey maroney <emmteeyem@yahoo.com>
Subject: here's the soap opera behind the poem
To: mmaroney@edit.nypost.com

Marcus, You were asking who Maura

is: She's a co-worker, 31, Catholic, married,

and just so nice she's too nice, you know the type,

just as sweet as whipped cream, and really pretty,

hazel green eyes and great skin, very pale, yet rosy.

She's quite literary and scholarly and has read all

my humor manuscripts in the past. The Celtic Face

manuscript -- I kind of sprung that one on her.

Yikes! It's about her!

She's cruising into middle age, putting Clairol in her hair,

still no children, still no bacalaureate, 'cause she's

taking one course at a time. (I refer to that as "gradual

school", an allusion to 'Garp') So this guy who's the

same age as her father, me, writes her a love poem. Yikes!

She was very gracious, told me it was beeyootiful,

said it sincerely.

I told her it was platonic, wanting to do no harm. I wanted

to tell her I was in a major state of lust, which I'm sure

she knew anyhow, or sensed. So I muddied this issue.

I should have just said I love her, but I didn't trust what I

was up to. I just knew I wanted her attention, to see where it

might lead.

This came as she decided to quit work, apply for

financial aid, get out in the real world, where there

is far too much reality, go back to school

full time. She's a student of linguistics and languages

[Japanese, Russian] and she's from Queens, N.Y., so I thought

she would enjoy my use of her name and rhyming it

with "can't ignore huh" , etc., in an outer borough accent,

a New Yawk Squawk.

But she left work before I could finish it.

So I look up her mailing address. I can get it to

her somehow.

Then I begin to hear rumors that she's leaving her

husband and may be seeing someone new -- someone

I know ! -- sonofabitch! Maybe, I don't know, that

could have been me, if I had made a bid for her love,

though I doubt it, that is unrealistic. [Maybe it's not even

true that she's left home.]

Interestingly, if she did leave him, she did it right at

the start of the NFL season: that guy made her sit around

while he watched one too many football games; he should have

been taking her out for Thai food, or somethin'.

So, back to me, I couldn't reach her on the phone during

the day, didn't dare phone in the evening, finally

I phoned Saturday afternoon and I got him on the phone.

Not what I wanted.

I say i'm a co-worker -- could I get a quick minute with her?

He, no doubt preoccupied with Notre Dame football on that afternoon,

says, "Well, could I give you her cell phone number?" "Sure," I say.

So now i call her at noon Monday on the cell, ask her for her e-mail address,

'cause I want to send her a poem making fun of the Queens accent. She gives me the electronic mail address, so I can send her the humor piece.

I ask her how things are? The connection on the cell is terrible, she says "Fine." Gives no indication of any troubles in her life. She wouldn't ordinarily tell me much if there were relationship difficulties.

Then I sent her the Outer Borough Rhapsody, and got no reply.

She had warned me in the past she doesn't typically reply to e-mail.

I, of course, really wanted a reply.

I told her it was from her "senior citizen admirer", still muddying the issue,

probably fooling no one but myself. I said that it was "a satire on how people

from Queens, Brooklyn, et al. speak English," more muddying.

The phone connection was so terrible, it kept breaking up. I guess my next step is to invite her to lunch in order to get her to talk about her life.

Or to simply fuggetaboutit.

She is my current muse -- meanwhile little Mo Conley, who is my age, late 50's, is convinced I wrote the Celtic Face poem about her, and she has it framed and on the wall.

-- Mackey

Soap Opera, On With Our Story

2005-10-17T05:24:00.000-07:00

Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 09:17:23 -0700 (PDT)
From: mackey mooney <emmteeyem@yahoo.com>
Subject: soap opera, on with our story

To: marcus maroney <mmaroney.edit@nypost.com>

So now I want to tell you the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey

always said on the radio.

This Maura did leave her husband, and at the start of the NFL

season, the spiteful little witch.

And who do we find this out from? From one of our prisoners,

a Tedbundyish sociopath who killed his girlfriend

[and is locked up for that] and who is in daily phone contact with Maura;

yes, she gave him her number when she left. She told me she'd

be around once in a while (sob); I didn't know she meant to visit him.

The reason the prisoner brings this up: he wants to arrange for her to visit

him in the lock-up.

I might even be called upon to supervise their visits.

So our treatment team leaders call her up and they interview her in a

conference call; she confirms all this:

-- She has left home [hubby owned their home outright and owed nothing

on it; he had just gotten a good job; they had just come back from a cross

country trip tanned and smiling -- or rosy and smiling in her case --

and she had just gotten financial aid to go back to school full time]

-- She is in love with the patient [who is a charmer -- he tends to be

really well-liked by both the staff and other prisoners; heck, I want to

play raquetball with him -- but there are lots of charming guys who

are not locked-up; me, I'm charming; I'm not locked-up, at the present

time.]

It's time for the Ole Mackerdog, awooo!, to take her down off the

pedestal [change her name in the poem to Dora?]

But, you know, I can't. She's forever on that pedestal,

though there's some pigeon poop on her shoulder.

All of her co-workers are losing sleep over

this, and I am, doubly so, because I loved her;

no, present tense, I worship her.

I think she's a dope, now, and an unprofessional dope with no

clinical insight, and no self-awareness, but I still think she's

wonderful.

I'm a dope.

I guess I'll just wait for some perspective to emerge.

This is like an Anton Chekov play.

-- Dog Who Woos The Moon

Soap Opera, Conclusion

2005-10-17T05:16:00.000-07:00

Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 16:35:01 -0700 (PDT)
From:mackey maroney <emmteeyem@yahoo.com>
Subject:soap opera, conclusion
To: marcus maroney <mmaroney.edit@nypost.com>

So the conclusion is, she answered the e-mail.

She liked the Outer Borough Rhapsody poem.

She declared it "fun to read out loud" because of

its imitation of the New Yawk Squawk accent.

So that was sweet, very nice to receive that note.

I then sent her an e-mail

I tried to advise -- people hate advice! -- that attempting

to start a relationship with a guy in a lock-up

is too big an emotional risk.

(I didn't mention the bodily risk.)

I told her everybody at work is losing sleep,

we're worried about her, quite true, and I mentioned

all of her immediate co-workers names to drive the point home.

I made a good argument for her cooling it, but I doubt she will,

she's already crossed that line.

And I don't have that kind of influence.

I think I, at least, learned something.

The advice giver learns.

The advice receiver balls-up the advice and throws it away.

I learned I am 58 years old,

she is 31.

I am her father's age.

Even if she could get interested in me and my funny conversation,

she should not get interested.

[Same way she she shouldn't get interested in the guy in the lock-up.]

When she is in her late 40's, i'll be 75,

spry, working on my golf swing, playing doubles, going for walks,

writing letters to the editor in the interest of solving world problems,

renewing the viagra Rx, riding my bike, but 75, a wrinkle beast!

Thanks for listening, Marcus,

your crazy brother, a mental health worker, signing off,

also still a dope, though an "intellectual", Mackey.

I think I'm done with meeting interesting people at work.

I'm just going to sit back now and watch the Yankees, Game 5,

Moose vs. Colon, etc. Colon is knocked out in the second

innining; we're going to win this thing.

Slurvian Rhapsody

2005-09-26T02:25:00.000-07:00

an English ode in the Brooklynese dialect

by Michael Dennis Mooney

She's such a lookuh
Is our dear Maura
Youse can't never not
Ignore huh

She don't need gole joolery
To be pretty
She just flash dem poifet poils
Das in her mowt

She don't need to pout
To be inter-resting
She just relaxes, smiles,
Foot traffic backs up for miles

She don't need no bling
Cause da sparkle's in her oys
She don't need to make no nerse
Just softly moves huh lips
An we benna ear to hear huh woids

An, no, she don't go
To no tannin parlas
Cause she gots such poifet skin
Like bran new bat room poicelain

(When you got great skin
You look so cute
Yer poifet tan's
A silk white union suit)

An unnerneat it all
She has a heart as woim
As an erl boiner

A mind dat gleams with light
Like da pervoibeeyall
Poil in da erster

An a disposition flawless
As a pussycat dat's clawless

II.
Hey, all de goils
Dat ever wuh
Aint not so fair
And nice as huh

Fuhgeddaboudit!
Yousha live dat long
Ta find such a Grade A cherce tomater!
Ya'd be a dumbstruck lucky schmuck
Wuh ya justa date huh

Youse could look all troo
Da County Gloccamorra
An youse'd not never find
A beeyouteeyous goil so fine
As our sweet Maura

And smart! Who knew?!
She can read a book dat big!
And can look stuff up on da computuh
She can argue so pat and poifet
Dat youse can't not dispute huh

Uhuh, an she still gots it!
Yeah, tho she might be thoity
She saunters by so nonchalant like
So Drop Dead, New York lovely
Like a headline in da news

Ana bingity bang!
Yer thinkin hoity toity
Thoughts of writin poesy
(...Hey, like my boy Moity
Down dere in Joysey)

III.
Wuh she ta wawk
Over da bridge
Inna da city
It'd be da day
Da ert stood still

Like inna movie!
All dem zhlubs
Dey'd getoutta dere cars
And look dere fill
She wouldna even know dis

Just anotha day
On da gridlock
Dat's what she'd say
Now dat's our Maura
An at's why we adore huh

A Celtic Face

2005-08-01T22:51:00.000-07:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

Hair of ginger and sweet brown sugar,
Skin of alabaster, whiter, smoother
Than steep walls of new-laid plaster,
Brow's pallid glow, a polished marble,
Throat's blush, a white rose pinkening,
Eyes, serene pools of green
Radiant in late afternoon,
Quizzing eyes behind clerky glasses,
Happily skeptical, lambent with knowing,
Piercing gaze that grabs you by the shirt,
Lips tasting fine wines of amusement,
Smiles, blessings, saying live, let live,
Let children play, let them play all day.

