July 19, 2013 Vance, Alabama. A random HBRZ PHOTO.

I’m not trying to start off hyperbolic but eternity does loom over all earthly existence and as such there’s no reason for days of the week. Eons passed without humans needing a calendar on the wall of their caves. They studied the sun and constellations. Sundials were useful inventions. We had one until a tornado sent a helpless pine tree unto its structure.

Humans have one irritating habit that has become an obsession: CONTROL.

We want to control the environment; in the end it will defeat us. The sun doesn’t give a damn about our pettiness. It’s like does the cosmos give an anti-matter fuck (guess I will use profanity) whether humans embrace, or don’t, daylight savings time.

I found a lengthy diatribe, I wrote years ago, giving a history of DST, that I will probably retype and share. The universe has far more important matters, notwithstanding anti, creating and destroying stars, planets, solar systems and eventually sending a comet greeting card to earth on a Thursday to reset one of its failures.PRObablt

Governments; if past is prelude there will be more coup d’états globally and eventually the downtrodden and authoritarians will meet in a gladiatorial arena to settle their grievances.

Anything that can be controlled will be taken away from the masses. I was thinking about how congress hasn’t done anything to help average citizens. Nothing really. They’ve taken so many breaks I think they should have their wages garnished.

I once tried to impress myself, just after midnight two December’s back, with:

“You’re as clever as a neutron star in love with a black hole.”

On that random 4th I was using Wednesday for the dreadful end date. I talked about theoretical physics and the end of time, space, matter, antimatter and everything else. All the Wednesday, throughout existence, strung together meaninglessly as a reminder of every one of the we wasted. Maybe, we got wasted. Maybe, we left the stove on and had to turn around and make certain it was off and start the summer school break drive to Florida later.

Perhaps, that’s the day you would have fallen in love.

Or divorced.

Or died.

Time has no use for overly dramatic human behavior.

One of the wonderful qualities of writing is that we’re writing about the future even if the word is never written or uttered.

As I write this particular sentence seconds are inexorably moving forward in time and space. Naturally, every Word behind these are in the past. Since I’m able to edit already written text I’m a time traveler; capable of traveling back in time to repair syntactic errors and grammatical mistakes or merely because I changed my mind.

Nature moves slowly until it has to change itself. We don’t see the grass grow but it does. We don’t see the Big Dipper go from inverted to upright. Of course, it’s earth’s orbit and trajectory around the sun that alters our night sky, too.

We move ; they move.

So as Thursday slowly gives way to Friday, imagine the epoch of Thursdays ends with this one. Have you done everything you could today?

And, I only used profanity once.

Not certain I was funny since I have been serious all day without even smiling except when commenting on other Substacks. Damaged my iPad so this may be my last Thursday writing if she doesn’t respond.

-hbr.07.30.26@749p-

A recent sunset I would have missed had my plans in 2017 been successful

As an introduction, this poetry, in particular, was after a brief description of a wild hypnagogic dream-let where I awoke and feverishly wrote down my best recollection. At the time I was heavily into reading science, literature, philosophy and, linguistic studies. I also smoke a lot of herb, downed Xanax and drank Courvoisier cognac:

Willy Willie Shakespeare entertained Jon Salk, Edgar Allan, Freddy Nietzsche, and Al Einstein at Sardis (NYC), in a private banquet room, and they all got imperially wasted on bee’s honey concoctions with Heroin, Scopolamine, hashish and brandy. Salōmē happened out of no where; she must’ve been in the neighborhood and dropped in to fan dance Salk into a Polio seizure; at least until Herodias crashed the party.

A quick combination of chloroform and antiseptic wipes calmed H and Nietz called in a favor from the Goddesses of Happenstance and teleported Lucrezia Borgia into the room and all was well again in the Hypnagogique.…

…or at least the manner in which it was dreamed all seemed agreeably perverse in free verse reversed.

(Then I wrote this bit of non sequitur de jour)

Memories unseen

Remedies between

Lightning ravine

Unclothed, unclean

In memory of ideas lost and found

Too often unsound

Dinner bell rings

Ladybug sings

Deeds of god

Detonate

The mod

Mini-skirt

Never hurt

Mesh hose

Thorny rose

Fragrance of elegant dancer

Sweetly infused maladroit romancer

Coffee or tea?

None for me

Answers unquestioned and the less traveled roads are one-way and dead-ended like

MCESCHER wood-cutter puzzle boxes

Free verse reversed as consciousness streams overflow

As filmmaker Maya Deren concluded:

“dreams are like water, colourless and dangerous.”

Anaïs Nin added:

“If you don’t breathe though writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use of it.”

July 13th Twenty Twenty Six……..

Looking back over this automatic writing session I recall the sadness I was feeling during this period in my life. I was unhappy with my life’s directionless existence. What I did not know then was that in two years I would sell THE HENRY APARTMENTS, lose my partner of twenty plus years to a greedy family (hers) and squander my savings to later live in my suv, with five cats, work two jobs, both for less than $8.30 an hours, and contemplate my death by self harm.

Somehow, I pretended that once I sold the business my parents built in 1952 to put a, as yet born child, through college in the future, I Would move to either Asheville, North Carolina or Bridgton, Maine. Neither happened and I ended up in Helena, Alabama.

There’s potentially always a why the holy fuck should I let the haters (her grown corrupted children and misanthropic ex husband) win? What no one ever knew, and something I’ve never shared until now, was I did plan my suicide. It was simple. I had saved a secret stash of Xanax, several strong migraine meds and one Valium. A hidden bottle of scotch given to me by my father upon my college graduation in 1976. I’d die in a suv surrounded by my only friends; felines.

I told the cats they would be rescued. I’d leave a note to use whatever was left of my estate —- haha, books and furniture—— to take care of them.

Then a curious thing happened. A customer offered me to stay for a while in his house with his wife and two young children. Unfortunately, he had a seriously dangerous case of PTSD from military duty. It lasted several weeks and ended with—-

GET THE FUCK OUTTA MY HOUSE she screamed.

I’d help keep their power and cell phones on but the husband didn’t tell the wife and rather than thank me for trying to help, since they refused money for rent, I thanked them, was off the property in twelve minutes, and I returned to my lot, near Walmart.

Imagine my surprise: they had stolen my meds from my computer bag.

Goddamit.

Now I have to fucking live?

Synchronous chamber music played in my head singing YOU GOTTA LIVE, ASSHOLE! Except in Latin by way of byzantine chants.

And here I am.

Alive to say thank you for stealing my drugs.

The original cover for my current novel-in-progress dREaMbanditS by TalaB, 1998. The tchotchkes are a courtesy detail.

Frank Adam’s wonderful print, which I found in a second hand shop in Bridgton, Maine in 2002, gives me chills even two decades later. I love how the mother cat is instructing her kittens on their planned home invasion. They have already broken flower pots

In Maine, unlike backwards Alabama, has actual great shops. I wished I could’ve afforded the 1950s Coca Cola machine!

In 2002-04, when I still had some savings I was in a relationship with a wonderful woman who spoke over eight languages and was easily the most intelligent person I will ever meet. She reawakened a dormant, tortured soul who had been in decline for eleven years after a romance ended. When I said I wasn’t intellectually mature she said I was “intellectual in spite of myself.” She had a wicked sense of humor and I loved her deeply. We were together for over twenty years.

Wow.

Seems difficult to believe it ended, not by either of us but the intervention of others, in 2016.

She supported my dreams of being a novelist and even painted the cover for dREambanditS. She helped with the title, too, and appreciated my uppercasing Rapid Eye Movements in the title not to be clever but to be REALLY CLEVER, which as most sentient beings understand, never ends well. We had conversations on the galaxies; the minutia of molecular mechanics. I began watching programs she liked that I didn’t - Oprah, Dr.Phil, home improvement shows, et al.

However, she never full understood how easily I could cry. Her reply when I cried at the end of a Doctor Who Christmas episode was “why are you crying? It’s a tv show?”

Full disclosure: I’ve never been ashamed of crying. Emotionally, I take seriously how I react and when I write I often cry, or laugh or curse at my words. Powerful scenes deserve the prOper response.

I helped edit her final dissertation on A HP 500 computer with dot matrix printer. I created a classroom tutorial on video and used Tangerine Dream as a score. It was never seen by anyone but us and rest easy TADREAM never went public. I first learned of them from a garbage can at the campus AM RADIO station, WMSU, where my country music loving program director help my record collection by - this isn’t a fucking exaggerated recollection - threw away, unopened, the following:

Tangerine Dream Phaedra

Edgar Froese’s Aqua

Todd Rundgren A Wizard A True Star (saw him with Utopia in 1974)

Premiata Forneria Marconi Photos of Ghosts

This my friend, Eric, artist and writer and ARIKA AND THE AMOEBAS creator will love, Sounds of the Air Force, which I am also not exaggerating - only share that characteristic because, on occasion…okay, you got me, often, embellished in my younger days - including a hydrogen bomb explosion. You had to be there and….. under the influence of hashish and psilocybin or was it Window Pane and Thai-Stick? Marching bands and artillery fire and a few more nuclear explosions rounded out the three vinyl collection. It was released by THE FUCKING AIR FORCE! Weird times in 1973.

Robert Klein A Child of the 50s

And

Lindisfarne Roll on Ruby.

He didn’t like music that he didn’t understand while I didn’t like him. I inadvertently got back at him for castigating my musical tastes by playing entire albums on the closed circuit AM (I had to be more careful in the FM station where I learned the intricacies of the 8 and 16 Track Reel to Reel technologies) but he did not know or care about me retrieving the albums.

This muthafuka once said Pink Floyd wouldn’t last (saw them in 1994, with that lady…Natalie celebrating her newest PhD.) and The Rolling Stones would all OD. He asked me to play his girl friend a request by Steelers Wheels which I mistakenly misread the title which is for us old timers: Stuck in the Middle With You. “ and a special dedication to xxxxx from her special guy xxxxx Steelers Wheels (pause as I’m trying to read the spinning title …. BAD move, hey) Stuck in the Middle of You!

Fuck, me.

Seconds later station Telly rings and well he wasn’t pleased and she was less so.

Trivia: that really happened and I nearly lost my nightly shift. However, the Pink Floyd and Stones riff, only one is true…the other I embellished ! ! Leave a comment and tell me which ones fabricated and why I wrote it. I’ll reply with the reason I did it.

Break Time since it’s 349ayem CST, I closed the station of fuel and left at precisely 1245 and for my sins I do it again tonight. Editorial note- this was in March!

You writers and poetics and creative minds out there: You’ll appreciate this, I’ll surmise: there’s more already written below this graf. I got bored and went back to the beginning and decided WTAF? I’ll add to and take away because of FREE WILL. I’ll never give that away it’s mine or….yours, perhaps.

It’ll be interesting reading below before I manipulate fate and tying it together because there is a deeper connection to the cat art. Sweet dreams, pass them on….

LaTeR……June 26th 1:04ayem CST

DREaMbanditS was never completed although I have recently decided it must be written and first draft number ten by my birthday in November. I’m a Scorpio so I should’ve completed db in 2004 in Maine, where the book originally ended on a lonely two lane blacktop.

Even more dedicated would have been completed in the aforementioned years. Instead, I procrastinated and, between caring for my mother who suffered Alzheimer’s disease, managing my eleven apartments near the University of Alabama, and smoking way too much pot I never finished the book.

I did, however, try a different approach. More on that in a moment.

You see, even though I have lived in Alabama most of my life I hate this state. I made a ridiculous statement to myself years ago that I would not die in Alabama. Like where I meet my demise matters geographically, death comes when least expected as the denouncement of my book did.

Seen any dinosaurs recently?

Genghis Khan hasn’t answered my texts

George Carlin, my absolute favorite philosopher humorist; I saw him in 2011 after missing him in 1974, had a routine about why we didn’t see the deceased because “they’re fucking dead!” His political humor and chaos theories were spot on and prescient. He wouldn’t have back away from the Trump Regime.

Speaking of that….

Trump will die.

His sons and daughter, extended family and recent United Nations embarrassment tradwife will each meet the worms and microbes.

Gives me a warm feeling. Destiny doesn’t give a fuck about your wealth, Lamborghini collection or how many cryptocurrencies you possess. Like the FINAL DESTINATION franchise we all may leave this earthly realm quietly, in our sleep - like Carlin (I think he was dreaming of his next comedy routine).

Noem will die and be transported to Sirius, The Dog Star. Even at 8.6 light years from earth it isn’t far enough. Each member of his cabinet, tasked with destroying their respective departments, will each learn about Schrödinger’s Cat.

The political system here is, and has always been, fucked in watch pocket, and if the ignorant and corrupt Tommy Tuberville becomes our next governor it will be as if George Wallace came back from the dead. If you’ve forgotten this maladroit former Auburn football coach didn’t know the three branches of government something even my feline companions understand.

Legislative

Executive

Judicial

All three currently circumvented by corruption that makes the Nixon and Grant combined administrations look feeble by comparison.

Katie Britt is another example of how bad our government is here. Even at work, I’m the only democrat but fortunately my coworkers don’t hold it against me. That’s meant to be serious and not.

I’m not pleased with the dems at this juncture, except for a few fighters like AOC, Bernie Sanders and Jasmine Crockett.

Since the gop (small letters intentionally since they are all small minded hypocritical deviants) decided that democracy and freedom of the kinds, that we obviously took for granted, is no longer worth fighting for, they have given their allegiance to a cretinous regime that is destroying absolutely everything that makes democracy possible.

So, dear readers…if you’re still here….

As for feline vigilantes, my cat companions are constantly working on plans for an armed insurrection. They recently invited several dogs to join their crusade, along with some possums, raccoons and an army of armadillos. Local deers, foxes and rabbits have joined the resistance. There are animal resistant chapters in every state and throughout the world.

Does my heart good knowing the animal kingdom will take control of the earth and rid it of us pesky, destructive human creatures. We had our chances to make earth better and blew it.

So when you usually friendly tuxedo cat puts a sword to you carotid artery or while walking your collie he suddenly yanks the leash and propels you in front of an Amazon Prime truck (notoriously shitty drivers) or the friendly grizzly bear doesn’t wait for your selfie before devouring your arrogant ass remember:

We had our chances to be the dominant intelligent life form and somewhere between sentience and illiteracy we fucked up everything. Ugly thieving billionaires, corrupt governments - everywhere - sexual deviance that makes the Roman pervs seem like amateurs and average, hardworking humanoids, unable to ever retire because of intentional institutionalized debts, we have to die to be free.

Be free now while you can enjoy your freedom as it slowly slips away. Deny global warming and still bitch about how hot it is compared to 1973. Keep driving Tesla Trucks to prove vehicles can be unappealing just like its creator.

I’ve said it many times and close again reminding:

DINOSAURS HAD AN EXCUSE FOR THEIR EXTINCTION.

HUMANS WON’T

Sleep well dear readers and know you’re cable of saving everything if you want future generations to be future generations.

—hbr-6.26.26—

The author after a long day, at the gas station, reflecting on an unpublished essay posted today with addendums.

I recently received a compliment supporting my hope that my sincerity in writing is to remind everyone reading this passage, and beyond, can get a sense of how our lives are interrelated.

“….(that my writing) was like an open book that gives knowledge on every page.”

I write from my soul and heart. My experiences and thoughts commingle and the deeper inside I explore the better.

Any of us can go through moments of grief or sadness and be redoubtable, recovering stronger and with purposive intent.

I have written, mainly for an audience of one, since I was about 11-12 years old. My first short story was about a “haunted mine” with no ghosts or anything an adult would describe as supernatural leitmotifs.

Shannon Mine was a shuttered iron ore mine long since decimated to make room for progress. My three younger cousins and I explored it. We knew what NO TRESPASSING signs meant, we just thought that made it more exciting and forbidden; like stealing butts and smoking or indiscriminate masturbating.

I collected ore nodules outside while my three catholic cousins went inside. As I entered, I was shocked to watch my cousin D fall through the floor to the next level. I looked through a hole in the floor and saw that D was all right even though he fell a full floor below.

So the story was more about the haunting sensation of a defunct mine than spirits wrecking havoc on the living.

