WALKING ON THIN ICE

except for jackalwood, there’s been a deafening silence on smokey grey, but that never stopped me before, so here’s his origin poem.

kathy and i came up with Smokey Grey december 2005 in our bed talk. she took the fantasy flight i’d built around my cancerously gravelly voice, added some lines, rearranged the rest, and - voila - Smokey Grey was born.  i’ve been talking of writing a short story around him the 10 months since. there will be more Smokey stories to follow, maybe even some with actual plots.

PRIVATE EYE SMOKEY GREY

i come to sip yer honey, honey,
my sticky bee–
internal hive memory

nothing personal, just duty.
howdy duty. by jingo. by golly.
by jolly we’ll be an external

manifestation

of an inner

conversation

we spark the waters
hold ‘em up
do the dirty bop

i need some heart gravy.
give me some heart gravy baby–
lounge lizard rhythm in
polyester time

Kathy Ireland Smith & Steven B. Smith 12.2005

the 1st Smokey Grey private eye short story
http://www.agentofchaos.com/poetry29.html

here’s the strangeness everyone forgets about traveling …
bra sizes, shoe sizes, distances, temperatures, recommendeds, etc

1 centimeter = 0.393700787 inch
1 inch = 2.54 centimeters

1 meter = 3.2808399 feet
1 foot = 0.3048 meter

1 kilometer = 0.621371192 mile
1 mile = 1.609344 kilometers
1 fathom = 1.8288 meters

1 ounce = 28.3495 grams
1 gram = 0.035274 ounce

1 kilogram = 2.20462262 pounds
1 pound = 0.45359237 kilogram
1 stone = 14 pounds
1 pound = 0.0714285714 stone

1 hand = 4 inches
1 inch = 0.25 hand

1 liter = 1.0566882 US quarts
1 US quart = 0.94635295 liter
1 US cup = 0.236588237 liter
1 liter = 4.22675282 US cups
1 US cup = 8 US fluid ounces

To convert Fahrenheit temperatures into Celsius:
Begin by subtracting 32 from the Fahrenheit number.
Divide the answer by 9.
Then multiply that answer by 5.

To convert Celsius temperatures into Fahrenheit:
Begin by multiplying the Celsius temperature by 9.
Divide the answer by 5.
Now add 32.

1 fortnight = 14 days
1 score = 20 years
1 generation = 30 years roughly (but closer to 20 years)

kathy put pads and pens by our bed’s sides last night to capture our dreams. here’s my pre-dawner:

after party 2 strangers were going to take me by the food store to pick up a package of ice cream. no room in their pickup so i got in back. 5-7 other folk climbed on, including chicago melissa. told driver to turn right at bottom of hill, but when he did, the truck disappeared and we were all walking thru a long dark double arched endless train tunnel. walked forever. end of tunnel ran down long hill and over to underside of closed store. there were hundreds of us by now - all ages, colors, sexes -  and a hundred foot pile of sliding trash led up to underside of store. i climbed up, kept slipping down, had to hide when the night guard shined his flashlight out a hole in bottom of store. told all the rest of folk sliding down trash all i needed was ice cream and they could wait for me out front, but we all got in. started donning guards uniforms, operating the bar code machinery, checking stuff out of the pharmacy. was a display pile of 10 foot styrofoam citrus fruits we sent rolling around the store. huge party. small black kid said “thanks, this is fun” and i said “yes, hold on to this, it will be hard to remember but keep it with you always - this is important.” never did get my ice cream.

once in 1970 county jail had a dream about a riot in the rec room and at end i ended the riot by standing up and yelling “aspirin is 9,000 times stronger than death.”

I stare at Steve. We’re both in bed, fully clothed, both in black. It’s afternoon. We’re full of malaise, bored with too much time, free choice.

I stare.

He says: I can see you looking at me. It’s too late. You should have examined me closely before you signed the purchase agreement. You’re wondering, Who is this strange creature? Who is this man I married? Who is this lifeform from another dimension, who, now disguised as a mild-mannered mutant, works for truth, justice, and what used to be the American way? Who is this Steve Smith?

When you get older, I’ll show you where the switch is, to my head. The switch that lets my head expand to make room for my thoughts. With it, you can unaccordion my head. go erh-anh erh-anh erh-anh. Then you can play me, my thoughts. Go squish squish in the night.

food for thought

finally finished reading The No-Nonsense Guide To Class, Caste & Hierarchies by Jeremy Seabrook (2002), so hopefully here’s my last blog of stat facts. make of them what you will.