numb and number

2005-07-19T08:50:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

at a certain point in my life
i smoked a lot of weed and
i hitchhiked around a lot and slept
around as much as i could

on a cross country trip with
my girlfriend wendy
we were stuck somewhere in the middle
of America
near michigan
as i recall
sitting near the road smoking some good
michigan green and watching the clouds
playing hide and seek in the afternoon sky

a guy in an old ford falcon station wagon
pulled over and asked where we are going
well i said wherever you are going is fine with us
he looked like bob dylan to me and i wondered if it was him

i looked in the back of the car and all kinds of tools
were strewn about
bob as i now called him was chatting us up
he was talking about the government
the weather, the rainforests, politics, protests
all the hippy crap i was so familiar with 'cause
i was a hippy at that moment
we discussed the things he spoke of
and he smiled at our like-minded agreements

well bob revealed he works for a local boat manufacturer
i was impressed
he told us he and some friends have been working on a boat
i say what kind of boat?
he says a big boat
big boat to me is anything bigger than a rowboat
i say cool
he said we are going to sail all over the world
and bring back to the people of America
the news of what is really happening
sounds like a good idea to me
he said he and his friends have donated all their time
to building this boat and
they are going to sail around the world
hmmmm i think this might be interesting

he said they have room for another couple
i look at wendy and then myself
we are a couple
hmmmm i think, room for one more couple
wendy said, yeah pete, we're a couple
he asked if we want to see the boat
sure i say, because we got no place in particular
to go at the moment
we pulled into a marina
we parked and follow bob down to the docking area
we were walking among all these little cabin cruisers
and i was thinking that maybe this isn't such a good idea
after all and then
all of sudden we stoppped in front of the "queen mary"
i look up at this boat in total surprise

wendy gasped and rolled another joint
bob said well what do you think?
want to check it out?
i said sure man and we walk onboard
i was expecting a marine guard to be there
to pipe us on because the boat was incredibly large
but no one but us was on board
we travelled through this incredible boat
three decks and three masts
it had diesel engines and was fitted for the high seas
the staterooms were incredible
all work was hand done
all equipment was complimentary from the
place where bob worked
we spent a couple hours on the ship
bob said well think it over and come back later
like about nine tonight
we are having a meeting, pete
and i will put up you and wendy to join the crew

i say all right man, sounds righteous
so bob dropped us off a few miles away from the boat
on a public beach
wendy rolled another joint and we settle down
for a tantric sexual encounter that far surpassed
any boat ride i ever took
needless to say we missed the deadline
we missed the boat!
and we missed becoming founder members
of a "greenpeace" type group
oh well marijuana is an evil thing, i have been told

numb and number narratives by tom nowak

2005-07-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

in the narratives that follow, tom nowak
tells the story of pete holmes, also his
girlfriend wendy, as they fly down the
north california highways on his old black harley
with the wolf pack, an outlaw biker
gang in the seventies

the pack is deeply involved in macho
hearty-partying, meth, cocaine, acid, both
using and selling

to these guys beer is a soft drink,
marijuana is a mild sedative

they like the hardcore stuff in every area
of life, bare knuckle fisticuffs, wild biker chicks,
harleys, 9mm's, sawed-off shotguns, and they
like the kind of drugs that keep you up for
days

tom nowak depicts with much candor how
the wolf pack motorcycle club follows the
"code" of an anarchic tribal youth gang, busting heads
"when they have to," and "ruling their lands,"
their territories, like the warlords of prehistory

nowak is writing their epic, instead of men
on horseback, badasses on hawgs

to view the full numb and number narratives
sequence, click-on the july archives

to see another tom nowak sequence about young
biker gang kids coping with returning from war
in vietnam, see the may archives

numb and number, #2

2005-07-11T08:21:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

it was a hot summer day
twice as hot as the temperature read
wendy and i stood near a freeway on-ramp
in the hick town of modesto
we had just smoked a number wendy had rolled
carefully she put the stash bag into our knapsack
we were enjoying the sun and the buzz
a chp car drove by us
the driver gave us the look
the look was a modified version of the pissed off mother look
a few moments later the same chp car with the same driver returned
this time on the off-ramp
he was definitely looking

i became very paranoid
i thought of jail and immediately connected it with the weed
the car had made a u-turn and was headed back towards us
i kicked the knapsack into a storm gutter
the cop smiled at us as he drove by
i waved, wendy waved
as soon as he was on the freeway i went over to the drain opening
i got down
and proceeded to push through
unfortunately my shoulders were too wide
i couldn't get in
wendy tried next
she couldn't make it in either
we needed a rubber person to get the stash back
i yelled the best obscenities i could muster
as loud as i could

a youngish dude, definitely rubbermade
strode over from the opposite side of the ramp
i saw what you did he said
what's in the pack?
weed my man, i replied
humboldt bud
ahhh he sighed
well look man, i can get into that opening, rubber guy was saying
i'll get it for you if ya give me a bud
deal man i said
well in a flash the rubber boy had slid into the drain
i asked how he was doing
fine he said
i was reminded of the tunnel rats i had seen in a different reality
he pushed the pack up and out
he came next
he was covered with dust but not wet, due to the dry season
he smiled and dusted himself off
wendy had the stash out and was rolling like there was no tomorrow
i gave the dude three fat ones and he smiled a large full-faced smile
his day was made
i lit one up that wendy handed to me
i took a long deep drag
i handed it to the rubber guy
he toked a hit in i thought would kill him
in a few minutes we were sitting on the ground laughing
we smoked a couple more joints and the little rubber guy split
wendy and i sat and waited for a ride

after about twenty minutes a vw van stopped
a fringed jacketed normal looking kid opened the door
where you going? he said
l.a. i answered
cool hop in
wendy sat in the back
i sat shotgun
the guy looked at me
i had long hair, a d.a. rough look
he smiled and said
i sell health food
ahhh i said
that term health food immediately made him cool
it was a counter-culture thing i was into at the time
i told wendy to roll one
she rolled a fatty and we all toked on it
the guy got really loaded
he said that it was great weed
i said humboldt
he nodded
hey he said want to go to a party?
sure i said, after all it is friday night

we pulled into north hollywood beach about 9 p.m.
we pulled up to an upper middle class house
he said to wait while he went in
he returned a minute later with a grateful dead girl
he introduced us all
she took my hand and said
don't be surprised with anything you see inside
and don't look too long at anyone
ok i said

we got into the place and started walking through rooms
we walked through the main room and it was filled with people
all sitting around talking
they looked at us then got back to their business
i saw military officers
a civilian judge
and a ton of money
then i noticed the dope
bales of it in the next room
ahhh i said
the old overseas connection
we followed the dead chick upstairs
we make these she said
and she handed me a bong
she filled it up and lit it
i took a long toke
i coughed
i was sent into the next dimension
totally blasted
we talked and laughed and toked
time passed without our noticing
the dead girl said
wanna go make love?

i said sure
wendy and i had an open relationship
i could sleep with anyone
she couldn't sleep with anyone but me
i went off with the girl
we stepped into a room with a hot tub
she helped me remove my clothes
and then she stripped hers off
wow she said
what are all these scars?
a different life i said
we slid into the tub
we played and played and played
then we smoked and smoked
resting on the bed
i saw the girl look at the time
well she said the party is over
i looked surprised
she said time to go

she walked back to the room wendy was in
wendy hugged me and kissed me
i said to her, let's get going
we followed the girl outside
the same guy was there that brought us to the party
he said i'll give you a ride into the city
ok i said
we climbed into his vw bus
we travelled a while on highway one
i said, look pull over man, we are going to sleep on the beach
sure he said
he pulled over
we said our goodbyes and left
wendy, that was the strangest party i've ever been to
me too, pete, she said
we walked down to the beach and laid down on our sleeping bags
wendy rolled one and we smoked it up
we made mad love and fell asleep to the sound of surf breaking
one never knows what the next moment will bring
in california

jack hooks us up

2005-07-07T10:04:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

we pulled into the drive and parked
the house was very rundown
the neighborhood was also rundown
so the house didn't look out of place
we walked up the creaky stairs
and came to a halt in front of an old door
i knocked a couple of times
we heard someone inside walking towards the door
the shade moved and a man peeked out
hey man i said
hey he said back
he opened the door and gave me a big hug
how are you doing, pete? he asked
i'm ok jack, this is wendy
wendy this is jack
come on in he said
jack was tall, thin and had very long hair
appropriate for that time
sit anywhere he said

the music stopped playing in the background
i'll be right back, jack said
he came back into the room and smiled
i have a timer set for one hour on the music
it stops every hour and i have to reset it
i do that because i lose track of time
i laughed, very cool i said
jack pointed to a plate on the table
help yourself, he said
the plate had a pile of cocaine on it
we just got this in yesterday
let me know how you feel about it
wendy drew us up several lines and offered the plate to jack
she always had a knack of knowing the rules
jack took the plate and inhaled the lines
i got it next
as the lines entered my nose
it was followed by a rather strong burning sensation
jack laughed at me
wendy, the old trooper she was, took the lines in with no problems
jack looked at her and said do more
she did and then the tears appeared at her eyes
we all laughed
that comes from our south american pipeline
i nodded

you remember bill west? he asked
yes i replied
he was a pilot in the air force, wasn't he?
jack said yes he was
now he works for john and me
cool i said
as i recall you came here to increase your weed trade, i said
yeah he said, we still do that
but the shipments from southeast asia
are going to come to an abrupt halt soon
the u.s. is pulling out of vietnam
and that means all our guys over there are coming home
we still have some shipments coming into hamilton and travis
but we don't know exactly when it will stop

it seems that when one wants to open an illicit trade
that can be supplied from a foreign country
it makes things easier if a war is happening
and you have troops there
the easiest troops to have help are draftees
because they really don't want to be there
and you need the help of the air force guys
the navy guys and the army guys
to make anything in vietnam work
you need the army to talk with local
black market guys
the air force to transport as well as the navy and army
and if you know the guys before they go over
it is easy to set up a machine
a well-oiled machine only needs one thing
to keep it running
money
and this machine had been running on auto since 1966
if the government had followed john's lead
money could have bought the whole country
john's shipments from vietnam leave tan son nhut air base
(because the customs service at tan son nhut is rampantly corrupt
heroin comes from laos on commercial planes, thank god for u.s. money)
empty military cargo planes are filled by the ground crews with
weed, hash and anything else that is sellable
the main supply is weed but the other drugs help with finances
as the shipments hit the u.s.
small airfields are used for the landing and discharge of the goods
hamilton is a great place because it is only a few hours away from san francisco
and it has no tower
no tower means that any plane with military markings can land
produce an order that is made by our contacts in the rear
and refuel and drop its load
the load is watched over by our guys here on the payroll
they load it into trucks courtesy of the u.s. government
and it is shipped to a central warehouse in san francisco