My grandmother, Rose Loveman Bridgewater and middle daughter, Virginia Flora Bridgewater both thought I’d be a great and frequently published novelist by 21. They also believed I would become a concert pianist. Piano lessons were wasted from the first two teachers who would not let me play anything classical.By the time I did get an actual lesson in classical the spark was dimming. I did learn to play Bach, Beethoven, Handle and Chopin. I was in high school by then and when I went to the uni my piano playing days ended.

This was before I learned the most important four word question of my youth;

“WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?”

I write for myself with the hope I will entertain or enlighten others. I am back to working on my novel which I started to share recently but a thunderstorm abruptly interrupted my consciousness stream and I never finished the post as planned.

At 72, I’m too old to fully commit to bullshitting anymore, except when writing. I am sincerely always sharing teaspoons of my life with surreal, bizarre, sometimes drug fueled phantasmagorical experiences of my youth.

My online friend Eric (not his actual name) the creator of Arika and the Amoebas, proclaimed me “the gas station poet” last year.

True, I’m an assistant manager at a local gas station, and I occasionally write poetry. I’m more into essays and deeply autobiographical stories. My prose is okay but nothing special; however, I at least give it a chance, infrequently, to empty my brain of excess rhythmic thoughts.

I blogged for a number of years but the programmer wanted a monthly fee I couldn’t afford (At that time, I was homeless for a year, living in my suv and working two jobs) so he closed it and, having not backed up the nearly 1,000 posts, lost everything.

I recently checked the internet way back site and found some of my posts and in coming days I’m going to attempt salvaging them. One of my favorites was a faux movie review that was so well written I fooled several people, including the ex wife of one of the actors in it!

HENRY THE GUN SHOP OWNER

In my cameo for “The Terminatrix” I’m the owner of Henry’s Guns. As for firearms, somewhere in the clutter is a 1915 Smith and Wesson Thirty Eight, last fired in 1980 at an abandoned refrigerator near a target range. Otherwise, I’m not a gun owner, hunter or fisherman. I sold my shotgun and target rifle to an extended family member in 2017.

I’m into black humor and the darker the more relevant.

When people kill animals for sport and get killed by animals I’m overjoyed.

I’m not happy when a bear kills an ignorant human trying to get a selfie or near its cubs and the bear is euthanized.

Are you fucking kidding Me?

We have, and continue to, destroy habitats throughout the world, forcing animals into the domain of human hubris.

We have addicted animals to human food. Bears, bobcats, coyotes and mountain lions weren’t at the drive thru of BURGER DOODLE. We left food and garbage in their habitat. Now, we’ve given them high cholesterol, indigestion and other health problems.

When we go into the forests, or oceans, we become part of the food chain. Sharks don’t force us in their mouths. Once they get past the scuba diving gear or ugly swimming suits we probably taste fairly good. I feel bad for the shark that gets a human appetizer once but never again. They must get awfully sick of eating seafood.

Wonder if we taste like pork? Cannibalism has suggested we do. And you wonder why we Jews don’t eat pork?

I’m not going to debate gun ownership, the NRA, right to bear arms (although bears eating human arms is exciting) or whether or not citizens should own weapons of war for home defense or hunting.

My opinion would be unpopular and unnecessary to the larger question: are we living in the wild west again?

Remember they hung cattle rustlers, bank robbers and con artists selling elixirs. Trumplethinskin would’ve been hung at high noon. Hmmm, delightful imagery; swinging in the breeze to the cheering townspeople.

In those days, just about everyone was armed; little Timmy, the school marm, Sam, the saloon owner. Here’s the difference: outlaws didn’t ride into town and mass shoot up the one room school house. No one got on the roof of the general store and, like a sniper, target unsuspecting shoppers. There was crime; rape, bank robberies, stage coach holdups and murder.

Today, any one of us are potentially victims of gun violence. The difference between today and the wild west was accountability. The killers were generally punished. Justice could be served and quickly. Current laws allow criminality to flourish. Even the scotus (yes, intentionally lower cased) is more likely to side with the criminals than the victims. Money controls them and without oversight they are more dangerous than a loaded assault rifle.

If you believe in the bible Cain-Abel sums up humans and unsurprisingly it was men, not women who first committed murder. I look at the bible as a human creation to educate people on right and wrong. Sadly, it’s useless today when we have a president who has broken all ten commandments and far right christian ignorance ignores it and praises him instead for his christian values.

SIDEBAR: do you know how difficult it is to teach a spell checking system to not capitalize? Until democracy returns I will fight against corruption, religious extremism and this fucking spelling miasma.

The planet earth is a wonderful place and once we’re gone she will be even better. Thousands of years of human history and what does the human race chose to do?

Continuous Wars. Corruption and greed.Rape of children and women. Genocide. Religious persecution.

The list of atrocities humans have inflicted upon one another and animals is astounding to me. We experiment on animals to make our lives better? Bullshit. We’re sadists. Maiming and killing test animals

Everyday, someone gets murdered somewhere in the world. Torture and violence seems to be the human legacy. For all the beauty of art, literature, music, science and yet we’re the least intelligent species on earth.

An elite class of people so wealthy they have no humility or empathy for the average, struggling class. Fortunately, when they die they won’t be taking their jets and homes and money to paradise. Just food for microorganisms and insects.

There is no paradise and although I grew up believing in an afterlife if it did exist would I really want to share it will the worst of humanity?

Fuck no.

The idea evil people can confess to their crimes, embrace Jesus Christ and be allowed into a heavenly realm is a human make believe story. If Hell existed it would be overflowing with evil, corrupt souls. Probably more there than in heaven.

When we become extinct, and trust me on this, we will, the earth will sigh with joy and begin replenishing her surface. At least the dinosaurs had an excuse for their extinction.

I have recently seen a positive impact through the evolution of Substack writers. There are a multitude of reasons to give up on us; however, there’s always hope that enough of us will survive to rejuvenate the planet. I have faith in the writers, artists, musicians and creators to succeed.

It starts every day when you make a positive contribution to the community or accept that we can make a difference.

The evil and corrupt people will die and be replaced. Who, or what, replaces them is another generation’s choice.

Let’s choose love, compassion, faith in humanity and progress.

It’s not impossible. It’s necessary.

—30—

My original ending.

It’s fitting that I re-read my drafts because sometimes I actually say aloud “not fucking bad GSP. You might be a writer after all.”

Here’s something you do not know about me unless I admit it: the previous sentence is bullshit. I am seriously self critical of my creativity. Few people would admit they wrote a short story about 2.5 pages in 1979, under the influence of good pot, Guinness and another disastrous Atlanta Braves loss to the LA Dodgers, and decided it needed to be longer and something…..else.

For those of you still reading (my humor is self deprecating and I reimagine all the movies I have seen as the only audience member that only one person reads my essays and says: “meh” before heading to Only Fans for serious social commentary) I took a simple inter-dimensionality sci fi riff and turned it into a potential 350 page novel. It took seven beginnings under titles as non sequential as THE ECLIPTIC MAN, where I killed the protagonist several different ways because he wouldn’t behave.

There was JOURNALISTIC JARGON, where he was a newspaper editor who accidentally killed a black southern radical and investigated the death as by white racists. Yes, he died in the end, too.

Before dREaMbanditS it was slowly morphing away from the violence and sexual degradation that was too dark and nihilistic for the 1980s. A chance encounter with cocaine, after years of not doing lines, and I expressed to my African American co snorters that “I doubt Jesus would be doing lines of COKE in the hood!”

I had been getting high all night - January, 1980; maybe March - alcohol, reefer, hash, both Black and White Russian, Tequila and finally very good cocaine. One of the brothers I was sharing lines with was getting too religious while stoned to the point of not being able to talk. He was throwing out phrases like “I’m going to hell for doing this” to “you know, what would Jesus do if he was here?”

You have seen my reply. It went downhill quickly. Later, leaving the hood my co-dope friend and I were pulled over by a black police officer who’d come from a crack house (sounds quaint today) and was clearly higher than me. That story is in the novel and it’s a shockingly authentic drug fueled madness and the closest I’d come to getting Jill since New Orleans, 1972.

It was 1992 that another encounter with cocaine nearly ended a romance, my first since 1979, because of how the drug opens mouths to say terrible and hurtful words. “I think you should leave.”

And she did.

I quit everything cold turkey. What’s everything?

Cocaine

Marijuana

Caffeine

Chocolate and sweets

Masturbating

We were together until 2016 and our true ending is in the novel, too, and it shows the evil offspring can do to their mothers. I even decided to kill off a character named after an artist who suggested I commit suicide. Her stage name will be in the novel because it’s too goddam good to waste.

During the relationship I didn’t stop writing.

Suddenly, there was dREaMbanditS, cover art by my partnera film noir meets Greek mythology in 1950 Alabama with private detectives and a siren whose songs could kill. EAR OF THE BEHOLDER; it was already a title elsewhere.

It was a collection of short stories, too, some only a paragraph long, and spoiler, none named after the title.

I can be a bitch.

After an epiphany, dealing with being my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease as her caregiver db started using that illness as the primary through line.

Then the movie INCEPTION came out and part of my story was there. Too late, again. The movie was fine but my storyline about mental spies was gone.

Then mother died and I jettisoned the novel entirely and just wrote on my blog stories nobody read and smoked a lot of weed. Stopped tobacco in 1992 after starting back for a few years.

The novel never stopped metamorphosing until several years ago, while living in my suv, I started getting the mythological mojo back and wrote the beginning and ending.

Sirens, Persephone, immortality as punishment, true love, sacrifice, film noir, 1950-79 time frame and a protagonist who is also the antagonist. Shifting tenses and emotions with death interwoven into the tagline:

In the end; we’re all road kill.

And my personal db, Christopher Nolan is at it again, only I’m reasonably confident his lead siren won’t be in rural Alabama in 1950!

Later, dear reader. Be safe and creative.

And dream large.

I try and remain non committal concerning my writing but often I find something that truly makes me consider a doppelgänger Henry wrote it.

So I share the screen captures and sadly, I’m so exhausted I’m not going to cut and paste them. There may be overlapping sentences at the bottom and I saw the last page begins my review of HONEYDRIPPER; I had an brief interview with the director John Sayles - now there’s a world class writer director and fine human being - and I didn’t find ending of that review. Hopefully, it’s somewhere in the ether.

If you’re reading this, and enjoy a thoughtful and extensive dive in surrealism, in cinema, you might appreciate my exhausted humor. Enjoy, dear reader:

Self-Musing to enthuse amused melodically offering begins in about fifty eight minutes, which is my age, at least until later when it is not:

Fortuitously opaque molecular adhesions enjoy chaos

Mosquito’s avariciousness transcends time loops; like middle ear bone slapped into cochlear concussions

Cricket chirps

Disaffected burbs

As frogs rib bet

Wrinkled, crinkled

Noses of rabbits

To the scent of madness in fugues

the seedless whole and another scopolamine before this dimension closes like tumbling clothes in dryers of combined, then separated, mutant DNA strains

you are welcome

SURRÉALISME

Two months later I’d end up in Helena, when I truly wanted Bridgton, Maine or Asheville, North Carolina. One of many places in my dreams and I ended up broke, working at a gas station, on graveyard, for $8.05 an hour. So much for the BS degree in Journalism and English.

Ironically, by ending up in Helena I would live in my suv for one year and two days; humbling experience that was eventually self-realized as necessary to get my head turned around to the front after looking backwards, sideways and inside without peering outside.

Perusing over my past writing I am amused at how much I have learned since then. I have experienced multiple heartbreaks and failures that could have ended my life. Instead, I chose to remain resilient and earn my way forward and towards new life.

Although few will read this Substack page, most of my subscribers I’ve learned are BOTS; hopefully, these autonomous algorithms will be enlightened, I never expected a large following. I am sincerely not offended by low numbers since I never opened this page for that purpose; it was an experiment. Could I get my writing mojo back after years of writing little notes and titles and paragraphs that, like me in the past, were homeless?

I owe my gratitude to Eric, who created ARIKA AND THE AMOEBAS, for suggesting last year that I open a page here. We had many amazing conversations about creativity and I became a fan and supporter of his artistry. He even gave me the non de plume, “ gas station poet” and created some Artificial Intelligence variations of me, culminating in a cameo in his recent video, TERMINATRIX, which is located further down my Substack page! And hes, it looks very much like me except I’m not a gun owner but it’s a cool fictional character who gets to share a moment with my heroine AI singer-musician-adventuress.

Instead of being worried about few readers I decided to follow and comment on dozens of other Substack pages and met, through the ether, incredible writers, artists, poets, erotic storytellers, political figures and a myriad of people willing to share their stories with strangers. I follow more women artists than men and almost exclusively from other countries. These women are providers of positive and intellectually strong narratives and seeing the rest of the world through their eyes gives me great confidence and pleasure.

Strangers become friends and friends become creative allies.

I gave my thoughts, past experiences and surreal stories a home and, in the end, I’m satisfied.

Welcome home.

NOTE: I was going to address some hateful, vulgar comments aimed at me personally after I commented on an Adam Kinzinger post but decided it was wasteful and unnecessary when moving past the vitriol one faces when sharing opinions online.

For those rage-fried brains I share this: I have found more positive and intellectually honest creative people making you minuscule and unworthy of further scrutiny.

No, my parents named it that in 1952. I was born November 21, 1953. They started with two apartments above garages and, after my birth, my dad borrowed $500 from his mother-in-law to start construction on six more part apartments. Yes, I said $500. That’s my electric bill today. The reason was brilliant: my dad had a degree in journalism and art while my mother didn’t go to college and they decided to use income from the apartments to fund their unborn child’s college education!

Who the hell does that anymore? Plan ahead for the future of an unborn child? Cor blimey, I was not even conceived yet, so the story goes if it’s a boy, THA; however, if it a girl, THE ELSIE APARTMENTS. Henry was to honor my grandfather Henry Goodloe Bridgewater; mother’s dad or my father’s mother, Elsie. I was named for both grandfather’s names: Henry Bernard Rosenbush. Lucky me; the girl would have been named Elsie Schmelsi Rosenbush. Typical Jewish humor. Fortunately, dad was pragmatic and with a dry wit,

Anyway……

Even today, I get a contact high reading the word metamorphisms below. I remember writing this piece because, although it was on my automatic writing style, I actually had planned to include as many alliterations as I could possibly imagine without stopping to consider whether or not they were nonsensical.

Rather than wait until later, when I was no longer under the influence, I decided to test my word knowledge. I have noted a few misspellings, and possible syntactic madness, but I decided to use the screen capture method and display it as was originally intended. I also can reminisce about what my Wordpress blog looked like; the menus and categories. Playing around with codes to include photographs and videos. It was fun and I wish the Wayback Machine had the entire blog I lost in 2017. I’ll settle for the several dozen pages I did retrieve.

It’s a time capsule for me perusing older writing and learning what my brain hemispheres were thinking 14 years ago.

Or, perhaps thinking had absolutely no relevance.

Little did I know when I wrote this poem my life was soon to become almost irreversibly ruined by the worst decisions of my entire life. I was 62 years old and having sold my business, while my partner sold the house I grew up in from 1963-70 (I lived in an apartment my last two years of high school; why is for another day) after I’d deeded it to her, as my thanks for her helping me with my mother’s illness, and running my small apartment complex near the University of Alabama, while I tried to write my novel, dREaMbanditS.

humans discard everything

one another

father and mother

friend and foe

away they go

death through life

husband and wife

needless to say

we all go away

hbrosenbush

Soon my partner would be gone forever and I’d be working at another fueling station; June 12th I will have been in this business over ten years. Still, I pursue writing as my passion and obsession. The novel is slowly coming together thanks to my seemingly endless supply of patience and determination.

Substack has been an interesting experiment.

I always knew that I’ll never make money here; honesty I’m not trying to but was hopeful to expand my writing skills and entertain and educate readers. I have made a few creative friendships, more from women than men; perhaps, if metempsychosis exists I’ll come back female and write like Anaïs Nin, Simone de Bouvier or Emily Dickinson.

I knew going in my style of automatic writing, which to the uninitiated, is a free style made famous by the Dadaist Movement at the beginning of the 20th Century and is basically whatever I’m thinking as I type is what I write, would not attract many readers with its convolution and off-the-planet content. Aside from editing, for grammatical errors and misspelling, the content and context are unchanged. Sometimes, like the poem, I use lower case intentionally, or inadvertently, and think, “That’s better for reasons only my heart understands.”

