"...there are nine types of ground excluding daily life."

- Sun Tzu

"When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos."

- Tao Te Ching

"This jester looks quite solemn, but clowns are
apt to be;
Their business is to make us laugh, not laugh
themselves, you see."

- The Little Book of Hand Shadows

Piss gasoline on FEMA and set them on fire
or
Don't kill Bush 'cause Cheney'd be worse


skiddle-ma-rink-a sip from the brink-
abyss-a sip of the dew.
You're.
News.
Too.

Slum fodder come God or high water,
sunburnt toddering tide slips
festering lunatic mind cogs
off of the rocking tombs'
liveried slaughter's
slim dance of the blithely exhumed.

our power-brunch bunch
punchy lunch hunch much,
such crutch clutch us
flushed hush-up.

Sing sung, "We've did all we've done,
and posed and what fun, yet it's time to run,
not habit, the nun,
and noon though it sinks must follow the sun,
not naught for the cost of the shit that we've bought
needs store 'fore the snowin' she comes."

Photo-genius face, charitearful embrace,
receipt for the good that they've done.
The hero whilom went way to where-from
while native son-dered
twain blight, twin hunger
thunder palled, sown under
loam, slumbering
growth.

"To piss warm and drink cold, as Trimalchio says, because in the middle is our Mother the Earth, made round like an egg, with all good things in herself like a honeycomb."

-Miller on Miller on Petronius

"Sometimes naked
Sometimes mad
Now the scholar
Now the fool
Thus they appear on earth:
The free men."

-Hindu verse

"I am a factor of universal balance. My fate has always been a matter of distribution, participatory or not."

-Moi

"All and nothing, breath to sound to echo to ear. Limitless light. And us... and us. How strange."

-Pythagoras


That was my night: full of strange promise, men consulting the cosmic rulebook, women with eyes and lips toward the sky. Stirrings. Something large will happen today.

Bring a bible and a rope
or
Tear the memories from my eyes


Frank settled down in the Valley,
and he hung his wild years on a
nail that he drove through his
wife's forehead.

He sold used office furniture out
there on San Fernando Road and
assumed a $30,000 loan at
15 1/4 % and put a down payment
on a little two bedroom place.

His wife was a spent piece of used jet trash
Made good bloody-marys, kept her mouth
shut most of the time, had a little Chihuahua
named Carlos that had some kind of skin
disease and was totally blind.

They had a thoroughly modern kitchen;
self-cleaning oven (the whole bit)
Frank drove a little sedan.
They were so happy.

One night Frank was on his way home
from work, stopped at the liquor store,
picked up a couple of Mickey's Big Mouth’s.
Drank 'em in the car on his way to the
Shell station; he got a gallon of gas in a can.

Drove home, doused everything in
the house, torched it.
Parked across the street laughing,
watching it burn, all Halloween
orange and chimney red.

Frank put on a top forty station,
got on the Hollywood Freeway
headed North.

Never could stand that dog.

-Tom Waits

My-oh-my-oh Mindy Moloch,

You talk a load of filth, such squalls of grueling kink as would make the Marquis de Sade throw up a little in his mouth. Prisons don't have slang for hobbies which you've diagrammed on your Twister mat. And those rosary beads you tell through your toes smell seamy.

She's fixing me with her humid grey eyes as one leg -- foot bare, toes shimmering -- dips precise time into a basin filled with... what? Each thick slap of the svelte metronome slicks the wood floor with prismatic tendrils barely violet and veined with pearl.

"The rosary belonged to a Borgia Pope who used it as a tickling addition to his holy of holies," she lies, twining her toes through it, "And the foot bath is not cum and liquefied plums, because that would be impractical." I wonder.

The slapstick skirmish between my goggle-eyed ego and terrified id rages. One paws to go over and give in, deliciously, even on pain of certain death; the other flails for the door, embedding fingernail shards in the floor as he is pulled to certain depravity. The hot fugue of steam and sweat and wood closes in.