neat, pretty and very profitable
jack and john had now branched out
they were using ex-pilots from the war to fly down south
and run cocaine into the u.s. using the same field
hamilton was a key
the war was a key
the black market was a key
money was a key
jack poured more cocaine out onto the plate just as the music went off
an hour had passed

riding shotgun

2005-07-07T10:01:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

warm with a cool breeze
haight street was booming
wendy and i were to meet jack
in a small cafe on upper haight
the people on the sidewalks were all happy
they smoked weed drank wine and pushed, life was good
we got to the cafe and spotted jack
we went over to his table and said hello
jack asked if i was armed
i said of course
good he replied
i need to pick up some cola, pete, and i need an escort
want the job?
of course man, anytime
we walked to his van
we drove to the freeway on-ramp and headed south
redwood city was the destination

we drove through the dim-lit streets
and snorted coke as we drove
jack pulled up in front of a small stucco covered house
wendy stayed in the car as jack and i went inside
an armed mexican met us at the door
we said hello and he nodded
hey pablo, jack said and pablo said hello
hey, holmes, he said nodding to me
long time no see
yeah i said how goes the world?
is ok, holmes, is very good

well what do you have for me? said jack
six keys of coke, eight keys of weed, high quality
and 20,000 pills of pharm speed
for those of you that need to loose some weight
pablo laughed
not one of us in the group was more than 110 pounds
anything else? jack asked
well from san diego i got some nice purple blotter
and meth from who knows where
ok jack said, i'll take it all
pablo smiled
cash, check or credit card?
we all laughed
jack handed pablo a stack of hundreds
pablo counted out a bunch and handed the rest back
just like mc donalds you get change back he said

we sat and talked for a few moments and snorted the obligatory lines
then jack said thanks and off we went
with pablo's crew to load the shit in the van
we hopped in the van when it was done and wendy smiled at me
jack drove and i sat shotgun, literally
i had a double sawed-off sitting next to the seat
as we crept towards the freeway
a car pulled up next to us
a nice dark colored low rider
the window rolled down
hey,eesee, want to buy some real ones?
jack said no and increased his speed
the car kept up with us
i saw a gun come out of the car's window

i yelled for jack to bend forward
i fired both barrels into the front seat of the car
i don't know if i hit anyone but the car pulled to a stop and no one got out
we hit the freeway and headed back to the city
well, jack said, that was pretty interesting
usually they try and hit me more than once
but that's the price i pay for doing business down here
i laughed and said, yeah i guess
wendy took the shotgun i handed her and reloaded it
she handed it back and i said, no you keep it babe
let me drop this shit off, jack said
and we can go to a party, ok?

sure man, sounds good
yeah at the old place, you remember it? in noe valley
ahh yeah i remembered it all right
it had belonged to a star once
and it was wildly decorated
we dropped the dope off with jack's partner and did the obligatory lines and left
the party is for harris, jack said
harris, i said
yeah he just got home from england
he did three years for us over there
smuggling hash
i wondered what happened to him
jack laughed
jimmy and bill and their old ladies will be there
they just got in tonight
jimmy and bill were friends from home
jimmy had been a drill sergeant and was a wild man
bill had been a captain in army intelligence
he had been stationed in germany and married a german girl
she was the double of eva braun, i never missed a chance to tell her

before we went into the house jack reached into a leather bag he had
here man he said, as he handed me a package
i said what is it?
5,000 hits of purple pyramids
ahh i said, thanks
no problem said jack, thank you
we went inside and moved around
jack went into the bedroom with harris as soon as we got in
and snorted a bunch of coke
people went into and out of the bedroom all night
i talked with clark and jimmy
i showed clark the acid
wow, gimmie some he said
and i peeled off about fifty hits
jimmy took them from me and disappeared
i'm sure everyone would be tabbed before the night was over
clark asked me if he could have some
sure i said, here, and peeled off a hundred
he disappeared
wendy and i strolled the rooms looking at people
we said hello to those we knew and just smiled at those we didn't
the bedroom door opened as we passed and jack said to come in
wendy and i stepped in

jack was there and so was harris
fresh off the plane, fresh from a british jail
hello i said, and put my hand out
hey pete, he said, long time no see
yeah man, how was the jail over there?
well going to jail there is a lot like getting hung
i said what?
he said well at first it's a shock to your system
then you get used to hanging around
we all laughed
i was well taken care of, he said
i didn't give anyone up and i even got the hash sent
yes jack said, and it sold really well
we sat at a long table and jack poured heaps of coke out
we snorted and snorted
and you know what?
the radio in the room went off
an hour had gone by
i smiled and jack reset the radio
we had all gotten into the hourly return to silence

jack left and we talked with harris
wendy stretched out on the bed and purred
harris and i talked old times
we snorted coke all night
at about 4 a.m. we got up and walked through the rooms again
jack had left earlier
jimmy was tripping and having a good time with his old lady

clark, the evil bastard
had given jimmy's brother bill massive amounts of acid
bill was talking weird shit
he was philosophizing about who the hell knows what
jimmy came out and told bill to go sit in the bedroom with mrs bill
jimmy then yelled at clark for giving bill so much acid
well, clark said sheepishly
i thought he could handle it
well he can't, jimmy said
we sat in the kitchen and snorted coke
after about an hour bill came back into the room
he had shaved his moustache off and had makeup on
he also had all his wife's clothes on including nylons
his wife was frantic
bill carried on just talking normal bill stuff
i was having a hard time to keep from laughing, but clark burst out
ahahahahah he said, holy shit bill
bill got indignant and left the room
jimmy looked at clark and said, ok we gotta take him somewhere

we walked bill down the stairs
i guess jimmy and clark were gonna take him to crisis
as we walked away from the door a police car pulled over

shit i thought, armed and dangerous and carrying drugs
the cop nearest us rolled his window down
what the hell is going on?
well, jimmy started to say
and the cop caught a glimpse of bill
bill said, sergeant arrest these men in his best captain's voice
the cop looked at him and then at jimmy

get him off the streets, and they drove off
we all laughed except bill
we got bill into the car
and jimmy, clark and bill drove off
i took wendy's hand and we started the walk home
the radio upstairs stopped
the hour's silence had just happened again

ex-human

2005-07-07T09:59:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

as things go
time never stands still for long periods
(which i think yogi berra once said)
and as jack had prophesied
the war was over
saigon fell and all the boys came home
one way or the other
southeast asia was no longer available to jack
as a cheap source of dope
luckily he and his partner had already branched out
cocaine was the big moneymaker
and jack had an incredible setup
wendy and i met jack at his new house
it was modest by the neighborhood's standards
but hey marin county was mostly ultra rich
or deathly poor, and only deathly poor in a few areas
we sat and listened to music and drank wine
and of course snorted cocaine

jack introduced me to a man who had been there when we arrived
his name was brown
he looked like a narc
but he wasn't

it seems jack had a friend, another dealer
this friend had been rolled into a carpet, beaten with baseball bats
and all his product and money confiscated
the local consortium of dealers was panicking

this man brown was the answer they had come up with
he was ex cia, ex special forces, ex human
after saigon fell, there were a lot of exes in need of employment
jack had hired them to find the guys who had ripped his friend off
they did
one guy was in prison and four were dead
the dead guys had not died peacefully
one had been fed tons of acid and when he peaked
he was taken out to the marshlands and a shotgun
stuck down his throat and the trigger pulled
the others were even more brutal
the guy in prison was willing to stay there forever
the outside was a death sentence for him
the guy, mr brown, smiled at me and offered me a position in his company
what about it holmes?
no thanks i replied
although the thought of doing it paraded across my low-functioning brain
for a moment

jack walked mr brown to the door
the radio went off, signaling the passing of another hour
jack reset the clock and came back in
we snorted some coke

jack asked if i had any more false i.d.'s available
i had set up him and his partner john
with passports, birth certificates and social security cards
all legal from a relative standpoint
(when you live outside the law
your perspective of what's legal changes)
sure i said, no problem
jack had invested along with his partner
in real estate
all under phony names
they had millions of dollars invested
in the green triangle of northern cal
best sinsemilla in the universe grew there
their future was set

jack asked me if i wanted to run the city end
for him
i was honored, and answered sure man
we snorted coke for the rest of the day
wendy and i rode back to the city
we had a modest apartment near a biker bar
we would go down occasionally and talk with the bikers
they belonged to a club called the wolf pack
they were badasses

i traded coke and weed to them for guns and speed
it was a happy relationship
also i had a harley and they were my insurance policy
days of drug induced euphoria turned to weeks
wendy and i were a happy pair
sunsets at the cliff house watching streaks of red and orange
were not uncommon
sitting lazily on the balcony
sipping wine and snorting coke as the sun
slid over the edge of the world
was mesmerizing

wendy and i got home early one night and had a phone machine message
it was one of jack's brothers
phil asked me to meet him at jack's house
i said sure, and wendy and i hit the road
on my old black harley
roaring across the bridge
listening to the pipes back off and the engine's thumping sound
just like a heartbeat, it was relaxing
all was right in the world

as we pulled into jack's driveway
i saw phil in the doorway
we got off the bike and walked into the house
hi phil i said, where's jack?
he pointed to the bedroom
wow i said, sleeping?
i didn't think jack ever slept
no said phil, and he walked towards the bedroom
wendy and i followed
jack lay dead on the floor
at first glance it seems he had about twenty bullet holes in him
blood was everywhere
wendy cried
phil cried
i cried
what the fuck happened? i asked
i dunno phil said, i came over and found him like this
all the stash and all his money he kept here is gone
it appears it was a drug related robbery
shit
i asked if he had spoken to john yet
well phil said
it seems the same thing had happened at john's house
no way i said
yeah said phil, way
i shook my head
any clues? i asked
not a single one he said
we sat in the kitchen and snorted coke
after awhile i suggested we set the house on fire
to burn any evidence
phil agreed