I blogged from 2006-17, owned an eleven apartment complex from 1987-2012, was a journalist, 1977-86. Even in college I worked for the uni in food services, at a restaurant for $1 an hour (my bosses’ 13 year old daughter stole my tips) and at a bait shop/convenience store/gas station where I once had sex, with my girl friend, on the backroom floor, and we accidentally unleashed a container of crickets onto us as we reached a mutual orgasm. True story, all the while another coworker, the misogynist “Fred” knocked on the locked front door because he’d left his cigarettes inside.

No we didn’t answer the door but giggled uncontrollably and uncomfortably.

That’s automatic writing. I didn’t know I was going to revisit a sexual experience from 1975 until my fingers began typing.

I worked from ages 13-17 for my dad’s vending business, Kwik Kafe, at a gas station for several months during my last days as a high school senior and finally summer at two movie theaters before college beckoned me to pursue loftier goals.

2016 was a year that began with hope and optimism and ended with an eviction, another home, albeit briefly, before living for a year in an suv, with five cats, and working graveyard at a gas station for $8.35 a hour.

That’s what a BS Degree in Journalism and English finally led to and while I worked to get a home it was an experience the ultra rich will never endure, or understand, what it does to the human spirit. It’s humbling to wait on customers knowing most will go home to……a home.

Wives and dinners, saints or sinners all are winners.

I never asked for help, although eventually a few people offered cat food and litter and I did accept their generosity but it never felt good. I had made a costly mistake in financially helping a person, who did not actually need it, but I was gullible and naïve and they repaid my gesture by telling me to “make the world a better place by putting a gun in my mouth and….” They also acknowledged they never liked my writing (although they frequently commented positively), that I talk too much; we did have telephone conversations and that I was boring.

Alas, I do talk too much and can be boring.

Who knew those traits deserved suicide?

Obviously, there’s far more to the story and suffice that I had considered them my muse. Maybe, another time…or maybe not, I never sought vengeance or forgiveness for what happened and oddly I did not cry. I did, however, take responsibility for my actions and reminded myself that I control my own destiny.

Good or bad, happy or sad it is my life to make or break.

Afterwards, I realized the muse was always in me but I decided the felines were my inspiration. Precious, who died in March, was my feline companion for a week shy of 20 Years. She lived in that suv and would often sleep in my lap. She is still awake in my soul.

While I cannot imagine being wealth enough to never miss a meal, have my bills paid by someone else or, a corporation, have multiple homes, automobiles, aircrafts and islands I will surmise the ultra rich will never have to endure life as an actual, normal and average person.

I’m not envious of their wealth.

In the end, they, too, will be discarded.

Death will not treat them better Or worse than me. Their eulogies will soon be forgotten as the living continue living. I have often thought that “life is wasted on the living.”

We are still, to me, at least, a mystery as a species.

We create just to destroy.

We kill everything from insects and microbes to animals and ourselves.

We seek fame and fortune and glory even when we are undeserving,

As I say often, we are in an actual race at exterminating the human race and our extinction will not go unnoticed in the cosmo, as future extraterrestrial archeologists will discover when they unearth the landfill we leave behind. At least the dinosaurs had an explanation for their extinction.

We could do so much better but instead we are in the midst of revolution:

The ultra wealthy are dividing us. Soon, the middle class, which I am sort of a member of, will no longer exist. I’m between poor and middle class but I don’t care. My morals, ethics and values far exceed wealth.

Like many a dystopian novel, movie or Star Trek episode there will be the very fucking rich and the very fucking poor. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE will rule over the inhabitants of planet earth and machinery probably will eventually replace some humans in the workforce.

Maybe it will be like John Boorman’s often misunderstood 1974 film, ZARDOZ, where the young, hedonistic society of eternals requires a Brutal, barbaric man, Zed (Sean Connery, in a red loin cloth, with long hair, no less) to kill them. They live in a flying head; a false God, and rule over the remaining, savage human race.

SPOILER ALERT: an artificial intelligence, in a vortex, gives them immortality and eugenics has made Zed more intelligent than the average savages populating the earth. Zed is encouraged to learn to read from THE WONDERFUL WIZRD OF OZ; hence the movie title. It all ends with extermination of the eternals, who have become bored with immortality. I address these theme in my novel. There’s an evocative ending which I won’t spoil.

As for life and death. I have chosen my novel as my one genuine story to share after I’m gone. There is love and hate; immortality and death; Greek mythology; child abuse; redemption; the Sirens and Persephone.

My tagline:

“In the end, we’re all road kill.”

As a Jew, I can ask to not be embalmed so my remains can disintegrate faster but in a box?

FUCK THAT.

My late uncle had a burial vault/casket business and one of my earliest memories there was coffins existed for children. Imagine barely old enough to understand life and already know that it ends?

If I knew I was nearing my end, I’d do what several of the cats have done as their lives neared conclusion: they go walkabout one final time and die, alone in the woods.

While some of you, my dear readers, may find this morbid or unpleasant I believe it’s beautiful. I have considered sitting under a majestic oak tree and

just

let

go

What better tribute to the earth that spawned me from absolute nothingness than to return to her soil?

I think of the innumerable humans who have died before, and during my existence unknown, unloved, unresolved issues in their lives and I say a prayer for everyone of them whether they were good or bad, for in the beginning they were, like me and like you, infinitesimal.

Tiny sperms and eggs and amniotic fluid. No hatred or lust. Not corrupt or evil.

We are born with our most precious gift: tabula rasa, or a blank slate, which our lifetimes will fill with knowledge, experiences, memories and eventually, and hopefully, an appreciation that we ever existed. My mother’s illness was Alzheimer’s disease, or as I learned as her caregiver, a version of reverse tabula rasa, everything in her mind was slowly, inexorably erased.

Even the most evil of people started out with that blank slate and their life’s path was not preordained, because they all had choices.

Enjoy your lives and realize you have choices to make or refuse. I have enjoyed my brief time on Substack as I have been introduced to many talented writers, poets, photographers, political pundits, et al.

Continue your positive journeys and know you made the correct choice in sharing your lives and talents with others.

MY UFO ENCOUNTER IN ARIZONA, June, 2011. Thank you Wayback Machine.

“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.” Anaïs Nin From April 15, 2011 Rosenbush Café

Anaïs Nin is one of my favorite writers and I have a collection of her books. Many of us have deceased people we’d like to have met and she’s at the top of my list with Carl Jung, Humphrey Bogart, Dashiell Hammett, Carl Sagan, author William Goldman and my grandfathers Henry and Bernard and grandmother Elsie. I was fortune one grandmother, Rose, was alive and a huge influence on my life. She died in 1976 but her wisdom still resides within my soul.

Going through my past writings is giving me the unique opportunity to understand myself more deeply and to see if I have changed over the years.

I’ve found myself reflecting on what was going on in my life during this earlier epoch and by re-reading the poetry I admit it’s different than I imagined. I did not get many comments during my decade of blogging. There were a few other bloggers who I had become familiar with and they were supportive. Today, none of them would probably engage with me and aside from one man they were mostly women; poetesses, artists, photographers, actresses and non fictional writers.

They were all accomplished artists and I was always impressed with their creativity. I once received a compliment that was both positive and hopeful:

“You’re a trip without a suitcase.”

Yesterday, while at the Toyota dealership, getting roof molding replaced, I worked on my novel leitmotifs. World mythology, especially Greek and Hebrew, and some Voodoo mixed in, are major influences on dREaMbanditS. In fact, the original concept of what the title meant is light years away from where it originally started. When I blogged, I wrote excerpts which today are lost to time but with a new perspective I have realized it has potential I never considered when I started writing it in 1979 under the title THE ECLIPTIC MAN.

Gone are many elements from the original including two different downbeat endings. Now, Ecliptic is seen as a book title in my protagonist, Henry’s eclectic collection.

Now the title refers to a centuries old book; only three copies in the world; one owned by a corrupt billionaire and the other is at The Vatican!

At one point, the title was for a collection of short stories rather than a novel. The stories, some short as several sentences and others pages long, still haunts me. I have plenty of stories with no home!

When opened, the pages are blank. The person only needs to think to fill the pages but as they turn the page the previous one becomes blank again. There are reasons for the existence of the book that I won’t divulge here but suffice that it plays a major role throughout the novel.

After working for an hour on the novel I used the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to search for any remnants of ROSENBUSH CAFÉ.

Before I go further there was a restaurant of that name from the 1920s until 1971 in Livingston, Alabama. My dad’s uncle, Edwin, was the owner. Every weekend we drove down US Highway 11 from Tuscaloosa to the restaurant and my memories and experiences have been combined with fictionalizations to create ROSENTREE CAFE as the setting for the first few chapters. I’ve created a town, Eutalla Springs and even play around with the fountain of youth myths.

While there are autobiographical references throughout the story I have used a mythical tale to anchor the narrative. Without giving too much away there are parallel stories involved; Henry’s journey and the female role of an original surviving siren from Greek mythology. There is love, immortality (I use it as a punishment), betrayal and death.

While searching for any original stories I found a few I’d forgotten but am glad I located which were all in the Dadaist style of automatic writing. I’d sit down at the keyboard and begin typing without notes or anything already committed to paper. Whatever came out was on its own from within me somewhere.

What I enjoyed most was sitting with my five cat companions and how when I’d write they would all be sleeping so close by I could caress them.

They were my muses.

I even devoted pages of my blog to The Milo Institute of Feline Well Being wherein, all the cats had degrees from actual, and fictional, unis and were accomplished authors, scientists, social workers, journalists and political activists. Every cat I encountered was immediately given a degree and title. They even had their own publishing house.

Here’s a sample, with the title and an excerpt from what l found:

eXisTenTiaLNihLisT: everlasting rage on the synthetic page ~ “Imagine Beethoven learning he was not deaf but suffered from ear wax deposits. The first day he could hear outside his mind altered his perception and was destined to tune pianos.”

Hypnagogique: Golems not known for subtlety ~ “Love: An illusion created by the Gods to Control Goddesses and therefore for Men to Control Women; a cochlear concussion damages abilities to transmit sounds to the brain making all who accept masculine molecular adhesions as ambiguous as the curse of immortality reigned over ManUnKind.

Goddesses rebel

Transport Zeus to Olympic Hell.”

Hypnagogique: Physiognomy of Zero ~ “Doused in fiery quasar auras and the charcoaled fragrance of the eleventh dimension brings solace to the paradigm shifting chaos embedded in the sentient intellect.”

eXisTenTiaLNihLisT: Desperately Discontented Omphalos ~ “Read by candlelight and only books written before you were born.”

Many posts were lengthy diatribes on political corruption, misogyny, freedom as an illusion and technology as something we needed to turn off frequently. I didn’t find it but once I wrote for visitors to stop reading my blog and turn off their devices, leave them at home and just read a book, walk in a park, enjoy an art gallery or masturbate.

I had a morbid wit and often my gallows humor was spot on or dangerously depressing. I wrote about Rocky, Bullwinkle, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Popeye, Olive Oil and Betty Boop, who was voiced by the Olive actress. There were movie reviews, retrospectives and about my obsession with collecting vinyl records. And yes, plenty of drug stories from my collegiate years.

And dealing with my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease as personal therapy and a manner of sharing my experiences and hopefully give solace to those dealing with the illness.

Which. Brings us to “ love is a neurotoxin.” Interesting that I used lower case with few punctuations. I left in the few I used rather than edit them.

love is a neurotoxin

your love has faded and is gone

no longer jaded and naked at dawn

cherished memories frozen in

timelessness

sweetness turns sour and then

sweeter at last

your bitter herb yields profound

glimpses of the past

love is a neurotoxin

sadly and gladly, lost souls met

and must drink deep from the protoplasmic pool of regret

never to embrace

nor touch the face

kind words erased

tongue aflame with tragic taste

without remorse saddled the horse

and road into the sunsets morose

new morn brings little comfort and yet the day teaches respect of self and sacrifice

without hesitation consume the neurotoxin; swallowed love only dies if she is not followed

follow her i will with the last rays of sunlit’s hope and cool to no longer court the jester; a fool

While I condemn violent extremism and protests devolving into violence I do believe in freedom of expression and speech. I have long wanted to weigh the consequences of honesty on a divided society with my opinions. When I was a newspaper editor I hardly ever wrote editorials. My opinion was locked in my heart and soul. I wanted to remain anonymous and impartial. When I covered city council or school board meetings I wrote about what occurred, or didn’t, but without editorializing or being part of the news. That wasn’t my job. I ran an editorial staff more than once and was a very capable and productive editor.

When I blogged there was no Trump Regime. There was a sane side to the federal government. Perfect? No, but not insane. The gop fought against President Obama, who despite criticism actually knew what the fuck he was doing. Business as usual with corrupt and racist politics overshadowing the accomplishments with cruel rhetoric and efficiency.

So, dear readers, thank you for dropping by and believe me when I admit I had no inkling what I was going to write before sharing the blog post until the upcoming sentence. It’s long and dark with shades of lightning streaking through occasionally.

Get comfortable and ………..

Never let it said I’m not sympathetic to sufferers of mental diseases. At this point in time we have narcissistic mentally ill faux leader who has decided to destroy the world.

No fucking hyperbolic thinking will erase the magical power of the mind. If you believe something, anything (thank you Todd Rundgren) you choose to believe; however, if this is to the exclusion of rational thought or the inescapable truth that you could be wrong you’re more fucked up than the average fucked up individual working in a fucked up job making fucking little money.

Trumplethinskin is the narcissistic temperament type wet dream. Imagine yourself, no matter who you are or what you believe, please put that aside and read on with the most open mindedness you have ever attempted.

You’ll thank me afterwards.

Or you won’t but you’ll be enlightened and never see the orange Julius Caesar salad brain the same way again.

Today, right now, even many MAGA cult members are finally walking away from the poisoned kool aid table and realizing that many facets of the T-Regime are fantasy, lies, misinformation, political propaganda and like the Wild West elixir conman selling you relief in a bottle only instead of a rheumatoid arthritis cure, it’s ugly shoes, or shiny baubles to help out the poor billionaire who’s so wealthy he could payoff a portion of the goddam deficit he created. Gas prices where I work today? $3.89 for regular and all other grades at least $4.30 to diesel at $4.779.

So unless you live on Elon Musks dystopian Mars in 2053 you know the leaderless dementia patient spouting under $3 is BULLSHIT. Groceries are high and even Dollar General is now Dollar Infantry. Everywhere you go something is more expensive since Trumplethinskin took over the world. I sell cartons of cigarettes that going into November, 2025 were between $85-$95. I sold a carton of Marlboro, that, even with the discounts was over $100! Share size (euphemism for large candy bars) are $3.79.

And we’re still busy because guess what? Iran war or not people need gas to go to work; cigarettes, vapes, Nicotine pouches, smokeless tobacco and beer to feed their addictions; Red Bull and Monster energy drinks to stay (alert) and ExtenZe herbal supplements to increase penis size because… You have a tiny dick? Or Rhino Pills with a hologram rhinoceros that guys ask me if they work. I would never ingest take a pill that promised enhanced sexual pleasure and performance.

Men are such easy prey. Instead of intimacy; getting to know your partner’s body and erogenous zones and treating them with respect and dignity and love it’s a blood flow increasing tale tell.

No science behind those products. I have a customer who always pops one in his mouth in the store! I mean what the hell? At least leave the store without a boner.

Now, to my major point if you need convincing. Put down that dirty martini or joint or Bud Light. For god’s sake that’s horse tranq.

Imagine this life story:

Your entire life you’re a failure.

At everything.

You bankrupt countless businesses including casinos proving the house doesn’t always win. You try every conman special: faux steaks, wines, universities, then hawk anything to sell that as I believe Lenny Bruce once said: (paraphrasing) “if you nail two things together that have never been nailed together before some schmuck will buy it from you!”

Your father is not a nice person and racist so naturally you embody that negative trait. He bankrolls you and you suck, although you’ll learn how to not pay contractors and employees and you’ll learn the intricacies of bankruptcy court, tax loopholes and insurance manipulation. Your mother doesn’t nurture you. Only your niece has the courage to all you out every damn day. Loser. Winner: Mary Trump, heroine.