1780 (start of industrial revolution) 40 lunatic asylums in england
1840  (60 years later) 400 lunatic asylums in england

1851 census listed 7,000 occupations
1881 listed 12,000
1981 listed 23,000

standard of living ratio of richest to poorest countries:
1820 - 3 to 1
1913 - 11 to 1
1950 - 35 to 1
2002 - 70 to 1

c.e.o. wage ratio to worker wage:
1960 - 12 to 1
1974 - 35 to 1
1995 - 135 to 1
2003 - 301 to 1

% of global income going to richest 20%:
1960 - 70.2%
1970 - 73.9%
1980 - 76.3%
1989 - 82.7%

% of global income going to poorest 20%:
1960 - 2.3%
1989 - 1.4%

of the richest 100 economic entities in the world today:
50 are corporations, 50 are countries

and speaking of corporations, an american judge just threw out ken lay’s enron conviction because the man died (killed himself?) after being convicted and cannot appeal. the rich certainly take care of their own, don’t they.

considering all the above, it doesn’t surprise me that pornography now makes more money than all professional sports entertainment combined according to cnn.com today - altho in this case, it is the pornography of the flesh versus the pornography of violence… with both being the pornography of mindlessness.

the war of spirit versus mammon looks like it is mammon’s to lose.

we live the number of the beast.
 

kathy dreamt about maj ragain last night - several dreams. in one, maj had 2 heads, one growing out of his shoulder. the 2nd head was younger than maj because they were trying to clone him to use the clone to fix him…. kathy accidentally knocked his head off and was carrying it around by the hair.

maj is perhaps the major living working ohio poet (in my book there ain’t no ‘perhaps’) - one of the gentlest, nicest people i’ve met. there’s all kinds of people, but i’ve met a few (maj, my friends steve wilcox & steve reynolds) who go way beyond good, nice, gentle into a special category which makes you want to be better just by being around them. maj reading his poetry once made me cry because of his hope shining thru… made me realize i’d lost hope, had become an attack poet. thankfully kathy came by a few months later and gave me back my hope.

kathy has also recently dreamed of a talking horse, parasitic guinea pigs wearing little t-shirts and hats, and a talking cat and talking dog that fought because the dog said the movie we were going to see was good while the cat said it wasn’t - the cat was right… it was nicolas cage’s wickerman, which truly sucked.

kathy writes something every morning and reads it to me. good stuff. but it’s all for the future. for her book/s to come. me, if i were producing all these good words morning after morning, i’d have started a new reading room on AgentOfChaos called Notes For The Future. i am ego, want my words read now. kathy is smart - she’s squirreling away her word nuts for when they will mean more. inside her head, she still lives old truths from when she was overweight, shy, unsure, unhappily related. if kathy could see the kathy i see daily, she’d see all those old dead truths to be lies belied by the now real new improved bluer blues whiter whites kathy.

of course, we all run old tapes. i still have dead-smiths-past inside my head whispering old-truths-now-dead-lies to me. but their voices have become weaker since i stopped drinking, went to europe, stood by mom, quit my job, found kathy, traveled abroad and found flux who didn’t know they should know me wanting to know me anyway.

i did not set out to be me. started off trying to emulate others, but the fiction of their lives, jobs, dreams never added up to anything rational, logical, worthy or desirable - their schemes for me always sounded fine until i examined their details and found no foundation to build upon. they all seemed to live by others’ rules, others’ choices, others’ needs. so my life has been more a combination of flow surfer and stupidity avoider. most of my path was not chosen so much as less pleasant paths avoided. a few of the actual choices i’ve made in my life are - join the navy for an education, trying marijuana, trying lsd, going into computers, quitting drinking, visiting europe the first time, sky-diving, marrying kathy, and leaving america.

so i’ve always gone my own way - once because i had no choice, now because i do. haven’t done badly either, even when you count the cost of non-conformance. my life is more interesting, more rewarding, more fun than any i know - and i’m still adventuring away at the start of my 7th decade. i have poems and art stretching across 5 decades - 60s thru the oughts. i ain’t quit. i ain’t given up. i ain’t rested on my laurels or anyone else’s. i don’t keep doing the same old thing. i still sail the 7 psychological seas.

the 7 seas: north atlantic, south atlantic, north pacific, south pacific, indian, antarctic, arctic. the names so much less magic than “the seven seas.”

but these are not seas in name, but oceans. what of the actual seas - the adriatic, baltic, mediterranean, tasman, caspian, caribbean, sargasso, black, dead? what are they? what’s the diff twixt sea and ocean?

this from the internet: “It’s not a rigid definition.  Seas are delineated by land masses, whether or not they are largely enclosed.  They should also communicate with the ocean. The Mediterranean and Black seas qualify here, because saltwater actually flows IN to both those bodies of water.  The Caspian Sea is, strictly speaking, not really a sea but instead the world’s largest lake.  Why aren’t the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of California, Hudson Bay, and the Bay of Bengal not called seas?  No real reason.  It’s just a matter of names.  If different people had named them, they might have been called seas. - Richard E. Barrans Jr., Ph.D. Assistant Director PG Research Foundation, Darien, Illinois”