just as we went outside the radio clicked off
jack was not able to reset it this time
the hours for him were over for good
we torched the house and jack was sent to his ancestors
phil and the rest of the group went back home
without jack no contacts were available
the money jack and his partner secreted into real estate
was gone forever
no one knew what names it was under
the dynasty had fallen
the radio had clicked off
forever

growing up with uncle vinny

2005-07-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

uncle vinny laughed
and gave me a hug
the interior of the bar
we sat in was dim
neon lights advertising beer
from every which way cast
shadows on faces and walls
uncle vinny was the president
of the wolf pack motorcycle club
they had chapters all over the united states
canada and were exporting to europe
and australia
it was a major production
i had been a "friend" of the club for years
living just down the block from their bar
i had many financial dealings with them
i sold them dope, they gave me bike parts
they sold me guns, i gave them dope
money was hardly ever exchanged

after hanging out with the club
i had decided i wanted to become a full member
this was the first step
i would then do official hang around
duties for at least a year
so everyone could get to know me
then i would become an official prospect
i would get my bottom rocker
with the name on it of the city
state or country or the universal
nomad rocker
it was a long process that tested your
mettle and your capabilities

there was a quicker way in
felony bank robbery or murder
time would tell which path i was going to choose
right now i had to submit all my military and police
records so the club could check me out
it wouldn't take very long
the club had contacts everywhere
i liked that about them

it was thursday night
i was told to get my bike and go to the clubhouse
i walked down the street and up into my pad
wendy was sitting in the living room
rolling joints and listening to music
she was absolutely gorgeous
long sun streaked blonde hair
big blue eyes and so california
we had known each other for years
she was my girl and i was her man
she got up and kissed me
well she said how did it go, pete?
good, i gotta go to the clubhouse
it's in process
i will be back in a day or two
behave while i'm gone
she smiled
always she said
i kissed her good bye
and went down stairs
i rolled my bike out and started it

in a matter of minutes i was pulling in to dodge
right outside the clubhouse
i parked and walked towards the door
stay outside, i was told by a prospect
the meeting called "church" was just starting
they will maybe call you in after they discuss you
my opinion is, holmes, you been involved with us so much
you have minor if any problems getting in
thanks man i said
i lit a joint and offered it to him
he took it and toked a long deep one
we will have a great time bro he said
i said yeah and we waited for the next step

flying with wendy

2005-07-07T09:52:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

wendy ever radiant
smiling and basking in the sun
dark glasses contrasting
with the golden blonde hair
climbed on the back of the bike
we were headed for black lake
our state run, a trip
for a large group of bikers, chicks and friends
meeting at a central spot
this was a large one for
the wolf pack m/c
i was near the front of the pack
a group of bikes riding together

wendy was enjoying the ride
i could feel her close to me
like a shirt flapping in the breeze
her legs and hands squeezed me
and she held a lit joint to my mouth

at 80 mph it was hard to smoke
but it can be done
wendy had made a science out of
being able to smoke while we rode
i took a nice long toke
it filled me with spacey thoughts
nice and relaxing

a moment later a swizzle stick straw
filled with crank found its way
with wendy's help into my nose
and then a second one into the other side
i was high and happy
the speed and the weed combined for a perfect match
floating along the highway a mere six inches or less
from the surface was always a rush

when the pack of thirty bikes we were with roared by
everyone looked
kids looked and cheered
women looked and smiled because they secretly
wanted the freeedom we had
and the men all looked and wished they were us
the pack was following a long and winding road
up the mountain
we were like a single organism
flowing around each curve
the road captain and uncle vinny
were in the lead
the sun was starting to go down
and we approached the campgrounds

armed guards lifted the barricade
prospects were hustling about
going for whatever we asked
this was their turn to shine
they were our grateful servants and we loved them
we took care of our prospects
they would do anything and sometimes
they went far beyond the high standards we set
no one could mess with our prospects
if anyone did, the wrath of the club
fell like a hammer on them

i camped near uncle vinny and his wife mary lou
mary lou would take wendy off for a moment
and come back all wired, the girls like to do that
i was unstrapping my gear when a prospect came up and started helping
i smiled at him and he smiled back
well ken i said, how you doing?
great, pete, i am doing great
i asked if our gear had arrived on the run truck
yes it did he said, and he pointed to a pile near the tent

i smiled again, i pulled him close and gave him a container of crank
he took a couple good blasts
wheeee hah fire
we both laughed
a prospect would be up for the entire weekend
no sleeping just running
wendy came over and handed me a joint
i pulled on it and handed it to ken
he gratefully toked on it

i told him to come see me later and i would let him
get some sleep if he needed it
he thanked me and hurried off
uncle vinny laughed at me
you're going to spoil those boys
well i said i feel like a mother hen sometimes

he laughed again and wandered off
our state run had about a thousand
bikes and three or four thousand people
gathered
we would party all night and then the next day wander about
talking with old friends and making new ones
we would talk business and make plans for any future
business we were considering

wendy and i walked towards the tents that had memorabilia for sale
we were on the lookout for any tatooists
we both wanted to ink up
we stopped and she bought a scarf that had our logo on it
i bought a couple stickers for the machine
mess with the best, die like the rest
and support your local wolf pack or else
we finally came upon a tattoo guy
wendy and i looked at the guy's work
it was nice
we picked several out
i picked out a club war tattoo
snarling wolves rampant
wendy picked out a butterfly
we sat down and the tattoo guy put them on for us
an hour later we were all done and walking again
music was blaring from somewhere
willie and waylon singing
good-hearted woman over and over
i was getting tired and told wendy
we walked back to the tent to crash
after we smoked some more and made love
ahhh the joys of a weekend run

brother to the best

2005-07-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

six months passed
as a hang around i visited chapters of the club
up and down the coast
i helped with any and everything
i picked up broken down bikes
i escorted members any and everywhere
i fought like a prizefighter and then
i got my bottom rocker
i was a prospect for the wolf pack m/c
i was on my way
wendy was quite amused at everything

we had plenty of good weed and a new twist
methamphetamine
it was like we could stay awake forever
and feel no ill effects
we made it, so we always had it for free
it was a rush to have your heart pound like a four stroke engine
and to ride on it was incredible, and oh yes the sex
was better then ever because you could go all night

as prospect i made sure all our functions
went off well and we all looked good for john q public
and our brother chapters would see how we took care of business

i was in more then ten gunfights during my prospect period
and there were severe casualties in each
i carried a gun everywhere i went, and wendy carried one for me too
i delivered packages all across the state
i was having a good time
then
i got my patch
i was a full-blown member in good standing
of the wolf pack

wendy sewed the patch on my vest
it looked great
and now i was brother to the best
every weekend we had a run somewhere
all the bikes from our chapter would meet the other chapters somewhere
and we would party, discuss business and see new members
we had lots of guests from overseas
except for their accents they acted the same as we did

the hang around prospect period
was a learning experience and molded each of the members
which was strange cause each one of us was different
i got a call one night
one of the brothers was in a bar and had everyone held at gunpoint
he was asking for me
he said he would only talk with me
i went to the bar and there he was in all his glory
hatchet harry
twelve known murders under his belt
i asked harry to have a drink with me
he agreed
i asked him to let the people go
he agreed
when we were alone he started to cry
it was the drugs and alcohol talking
but it was very dramatic
he put his gun away and we went to my house
wendy fed him and he became mild as a sated lion

he quieted down and asked if he could stay for awhile
i said as long as you need bro
he smiled and wendy showed him the spare room
harry went in and attempted to sleep
after about twenty minutes we heard a roar come form the room

harry had met our new pet ali
ali was a cayman
a small alligator
he wouldn't get more then six feet long
it cost us about $2.95 at the five and dime
ali had a plexliglass pool in the spare room
i had forgotten to tell harry
harry rushed out of the room
there is a gator in there
no bro, he's a cayman
ahh harry said, ok
harry i said, he won't hurt you but leave the light on
why harry asked, cause they are nocturnal hunters
noc what? harry said
they hunt when it gets dark
harry laughed, ok no dark in there tonight

but harry said i still want some protection
i rummaged around in the room and found a shot gun
here i said, would this do?
harry smiled took the gun and said thank you
not a peep was heard for the rest of the night
wendy and i cuddled for a while before we fell asleep
and i kissed her as she drifted off
and promised to meet her at the bench in dreamland

sort of like republicans

2005-07-07T09:48:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

as the activities of our club grew
so did the attention of law enforcement
many of the leadership was placed in jail
we bailed them out if possible
we also hired the best attorneys
drugs became a way to make money to cope
we needed cash all the time
at one point the club was just a bunch of drinking
fighting guys who smoked some weed, drank a lot
and occasionally did speed

that changed the last time uncle vinny did time
when he was in the last time he made friends with
some criminals on the inside
and brought a few with him when he got out
under their tutlege
we became a well-oiled crime machine
we loved it too
we were arrogant about our lifestyle
sort of like republicans

i remember a drug enforcement agent
being a pain in the ass, well they found the remains
of his car in a canyon all blown up
we had no idea who would do that sort of thing though
oh well, it was survival of the fittest
and he had done damage to many of our clique
so you get what you give

basically there was enough money to go around
the local law, the state law
and the feds all got their share
sort of like republicans
as long as money flowed so did the crime

we stayed beneath the umbrella of acting like citizens
so it made it easier to rule our lands
we didn't do meaningless crimes
we had enemies
other clubs wanting what we had
we also had ruthless members
wanting to rise to the top and
they could be quite dangerous
one never knew when one would be
welded into a fifty-five gallon drum
and sent to the beach

it was like a pyramid scheme
money from the bottom rose to the top
you got to keep some but you also gave some up
in return you got to operate in a district
hey, like republicans in congress
special interest groups abounded

we used a bike repair shop
to help launder our cash flow
it worked great for us
life was good
drugs, bikes and chicks as the saying goes
welcome to the land of kicks
wendy and i had a great time
smoking the best weed and
snorting the best crank
we rode the best, owned the best cars
had guns galore and
the absolute best of everything
we had all the toys
life was good in those reckless days
but as you know all things change