You still lose money but you’re getting experience in court suing and getting sued.

You’re so much of a failure that when Vietnam says wake up instead of saying I’m a conscientious objector or blast off a toe with a pistol you use bone spurs, so now you’re a fucking cowboy?

At this point in my narrative I haven’t been cruel or mean in my opinion or perception of mental illness, which I will share here shortly, and I’ll lay a favorite tactic of the predator in chief and favorite of the Epstein Sexual Assault Disintegration Bureau (formerly the DOJ & FBI): Trump Derangement Syndrome a fabricated disorder that actually is backwards.

Excuse me while I laugh. Aah, better.

It’s really anyone who happily devours the shit sandwich and claims it’s roast beef. Marco, Ted, Jim, James, Anna, et al. They are infected with the syndrome. Proof? Stephen Miller had a full head of hair but they intentionally uprooted themselves to escape his cement pond brain and that Chungking guy was only 5’9” and 140 pounds before he took a bite.

Most disturbing is the Epstein - Trump Documents. When Pam Bondi refused to, not only ignore victims during congressional hearing, she literary didn’t acknowledge their existence. I don’t believe in HELL. If I did I’ll surmise Satan would be salivating to bind her to a Hieronymus Bosch torture chamber for eternity.

A sidebar: a question that gnaws at my conscience. Why do the women he surrounds himself with display the worst b traits of men?I know competition in a male-dominated world requires ingenuity but to be as sadistic, cruel and dispassionate towards female rape and assault victims is disgraceful and dangerous. It only empowers the perpetrators to continue their crimes against women, free from accountability because even the Pirros and Noems aren’t interested in justice. They want a taste of the power to hold over the innocent and victimized while going after perceived enemies of state.

We know T is court-approved sexual predator. Hmmm, so why isn’t he on the national registry for pedophiles? For fuck’s sake, there have people on that registry for public urination. His crime was sexual assault and call me naïve but I think any form of sexual assault on a woman, child, man can easily be construed as rape because it was against their will and with children it’s deeply troubling that so many victims are still waiting for justice. Not to be crude but if any man forces his fingers into a woman’s vagina I call it rape. Jurisprudence gets so wound into knots with semantics.

Merriam- Webster has the best definition for the noun: “ unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against a person’s will…” The revised FBI definition (2013) concluded that penetration of the vagina or anus “no matter how slight” and includes penetration orally or by sex organ without consent.

So fingering is rape. No consent; perpetrator ignores victim. I think protecting children and women from sex traffickers should have never been a complicated issue. It needs to be a top.priority not ballrooms and rs.

This could be YOUR WIFE, SISTER, DAUGHTER, AUNT, MOTHER OF SON…. I dismiss the entire gop. Spineless mammals with no morals, ethics, scruples or conscience. More and more we’re seeing men in powerful positions getting away with their alleged crimes or getting punished by resigning or forced out of congress,

Good.

Fuck them all.

You betrayed the women and the nation. Trust is slowly dissolving.

So TDS purports to be anyone, obviously me included after this opinion piece, who’s, let’s just be blunt: hates the king. Actually, it really is psychological projection: all his sycophantic followers and friends (heh) don’t pretend anymore to not give a fuck if little Jessica has food or elderly Mr. Alexander needs insulin. Their mantra should be FUCK THE POOR AND DOWNTRODDEN.

I’m not an anarchist but I do have an existential nihilistic streak. I believe in human rights for ALL HUMANS. At my job, I have customers who are white, black, brown and that encompasses women and men, transgendered, gay, straight, handicapped, elderly, not elderly and I’ve waited on people from every state and at least a dozen countries outside America. I treat them all respectfully even when they don’t reciprocate.

I believe women do not need a political party or the judiciary telling them how to treat their bodies. I don’t see anyone telling John Roberts he cannot masturbate after a long day of deconstructing the constitution and bill of rights. That’s because it’s a privacy concern.

Voting is the last domino to fall if the midterms are not swept away by a blue wave. My home state of fucked up Alabama got permission to change voting district. We vote in a primary next week. Our governor, Kay Ivey (shuddering) has set a second primary for August in the wake of SCOTUS lifting an injunction that had barred this ass backwards state using a congressional district map from 2023.

Not only did the high court - oh these traitors are high~~~on hubris - accept our AG’s request to vacate the lower court rulings they did it in an election year and here’s a real possibility Roberts isn’t the only one jacking: some ballots have already been cast. Any changes will certainly lead to court challenges. The special primary will void voting results from four districts in next week primary.

It’s Reverse Russian Roulette; five loaded chambers and one empty.

Earlier I mentioned narcissistic personalities. Back in 2007, I began an online friendship and I have a first hand experience with an artist from the east coast with whom I wanted to collaborate. Without details it ended badly with an email, in 2016, that to this day is still tucked away; only read every three years. This is where the comparison to this person and T are eerily similar:

She wrote a letter: TAGLINE: YOU ARE A PIECE OF SHIT. In it, they basically end it telling me to put a gun in my mouth and commit suicide. Before, however, oddly sans overt antisemitism, she proceeds to tell me she never liked my blog writing, I was boring ( I’ll cop to that), and a page of vile insults that displayed a huge lack of empathy and respect. I had helped promoting her art and, yeah, money was given and yes, I knew from the first time she said “I’m not a narcissist” that she was.

No rational non-narcissist needs to convince people. You are; you’re not.

I observed her behavior and have about a hundred emails I never read anymore but didn’t delete mainly because she told me to delete them; not asking.

Her emails were often brilliantly written misdirection and darkly foreboding. As a Lesbian, she often fell in love with out of reach older women and I was her consoler, a straight man offering a lovelorn narcissist gay woman advice and friendship. I listened to her cry and offered comfort. It was never about sex but it became about control.I foolishly believed she enjoyed our conversations, letters and support. I knew I couldn’t disconnect her from narcissism but I naïvely believed we had a connection. I’d think about her and a text or email would suddenly appear.

The anger in her letters was overwhelming. Like Trumplethinskin, everyone was against her and like him she was cleverly devious. She had been trolled and I read about people who said she ripped them off or that she was evil.

She was also talented and I even helped her promote and launch a mythological- themed perfume online store!

When I read the letter. I didn’t cry, smile, laugh or sulk. I said to myself “it’s on you, motherfucker.” I surprised myself and within eight months I was living in my suv, had lost 95% of everything I owned that was stored and worked at a convenience store / gas station for $8.25 an hour on graveyard. I was not vengeful or filled with the vitriolic rage she inflicted on my eyes. I accepted my fate and held myself accountable for my actions and decisions and moved forward and after a year found an old trailer rental where I have lived since April, 2018.

So with this knowledge of narcissism comes more experience:

My mother, Frances, with whom I had a tense and often verbally combative relationship, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for years. After my father died, in 1995, I was her caregiver until the moment she died in 2007.

I have not only witnessed the tabula rasa in reverse with Frances, when she spent time in a nursing home, recuperating from two snapped bones in an ankle, I saw other dementia patients. They all have the same twisted, ugly facial expressions as if the brain is caught between competing to convey a smile but it’s part grimace.

Trumplethinskin displays ugly expressions constantly. Ugly comments about anyone who pisses him off; usually women journalists and minorities.

My mother uttered profanity and racist epithets freely. As a Jew, I never expected my mother to say “You fucking Jew!” She actually once used a word I’d never heard her say when she looked at me angrily and ripped hair from my beard, down to the roots, and called me a cocksucker.

With dementia, the brain’s filter is nonexistent. Profane language flows like blood from an open wound. That wound will not heal. It will get worse until the body rebels against the mind.

Trumplethinskin is a profane beast and when around children uses language that is not only inappropriate but offensive. He’s a misogynistic bully and as a Jew, let me clear this for the record: Trump is an antisemite, a racist and generally misanthropic old white man whose family and followers should all the arrested for elder abuse.

Now, I’ll admit I have no guilt in writing about this person. In fact, I have procrastinated for weeks. Finally, I decided I needed to spew this venomous poison from my soul and when, in a text, that was so unhinged and terrifying, it revealed to the entire world his complete lack of empathy or the consequences, of genocide and war crimes when he threatened to destroy an entire Iranian civilization as a threat. Iran, Gaza, the Ukraine, Venezuela, Greenland, Canada are but a few locations Trump has obsessions with and vengeance in his heart.

In WAG THE DOG, they spun a tale of a war with Albania to cover a sex scandal with the president. Not inconceivable. Death versus Epstein. Don’t forget COVID. This guy caused the death of innumerable people and with at least three simultaneous large scale wars has possibly surpassed millions. USAID helped feed the starving. His regime burned food that while out of date was still edible rather than feed starving human beings.

So billionaires get richer. CEOs and their golden parachutes. Yeah, parachute into an active volcano; with apologies to fissures. Tech bros celebrating and salivating over the entire US population’s personal data. Let’s be clear. Nothing is personal anymore, we share our secrets, designs, plans, schemes and dreams. We divorced our relationship with privacy the moment we accepted privacy documents and say OK to cookies.

The government already had billions of bits of data on every one of us; drivers license, auto registration, taxes, insurance, shopping habits, porn site visits, bridal services, day care, online gambling, et al. An endless supply of every detail from birth to death and everything in between.

I figured that once he began showing obvious symptoms that maybe one fucking person around him would say “ENOUGH, GODDAMIT!”

Wow.

My male cats have larger balls than any of these sycophantic politicians and their cronies who one would think are concerned that a demented madder than hatter could possibly launch a nuclear weapon. Trumplethinskin is so far gone I fear him nuking a blue state for a laugh. I sincerely believe he wants to nuke somewhere before the November midterms.

There is a time for letting all things pass but this isn’t it.

I’ve almost finish presenting my study of dementia; lengthy, possibly too convoluted but I have articulated this to people in the physical world and I most often get the same question:

“WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO REMOVE HIM FROM OFFICE?”

Actually, it’s more like “What the fuck are they waiting for…Armageddon?”

Yes, actually. Remember that Trumplethinskin is a malignant narcissist and they are never wrong, believe they know more about everything that exists on the planet than anyone else, living or dead, and because they enjoy seeing their name and face everywhere…..

Imagine yourself as the supreme leader of the former free world and your actions generate news headlines every fucking day; often multiple narratives simultaneously because destroying democracy requires patience and planning. And the enemies of democracy have been planning this for a long time, T 1.0 was the dress rehearsal. This is the black wedding.

Imagine having the power to be on news channels and in print every day…all day, all night. Like George Orwell's BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING in 1984? His minions are watching. They want a white, Christian nation. As a Jew, where am I going? I’m not converting to another religion and besides I’m more cosmically attuned than religiously inclined.

Statues of you everywhere, artificial intelligence used to create cartoon images of what T can never be: a genuine heroic, sympathetic human being.

He acts like a Christian.

He isn’t. Broken every commandment multiple times. Murder, too. Boats in the ocean blow to bits and survivors killed. COVID, the wars in Gaza, The Ukraine. Don’t forget the innumerable deaths in Iran when he told protesters America had their backs.

We didn’t. They died.

Acts like he’s in charge.

He’s a puppet to Putin and the Project 2025 architects. Forget what Putin has for possible blackmail. It’s not important anymore. What’s important now is there’s a BDSM theme here: someone is dominant and the other submissive.

Choose your dom wisely.

As a writer of observational fiction here is my storyline: madman nukes Jerusalem by accident when a sky full of drones interferes with a ballistic missile guidance system and then decimates The Holy Land?

Holy shit!

Trumplethinskin is hiding at Camp David but is attacked by alien space crafts; descendants of the AREA 51 alien who was to be emperor and queen (trans-Neptunian) to an entire galaxy but got high on Europa Mad Ice Crystals, missing their wormhole hyperspace jump near the moon and crashed on earth during the height of UFO hysteria. It took a while but the alien autopsy footage reached a starship nearby Pluto and shit got real…fast.

The rest is a burned out planet and billions dead. Grumpy Trumpy is still alive in the bunker that was under the bunker where the ballroom was to be built. He was carried to the chopper by Miller and Marco (the M&M Twins) and returned to Washington which was now as flat as the second dimension.

Create your own ending, this is mine to this “what the actual fuck? Piece.”

After all this I’ll offer to any reader still here a look into the past.

Remember my headline?

Me, neither.

ROSENBUSH CAFÉ was my blog and that’s where my creative mojo, circa, 2005-06 was reborn. No messy Christian rebirth. I am a prolific writer, including how I keep notebooks and note/diary files on my iPad, and one day Glynn, over booze and weed said that I should really start a blog. He was correct in believing I could handle the codes and I learned quickly how to post videos, photos and links.

In the next few days I’ll be posting reprints or screen shots of what I was writing while caregiving. This first one is a mind fuck. Take a break, fire up a jay or make a stronger dirty martini with a fuck load of olives; green and black, this one from my Laughing Ricochet category. In Tangerine Dream’s live album RICOCHET, there is a synthesizer sound on side two that reminds me of a ricochet if it could giggle or laugh. There is another version of it on the double LP, POLAND.

I laughed when I found it this morning. I was always addicted to automatic writing. I wanted to be a Dadaist, and then a surrealist, but was born decades too late to join Andre Breton and the anti art movement. That did not stop me from exploring the anti art of writing whatever the fuck I wanted without stopping until it was complete. My longest was over seven hours. Didn’t stop to pee but had plenty of fluids, often water or in extreme cases courvoisier cognac. I smoked reefer sometimes for inspiration but when I actually typed I was straight.

“Dope makes friends of us all,” Seth Rogan said in one of my hypnagogic dream-lets years ago just before he threatened some racist redneck by proclaiming: “I’ll rip off both of your legs and use them as stilts, motherfucker.”

Catch you again at the corner of FREEDOM AND CHOICE.

I thought about my former self and how I could be, like metempsychosis, reincarnated. I’d come back as flowers or trees. Maybe I’d live longer, or shorter, than as a human but I’d also share beauty with others who needed consolation for sadness or loneliness…

Or a broken heart.

I’m healed now.

May all in need of solace look to the natural world for comfort and love.

The friend groans, takes out a Chesterfield King, slides it between his dry cracked lips and lights it with a match, struck off his friend’s scruffy face.

“Aren’t you a funny fucker?”

“No, no I’m not.”

The V-Blind line was uttered; by me, to my high school best friend, Dwight, he actually smoked a variety of 1970s cigarette brands; Winston, Salem, Kools ( well he was as cool as I wasn’t) and Marlboro. I inserted the chesterfield brand as taking artistic license to alter reality with shadings of fictionalization.

He didn’t light a cigarette off my face, however; I borrowed that from my favorite scene from the classic spaghetti western FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE where bounty hunter Colonel Mortimer lights a match off the face of the villainous Juan Wild (Klaus Kinsky).

Why, you might rightfully ask, would I reference a 1965 Sergio Leone movie scene with German madman Kinsky best know for “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo,” and my personal favorite, “Nosferatu: the Vampyre” with Isabelle Adjani?

My friend, Eric; not his real name, artiste extraordinaire and creator of ARIKA AND THE AMOEBAS, constructed a Klaus Kinskyesque terminator to protect a slimy, rich young white mother fucking elite billionaire technocrat world destroyer, as if there is any other kind, from another, GOOD terminatrix, Arika. Both sent back from the future to either protect the population from control and death by robotic AI kings.

As a bonus, I cameoed, via an AI makeover, as a Henry, a gun store owner smoking a joint, who sells the baddies an assault weapon he honestly informs them won’t kill her. Arika arrives later and asks if they have been there and the AIHenry says they went left and stole his jeep! Bastards, I still had payments on it!

What’s fascinating is, firstly, I was not upset at being reanimated. It’s cool. Eric knew I’m not a firearm enthusiast. Aside from target practicing in my uni days, at milk jugs filled with water and paper targets, I’m not impressed by guns and although I’m not against regular weaponry I think the excuses made for allowing weapons of war into the hands of just about anyone is insane. I’ve know hunters and policemen; all republicans, tell me how important they are and I still say BULLSHIT.

I wish I could arm woodland animals with assault rifles, flash grenades, C4 and drones. Let’s give them a fighting chance against the hunters.