Normally I'd sooner clamp my teeth on an electrified cheese grater and start sawing open nerve endings than be interested in reading the play-by-play of banal minutiae that makes up a terrifying fraction of most people's day-to-day routine. I know, I know, relating the details is probably cathartic in a way I won't go into, and some may find it to be compelling journalism. Maybe my complaint lies with the lackluster, milquetoast declarative style that they're written in; like Hemingway on a depressive jag. C'mon, you know what adverbs are, use 'em. But I digress. Having said all that, I'm now going to tell you what I had for breakfast.

Seriously, I wouldn't subject you to Chinese water torture unless I thought it would be good for you. And after the breakfast I just had, I sincerely think that you might want to read on. Check it:

Eire's oatmeal (McCann's Irish Oats made w/ chocolate rice milk & water, with 2:1 ratio of Irish cream:scotch splashed in at boil along with 1/2 tbsp molasses, topped w/ pads of butter, rich warm cream, and brown sugar), fresh cranberry lemonade, two scrambled eggs w/ green chile & cheese, half a pomegranate, green tea w/ raw honey, blueberries, and a fucking-A cigarette afterwards. Oooh Damn!, if you don't know you better ask somebody!

I'm no fitness fascist, but eating a fine breakfast is the next best thing to having toe-curling sex in the morning to start your day off in an irie-i way. And despite the cream, butter, and cigarette, the breakfast above is like an energy enema; and if you go all organic then you go with grace.

I hate to sound like a Jewish mother, but eat some breakfast, eat, eat, you're skin and bones. You're gonna thank yourself.

A piece I'm working on. Humor? Erotica? 19th-century-style bloviation? You tell me. Regard:


On the tide of recent events my mind turns to New Orleans. NOLA as I knew it, a suppurating Shangri-La where every facet of life and decay flourished in four-four time, is now forever bound down the backwater burgs of history. Those who knew the Big Easy will not soon forget it, nor will they recognize their gelid Gomorrah after it is rebuilt. The chortling developers will come in with their thumbs hooked through their suspenders and lay a plague of gentrification and commercialization upon the land. It will become a decadence-themed vacation destination complete with such attractions as Louis Armstrong’s Jazzy Juice Joint, Marie Laveaux’s Loa of Relaxation Acupuncture, and Hookers: The Ride. A garish caricature of its former self, New Orleans will then stand as a monument to opportunistic Stupidity until being finally, irretrievably swept to sea. Some things will remain the same, but in different ways. For instance people will still find themselves being fucked for a few dollars down there, yet now they will find no pleasure in it and indeed won’t even have the chance to disrobe. Mark me well. So goes the American way.

Though I mourn New Orleans, I feel I am more fortunate than most. My two years there provide me with memories that I will cherish for a lifetime and whole weeks that I can’t remember even now. I loved New Orleans, and in memoriam of that old city I now commit to tell of a love that could only have been possible there:

It is now three years since I met Christine and the Coke machine. Yet much like the sea in a conch shell, the sticky sublimity of our sexual trinity rushes to me still when I put an effervescent can to my ear. How tender to think that Christine and I led that perspiring machine through the archway of innocence. It would wait, humming in electric anticipation of our next rendezvous, perhaps seducing a few quarters from passers-by, whiling away the moments until Christine and I would come again, and again, and again! Those were the days. The memories come flooding back to me now like so much carbonated syrup.

With Spring in the air and my step I left the dorms of Tulane University that day. Jasmine mingled gently with the soapy-peach season, wafting upon the step of the budding student body; the sun-dappled skin of all inhibition lain bare by the virtual certainty of sowing seed for the price of a little courage. In that warmth everyone felt promise in their future and love on their threshold. I was perhaps uniquely representative of the current sweeping through the campus as I was on my way to learn the language of love. It was my first day of French class.

Entering the classroom early, I took a seat near the back of the room to appraise my classmates as they entered. My curiosity was not to be satisfied, however, as the first person to walk through the door behind me took the breath from my lungs and the reason from my head.