out on the asphalt

2005-07-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

one of our favorite pastimes
was drag racing motorcycles
we loved it
wendy and i would go to any races
we could and hang in the pits
when you hang in the pits
you meet very very interesting people
i learned every trick in the book
form legal to illegal to make a bike fly
down the quarter mile

one weekend we were at a track
in the middle of the desert
and for two days we were on the tarmac
by saturday night i was feeling quite ill
i had a fever, chills and was light-headed
at first i thought it was the dope i was taking
but it wasn't, it was heat stroke
wendy and uncle vinny made me lie down
in a club member's van to rest

wendy stayed with me all night
she lifted my head to pour fluids down me
she put cold compresses on my head
she kept me covered cause i felt i was freezing

and she rolled many joints for me
she also lifted my head to blow crank up my nose
wendy was my girl, she nursed me back to health
and by sunday afternoon i was already to
tackle high-speed motor sports
once again

sweeties

2005-07-07T09:44:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

in order to really understand
things
one must be aware why
they happen
not to be put off by them
but to understand they happen
for a reason
yes some times the reason
is not always clear
but there is a reason
trust me

bikers have categories
for everything
especially women
women, to bikers, fall into
several categories

one is wife
your old lady, the mrs
affectionately called by her hubbie
momma
not to be confused with a momma
which we will get to

the next category is
girlfriend
a girlfriend may exist
in a cooperative manner
with a wife
if they are friends
if not there is constant friction
and here is why there is friction
wives are not fucked after marriage
they produce several offspring
then just clean, cook and run errands
although they are as powerful on the
social ladder as their old man
most wives hate this sexual
tormenting
and sometimes seek relief
with another man
that is a bad news item for the other man
if they are caught
they may wind up welded in a fifty-five
gallon drum if you know what i mean
the reasoning for this tormenting
of the wife has been explained
to me by a psychologist friend
seems the wife represents
the virgin mary
and who in their right mind
is gonna fuck the old lady
of god huh?

sweeties are the third classification
they are the charming upper class
girls who went to college perhaps
doctors or lawyers to be
they like running with wolves
they are the girls that a biker can fall in love with
being in love creates incredible energy
so if you constantly fall in love
you are high and energetic all the time
and yes it has nothing to do with ingestion
of drugs
it's a natural high

sweeties
are hated by girl friends and wives alike
many allegiances are formed
with the girlfriend and wife of a member
who has a sweetie
to "trick bag" the sweetie into a hell
beyond comparison
the whole idea is to make her paranoid, spook her good
the sweetie sucks the lifeblood out
of a relationship and she may either
be dumped, passed-on or upped
to a girlfriend status

i knew one member who had a wife
six girlfriends, and a new sweetie at least
once a week
he was a very busy man

women perform various tasks
they hold and carry dope
they hold and carry weapons
they back men up in fights

and they cause scenes whenever
the mood hits them
they may cause a scene with
a citizen, like showing their tits
their hootchie or teasing flirtatiously
they may also whack out
and pull a piece and start gunning
people down at any moment
most women are extremely loyal
to their old man

girlfriends or wives might never
be left behind, it all depends
on the members' desires
wendy was always my girl and i never
found a desire to use any of the club
girls

we always had a few hanging around
to give sexual favors to members
to any member that wanted or demanded it
or used to entice guys into hanging around
or to use as blackmail

mommas is a holdover term
from the 50's relating to a club chick
who would perform multiple intercourses
at anytime it was deemed necessary
they are far and few in this day in age
although some bush league clubs cling to the old-fashioned ways
similar to the actions of republicans
on holiday

as a prospect i luckily never had
to participate in the ugliest girl
contest
you had a certain amount of time
to find an ugly duckling bring her to the club
and perform various sexual events on and with her
disgusting i know, but hey traditions
are sometimes hard to change
and boys will be boys

bear tiny gorilla fatman bones crazy man buffalo

2005-07-07T09:39:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

wendy and i were at a movie
my bike was parked in front
of the theater
we would park in plain sight
as a sign we were close by
you had to either wait near the bike
or leave a message and know
we would soon either be there
in person or pick the message up
we would also check the bike visually
every half hour to see if anyone
was about
wendy came back and said
two prospects were waiting
i said ok lets go
we left the theater and headed
to the bike

i had no idea what was going on
the senior prospect said
vinny sent us, we got problems
whats up man? i said
well, slick, the prospect fred
answered (in every bike club
there were various names used for members
bear, tiny, gorilla, fat man
bones, wild man, crazy man, buffalo
flathead, etc, my nickname
happened to be slick, 'cause i was slick)
we are at war, fred said

war? i repeated, with whom?
the peckerwoods m/c, he answered
ok, more shall be revealed eh?
we drove to the clubhouse
we went below ground level
to a room we had that was soundproof and bugproof
vinny was sitting at the table
he didn't look happy
hey slick, he said
peckerwoods fucked up
i listened closely

they killed a prospect, a hang around
and too tall is in the hospital
he has three bullet wounds to his head
they set the boys up and tried to whack all three
i have no idea why
ok i said what are we going to do?
well vinny said
i was hoping you could help plan
a pay back trip
ok i said

we need to have a rep from every chapter here
fast as we can
by morning if possible
i want to hit those motherfuckers
so hard they will never recover

they were, up until now, just another club
we partied with them, we fought with them
and we had friends in their ranks
now they were just enemies and must be punished
vinny and i talked for a couple hours about plans
in less then three hours members from the different chapters
were rolling in
it was about 4 a.m.

the plan boiled down to this
the leadership of the peckerwoods
would all be whacked
preferably by prospects with a member present
the prospects would then immediately be given their colors
the membership cadre at large would be harassed and beaten
and if they fought well they would be given a chance to prospect for us
if they surrendered their colors without a fight
everything they owned would be taken
tv's, houses, cars, bikes, wives, girlfriends, etc, everything
we would hit the leaders as soon as possible, hopefully by 8 a.m.
that gave us two hours to make their world a piece of shit

prospect fred and a hang around and myself
would do harold the local president
fred would do it
i would watch
and the hang around
would stand guard with a weapon in case anything
went goofy
the same thing would happen all over the state tonight
and the country tomorrow
the papers would go crazy with the magnitude
but who gave a shit
we would make headline news and the peckerwoods
would cease to exist as a club

at 630 a.m. we were in front of harold's house
the hang around stood outside with the car
fred and i had keys
we had long ago had club girls fuck the guy and take impressions
of his keys, just in case we wanted to fuck with him later
we used the keys it was a lot easier that way
we crept into his bedroom
his old lady was snoring
harold was turned away from us
i tapped him
he looked up at us
fred stuck the gun in his mouth and put a finger to his lips
i said you know why this is happening
harold started to get up and i hit him with a bat
he fell back into the bed
fred pulled the trigger once and the silenced weapon
popped and harold went to rest with his relatives
wherever they resided in the afterlife
harold's old lady woke up and started to scream
fred pumped a round into her noggin and it was all over

we ransacked the house
now here's the cool part
we left the gun
it had the fingerprints of one of the peckerwoods on it
we had gotten them by showing the jerk the weapon
and he looked at it and sighted it and said bang
leaving a perfect set of prints on it
it was the vice president's problem now

as we looked hurriedly around
we found money
a lot of it
we also found dope
not a lot but enough
we took it all
we went downstairs to the hang around
i told fred to give the hang around his prospect vest
the hang around glowed
i took my vest with the full patch on it
and i handed it to fred
i gave him a big hug and kissed him
gangster style
he smiled and glowed like a king
he was now a full member

i told the prospect to go into harold's garage
put all his bike shit in his truck and stash it
it was now ours
he grinned and said no problem, pete

we got back to the clubhouse and had to wait to go in
there must have been 150 members there
it had been a good evening
the peckerwoods m/c was no longer in existence
18 presidents gone, 15 vp's gone, all the treasurers
and most of the club's secretaries gone
the leadership was now defunct
the membership at large would be dealt with during the week
they would join us, if worthy, or perish
we were now the largest club in the state
ahh it's good to be king

she was 15 when i met her

2005-07-07T09:31:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

wendy was 15 the first time
we met
i was an old 16
when i went away
she wrote me once
and i never returned the letter
when i came home
we ran into each other
by accident
i was in a bar near home

she walked in like
every step was choreographed
she walked past the table where i was sitting
with two other girls
we were smoking dope
wendy came over and said hello
i immediately recognized her
she sat near me and we talked
as the music played
her hair was long
straight and california blonde
her eyes were so soft yet piercing
at the same time

she didn't care for the two girls
i was with
i could tell
as the night wore on
she walked around the bar but
would always return to me
the girls i had there were getting
goofy from the weed
wendy came back and sat on my lap
facing me
she kissed me deeply and long
i still remember those kisses

she asked me to take her
away from the bar on a ride somewhere
i said ok and we walked out to my bike

i kicked it over and it roared to life
she hopped on behind me
she wrapped herself around me
we were as one on the bike
we went
down highway one
feeling the changes in temperature
as we rode along the ocean
i put my arm back and squeezed
wendy's leg
she closed her legs against my body
as we drove along

we went to the old battleship momunment
and looked out across the ocean
the full moon
shone off the crashing
waves
i pulled up into the park
we drove to the old japanese cemetery

the cemetery had been abandoned
and the land was now a golf course
but several large trees stood watch
a small wall was still intact
in places
and plenty of headstones stood
mutely as testimonies to those
who had passed
we sat and smoked a couple joints
we said few words
but each word had much meaning

she reached over and kissed me
we became like explorers
searching for new and exciting
treasures within and on each other
we made love over and over
wendy and i were one from that
night on

the sunny day she got shot

2005-07-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

i woke up early
wendy was cooking breakfast
and rolling joints
music crept out of the twin speakers
and floated through the house
wendy kissed me and stuck
a lit joint in my mouth
i laughed and took a long deep hit
i jumped into the shower and
sat with wendy to eat breakfast
it was sunday
a lazy sunny sunday
we had no plans and we
were going to enjoy ourselves
wendy put the dishes in the sink
and said let's go for a walk

i said sure baby
the door slammed as we went out
the air was filled with wonder
as we walked out of the house
the shot took me by surprise
first one then another
bullet ripped into the wall
i hit the deck
and pulled wendy down with me