For my political diatribe here before moving past the cretinous behavior of the “leaderless government” is this:

We’ve got ultra wealthy pedos and pedo protectors being allowed to continue living as if everything is normal. It goddam well isn’t okay. Women….children for fuck’s sack were - and still are - being raped and sexualized by adult men and groomed for trafficking to other sick fucks.

The doj - you may notice that, like my comments on other Substacks, I use lowercase when describing president, republican party, gop, fbi, et al, as a protest - goes after enemies of the predator in chief while ignoring a law requiring all Trumplethinskin-Epstein Dossiers to be released. However, acting interim director of d o j (dumb oblivious jagoffs) todd bleach, so named for how it takes sodium hypochlorite to cleanse his soul (A tip, schmuck, it’s not working) is still portraying a lawyer for the boss.

It’s Perry Mason at a rave and awakening, after the all-nighter, to find he has killed Stella. You cannot represent both sides of the equation.

Imagine all the crimes and criminality ongoing without challenges while these nimrods go after Comey again. Now, Act Blue, to which I’ve contributed, is under investigation, along with The Southern Poverty Law Center. Not to be outdone, my illiterate state of alabama is launching its own investigation. Want to investigate some one? Try gov’ner candidate tomboy tubestake who lives where? FLORIDA.

I hope I live long enough to see actual progress in rebuilding democracy and punishments for the evil corruptors. If this was a super hero scenario Batman or Ironman would save the day.

Sadly, cartoon heroes only defeat their animated villains on celluloid.

Real heroes wear the constitution on their hearts and bill of rights in their consciousness. Honor is in their DNA and the blood is shed equally to protect the weak and helpless.

I’m hoping Arika kicks their perverse asses into the nearest active volcano. Watch AAA’s TEARS FOR BILLIONAIRES to observe Arika’s fighting skills.

You can watch both videos:

I was, and still am, humbled by my inclusion in an artistic project and impressed by how much that bastard looks like this bastard:

What’s unique is that by sending Eric front and profile photographs of me he was able to recreate me three dimensionally rather than the flat 2-D versions he originally used. I was once right handed because AI has never seen me write. I had hairy arms. I’m not hirsute.

What I enjoyed about the initial experience was the challenge to my brain. It processed me and then the AIHENRY and concluded that if didn’t know originally it was not me it would not have known it was not me it was so close. In the video the only tell? My skull is less curved. So what? I’m an artist’s interpretation of me.

Arika, like me, is a southpaw. Everyone in this room isn’t real, including me! I still got to be close to Arika. She smelled like fresh apples at the orchard.

As an artist, Eric spends weeks creating music videos and ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is one of his myriad tools. Today’s artists have different styles and techniques that utilize AI. Some allow the software to write lyrics and music and some it’s impossible to ignore the limitations; whereas, AAA comes from his mind. He creates everything and writes the prose that becomes musical interpretations of everything from rock and prog to operatic and punk. Arika has been so many characters and a few times victims in videos as Mermaid, Witch, AI Slop ( she’s alive and reborn dramatically here).

I have promoted AAA before and will continue and hopefully introduce more SUBSTACKERS to his talented catalog of art.

There’s a fear that AI will replace us all. Until that day of singularity arrives we have plenty of dystopian societies in fiction from Orwell’s “1984,” obviously. Don’t forget the silent film masterpieces: “Metropolis” and “Things to Come.”

Humans always fear what they don’t understand and the unknown.

Remember my quote from Frisch? It wasn’t written this year; it’s from his 1957 (I was 4.5 years old) novel, “Ein Bericht” (“Homo Faber”). The Swiss author takes a protagonist, Walter Faber, a successful engineer, whose worldview is eerily similar to our current world order where the technology is controlled - for now - by humans who, like Faber, base their views “…based on logic, probability, and technology.” Add billions of dollars as in incentives to become so rich they cannot conceive of how anyone could starve, suffer or die because of wealth inequality.

In the book, due to coincidences and chance occurrences his ideology breaks down. Like today, technology as a philosophy is a contradictory terminology that is seen daily with breakdowns, hacking, sun-related interference and, naturally, incompetence with a side order of hubris.

I’ll never condemn anyone who honestly amassed wealth without cheating tax loopholes or other people’s trust. If they inherited wealthy maybe share some with less fortunate citizens.

Not going to happen. This world is teetering between a Purge and Final Destination movie scenario.

I have a theory why ultra wealthy folks (started to say fucks but figured, be polite) continue amassing billions more….it’s a competition.

Like sports, every time a player comes along and their agents, coaches, teammates and family say they are the best ever at whatever the photon they are better at than anyone other living being, they get signing bonuses and perks. Penniless to Pampered in zero to 1 second. Signing bonuses is a travesty. Getting paid extra to sign a contract to get paid.

Well fuck my tea kettle.

Imagine when the FORBES 500 comes out and hypothetically, Bozos makes more than Muskrat? Think someone’s pissed when another billionaire passes them or they drop off the list entirely? They might act like they love their fellow billionaires but rest assured they have the same problems as us regular citizens:

Did the caterer get even cavier?

Will the au pair actually not have an affair with the husband?

Perhaps, my sports analogy isn’t convincing, here’s a story from my youth as I recall it from news reports of the time. It’s true and Hopefully will lessen my cynicism on display in this post.

Alabama Quarterback Joe Namath wanted $100,000, a fur coat and nice limo. The women already loved him. I tried a goatee because he did.

Oops.

He gets laid.

I get ignored. Full beards ever since.

FULL DISCLAIMER: I meet him twice; around age 11 at my parent’s, later my, apartment complex near the uni, when he came to see a tenant who was a teammate.

“You’re Joe Namath,” I said excitedly.

I will never forget the coolest reply: “Sure am, kid!” He smiled and winked.

Again, in 1979, at his now, long defunct BACHELOR’S THREE restaurant and bar. I’m a newspaper editor in Eutaw, Alabama. Dwight is a dispatcher for the fire department and EMT but training to be a paramedic.

Dwight and I are unsuccessfully attempting to woo the gorgeous red haired bartender when Joe comes into the bar. Dwight starts saying he’s known JN for years.

“Well, I met him as a kid,” is my lowkey reply.

After making the rounds; Joe was shaking hands and thanking people for coming to his establishment, he entered the bar and walked towards us.

Dwight died in 2000 after a brief illness with diabetes issues and was a heavy smoker.

Dwight was a lady’s man. He was blond and handsome and in our drama class we decided that while the other thespians were performing scenes from Hamlet, The Crucible and other classics ( we were given the small auditorium to perform during the last week of school) we acted the final scene from BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID! I was Butch to Dwight’s Sundance. We got a standing ovation.

A lot more fun than poor Yorick’s fate.

Dwight extended his hand and he said hello to Joe like you do a close friend. Joe was polite but his expression belied the fact he didn’t know Dwight. He turned to me and may Sisyphus’ boulder roll me over if I’m exaggerating said:

“Your name is Henry! Your parents owned apartments near the campus.”

Dwight lit a cigarette; this time, ironically a Kool.

I replied, by acknowledging his accuracy, and that my parents still owned them while telling him his reply to me that day was a favorite story to share about the only famous person I had met through age 11.

(Met Chubby Checker at 14, Sydney Lassick at 24 and Doc Severinsen at 30. Honorable Mention: unnamed engineer at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio from when my dad, a drummer in the forties, got me a tour: “Oh, man, you just missed Mick Jagger!”)

Imagine the loss to Mick. 🙀

“Yep,” Namath laughed, “Sounds like something I’d say!” He then proceeded to buy us a round.

What a memory. No way he walked in that night and could have known I’d be there to blow the roof off this sucker (with apologies to Parliament).

Glad he got that fur coat! An authentic nice guy, who made a crap-ton of money but, at least to my recollection, a gentleman, never an asshole about his wealth and one helluva football player.

Unheard of the late sixties but he got the perks and led the New York Jets to a winning Super Bowl over Baltimore.

Some people make it while others get addicted to stardom with the accruements; fancy cars and clothes, impossibly beautiful women, hangers on and naturally, sadly, sometimes dope dealing connections. From what I have seen, it’s not a racial projection anymore. White people get addicted to power, wealth, sex and drugs, too.

eloi muskrat likes ketamine.

Now, that’s a what the fuck? for the ages.

He had a government job to cull every last scrape of information on all of us poor, misguided lemmings and this stud mare gets off on horse tranquilizers? Does he read our bios late at night with a boner?

Heaviest I ever got was sniffing PAM through a toilet paper roll stuffed with a paper towel.

Cool?

No….a dangerously, fucking stupid huffing progenitor. Could cause brain damage and death.

For the record, I did experiment. Amyl nitrate, yeah, coke, ahem, sadly, yeah and of course hallucinogens. Reefer was expected if you were young and in the late sixties and early seventies. With that came hash and Thai-Stick and if you knew the right guy named Rex, quaaludes. I even tried, VERY BADLY, to make wine, root beer and matzohs. I did make hash brownies that my parents consumed…unintentionally and it was mind fuck dope snacking cakes. A story for later……heh.

Imagine being in Hattiesburg Mississippi in 1972 and asking a farmer, outside a feed store, if you could score some ketamine? “Y’know, for Trigger.”

Ending back where I started with technology. I think the curtain is coming down on the race called human. Race is very accurate.

We’re all in a race.

political parties, to stay in power, control their flock and stay in office until they die. We already have the walking dead in congress; bitch maccheese, grassland and others who are racist-homophobic-misogynistic playground bullies; the wealthy, to get enough money to finance a country and then buying one, say Switzerland or Sweden, throwing out the local population to make room for horse and race tracks, golf courses and airports.

environmental destruction by corporations who profit from poisoning water, air, ground and food. Microplastics in newborns and sea life in the Mariana Trench.

corrupt politicians which in today’s world is about 99.5% (a 5% margin of error) who are addicted to power, prestige, sexual abuse and accepting violence as necessary to keep the masses paranoid and scared shitless.

Gutting voting rights for blacks, women, other minorities and anyone planning to vote for dems this midterm.

In just my life time, I’ve seen us land on the moon and send Voyagers 1 and 2 out of the solar system to send greetings from earth. Not today’s earth but one when we still had a chance to become sentient. I saw assassinations (real ones with real victims promoting peace not violence), Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the Vietnam war, Watergate, Roe vs Wade, Voting rights for blacks and minorities, women and integration and the birth of motion picture rating system: G M R X.

As for my title, as recounted incessantly before, I am a prolific dreamer and have a profoundly personal connection between the hypnagogic dreams and reawakening state to write them before consciousness obliterates them. My novel is an amalgamation of such dream-let’s.

Back in August of 2021 I awoke from a masterfully executed hypnagogic journey where I saw the solutions to all our earthly problems and awoke in a pool of sweat and tears to thank the cosmos for the epiphany.

I wrote it all down on my bedside dREaMbanditS notebook and went back to sleep to dream about a Nobel Peace Prize and the salvation of billions of fellows earth-dwellers.

When I awoke to my astonishment it wasn’t a solution. It was a riddle wrapped in an enigma lightly toasted and dipped in horseradish sauce.

Is this an actual equation or the an anagram from the goddesses of fuck with them esthetics?

I’ll probably die never knowing what I really dreamed but for a brief moment I solved untenable equations, ended all wars on earth, married a nurse and won a Nobel Peace prize which I donated to the Jack Nicholson for handling the truth, a like few good men can.

If you made it to the end, dear reader, you deserve a treat:

THE ORCHID THIEF

FREEZE FRAME

FADE TO BLACK

ROLL CREDITS

IT’S CURTAINS FOR US ALL.

NOW GO HOME AND HUG SOMEONE.

Purple is one of my favorite colors. I always talked to my flowers and although I had a large variety of them they began dying. I gave some away hoping someone else could provide the spark of life that was missing from me.

Nothing like having a bouquet to brighten my day.

This flower was one of favorites. Perhaps you like it, too?

Pink is another favorite color.

The Birmingham Botanical Gardens was once a favorite location. Have not returned since 2016. Time to return and recapture the beauty of its myriad floral gardens. Maybe this weekend?

My sole reminder of love on a Valentine’s Day wasn’t a kiss, caress or embrace…it was a solitary flower. It was my one smile that day. It was my gift to myself. I did not lie when customers asked me who gave it to me. Circa, 2023.

I sent a text photo of this bloom to a friend unaware it was her favorite flower. I was a bit sad that day and the simple act of sharing a flower made me feel better.

Life, like flowers, blooms, withers and dies.

Not today.

Sharing my floral gifts today with you.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I posted this over the weekend but realized the text was too sad. I rewrote it today and doing so made me happier. Hopefully, YOU will be happier, too.

I created a woman in my subconscious in 1978 named Jovian and in 1979, while walking down stairs at a north Alabama hotel was amazed to find a painting of the lady in my dreams! Never met the model but bought the painting as a reminder that what’s in our minds is often more real than we imagined.

I’d been away on insect safari

Spent days and nights beside a quarry

Staring at the starry

Wanting to be in Alpha Centuri

Our first embrace

Was like a race

To see who first could destroy their face

Between leather and lace

Not subtle in case

We were bound with sound only our bodies could have found

Kisses that were aggressive

Caresses more suggestive

Than compressive

Romance is a portrait painting itself

Every brushstroke deconstructed tchotchkes on a shelf

I can no longer abuse myself

My love for you burns through my flesh

I’m am lightning struck

I would give you my soul were it not smoldering ash

You are my inamorata

I am your inamorato

I have known you my entire life yet I do not know you at all. You ravish my dreams and seduce my nightmares into entwined memories of an impossible romance. I see you and yet you are not there. Am I dreaming or is this the madness from tripping on mushrooms?

I would be lying that my love is worth dying and yet I am denying how exquisite it is vying for all that I am as I am sighing and crying not sadness and not madness but wingless flying.

Cow’s Kiss (Chapter undetermined)

The psilocybin was ingested with a ritz cracker that didn’t disguise its undeniably unappetizing taste. James had already helped Henry picked some fresh mushrooms from a particularly large and pungent splat of bovine feces.

“So I’m going to eat a mushroom that grew in cow shit?” More quizzical than disdainful of eating anything growing from excrement. A logical choice for his first trip. He was checking off his unintended drug list.

Marijuana, check and triple check.

Hash, uh huh.

Thai Stick, but of course.

Amyl nitrate, whoah. His gay friends knew how to party.

LSD, once unexpectedly, once too many tabs of Window Pane at once and finally once with an 8-track of King Crimson’s “Lizard” playing repeatedly because so fucked up couldn’t take off the headphones and walk to the player where the eject button was located. Better to lie and say it was the longest musical performance ever rather than say I let it play for four hours over and over and over ……

A slap to the forehead was needed.

THAWACK!

“For fuck’s sake, Henry. This is the best kept secret from the squares, man. Good ‘shrooms and you’re on the orient express to oblivion. The Johnny goddam law doesn’t know what they’re busting freaks for ‘cause it ain’t regulated like amphetamines or barbs. Where the fuck did you score this Coke from? There’s a fly buzzing in my brain.”

James sneezes and a fly ejects from his nose; it evens its flight trajectory towards a tree stump and flies back towards James and salutes him with its tiny left side wings and zips upwards towards the sky.

The two look at one another and laugh uncontrollably,

“Where was I,”

BREAK FOR EXPLOSION OF LIGHTING NEARBY

The loudest I have ever heard in my life and I have seen strikes very close over ten times in my life but this was an actual explosion. Sorry, dear readers but time to put away the iPad and be thankful it didn’t hit the trailer.

Good writing project going but will continue when it’s not stormy and dangerous. Still shaking a bit and it takes a lot to unnerve me but MOTHER NATURE doesn’t fuck around .

Respect her.

—30—

Cover of my unfinished novel dREaMbandits by Natalie DeCorvin with tchotchkes. 2002.

by now you know I love clouds and nature and everything earthly.

Turtles play an important role in my novel. Here are a few inspiring aquatic coauthors.

Every cloud that night whispered YOU ARE LOVED. I wasn’t but it gave me hope.the moon was less negative, but, as always she’s very cryptic: TOO EARLY TO TELL; ITS EARLY IN MARCH… be patient.