Christine. I remember nothing more of the day after first laying my eyes on Christine. She flowed into the room like cool water, undulating softly beneath her white cotton dress. Placing her teaching materials on the wide desk, a daffodil in her golden hair fluttered to the ground. She bent over to pluck it again. Two perfect ovals strained against their confinement, pleading with me to set them free. I was stricken. The ancient Greek philosopher-poet Clitores, most revered at Lesbos, put it thus, “He spent, but love replenishes.”

“Eternity in an hour,” said Blake, and so it was. Her green eyes seeded forests in which I lost myself. Arcane mysteries were revealed to me through her sacred gestures. She could not help but appreciate her effect on me. How laden with promise was her voice when she first spoke to me:

“He vous, l’idiot de clingnotement dans le dos, what did I just say?”

To which I replied, “Je ne sais pas,” assuring her that I was born just that afternoon upon seeing her. Coquette that she was, she hid her approval behind a sneer and continued with the lesson. Capricious Fate decreed that we were not to speak but those two sentences to each other that first day. Concluding the lesson, she busied herself nervously with her teaching apparatus as I stood over her passionately clearing my throat. She pretended not to hear. Coy. Two can play.

When our workbook assignment came due the next day I had conveniently forgotten all about it. Her reprimand – though overacted – was a balm to my soul. It assured me that her feigned indifference to me was exactly that. Woman, me thinkest thou dost protest too much. The ball: in my court.

I digress here, gentle reader, to give a brief preface to my succeeding actions, which, to the uninitiated, might seem inscrutable, even foolhardy. I assure you that they were calculated with a measured elegance and were the sole reason for my later success with Christine. Sex, for most of the populace, is the be-all and end-all of their barely restrained desires. Like a starved dog they pounce upon any meat thrown their way without hesitating a moment to savor their victuals, and in record time are finished and begging for more. The connoisseur knows better. Sex is exponentially greater than the time spent on seduction. And seduction, far from common understanding, is not a one-way street. Seduction is the careful art of a chase between two mutually endowed predators. If one becomes too aggressive, the other is frightened and flees; if one is too relenting, they are soon overcome, come over, and passed on.

(To be continued...)

Wild animals are alive until they're dead. Most Americans, on the other hand, are neither truly alive nor totally dead. They sleep but do not dream, and they breathe, but never deeply. They stumble through their days and argue, unconvincingly, between complaints, that they are happy. Elation and anguish are strangely absent from their lives, just as large predators are missing from the landscape. Most Americans will never experience a gore wound, tumble down a mountain, or even get punched in the nose. Their pain is worse. It's the suffering caused by an atrophied spirit.

Anarchists would have us believe that these people can somehow be awakened, saved, shown the light, liberated. Or better still, that they will one day decide to save themselves. Let's face it: most people are neither capable of, nor willing to, master their own lives.

With these considerations in mind, there is a strategy I would advocate. Admittedly, it isn't for everyone. Unlike most tactics, however, its effectiveness does not depend on drawing recruits into a critical mass. It satisfies not only the conscience but also the stomach of that rare person who feels that it's not enough to defend the wild, but who more than anything longs to be wild.

The strategy I suggest is an example of the permaculture multi-use principle at its best, not only reducing global starvation and overpopulation, but serving to free up much-needed environmental resources. This, in turn, will relieve some of the environmental strain caused by overconsumption while simultaneously helping the economy.

Yes, cannibalism is the tactic I support. It does not dilute its message for the media sound bite, but instead bites the anchorperson in the throat. Instead of begging politicians for table scraps, they become the main course. Imagine savage tribes of high-schoolers head-hunting in the burned remains of Wall Street. Artists and activists, malnourished no longer, practice with their homemade bows on the slowest, most bountiful game while it lasts. The once-starving millions now exchange recipes. Copdogs. Monarch-a-la-king. Papal sauce. And in every recovering clearcut, Buddha-bellied gangsters are lounging, picking their teeth, belching beside their cook fires.

-John Robbins