i didn't notice she was bleeding
she had been hit and i hadn't
i saw nothing
whoever was doing this was good
i searched the opposite side of the street
i saw the glint of sun off a scope

i didn't have a weapon on me
i was careless
wendy lay there and said nothing
i told her i was going to move back into the hall
and she looked up at me and smiled
and then lost consciousness
i picked up a piece
and ran back outside
crouching in the style of the khe sanh shuffle
the glint was gone
the assassins had fled

i looked wendy over
i saw the small hole the bullet had
made at the point of entry
neat and precise
i looked at the exit hole
it was bleeding profusely
i called an ambulance
and then called uncle vinny
he didn't answer his phone

i started calling down the phone tree
i got one prospect
he said that we had suffered
a retaliatory raid by the peckerwoods holdouts
i asked if anyone was dead
he said two members, and uncle vinny
was in critical condition
the ambulance arrived
they started an i.v.and put wendy
in the back

i went inside grabbed my colors
and jumped on my bike
wendy was already in the operating room
by the time i reached the hospital
they asked what type blood i had
o positive i said
good they said, she needs some
i sat nervously in the waiting room
filling the telephone with quarters
after i had donated my pint

the attack had been coordinated
across the bay
two members dead, three wounded
uncle vinny in critical condition
wendy hanging on by a thread
as vice president i called the first number
on the phone tree
and the message was relayed to all
involved members, prospects, hang arounds
ex members and friends
there was to be a meeting at the club house
at noon
be there, was the message

i made sure there was an armed guard
with uncle vinny and wendy
the other casualties
had already been released from the hospital

i sat at the large table
in the members-only room
well i said
any ideas or names?
no one had any info yet
there was a knock at the door
a prospect came in and whispered something
in my ear

i said thanks and he left
well there were six teams
only four connected
vinny, the two dead members
and my old lady
the other two ran afoul

a member's kid had seen one team
he came into the house and told
his dad about the guys with guns across the street
that member had shot one and held the other prisoner
he was now singing like a proverbial canary

i was guaranteed he would give up all the details before he died
the last assassination group had
received heavy gunfire from the member they had
been sent to murder
they gave up and split
within an hour i had the names
and the addresses of everyone involved
it was ex peckerwoods and some
friends

within an hour and half
i had teams in the field with instructions
to capture or terminate
the word came from the hospital
vinny was out of critical condition
i rode back to the hospital wendy was at
she was still in surgery
i sat pacing in the waiting room
i was pissed
i was angry with myself
i had been careless
just because it was safe an hour ago
doesn't make it safe now
well i would never make that mistake again
the doctor came into the room
he walked towards me
he looked at me and said
she made it
but she will need a lot of time to recuperate
there should be no permanent physical damage
she will be in a room in intensive care
go see her but only spend
a few minutes with her now
she keeps asking for you
i walked into the room and saw her
she smiled weakly
i bent down and kissed her
she had tears in her eyes
she tried to talk but she nodded out
i kissed her and went out to the prospect i had waiting with me
i want armed guards around the clock
he nodded

i rode from the hospital wendy was in
to where the boss
uncle vinny was
i walked into his room
the boss was looking miserable
they got us eh?
yeah i said but it's under control
damage was not as bad as they had intended
how are you doing?
i'll live he said, but i'll be sore
i got five slugs in me
can you imagine that?
five 9mm's, the doc said
i guess 9mm aint shit, eh bro?
we laughed and the boss went to sleep
the guards were in position
the day's deeds were done

now i went to see our prisoner
i looked at the bloody face
he flinched when i grabbed him
i said look man you gave it up
so i'm going to let you go

everyone looked shocked
he tried to smile
oh, i said but i already put the word out
you snitched your bros off
i'm sure they will take good care of you
get him home
i suspect he will have visitors waiting
they dragged him out and took him home to his place
i was told shots rang out before the boys left
payback is a bitch
i went back to the hospital to sit with wendy
i felt tired and fell asleep in a chair
i lay my head on the bed and held her hand
life sure is strange i thought, and drifted off to sleep

biker thanksgiving

2005-07-07T09:26:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

the first thanksgiving dinner
i had as a club friend
was held at uncle vinny's house
i brought wendy
and a lot of weed
i was sitting with the guys
shooting the shit while
we were listening to some
tapes of country music
uncle vinny had made
the ladies were flitting about
in the kitchen
fussing with the dinner
and staying out of the way
occasionally a cackle or a laugh
would rise from the kitchen

now one must understand
the biker and biker-lady
roles
the married old ladies
were denied certain basic
forms of intimacy with their husbands
they were stressed beyond belief at times
to do impossible things
no show of affection
was ever allowed
in public between males and their mates
sweeties and sometimes girlfriends
were allowed to act differently
they could show and receive affection
according to situations

the major premise of not showing affection
in public
was to keep the object of affection
protected from dastardly deeds

outside club or even inside club forces
could use his affections
to get to a member

one might see this aloofness
as a buffer to keep
a person's friends from
being hurt, thereby causing
physical or emotional harm
to be inflicted
on a member

once a friend of mine
a club member
who was untouchable
to any pain or any feelings
of discomfort
similar to an ancient samurai
found his only close friend
a friend from childhood i might add
dead from an overdose
of heroin
he was found on the biker's front steps
strange thing was
the dead guy didn't do heroin

so back to the story
the meal was completely cooked and ready
vinny's old lady said dinner is served
one guy incurred the berating
of the others, he went to fill his plate
the rest of the group sat and
waited to be served

orders were barked at the women
this was a macho scene and face had to be saved
wendy was unsure of what to do
a friend of ours, a woman we have
known since day one, came to wendy's aid
come on hun, let's get his food she said and
she took wendy away and they returned
with a plate for me
it was heaped with all the stuff i love
mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, green beans
and turkey, plus dessert, pumpkin pie and whipped cream
i was in seventh heaven
the other old ladies brought plates to their respective mates
and then retired to the kitchen
they were summoned occasionally to fetch salt or pepper
out of the blue the members got a call

and all had to leave
i was left alone with all the women
i found it amusing
i heard the chatter going on in the kitchen
one of the old ladies was sitting, still eating
in the room with wendy and me
i said to her
elaine that was pretty nice of you
to serve the guys food like that
she laughed hysterically

the other wives came to see what the humor was
elaine said to the assembled group of
women that i thought it was cool to see the wives
getting stuff for their husbands
to eat
they all laughed
i wasn't sure what the joke was
yet

elaine said, well i'll confess
i did it
but i never want to
because i get no thanks
for anything
so to kind of even the score
--because at this time no one would dare say anything
was wrong
that is, no one would say in public
what was going on
and lose face --

i don't understand, i say

--well she said
we pile their plates with
everything they hate
and they have to eat it!
or look bad
i laughed like hell
payback certainly is a bitch
and her name is elaine

anarchs of the highway

2005-07-07T09:23:00.000-07:00

by tom nowak

when i started riding bikes
you didn't need a license
you didn't need a helmet
you needed balls
my grandmother bless her soul
asked me when i spoke about it
what are you gonna buy, jr?
an indian or a harley?
i laughed
what do you know about bikes?
she smiled
well i used to get rides out to the ocean
on the back of both kinds, but i like indians best
i laughed
when was that? i asked
1915, she answered

so i guess you might say bikes
were in my blood
the first ride i remember
was with a favorite uncle
a marlon brando type
fresh home from a long war
itching to ride
he was an ex-paratrooper
and rode like a madman
which i suspect he was

after the first ride
i was hooked permanently
i hung with the bad boys
the people who had little
book learning but had lots of smarts
that went beyond the typical
scholar's
they could fix anything
with some wire
and some bolts
they made parts they didn't have
and they shared their knowledge
with anyone who could hang with them
they drank a lot
they smoked reefer
they raised hell
they had honor
they had pride
their word or handshake was as bonding
as any written contract
they were the last real americans
they had incredible ideals and
they believed in codes of conduct
that went beyond the normal citizen's
understanding
they loved this country
even as they were being taken
to jail for minor infractions

they still believed in the system
they worked under it
it never really worked in their favor
sociologists call the biker life a counter-culture
we called it a band of brothers
a society of warriors existing and thriving
beside the dominant straight culture

i remember taking my motor apart
and hauling it into the kitchen
i put the engine on the table
disassembled it
and did a valve job
i took the heads off
threw them into the oven
heated them up
pounded the bastards out
put the new guides in
put the springs back on and
re-assembled the whole thing in about four hours
i took a head to a machine shop
to have an engineer mic it up
he laughed
he said the clearances were perfect
and the porting and polishing
was on the mark
what machine shop did this? he asked
i smiled
i did it i said
he shook his head in disbelief
come on where'd you get it done?
i swear man i did it on the kitchen table
he laughed and said, well keep up the good work

keeping the bike up and ready
took little time if you did it right the first time
you only needed
basic maintenance to keep it running
running like a stolen horse
most often points would need to be reset
and anyone who had a matchbook could do it
the perfect gap was the thickness of the matchbook cover
go figure

i loved the bikes
i loved the feeling at 5 a.m. when prospects
pulled up out front of my place
they all wanted to ride with me
i have no idea why
we would stop at a gas station
before we got on the freeway
i had filled my tank up the night before
i remember what being a prospect was all about
depending on gas tank size
we could be rolling without stop
for at least a couple of hours or
longer if the machines were running well

sometimes we could ride for hours
stopping only for a piss stop
i remember being in the saddle for 450
miles before we stopped except for refueling
450 miles and then maybe we would pull over
smoke a joint or drink some brandy
and just bullshit

when 80 bikes pulled up outside
a restaurant many heads looked
but when we left several hundred dollars in tips
many more heads looked
and we were always
welcome to come back

the feeling of riding in a pack
was incredible
it reverted to the basic herd instinct
the pack
was an entity of its own
you gave up your individuality
to the pack
it must be a long forgotten
memory of our mounted
hunter past
when the road slipped
underneath you at 70mph
and the air temperature
changed as you rode
you melted into one with the bike and the pack
you felt safe
you felt invulnerable
you felt the pack's strength
you felt the earth
you were one with it all
when you finally stopped
your body tingled
with the vibration of the engine
your ears still roared with the sound
of the wind rushing by
and the noise of the engines
the sound of straight pipes
like thunder reverberating
off the road
off each other
off the walls
off the bodies of cars
you passed

passengers in the car would look
terrified
all except for the kids
they would smile and
wave and look all big-eyed
as we passed them
they knew the score
they knew
who and what we were
we were what they wanted to be
in their heart of hearts
we were free and they knew it

Midcentury

2005-06-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

In 1950 all the cars were black.
You could see it in the photos
Of them parked along the street.
You might say they were dark blue,
Slate grey, Sherman Tank green?
Perhaps. In the photos they're black.
Also dark, shades of dark chocolate,
The fedoras and overcoats men wore;
Black galoshes had big black buckles.
Ink-dark fountain pens in starchy shirts,
White handkerchiefs in somber suits,
Outfits serious enough to be buried in.
Satchels lugged to the train in the dark
Carried the burden of working at dawn.
Polka dot dresses in dark navy, for women,
Went with white gloves, even a gardenia!
A string of pearls would be more likely.
Rotary phones, desktop radios, clocks were black;
Ditto Remington typewriters, tommy-guns.
Refrigerators, medicine cabinets were white.
Doctor's bags, stethoscopes were black,
Nurses' dresses, their shoes, hats, white.
It was a noir world.