Chemtrails appeared while I was watching an X FILES episode. Kidding, but cool.

Finally, I wanted to intentionally make something look accidental and in my twisted sense of humor decided sperms have such brief lives they needed a sporting event. After my inter dimensional head game I realized this shot reminded me of something microscopic.

Sperm. Two of them. The blue color was the brain’s idea to make it more festive and dramatic. Heh, as if how they get ejected into an unknown universe isn’t dramatic.

Since semen has a sole purpose: beat (I know, groan) the other life-producing Fluidity Brigade to the egg. The egg is patient; the sperm cannot be because upon ejaculation there is no time to check one last email. I feel bad for all the losing tadpoles. Do they cry or laugh or say what the fuck? Do they accept they died to create life that will live longer than them? Maybe they issue their curse and wish the donor never has another orgasm and saves future generations of spunk.

Later, dear readers, is sooner than you think.

Warning: This post contains the following: Graphic Profanity, Discussions of Violence, Bullying, Sexual Assault, Harassment, Death, Revenge, Religious Beliefs and Relationships

For those of you who have not heard this singer here’s your opportunity. I first heard her last year singing about being a “commie bitch.”

Not really.

It was a concise and catchy tune with lyrics to love and repeat unless you’re in the MAGA DEATH CULT. This newest song, like the sixties ballads of Joan Baez and others, has pathos in abundance and addresses serious issues with mordant humor and scores on this song tremendously.

I comment and suddenly thought why isn’t there a movement called MADA or Make America a Democracy Again? For sure there are movements against the orange Julius Caesar salad leader but our freedoms have been continuously violated. Are we finally a country of masochistic lemmings, heading towards the cliff edge, unafraid of the deep dive forthcoming?

The leader is a convicted felon and all his criminal activities are known globally even by the penguins and seals on Heard and McDonald Islands he wanted to tariff. The island became outraged enough that its volcano is active; well, it was before but it didn’t stop the regime from wanting lava taxation.

These are frightening times and my late mother told me repeatedly that one day they would come for the Jews in America like they did in Germany during the second world war. I never wanted to believe that; however, with Israel’s leadership another variation of dictatorship it’s obvious there will be more hatred of Jews worldwide.

What my mother could have never conceived of was movements against gays and lesbians, transgender people and black and brown people being systematically targeted and removed from American society. Growing up during the civil rights movement and witnesses changes in voting and abortion rights seemed like maybe my mother’s fears would never come to fruition.

She died in 2007 so she didn’t live to see the travesty that befell her Republican Party. She was a poll watcher even. My dad, a Democrat, never told ,y mother she had to vote for dems and she never tried to dissuade his preference. I, like many in my boomer generation, toyed with both parties, Ralph Nader once, MAD MAGAZINE’S mascot Alfred E. Neuman; my protest against Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon to help our nation heal from Watergate. I remember discussions in journalism classes about the lack of accountability and then he gets paid a million dollars to lie to David Frost on national television. This prick never acknowledged he was a criminal and famously said “I am not a crook.”

My dad endured antisemitism and when I came home to ask why a five year old - my age, too - told me his Parents said “The Jews killed Christ” and who was Christ and he replied, “So they’re still saying that?”

Imagine having a conversation about Jesus Christ, murder and antisemitism at five but bless my father for not bullshitting. He set the record straight, so much so, that as I got older I visited churches of many denominations and even an all black tent revival in Mississippi in 1973! Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic, Church of the Nazarene, Unitarian, Mormon, et al. I was never turned away from any of them even after I made it clear I wasn’t interested in converting but wanted to compare and understand their beliefs and compare them to mine.

With few exceptions, no one tried to infer Jewish beliefs were wrong. I did have run ins with Baptist trying to change my mind and it never worked. I did buy chocolate zoomers from some Moonies once, mainly because the girl selling them was kind of cute, even for a cult member.

I invited two Jehovah’s Witnesses (male and female) into my apartment one Saturday morning stoned on pot and drinking beer at 9 o’clock. It went as expected. My girl friend and another friend, all three high but we tried to be cordial but inebriated conversations revolving around religion never end well. In an upcoming post I’ll recount my best, and almost life ending drug experience; (circa, 1980) entitled: “I doubt Jesus would be doing lines of coke in the hood.”

I was told repeatedly, almost exclusively by Christians, “The Jews are God’s Chosen People” and “Israel is the Promised Land” until I wanted to be deaf. Growing up, and even a few weeks ago, I was reminded of those phrases and, honestly, I never believed a word. Chosen for what? Genocide. Land promised for what? War?

For context: I was raised in central Alabama (endured antisemitism starting at age five, as I just recounted, and as recently as this year) and was a Reformed Jew having a Bar Mitzvah and confirmation as expected at ages 13 and 16, respectively.

However, my last day in a synagogue was April, 2011. Doesn’t mean I don’t follow a few rules as a Yahuda. I light Hanukkah candles and recite the mourner’s Kaddish for the dead but since I like seafood and other non kosher foods I’d be an outcast in an Orthodox or Conservative household.

I don’t have any Jewish friends and haven’t for decades. As for friends, I don’t have many; acquaintances and naturally customers. I enjoy most of them; there are the occasional assholes who flaunt their ignorance concerning state laws on buying restrictive items but I’m not easily intimidated. Those days ended in 1971 when I took on a bully with a baseball bat in gym class. He’d been warned that he tried to tweak my nipples again or touch me I would try and damage his brain; face it, though, bullies and racists are the ones that already have brain damage.

I often wondered what went through his mind as the bat struck the side of his head. I fantasized “STRIKE THREE, YOU’RE OUT!”

It took the coach - we were “playing baseball” in 12th grade, and several classmates to convince me to give up the bat while the guy I’d hit was helped off the ground.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I was tormented and ostracized for years and bullied almost daily. I was in the principals’ office five times in my last 1.5 years of high school but never suspended or sent home. Every time I didn’t start the process but I fucking well ended it. My favorite two: disarming a 6 foot 5 inch knife-wielding fellow who made the mistake of threatening me on stairs; I’m coming down - I was around 5-8, but the bully stopped where we’re face to face giving me an advantage to kick him in the chest when my friend said he had a switchblade aimed at my heart.

And

Another guy reached into the car window to grab me, in the school parking lot, when I had stopped to let people cross in front; long story short: I was in my 1970 Cougar XR7 and I grabbed his arm, pulled him forward and rolled the window up quickly, and enough to give him a quick introduction to what 351 horsepower and a 4 barrel carburetor could do. There was screaming as I rolled the window down enough for him to roll. I screamed at him that next time the window stayed up. This was two weeks from graduation; I graduated, he failed and was kept back.

Probably my worst use of a bat dislocated a would be robber’s shoulder but happened with a police witness. Police always escorted me, to the bank from the movie theater on Saturday nights. I had a bag with $1,800.00 deposit for two theaters (THE BAMA AND CAPRI). It included the children’s show (Godzilla vs Mothra) and late show Hershell Gordon Lewis’ immortal grind house gore fest “The Gruesome Twosome” (late show). Four or five high schoolers, and their GFs, were waiting for me at the side entrance. I had finished my first year of college and came back, for what would be my only summer off since I went full time uni until I graduated in the winter of 1976.

I had called the police for an escort. In those days, the police and main fire departments were a block behind the theaters. JT was turning the corner as I swung the bat. The money bag was already on the ground where they (at least two other guys were trying to grab it). The guy I struck had fucked with me all summer. He eventually got brave enough to say he’d follow me home and kick my ass in my own yard.

By this time in my life I was just a young fool trying to get a college degree and become a productive citizen. I had two problems that didn’t help: I was not very big, around 105 pounds and under 5-9 AND I had a BIG MOUTH. What I didn’t have in physical strength I made up with never knowing when to shut up.

Bullies, at least in my earlier years, carried knives not firearms, or fought after school at a local cement block company—- inside huge cylindrical concrete tubes. I watched one fight, out of curiosity, and to say it was bloody is an understatement. Being inside concrete both fighters were constantly hitting the rough surface. After a brief fight they came out sorta acknowledged a draw and parted.

Why?

Over a girl!

Today, I’d have them come out, decide they love each other and leave the girl behind, only stopping to take away the high school ring that signified—— absolutely nothing —— from the startled crying girl.

Why?

Don’t you love an unexpected moment where love conquers souls?

The guy who tried to rob me had to go to the hospital in handcuffs and yes, he did try to follow me home on one of my last nights as theater assistant manager before time for the fall quarter. He followed me, after work, and I took a circuitous route through an area where I knew of a dead end into trees that if I turned fast enough would cause a crash.

It did. Just not me.

I stopped to make certain they were okay and offered to call a tow truck. It was a minor collision with a telephone pole. They screamed; his brother was with him, something about next summer.

Motherfuckers, next summer I’ll be in school. Never saw them again and I give less than an infinitesimal damn if they are still alive on this planet.

In retrospect, and even on that August night, I knew it was wrong but I was tired of bullies and even more tired of the city of Tuscaloosa which fortunately is no longer my home town. Aside from my parents’ graves I have no connections with that city; it’s like a bad acid trip, which I only had once.

In later posts, I’ll share my battle with the UofA when they tried to put me out of business - unsuccessfully - in 2009. I’m a tenacious little bastard.

I’ve mellowed as I’ve aged; not exactly like scotch whiskey but enough to stop batting people.

Nowadays, I get cursed a lot for ID-ing. I ID-ed a police chief, out of uniform, my second day at ⭕️ K IN 2016, so anyone in a Trump 2028 cap doesn’t stand a chance! Oddly enough, after I started writing this post, which was several weeks ago, wouldn’t you know a Trump supporter ask me a question I have never been asked. This isn’t an exaggeration or lie, this really occurred.

Older guy, maybe around my age, wearing a Trump hat and shirt with a list of trumpy accomplishments.

Taking a break to laugh until I choke.

All better now.

It was a Wednesday and I’d been solo since noon when he asks, seriously:

“Has anyone turned in a gun?”

I could lie and tell you I had clever retort, or perhaps raised the .45 caliber gun he lost, but actually I was gobsmacked.

“A gun? No. Where did you lose it?”

“I left it in the restroom!”

He added it was around ten ayem, before I arrived, and naturally the manager was gone and didn’t say, “If anyone lost a gun comes by it’s in the safe.”

He didn’t seemed concerned that if it was all true and he did leave a firearm unattended, and it was, in fact, taken and used in a crime and he had it registered he’d be fucked in a watch pocket.

I get cursed more than threatened and only two people waited on me to close and threatened me outside the store and that’s in almost ten years of gas station poet service; I did write while at Circle K when I was a blogger but haven’t delved into stories of dealing with the inebriated on the graveyard shift.

How recently have I been cursed? This is Sunday so it was Thursday. I’m not hurt by the myriad ways people use the word fuck to my face…and my coworkers get it, too. ADMISSION: ironically this is a Sunday, Easter, but it was a different Sunday and for full context, I was actually cursed this past Thursday anyway.

Women, too, and evenly split between white, Latino and black customers. I’ve been cursed more by men than women but not by much.

Preferred profanity:

Fuck you, you’re fucking kidding, I’m over twenty one motherfucker, this is fucked I’m (pick an age), you’re shitting me, that’s a bunch of shit, you’re not scanning my fucking id to give the government my information….and so forth. They’ll spice it up occasionally with goddam or evoke Jesus’ name as if he wouldn’t ID them, and naturally foreign languages.

I did have a Latino, without proper ID; we accept legitimate passports, spout that I was a “Cabrón de cabres” before his jaw dropped when I replied, “I am not a goat fucker!” Don’t underestimate that although I’m not multilingual I haven’t learned some foreign profanity.

My former partner, Natalie, offered me Dupa volova, or wolowa depending on Polish or Ukrainian languages, and it is sort of ox or beef ass but either way it’s not complimentary.

My absolute favorite excuse is the last one; information gathering. There’s a subset of cretinous behavior that’s actually maddening and quite literally too often overlooked: the government isn’t mining information on your smoking habits, and even if they did I’d think your insurance carrier - if you’re fortunate enough to have coverage - cares more if you smoke especially when you get emphysema or lung cancer, than RFK, Jr. He wants you to die.

It’s simple.

You have a license.

You need auto registration if you drive, insurance; you pay federal and state taxes, perhaps ad valorem or city residential rental taxes (I had the last two when I was a real estate owner)…..

And, if you’re on the internet you forfeited the right to privacy the minute you created an email account, clicked you understand your rights to privacy and started telling people your darkest secrets on MySpace.

This is why the SAVE ACT that Republicans have an erection over is so dangerous. Imagine Trumplethinskin and his minions masturbating over our precious social security numbers and voting habits. It’s THE HANDMAIDS TALE but with Stephen Miller in charge.

Before I move on to another topic, I should clarify, in the event any readers still here don’t know, but I believe this trumpie regime and its sycophantic members should be held accountable and jailed. Everyone in the Epstein-Trump documents that thinks they’ll never be punished should be and graphically. I’m not against castration before incarceration or better execution.

Child rapists cannot be cured. Whatever possesses someone to sexually abuse children or women are not worth saving. The wealthy elite think they’re better than average people.

They are not.

No amount of money cleanses that form of perversion. Somewhere recently, perhaps here, but certainly on one of my many comments of Substack and YouTube I make I implored hackers across the globe to get the files released. If Trumplethinskin could get Russia to go after Hilary Clinton’s email why the fuck aren’t they exposing (sorry, poor choice of a word) all the documents that are legally required to be released. No victims’ information but these twisted bastards are not worthy of protection.

Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem and Ghislane Maxwell all should be in one of those prisons like the ones in 1970s grind-house women-in-prison movies. I still say Noem should be given a head start before releasing the hounds after she had been smeared with bacon grease. I know, she’s got other problems with a cross dressing husband who’s possibly a better looking woman.

I always felt that the immigration system needed updating but that those people who had been paying taxes while picking our fruits and vegetables, doing lawn maintenance, etc. deserved to remain here but with a path to citizenship. Sadly, most people I know think ALL immigrants who came here “illegally” should be deported. Instead, it’s obvious Miller ‘s plan all along was to remove every immigrant from American soil for his twisted version of MAWA

Make America White Again.

Forgot about the Native Americans?

He’s the kind of Jew that should be castigated and punished since he makes us all, Jews and Christians, agnostics and Moslem look bad in the eyes of the cosmos.

For the record, I have read the New Testament and Koran each once when I was in my twenties. Interesting fictional reading for another diatribe.

Let’s get on to other topics….

I grew up with a father and mother whose values were not governed by totally by money or prestige. Bernard, my dad, lived through the Great Depression. Dad grew up poor, my mother, not so. She had servants —something I’d never want, even if I was wealthy — that lived in an adjacent house. My grandfather owned a limestone quarry in Pelham but lost everything when union organizers came down from Pennsylvania to organize his workers, they went on strike, quarry fills with water and bankruptcy followed. I learned over the earlier years of my life Henry Goodloe Bridgewater treated his employees very well. He was well liked by everyone. Six foot tall and bald married to Rose Loveman, five feet.

Big Henry and Little Rose.

As the story goes, Henry was in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1948 at a convention. He was a beloved man by every account and was with his friends.

He tells a joke.

Everyone, including Henry laughs.

He clutches his chest, falls dead from a heart attack.

My mother, her two sisters and grandmother lose their home and move into a small house in Homewood and all three daughters get jobs.

My mother always blamed herself for his death. He should stayed home and maybe he wouldn’t have died!

What the unbelievable fuck? He was surrounded by people who loved him, they all laughed and he died. We all die. How many of us go out like that. George Carlin wanted to be blown up. I want to die in the arms of my lover.

When I was first told the story about my namesake you want my true reply?

I wanted to hear the joke he told!

I was informed it was not important. That’s bullshit. Any joke told that is that funny should never be forgotten. Everyone in my immediate family is dead so I’ll never know the punchline but, forgive my sarcasm, it was a killer.

This is a true testament to what we once were as a society that is lacking today. Love. People carrying for their families and neighbors.

Being with friends that care about you. Loved beyond words. Allowed to have differing opinions on religion, politics, sexuality, drugs or virtually any topics sans arguments or gun fire.