The everpresent cigarettes were white.
The flashing grins were pearly white.
They did not know what they were doing,
Smoking themselves to death happily
In emulation of tough guy Humphrey Bogart.
Here's looking at you kid! Have a smoke?
My chest's getting a little tight -- must be love.
It was also the era of the TB ward.
The x-rays were, of course, in monochrome.
My uncle wed his TB ward nurse;
Their five beautiful daughters are
Blooms from the graveyard's edge.

Cocktails, also everpresent, were silvery.
Straight up? On the rocks? Olive?
The slick silvery rails of a train straight to hell.
Coffee next morning, perked, black, three lumps,
In thick white diner mugs, was a mighty engine
Towing you back to the station for your next run.
If you could stay sober 'til happy hour
You could deny you were a drunk,
No matter how unhappy.

The family albums were in black and white.
(That's where I found the pictures of the cars.)
The Daily Mirror was in black and white.
There was no real TV then, not widespread.
There were the newsreels at the theater,
Then the movie, on Saturday afternoon.
When TV finally did come in big
The newsmen smoked while interviewing celebs
(Hell, doctors smoked while taking your pulse)
The air was grey.

I remember when we got our first TV.
Eisenhower was president, circa '53.
Soon I was full of images of cowboys,
Roy Rogers, Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy.
Riding white horses, fighting men in black,
Using pearl-handled revolvers, silver bullets,
Playing cards with Bat Masterson.
(The hearts, the diamonds were black.)
I remember I dreamed in black and white.

Years later my kid brother,
Being young and full of it,
Had to be different:
He claimed he dreamed in technicolor.
I had to hand it to him.
That was pretty good.

Uses For Your Duct Tape

2005-06-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

"If the Egyptians had had duct tape,
the Sphinx would still have a nose."
-- Garrison Keillor

This stuff is so versatile and useful.
Think of the things you could do with it,
While young George is out back attacking beehives
With his brand new baseball bat.

Okay, let's see? Our heating and a/c ducts,
Per se, are intact. There is a hole
In the back door screen -- Cousin George, too,
With his fishing lure. He's a terror, that boy.

A little bit of tape on the tear here
Will keep out a few bees.
And when Georgie gets his brand new bat broken
We can patch together his toy good as ever.

Right under where it says Louisville Slugger
Burned into the label, right under where the wood
Splinters like a man at arms gravely injured,
We can smoothly wrap and wind the silvery stuff.

Now, there, it's like it was never busted.
All is made whole. Don't worry, George.

-a poem by Michael Dennis Mooney

[March 2003]

Sequellae To Our Campaign Of Slaughter

2005-06-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

A fifteen million dollar helicopter crashes,
Brought down by a farmer with an old Czech rifle.
An M1 tank, state of the art, tips over into a muddy river
And its entire crew is killed. Similarly by accident,
We shoot down our best fighter jet with a ground-to-air missile;
Zap! Poof! Zeus-like power, misdirected by a "software glitch".
A maintenance convoy takes a wrong turn in the streets of Nasiriyah,
And ends up captured, missing, killed, or p.o.w.'d.

Among the missing are young women.
They are likely being raped as we listen
To Rumsfeld spinning the news on TV.

He says, support our troops.
He has a lot of goddam nerve!

Nineteen-year olds, twenty-year olds, a year out school, babies!
Are coming home today to their weeping mothers at the airport;
Out of the planes come their flag-draped coffins;
Inside those coffins, they are dressed in clean new uniforms;
Their accompanying papers award them "distinguished service" posthumously;
Also, they are awarded death benefits, burial costs.

The U.S. and its young soldiers went to war last week,
And now we have dozens of our youngsters back.
They were killed mostly by the accidents of our campaign
To slaughter Iraqi conscripts, who are wisely fleeing.

[Spring, 2003]

##

The United States Needs A Regime Change

George W. Bush is using weapons of mass destruction.
The U.N. should form a coalition and stop him.

The United States needs a regime change.

George W. Bush is destabilizing the Middle East
With an unprovoked invasion and merciless slaughter.

The United States needs a regime change.

He is the unstable leader of a rogue state, reckless,
And has no foresight about the consequences of his actions.

The United States needs a regime change.

His government consists of corporate cowboy honchos:
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz are the Axis of Evil.

The United States needs a regime change.

Maddie Albright and Condi Rice are the Ladies' Auxiliary of Evil.
Colin Powell and John Mc Cain are the True Blue Boy Scouts of Evil.

The United States needs a regime change.

Bush is turning Iraqi towns into rubble-strewn shooting galleries,
Making the heart of Mesopotamia into a cruise missile test-fire range.

The United States needs a regime change.

Baghdad's buildings are smoking hibachis filled with the dead,
This the fuming retort in which Islamist hatred is bred.

I'll tell you what the U.S. needs, representative government.
The United States needs a regime change.

[Spring, 2003]

Watching CNN On Drugs

2005-06-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

"I had to have an operation last week and had
the unique experience of being laid-up in the
hospital watching CNN on drugs."

-- Senator John Kerry, Spring 2003

All the banks in Baghdad have been looted.
Mobs with guns pushed right past the guards.
They're throwing piles of dinars in the air,
Tearing 100-dinar notes like confetti,
Each one bearing a likeness of Saddam.
No one in Baghdad can write a check
To pay a bill, or to pay for anything.
There is no money in any of the banks.

The archives, likewise, have been looted.
There are no records left of any deeds to property.
No one can sell a property or dispute a claim.
One might as well lay claim to the four winds.

The National Library of History has been emptied.
Ancient manuscripts and books there all are gone.
The books have been stolen by ignoramuses.

The Museum of Antiquities has been sacked,
7,000 year-old stone tablets, statues, urns,
All are gone. Old Hammurabi surely made a law --
But then Old Hammurabi's gone among the lawless!

A garbage truck's flying erratically down the street.
Even garbage is part of the looters' haul.

No hospital in this city can do surgery.
Besides the fact there is no electricity,
Too much equipment here was stolen
By angry mobs who smashed what they couldn't take.
A taxi, doors flung open, careening, stops.
A dead body is lying on its back seat.
This taxi is the new impromptu ambulance.
The ambulances have been stolen by the looters.
Nineteen thousand bombs have fallen these three weeks,
And no hospital in Baghdad can do surgery.
The doctors curse a blue streak; they carry pistols;
The nurses walk around in tears.

At the Ministry of Health the refrigerators
Holding the key vaccines for the whole country
Have been unplugged, stolen for quick-buck resale.

Being guarded by U.S. troops, the Ministry of Oil
(Unlike Education and Health being laid waste to)
Does not have all its assets safe from the locust plague.
Resourceful looters are themselves drilling for oil.
They are drilling holes in the pipeline in the desert
And carrying drums of the black goop away,
To be used for home heating and for sale.

Many of the looters are now feeling guilty
And turning in their booty at the mosques
Where it is being registered by clerics,
A chandelier here, there a gold plated faucet.
The city is one giant lego set
Kicked under the bed, scattered to pieces.
It'll never be put back together the same.

Now that the place has been wrecked beyond recognition,
A crime far worse than Al Qaeda's attack on New York,
Now comes the era of reconstruction!
The U.S. Army holds a big public meeting
For civil servants who want to go back to work
(Police in this line, engineers here, doctors over there.)
They'll get paid in U.S. dollars. Iraq will be the fifty-first state
For years, its twenty-three million people on welfare.
Children in hospitals, peppered with shrapnel,
Fingers blown off, need not apply for the new prosperity.

What are the chances that George W. Bush's can-do army
Would roll into Newark, Detroit, or South Central L.A.
And say, Let's all get together and go to work,
Let's spend billions from our treasury,
Let's make things permanently better
And put a smile on the face of the people?

[April, 2003]

shrub's second 'naugural
after e.e. cummings

mista and missus dumbass americans
this day january twentyish is the first day
of the resta yer bush administrayshun
and i mr g dubya dumbass the second
am delighted to take the lead as yer dumbass in chief
we need to provide more security for our peoples
and hep the economy by gettin rid of needle-less paperwork
plus southern fried english will become the official lingo
of these here united dumbass states

[note: shrub = junior bush]

On the Holidays

2005-06-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

by Michael Dennis Mooney

Gather round the turkey feast.
Look on this poor carved-up beast
Who yodeled with vivid animal joy
And all the barnyard did annoy.
His offenses were not overlooked.
He, with his friend the goose, is cooked.
As this doomed bird is cannibalized,
I will the holidays anatomize.

No? You're given to veganism,
Repelled by meat-eating paganism?
Gather round the green beans almondine!
Soon you'll resemble a stringed bean.
With those beans, you'll want some rice.
Too bad you can't have cheese, 'd be nice.
What? Cashews? Huh? Cashews? 'shundheit!
No? You can't have a pickled egg?
Would you could gnaw on this poultry leg.

You have your list of things to do.
Now, have I an idea for you?
Know how you rush the season, put up lights,
The tree, right away Thanksgiving Night?
-- A giant, vinyl turkey, inflatable,
A light inside, butter in the Butterball,
Plunked in the front yard, day after Halloween.
On to another holiday! No breather in between.
This need to do, this compulsivity,
This hyperorganized activity
In arranging for warmth, festivity,
Against the oncoming cold, dark season,
Brings the strain of overdoing without reason.

This getting in touch with your Inner Martha,
Arranging for warmth where there's a dearth!
I remember your last holiday dinner,
As a perfunctory show an all-time winner.
Few could attend, so it was "intimate".
All were intent on staying Atkins skinny.
When we'd eaten a morsel of turkey, stuffing,
I was made to seem a perfect ruffian
For gazing at the dishes whisked away,
Most of all the mashed potatoes, gravy.

Mom had had an operation -- and had gained!
Hyperglycemia caused Dad to refrain.
Junior's spirits were on the wane
Because a divorce had caused such pain.
Even Grandma showed much passion
For staying slim and fitting into fashion.
None could summon the will to eat,
Though each dish held a tantalizing treat.
I had traveled all this way
Only to see the dishes whisked away.

Perhaps you'll recall the card I sent.
No one could have mistaken my intent.
It was full of news, my jokes, my thoughts.
Your reply was a perfect, empty nought.
Under the phrase, Happy Holidays!,
Your name's not signed, it is engraved.
I hardly know which agency to thank --
It might as well be sent me by my bank.
I think I should thank your printer
For thawing my bones, warming my winter.

And I should thank your personal assistant
For the very thoughtful gift she sent.
Who knew I wanted fruits and nuts
Brought to me by a Fed-Ex truck,
Arranged by one, two deft mouse clicks,
Backed-up with requisite credit card digits?

Not decor, not food, not card, nor present
Can speak so clear a sentiment
As your talk, in this case your excuses,
Schmoozing and Hypocrisy your muses!
The reason you don't waste a drop of ink
To tell us what goes on or what you think:
"To talk on the phone is much more versatile,
And, after all, it's much more personal."
Likewise, to order gifts online
"Is more reliable than to shop and stand in line."

I can see the note in your appointment book:
"Take M. out to dinner; won't have to cook."
You're a slick business-culture people pleaser --
Yet just another kind of Ebenezer.
For all your lights, food, cards and gifts,
You leave your friends and family feeling miffed
By your utter blank-stare lack of feeling.
All our eyes are rolling to the ceiling.
As you make me feel a helpless stooge,
I say you are a Nouveau Scrooge.

You detect some notes of bitterness?
I hope for normal. That get's me depressed.
Like Crosby in L.A. dreaming about snow,
I miss the holidays I used to know.

A Celtic Face

2005-06-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

Hair of ginger and sweet brown sugar,
Skin of alabaster, whiter, smoother
Than steep walls of new-laid plaster,
Brow's pallid glow, a polished marble,
Throat's blush, a white rose pinkening,
Eyes, serene pools of green
Radiant in late afternoon,
Quizzing eyes behind clerky glasses,
Happily skeptical, lambent with knowing,
Piercing gaze that grabs you by the shirt,
Lips tasting fine wines of amusement,
Smiles, blessings, saying live, let live,
Let children play, let them play all day.

Pregnancy In Late July

2005-06-23T11:31:00.000-07:00

His love is in the garden.
She is ripe as a brown pear.
Her smile is a water lilly.
Her step, the sway of a laden vine.
She is splendid and at ease.
Seeing her thriving thus,
He feels he makes rain and sun.

Poem of Jack's First Day

2005-06-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

When we first met our son Jack
He was a cry heard across the room,
A high-octave pipsqueak wail.
Then the surgeon, smiling, held him high.
He was a flailing package of surprise.
His spread-wide fingers clawed his cheek.
His almond-shaped eyes were open, wildly, madly blue.
His head's shape was beautiful.
He had dark lanugo hair like an Eskimo's,
Ruddy skin pinkening, a deep chest breathing deeply,
Broad hands like a carpenter's in miniature,
And long limbs wheeling in the cold and antiseptic air.
He came to a halt on the warming table,
Under it's sunny light and the nurses' songs of praise,
And found his first repose.
He turned and looked me in the eye,
As I moved in close.
Then we clasped him to us.
He was blanketed like a rescued seaman,
This secret stranger we had been hearing from
By sonar and knocks on the bulkhead wall.
We held agitated get-acquainted talks.
He cried, though he could not tell us why,
And we cried too, to know his voyage ended safely.
Later, I read a magazine by a low light
And watched his sleeping respirations
In the late night quiet
Until I could not sit upright.

[September, 1991]

A Poem of Jack's First Words

I. "DADA," the name that Mamas teach their babies first!
He started with "addy," and "adda adda,"
Then finally he could say "dada."
He said it as early as six months
When he could hardly say boo,
But nobody would believe me.
People told him, "You're Dad is silly,"
And tickled his chin to see him laugh with them.
They were sure he could not talk yet.
He only listened in their noisy rooms,
He was just visiting, looking around, no comment.
But, on the shadowed stair, as I brought him down
From his crib in serene dawn light,
With no one else around to distract his gaze,
He would look me in the eye and stop me cold
With a quiet "Dada!" and a smile.

II. "EDDY," his name for our dog Ted.
Again, his mother's coaching showed,
She was teaching him to name the ones he loved.

III. "BABA," for his formula or milk or juice, his bottle.
Later his bouncing ball was "ba" and "baba,"
Likewise his little rubber baseball bat
Which he held by the fat end and sucked
And waved in the air. His morning banana
With his cereal was always "baba."
A Golden Delicious, a peach, was a "ba,"
A ball of sweetness his mom would cut up
In slippery chunks for his nimble greedy fingers.
Also "baba" became "ball ball," bouncing the ball,
When he saw big kids playing "ball ball" in the park,
He'd go waddling into the basketball game.
He'd have to be pulled out. He'd wail, "BALL BALL!"
He was sure he could play with those kids.

IV. "KITTY," another love object,
Loved for its soft fur
And its contented purring.
Any small animal, a squirrel
Or puppy, was called "kitty."

V. "VROOM!," a sound he loved to make
As cars shot past us
When we drove to daycare.

VI. "M-M-M GOOD!," another imitation of his Mom,
From his introduction to solid foods.

VII. "M-M-MAMA!," Jack finally said "Mama!"
And his mother almost fainted.
After many false starts,
"Emma," "Emmay," and "Emmy,"
Which he said for weeks and months,
His Dad finally got the idea
And established a firm tutelage,
Continually modeling "Mama" as an address.
Then one day while eating he said, "M-M-Mama!."

VIII. "COOKIE," a tasty treat to munch
With new teeth.

IX. "BOBEE," for flying marvels in the yard,
Big blackbirds, for gulls that swooped down at the beach
As he ran to them with handfuls of popcorn.
Later, he used "Bobee" for Big Bird on TV,
Though that dodo seemed incapable of flight.

X. "AWGEE," the actual name of his cousin's dog.
Later, he learned to call Ted "Awg."
On the TV shows we watched, the bears, the lions,
Most creatures, were "awgs."
But the unicorn was "kitty."
At a circus parade, an elephant
Was an awesome-- deep breath-- "BIG AWG!"

XI. "UH-OH!," another dinnertime word,
For when he dumped his plate
From his highchair perch,
Making a mess for us
And a feast for "awg."
Soon he would use "uh-oh!,"
With a big full-faced smile,
To make us laugh
When we were tense or upset.

XII. "PRETTY!," his name for his mother's earrings,
Her necklace, her smile, her eyes.

XIII. "HI DAD!," a greeting his "Pretty Mama" modeled.
I got to hear it every day when I came home.

XIV. "HEY GEE!," this his greeting for the "awg."

XV. "PUMPTHIN," his first round object
That was not a "ba."
At October's end
His Mom transformed it
Into a lantern.
That magic night
We went out on a walk.
All the neighbors had one
In their windows,
And he couldn't believe
All the "pumpthins!"

XVI. "BA-DOW!," Jack's word for excitement.
When a train crashed in a TV movie,
With the onlookers screaming, "Lookout!"
Our boy yelled, "Bow! Bow! Ba-Dow!"
He derived it from the children's game
At daycare: "All Fall Down!"
(Yes, Ring Around The Rosie.)

XVII. "PEAR," his only fruit that was not a "ba,"
Softer and more sweet.

XVIII. "GET DOWN?," his urgent request to be released
From his highchair, his playpen, my arms.
Our Jack now lived by the "Get Down!" imperative,
His continual need to go off and toddle,
Explore, and knock things over, "Uh-Oh!"
And to fall down, "Ba-Dow!"
As we were watching football on TV,
The players collided and tumbled to the grass:
"Booboo Down!" -- daycare his model for this, too,
A playground mishap. He was delighted,
On TV they repeated it over and over.
This new game, football, was "Booboo Down."

XIX. "PEASE?," his asking for "More, please"
When there's no more milk in his "ba."
(He was not asking for peas.)

XX. ... And now this latest was not really a word,
But a marvelous and fun linguistic exercise
With a mouthful of milk: "PTH-TH-TH! PTH-TH-TH!"
The raspberry! It tells adults
To try and have some fun. Let's play.

[October, 1992]

Tantalus In Greek Myth

2005-06-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

Tantalus, in Greek myth, is standing on tiptoes
And up to his chin in water.
Above his head is a branch laden with ripe fruit.

He cannot open his mouth,
Though he is perishing from thirst;
He cannot open his mouth,
Though he is starved;
He cannot open his mouth:
He cannot eat fruit or drink water,
Because he will surely succumb to the flood.

He cannot open his mouth to cry out.
He is tortured by abundant hydration,
By a plenty he cannot have,
By unfulfilled appetite.

II. Tantalus At Denny's

Well, I guess the grand slam is out.
All those hotcakes, butter, syrup,
Sausage, bacon, eggs, etc!
Washed down with coffee, cream, sugar,
Maybe a glass of orange juice.
Then there's the coffee refills, more sugar.
Too many total calories.

I'll have the salad. Yes, low-fat dressing.
The chicken breast with carrots, rice.
A diet coke. No, no dessert.

No, don't bring me any water.