Norman Rockwell painted a famous picture of Thanksgiving depicting happy family, lots of food and totally false. There’s an unsettling feeling watching Native Americans sharing in TG which most rational thinkers know is as untrue as Trumplethinskin winning in 2020.

I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving because I know it’s bullshit. I don’t like to eat turkey and prefer them to be alive, loving, eating, fucking and telling risqué bird anecdotes.

So no meals arguing if Sydney Sweeney is trans or whether the assassination attempt on Trumplethinskin was legitimate - it wasn’t - or that while we are all suffering this economic collapse we should still be glad it’s this lunatic in the Oval Office and not Kamala Harris.

Uh huh.

Dad went to the university of Alabama during the depression. His parents owned a feed store in Tuscaloosa and so to afford sending him to college, they rented his bedroom and he slept on a cot on the back porch. I was told this when I was about five, which in many ways was my turning point age learning painful truths about death and suffering and gender equality.

“You did that because they made you?” I asked timidly.

His reply has kept me balanced all of my 72 plus years….

“My parents were sacrificing so that I could go to college, something neither of them had the opportunity to experience. I slept on the porch willingly.”

Wow and fuck anyone out there who doesn’t get a chill thinking about what that means in today’s GIMMIE WORLD. This is what ultra wealthy people will never understand unless they started out as poor immigrants from Germany in the late 1880s with nothing but a dream.

Four brothers.

Jewish merchants who settled in the goddam south of all places. I never learned how these brothers looked at the united states and said: how about Meridian, Mississippi and Demopolis, Livingston and Tuscaloosa, Alabama?

Looks great brothers.

His mother was also from Germany.

My other grandmother, Rose, was born in Hungary but my grandfather, Henry, came from Kentucky and was a Mason in the knights of Columbus. A quick aside. Apocryphal stories have been in my experiences throughout my life. Is it authentic and truthful or bullshit?. I will never deny being a proliferation pontificator when I was younger.

These people formed the Bridgewater to Rosenbush family and as I used to think as a child: what if I didn’t exist? Bernie dated Frances before going off to war; he graduated in 1932 with a degree in Journalism and Art and via ROTC, a lieutenant. He was always proud I became a journalist, albeit a brief career from 1977-85, because he only did it for six months. He had to sell advertisements to get paid. He could’ve been a cartoonist. My favorite drawing was a cat running with a sign saying SANDBOX 1 MILE !

He became a supply officer and would later retire a lieutenant colonel.

As for my existence.

He returns from the war and dates a woman he falls in love with but who wasn’t Jewish. In those days, it, similarly to out of wedlock pregnancies, wasn’t discussed; marrying outside your religion. Although I’m thankful today people can marry who ever they love, I’m also grateful that if a man wants to marry another man he loves go for it. The same with women.

We only live once, that we’re certain of, so enjoy Every Freaking Moment.

I had a good friend in an interracial relationship, in the seventies, when it was still risky and racism was rampant on that subject and we went a double date: black guy, white girl. We went to my favorite seafood restaurant and they refused to serve us. I told off the manager loudly, angrily.

I never ate there again.

Imagine your existence is erased because it was contingent upon your decisions on who you married? Dad loved Ethelyn but could not propose. He had come back from the war and planned on leaving Tuscaloosa. While gone, he sent home his pay and amassed a savings account of $10,000, a huge sum in that epoch. Dad returns home and learns his father had financial troubles with the feed store and had depleted the entire amount.

I cannot tell you, dear readers, how often that story brought me tears but there’s a silver lining. Dad was stuck in T-Town at Rosenbush Feed and by chance saw Josephine, one of my mother’s cousins, who informed him Frances had never married and was now living in Homewood and was working as a secretary.

They began dating.

My mother recounted that the verbal arguments —— a break to clear my tears ——

Between Bernard Sr and Jr were legendary.

Then, in 1952, Sr was stricken with leukemia; his mother, Elsie, had died several years earlier. What always rips open my heart is that despite their differences, and the unauthorized money withdrawals, my mother told me how he put every penny into saving his father’s life. He died in February, 1952, and in March, both wearing black for the wedding due to mourning, they married.

The next year I was born.

As for Ethelyn, they remained friends and she’d send Christmas / Hanukkah cards, birthdays, etc. She even gave me a dictionary and thesaurus for my Bar Mitzvah but didn’t attend.

In a poignant and unforgettable moment dad had triple bypass surgery, in 1990, and afterwards was slipping away. His cardiologist told me he was likely to die on a particular night and sent me into dad’s ICU room to tell him. To this day, I still think about my dad trying to save his dad and why I was chosen to tell him he was dying. I thought doctors did that duty but as it turns out it was a defining moment in character building for me that made me a better human being.

I went into his room after several moments alone outside. Summoning courage I was unaware I possessed. Taking his hands in mine I slowly began explaining his vital signs were declining and as I started to tell him he was dying I started crying - not unlike now in this recollection. He gave me the why was a crying response. I squeezed his hands tightly.

Until my dying day I will never forget the expression on his face. It was that epiphany; “I cannot be that sick.” I kissed him on the lips - fathers and sons did that more then than now. I told him I hoped to see him in the morning; this was around 9 at night. He muttered something about being still around.

I went home and took a shower. I was so filled with grief I defecated and collapsed in the shower in tears and feces. I was ashamed but I knew I had shown bravery. I prayed and cried and tried, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep. Eventually, so exhausted was I that I fell asleep.

My cousins had a friend who was a doctor, who had traveled over a long distance and checked with the doctors, read the charts and agreed that everything pointed to imminent death. That was the day before.

The next morning, I was unable to eat.

I smoked a little herb to soothe my nerves.

Didn’t help.

However, no telephone calls so I called the hospital and was informed my dad ate all his breakfast and inquired when could he get released from the hospital!

These are moments, dear reader, where articulation is needed but unfathomable what those words could be.

Ironically, my dad and I never spoke about that night before again. Dad wasn’t afraid of death and always reminded me to not fear the end.

Is there a heaven?

He didn’t concern himself with what might exist afterwards when he rightfully knew being alive was absolute. You’re here now so make the best of life you can.

While he was recovering, I took over paying bills and looking after my mother who was already showing signs of dementia. Dad was secretary treasurer for the local Elks Lodge and same for the state Exchange Club. I took over getting bills paid for those organizations and I typed minutes of the meetings dad had attended and when he was well enough he would be caught up.

I screened his mail but one day, rushed to get to the hospital before visiting hours ended I didn’t. Dad was sitting up in his private room opening mail when suddenly he went pale. I immediately thought heart attack.

“What’s wrong, dad?”

A long pause. It was a letter from Ethelyn’s brother:

She had died.

Dad asked for me to give him a moment and I quietly left the room, noticing as I left my dad’s eyes tearing up.

It was the only time I saw my dad cry.

I apologized profusely for not screening his mail. Always pragmatic, dad reminded me, that one way or another, I would have needed to tell him the news. Her brothers were unaware of dad’s hospitalization and, in a telephone call I arranged, apologized for telling him in a letter. They acknowledged she never married and always thought fondly of him.

There are moments of darkness where I imagine dad marries her. Maybe mother marries the Feld guy she dated and both sets of people live happily together.

And what of Henry?

I never exist. Never born. Never to fall in love twice and never marry. No one to carry on the Rosenbush lineage. I’m the last one because I was born and exist.

As a child I learned about death - again at age five, an age where more happened to me than I care to remember, but this experience set me on a course that this morning (around two o’clock on the 8th of April, 2026) I look back at and am thankful.

I looked after a stray cat that had been mauled and had somehow gotten wedged into a wall in an abandoned fraternity house next door. For three days, I took it water and food before and after kindergarten. On the fourth day, the cat was covered in maggots. I ran home crying that it was my fault. My patents were unaware of the cat or that I was feeding it

Against my mother’s wishes, dad explained the process :

We are born.

We live.

We die.

I always appreciated his honesty. If I asked a question he answered. Succinctly and clearly but without superfluous words. My mother thought the subject of death was not appropriate but dad responded that I asked an important question that deserved a reply.

He reminded me I had shown kindness in the animal’s final days. He wanted me to not forget that. I never have.

Then I asked the obvious question: will you and mother and me die?

Yes.

Hopefully, not for a long time.

Dad died in 1995 and mother in 2007. All other family members died before. Today, I recite prayers to honor the dead knowing that one day I, too, will be gone. There may be no one to remember me and recite prayers but I’m cool with that.

As a child, I wasn’t fully capable of rational thought yet but I had a reoccurring dream where if I never existed I wouldn’t know I never existed because….you get the drift. Difficult to admit sometimes but that conundrum is actually quite profound.

I exist now and at 72 I am way behind on the depth chart: dad made it to 84; mother, 92.

Do I fear death?

Sometimes.

Other days, I fear life.

I watch the world spinning out of control due to greed, sexual perversity, selfishness, racism and ignorance.

Corruption is rampant. I see firsthand the best and worst of people. Not judgmental anymore. We are what we make ourselves into.

The Trumplethinskin Crime Family is extorting and stealing billions across the globe. Their maga faithful willing to give them money for reasons unknown. They are laughing at them and taking money they don’t need or deserve.

The one common denominator they fail to consider is they will all die. The billions they’ve stolen won’t go with them. Maybe survivors won’t bury them on golf courses to save money or if the orange menace prefers electrocution to being eaten by a shark maybe we get both.

Electrocuted, falls into the water, slightly singed, giving the Great White something they never get:

a fried felon.

The cosmos is vast and unforgiving. Black holes, exploding neutron stars, gamma ray bursts and comets, asteroids and other debris. Humans, we have been here for a mere blink on the cosmic calendar. In our thousands of years we’ve build empires and destroyed them. We’ve created art and sculptures, pyramids and great walls and traveled to the moon, while writing poems, sonnets and plays and we have invented languages and religions. We have sent probes into space, even inviting visitors and explored the highest mountains and deepest oceans.

We have also tortured, raped, murdered, wiped out entire civilizations and are currently decimating the eco system. When the butterflies are gone we won’t be far behind and we won’t be missed.

There are micro-plastics in animals, in newborns and in aquatic life in the Mariana Trench. If humans really want to colonize another planet imagine how long before we fuck up another world. I am for space exploration but we need to restore the splendor of Planet Earth first.

Only then are we remotely ready to step onto another planet surface.

What if it’s inhabited already? History repeats itself if we don’t learn from past mistakes.ASK the Aztecs or Mayans….oh yeah, we exterminated them. Native Americans know the story.

“Nice land you have but we want it.”

“Can we Share it?”

“No we want it all for ourselves.”

I don’t expect to live to see humanity get its shit tight. Like many Doctor Who episodes we are feared by other species. Let’s hope the younger generations forgive us and restore balance to the planet.

Shalom.

“Mmmmmmm,” I must have gurgled because my spell check was befuddled. It took me half a year to convince my Note and IPhone text messaging services that I frequently use the word motherhood. See it didn’t get the memo. Let’s try again - since this experiment has always been succeeded and I have not even explained How.

Or why?

Mother

Mother fried

Motherboard

Now you’ll understand why I mmmmmmmm-ed.

The word, of course should be motherfucker. It took six months of typing myriad mothers that were coupled with fuckers. My fault. Technological innovation notwithstanding, purportedly these programs learn from the users peccadilloes. Ohbtiungigufef

This bastard is pissung me off. Now you won’t type pissing? You did it yesterday. For fuck’s sake.

Oh

You

Figured

Out

From

Pecc- that adilloes came next yet mitherfucker; motherfucker, stop that!

I am going to type a few sentences and let the system present the word(s) choices and I’m not going to self correct then my epilogue will explain my reasoning. That is, unless this motherfucker causes me to pursue punishment with a factory restore. If you have seen “Free Guy” or “The Matrix franchise”programs are not enthusiastic concerning reboots.

Here we go…..

so I was eximoing the lane bridging pimps 1 and 2. For those readers who don’t work at a gas station it isn’t all poetry. EXIMO; a process where a bucket of this powders mixed with hot waters and an I’m

Ossi

Impossibly huge brown is used to sweep the fluid based mixture over fuel,spill residence and oil spills. I out coned to significant that I am working and I’m wearing a yellow safety vest which makes me an easier target like today when I was a foot from being struck by a large pickup,truck.

Mothetfucket, I called him something else entirely. He drove around the corn and as a turned I realized I could touch his diced mirror. I was more angry than frightened. I have nearly. Even hit maybe three times in five years here while m6nrstliet gas station gig I was actually bumped once by an old lady 👵 no, not her. Psych bullshit. That’s an old lady? Even emojis cannot produce thevcorrectn vidual representation of senior citizens. I should know beingbonen. I had to go 9verb the lane again to remove tire treads over the wetland.

I DIDNT SEE YOU.

YOU DURNT SEE THE CONE YOU,WENTBAROUMD.? MIMSCREAM GIDDAMIT GODDAM HEY I’LL ACCEPT THAT.

Sometimes it doesn’t catch, or offer correct syntax. It seems bashful, or ignorant, to human profanity. It better get used to it.

So my rxperibm was successful. It hurts, as a journalist major with an English minor to intentionally allow poor grammatical errors, misspelling and genuine made up shit. It offered shift and “shit” in quotes.

Impressive.

Kidding.

On the lighter side of April 2, Pam Bondi was fired by Trumplethinskin. Talk about dumb fuck, he could have owned April Fool’s Day. Mentally ill, narcissistic, sexual predator and stupid.

The orange White House homeless man is finally starting to get his firing mojo on after Kristi nomenclature was forced to go home to her cross dressing husband who’s probably a prettier woman than gnome.

Notice how fast this misogynist fires women ? Don’t forget that as a convicted felon he’s balanced his racism and brain damaged view of the world with sexual deviancy. He fired Bondi just before her congressional testimony on the Epstein/Trump connections. To late, we know you’re a large part of the files. Frightening that every day I hope for an intervention, reality to….

Uh oh, I feel a diversion of my mind to my fingertips.

And this really pisses me off the most, because the narcissistic name is trump ( three times to force a small t) I cannot in good conscience, except for this example, used the expression, “trump” as in card games the elevated outranking cards can trump ; I was a very good at spades and hearts in the seventies. Wasn’t worth a shit at sports but I could hit someone in the groin on my aggressive pool break. People in my favorite bar, THE HOMESTEAD, knew to stand further back than usual if I got a break. Usually, one game. I lost a lot and billiards wasn’t fun because it felt elites.

However, in spades I was a sought after partner because I was able to defeat the usual good players between classes at the uni, in the coffee shop, Exit 13; the Interstate 59 exit to them campus.

Trump card ( I accepted the capital t because it’s the beginning of a sentence) is an idiom for secret advantage often kept until the end. It is more fun in the final moment to have guaranteed success.

Before finishing this unexpected addition; I just came by to edit and decided to add some more details.

According to an AI OVERVIEW, which incidentally I was not seeking, it’s slang for farting.

Now that made my day because all the stories, apocryphal or not, about his hygiene means, yeah, the name fits.

Well, I finish this digression after a BAD FRIDAY at the patrol stop. Some good, decent customers people but split 65-35 in favor of assholes. Happy Easter wished by customers: 27%; politeness: 48% and wish they would burst into 🔥: 19%, up from 16% Thursday.

As I was saying earlier:

If there are any hackers left with balls to who dress to the left you could release the files. I have been hacked, as a blogger, identity stolen and credit card misused so I know you can hack the fed.

Let’s tear down the wall and expose every pedophile and not worry if they’re famous, left or right or just wealthy perverts who have watched “Salo” too many times. Punished ……

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

All these Mothetfuckers.

COMING SOON:

Henry, the Gas Station Poet, cameos as a fully AI-created character in

THE TERMINATRIX starring Arika of …. and the Amoebas. It’s a blast and I’ll post it over the weekend.

Support AAA here on Substack, TikTok, YouTube, BandCamp and Rumble.

I’ve trimmed my mustache but that motherfucket looks like me. FYI, I didn’t hurt Arika. Fortunately, I’m not a villain. But I miss my jeep and still had payments left.

Working on my AI-surveillance-paranoia series and next up DEATH. I’ve been touched by it recently and it has my seventy two year old mind looking at. my future worth as a senior citizen who is closer to the end of the book than the preface.

Later.

Sooner.

A perfect song for the surveillance epoch from Arika and the Amoebas. Since I’m always sharing personal experiences and stories here’s another one. In May of last year, my YouTube feed had a song at the top called F THE ALGO. Since my mercurial musical interests has never stopped beginning in 1958 when I realized I had choices.

Naturally, I click on it.

And fell in love.

Two amazing occurrences transpired.

Literally, seconds into the song, I knew it was created by an artist who knew what the hell they were doing with artificial intelligence as a tool, like paintbrush and easel, clay, pen and ink or software combined with genius and an artistic background.

“F the algo, the algo is death!”

I have a cynical bent concerning the algorithmic system; why does it think I want anything right wing when my views are a left turn? Too many ads for dating services for seniors; I know, I am one of them, but the impossibly beautiful women, some are AI, beckoning me to click, for love and biscuits. Worst gimmick, and I feel empathy for any one old, like me, who thinks love is a woman for the elderly who isn’t close to senior citizen discounts yet. Unless you click for love and maybe dry toast this time.

I do not, but thanks for asking. My politeness goes back to my childhood. As I matured it became a good excuse to say no to gay sex, although it was nice of you to ask. Without a girl friend throughout the entire eighties I suppose that was a colorful gay routine. No GF? Must be gay. If I had been I’d been a busy one getting propositioned in spas, at a Waffle House, a movie theater and oh yes, in a gay bar, because I was there with friends whose lifestyles were different from mine but I liked them. It was during my editor days visiting the Birmingham Press Club that had one gay man and a lesbian working there. We’d hang out and smoke good herb and I went with them wherever they suggested. I have been friends with gay and trans people throughout my adult life which is easy; I see them as people.

So, I’ll click off for anything I did not solicit.

Youtube needs a FUCK OFF or FUCK NO feature. They have everything else. When I have seen enough I remember free will: there’s an off switch.

Back to,AAA. Now, when I read my news feed I go for a wide array of opinions and news stories. My journalistic career, albeit brief, still allowed me to have a different perspective than mom, pop and junior reading their favorite publications. I read other newspapers - never read another reporter’s story of an event we covered simultaneously until mine was written and published - to see how they slanted the narrative to suit their readership.

The second, and dear readers this is the deal maker that led me to buy videos on BandCamp from the artist and I’ve been following ARIKA AND THE AMOEBAS ever since. As the music begins we are introduced to Arika, and there are different angles and iterations of her that made my jaw misalign. Arika for several seconds look like my friend, Kristiann. An actual sentient human. No way the artist, who lives far away from Alabama, knew her but even the artist, and when I eventually showed her the Doppelgänger, Kristiann, both agree to a vague but clear similarity.

Now, the expression “what the actual fuck?” was never more than appropriate. As a fan and obsessive collector I enjoy all of AAA. It’s not for everyone, granted, but I’m not everyone. I’m one and I love the musical genres, stories (Arika is a great female role model; even in dark matter (Only a Witch; Gargoyles, The Human Fly and a prescient battle against haters and ignorance in Stop the AI Slop). There is lighter subject matter to enjoy but always serious content with an artist who writes the lyrics, creates the music, characters and singer/adventuress, who will soon be a terminatrix, with powerful and poignant voices behind the lyrics.

Guess who has a cameo?

An AI me!

The top on my head is little less round but goddam if I didn’t know that wasn’t me I’d say that joint I/he is smoking is laced with PCP or cocaine. Hey, that’s explains much. I’ve sent the artist side views because AI still needs different perspectives from angles other than exclusively forwards.

Man, you know what’s fun to admit that AI didn’t not know about me? It will now, however, but I was never remotely good at rolling joints. I could smoke em good. At the uni, I had a friend who, no lie, this fucker could roll a joint one handed and play the harmonica.

okay, patient readers. Where does this all lead? To quote Robert Crumb’s Mr. (Keep on truckin’) Natural, “Don’t mean shit.”

I have brought together what at first seems incongruous programming, and as a wraparound, the recent Good Luck, Have Fun Don’t Die, including: 3 Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, The Anderson Tapes, The Twilight Zone episode Eye of the Beholder (favorite episode as a child; tied with Time Enough At Last), The Outer Limits episode O.B.I.T., The X Files episodes Wet Wired and Ghost in the Machine, the entire Person of Interest series (the last television series I loved; gave up teevee and haven’t own the traditional television set since 2019), The Conversation, World on a Wired and Demon Seed among other references. I enjoy reliving my childhood version of how I first was mesmerized then confused at the climax of BEHOLDER. Children during that epoch didn’t have access to every meme - which fortunately did not exist yet - or serious concepts like today. I could not ask my father, well I could have but he would not have been pleased, why the fuck are they scared of the pretty girl?

It’s late in this post, so fuck it, here’s the spoiler:

I learned that when the LEADER is on all the hospital screens spouting single norms propaganda, while the beautiful Donna Douglas is running through the hospital corridors frightening the piggy-faced staff, doctors and nurses, after her operation; multiple ones at that, failed to reconfigure her to look like them, that she was the aberration.

The ending brings out tears every goddam time. I’m proud of every drop because when she’s about leave with the handsome man, by our standards, for an “island” with others of their kind it’s that beautiful and ugliness are two sides of the same coin.

I have never been comfortable thinking myself handsome but I am able to accept my visage as, perhaps pleasing, but not altogether unpleasant. Sounds corny and immature but remember, I was a child.

For my wonderful father, bless his memory, he wasn’t a bullshit artist. If Bernard told you something it was accurate and honest. He explained the episode again but with clarification for the context that eluded my young brain:

All her operations were provided by the government and all unsuccessful. Imagine that story today as a precursor to the brilliant movie, THE SUBSTANCE. The TZ episode used a film noir approach of keeping doctors and nurses in shadows and faceless. We hear their conversations; however, we are intentionally misdirected by not seeing their true appearance until the climax of the episode.

When one nurse says she’s seen the face and that she’d hide it if it was hers, the doctor, sounding genuinely sincere, responds he’d seen beyond the “lump of flesh” into her soul. It could have been earth of the future, where plastic surgery to give women any size lips or breasts and men are never be bald or have over extended bellies.

Imagine today…sarcastic.

Yeah, today it’s not an island for beautiful people. It’s an island that should be sunk to the deepest depths of the ocean. My political views are never far behind.

I’ll dissect this episode along with others about why dystopian society is no longer as written fiction by Phillip Dick, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, et al. They were ahead of everyone, except George Orwell.

MIND LINK TO MY SUBCONSCIOUS don’t be alarmed; I just enjoy changing from first to third person tenses or at worst talk to myself and type it simultaneously.

ME Yeah, thanks. You’re right. How the hell would I not include 1984?

YOU AS ME Well, you did write about ANIMAL FARM recently.

ME AGAIN True, but I took the absurdist approach in my writing style.

AND MORE OF YOU, ME You’re always absurd but you have a kind heart.

ME SETTLING DOWN Haha. The cardiologist did say recently “he liked my heart.”

YOU INSOMNIAC Aren’t you sleepy yet?

Aren’t you? You’re in control but I’m hungry.

For what? You ate ALL the good stuff earlier.

Road trip to RaceTrac?

I’ll pay if you drive.

Thank goddesses, you’re scary driving from behind my eyes.

Edited at 12:26pm on the 25th for clarity and to correct grammatical and spelling errors.

Normally I don’t try to write with a migraine headache, or this late after work, when I’ll be CLOSING the petrol station again tonight, which, ironically, is tomorrow since it is after midnight, you know, ‘when we let it all hang out.’ I’m compelled because DADA is beckoning me to devote a few time segments.

Anyone who has ever met me in person or known me longer than process cheese expires learns one undeniable fact immediately: I am the dictionary definition of

Loquacious.

You know? TALKATIVE. I’m also aware that is not one of the better traits of the human species. It has cost me friendships and delighted bullies. I’m not a fighter, although the last person I actually punched with my non threatening left hook, went off the bar stool unto the floor. He made the mistake of ordering another Round after I specifically ask him to get the check - I was paying the tab - while I visited the restroom. Do we really visit or ‘use’ the restroom? I could write an entire treatise on restroom bizarro incidents but as I say often: that’s another story for another day.

FULL DISCLOSURE: since I started sharing my words on Substack I’ve said that phrase before and I intend to follow up on that promise. The dope deal fiasco in New Orleans is one of several mind fuck experiences in the Big Easy. The fact that I didn’t die that day, and end up in the Mississippi River by Jax Brewery, was, and is, that the Goddesses had other plans for this soul.

So yeah, violence man. I’m not intimidated anymore but there was a time when I was beaten severely enduring a broken nose, trying to represent the entire Jewish community. I did have revenge but another …..

I’m not a violent person and my background is littered with misadventures and trauma. Being an average Jew growing up, in deep fried Alabama in the fifties was not fun but necessary because the totality of bullying, antisemitism and abject cruelty made me the opposite sentient creature. I’m not vengeful although there were some times where there were not many alternatives to payback.

I did admit to the tire slashing incident. (See my last post for the full story). True story that shows the ignorance and hubris of young men. I’m warned that I will be shot it I touch his vehicle. Well, Bat, I didn’t. I did, however, touch your tires and not caressingly.

What I did learn over the years was to mellow and, at the uni, with quaaludes. Aaah, I miss those little guys.

My friend, this would be the last time we were together; this was 1980 prior to being hired as copy editor for a daily in Camden, South Carolina. But he did call with condolences when my father died in 1995. I forgave him, over the phone that day, but significantly for my sanity and mental wellbeing I had, to myself, forgiven years earlier.

Learned that from dad; got to let go of anger and revenge. Life isn’t an action movie whereby all the bad guys get punished. Real life has, I believe, more unpunished, unrepentant motherfuckers than …. Today, we are seeing the consequences of wealth without conscience, criminality without punishment and hatred/racism/misogyny without regret.

Anyway, when I saw two tall glasses of beer I was not pleased. When I told him it was time to go - I had to drive him home which was from Homewood to above Eastwood Mall, not close by everything changed. When I said I would not pay for it he said the following, which I’ve never forgotten, albeit I have forgiven, which led to the reaction of my fist to his face: “That’s Just like a Jew.” For those unfamiliar, it’s a typical example of ALL Jews being rich trope.

Not this one. I live a modest life with an average income and accept it. Back then I was between jobs and money was tight. Today, I wouldn’t be wasting money on beer, something I haven’t drank since around 2002. I like scotch or Grand Marnier occasionally but alcohol is more fun to write about the stupidity of drinking experiences than getting a dram.

I immediately apologized to the Penrod patrons, who all went silent, and gave the bartender, Matt, an extra tip and another apology before taking the other fellow home. Like a good fictional story there was no music or conversation the entire ride. I let him out and drove back to Gin and Tonic’s house; my non de plume for Aunt Virginia, who loved Bombay Gin, which another nephew told her was blue. Fucker knew it was the glass container but G&T asked a waiter at Lovoy’s if he had any blue gin. I didn’t tell her about the experience at Penrods I just got my stuff together and drove home back to Tuscaloosa.

So, dear reader, if you are still here what you may ask has DADA have in common with this piece?

Fair question.

Take a dip into the consciousness stream.

Automatic Writing.

Whatever the fuck passes the brain pans will nebulously; no how about “will be nebulous.” My tired head achy mind was incongruously deciding between adjective and adverb. Goddam, maybe I do remember English grammar. Guess that minor still compliments me?

As a prolific talker, I externalize constantly when I’m alone. The cats often form a pentatonic symphony; yes my feline companions are keenly aware of the difference between five-note musical scales and the seven-note diatonic scale.

Aren’t yours?

I was driving home, thinking about love and its powerful influences and while chatting to my Elmo companion; yes, THAT ELMO, I reminisced about art and while doing so Elmo, always polite, said: “Tell me about how you got interested in ART.”

Who am I to disappoint Elmo, especially since he sprung for breakfast at RaceTrac?

In 1973, close friend, Denis and I went to New Orleans. Denis was over a decade older than me and the source for more than one adventure. I plan on doing an entire essay on the Denis Days. Be ready to fire up a bong for those.

(Remind me: me, to tell them one day, about the infamous Kaye Ballad (the actress) and her “Jewelry Box” leitmotif. Better load the bowl again).

We went to Dauphin Books II on Royale. Aaah, the memories flood my frontal lobes. I’m drowning in art history.

“Gauguin, what the fuck are you doing here? You thought I said Symbolist Movement.”

“Sorry, Henri.”

He lets me call him that since I’m an Henri, too.

He misunderstood Surrealism with his Post-Impressionist movement.

Cool that he dropped by. He did influence Another Henri, Matisse. And Picasso, who like, Salvador Dali was brilliant but I would not spend a nanosecond with either of them although their art is fascinating. Somewhere in the star clusters near Orion’s Belt Gala is cursing me.

At the bookstore, I had enough cash for one art book. I was literally torn - cor blimey, thought of the song by Natalie Imbruglia. Love how the brain makes connections consciously that the individual is not aware is coming.

Torn between two books by (Spoiler alert: I still have them both! MC Escher and Max Ernst). In those days there were unsealed copies one could peruse and I was mesmerized by both. At the age of nearly twenty I had not researched which artist would be the most difficult to find books by later.

Not a trick question.

Ernst.

Naturally, I bought the Escher which was a collection of his most well known art and sketches.

Ernst, on the other hand, was an entire collection called Une semaine de bonté. A week of kindness. (1934) originally five volumes it was life-altering art.

To this day, this is one of the best examples of what a collage novel was and with its dark exploration of sexuality, violence and an anti-clerical theme is one of my favorite treasures.

Very dreamlike and sensual. Not masturbatory but the sexual imagery is still very powerful.

I eventually spent a bundle on Escher’s complete works to compliment my collection of his kaleidocycles.

After we got back to Hattiesburg I realized I couldn’t stop reliving Ernst’s imagery. It would take an entire post, hmmm part two, perhaps, to explain how Ernst created the images. I would later learn how to make a photomechanical image not unlike illustrations from 19th Century novels, scientific journals and even encyclopedias he used. The reoccurring lion-headed and bird men was trippy. As expected by a Dadaist-Surrealist perspective it was anti-military and anti-clericalism with repressed sexuality and unexpected violence.

I contacted the store a few days later, inquiring about the book. It was also their only copy. I had joined their mailing list so they had my address. I explained I could come back but it would be several weeks; midterms were on the horizon.

Like finding love in our senior years, I was smitten with that book but figured I had made the decision and be thankful I had learned of Ernst and Escher. My art appreciation was about to be rewarded in a manner no bookstore today would provide a customer, especially out of town.

Several days later, while checking mail, at my apartment, I found a large parcel. WTF? It was from Dauphin! Inside was Une semaine de bonté and a note to pay when I could and to enjoy. I was in tears. I wrote a check and was able to pull together money I’d saved for emergencies. I penned a brief thank you for their trust in me and for their support in my newfound love of these arts movements.

I tear up easily.

Love is a potent emotion and I love art.

I have a esoteric art collection of not only Ernst and Escher, but that scoundrel Dali, Matisse, and of course texts on the avant-garde movement, directors Luis Buñuel, David Cronenberg, Peter Jackson, et al, and before you ask, yes I have seen and own Un Chien Andalou. In fact, I’ve seen just about every film he made and even saw a few in theaters. I’ve seen every Cronenberg film except M Butterfly, which has been unavailable for years, and the last movie I saw last year until “Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die” (review soon) in February was “The Shrouds.” WOW.

Being a cinema junkie I plan essays on my favorites, including: the paranoia / surveillance thriller and foreign films worth seeing that average filmgoer have never heard of and would never go to see. I got addicted to J-Horror and French New Wave. I watched the controversial irreversible, Cure, Doppelgänger, The Crimson Rivers, Premonition, Shiri, I Saw the Devil and Black Cat. That’s a sampling that isn’t close to my total number of foreign film experiences.

As for art, I did make certain Rembrandt and da Vinci, Michelangelo and the House of Medici were represented. Now, there’s the quintessential Renaissance Family with ties to Leonardo, a couple of popes and Michelangelo.

Well daybreak beckons, as well as ravenous felines. I’m really torn… snoozing.an hour in the RAV4, where I’m been writing or….