Walking on Thin Ice

collage by smith

albert einstein - “the world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it”

i must thank our black-shirted campus police in this land of doom and gloom in the belly of the beast we call america for doing such fine anti-war work for us - by tasering a college kid for asking questions, they’ve caused many more americans to sit up, shake off their stupor and ask why is this happening in america, the land of free speech?

the answer is, it’s happening because feces flows downhill, and we all know the source of the flow from the top - vice dick cheney and his middle finger puppet george warcrimes bush.

i’m grateful to the cheney-bush beast and their gang of clones for being so clumsy and incompetent at hiding their greed, their need, their fascist creed.

except for stealing 2 elections, destroying the separation of church and state, killing habeas corpus, torturing innocent people, bankrupting the american treasury, robbing the poor to pay the rich, imploding the world trade center towers, murdering 1.2 million civilians, and making the u.s. the world’s pariah, they haven’t done one thing right they set out to do - instead they’ve destroyed the republican party (thank god), they’ve bungled the war, destroyed our economy, and made a laughing stock out of the christian fundamentalist wrong (again, thank god).

no one’s doing a better job of exposing the evils of the current administration than the current administration is. eventually life will get so bad and the evil so obvious that even our sheep asleep american public must wake up and revolt against their clumsy masters. or not. people get the government they deserve, and right now i think it’s a beautifiul match, more than fair - the tv consumer sleepers and their rabid greedy right wing authoritarian leaders.

my college english professor always said evil was banal - now, thanks to the stupidest (bush) and evilest (cheney) men ever to be in the whitehouse, i finally know what he means.

(there is one other as evil - henry killinger - but he never stole office).

“few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts” - albert einstein

collage by smith

Some things Smith tells me lately:

“I used to put chocolate mousse in my hair but then it attracted fly larvae and people thought it was dandruff.”

I said, “You feel like yr king of the mountain now, don’t you.”

“Nope, just master of the mole hill.”

Another time I said, “If we were starving we could collect these live snails, escargot.”

“Yeah, and I’d throw up, and then eat it. Dog vomit.”

“Boy, I feel dopey.”

“Probably because you’re basking in my incredible brilliance.”

“No, I feel physically sluggish.”

“That’s probably why you left that trail of slime.”

foto by smith

everywhere we walk or bicycle here in south france, the air is steeped in the sour grape mash smell of newly fermenting wine… makes me think of a moonshine still i never saw on top a high and very quiet hill - sort of a heap still steep hill still.

at the village market today i was petting an affectionate cat in back of an open van filled with merchandise - the owner scurried over because she couldn’t figure out why i was caressing her goods - thought i might be fondling the merchandise. she saw the cat who wasn’t supposed to be in there and threw him out. i was doing good, while she feared i was doing bad. appearance is so heisenbergian - you see that for which you look, your answer depends on what you ask.

since appearance is such, after i’m safely dead and can’t disturb the sheep people anymore, when they make a movie of my life, i want young wild smith to be played by samuel l jackson, older wiser smith by morgan freeman, and in-between smith portrayed by jodi foster - while my wife lady k wants to be played by sigourney weaver. mom would be susan saranden, dad tommy lee jones, my brother fritz the cat, my long lost sister satan. or if it’s going to be a comedy, lady will be played by shelly duvall and i’ll be hervé villechaize, or zelda rubinstein, or gary coleman, or maybe morris the cat.

recently walking, i came upon a cat with a mouse in its mouth. startled, it dropped the mouse and started to slink by me. in a gentle voice i said “you’d better get your mouse.” cat went back to the moving mouse, picked it up, and went on by me.

foto by smith

collage by smith

can “do as you would be done” ethically be turned around to “do unto them as they have done unto us”?

governments murder torture lie maim and imprison whenever they wish. campus security cops taser students who ask inconvenient questions. police lie cheat beat kill. the rich steal lie kill at will. politicians lie and steal and all too frequently kill. corporations steal and murder and lie and sell defective products whenever there’s a profit in it (anybody remember thalidomide as a birth control ingredient?).

why can’t we do unto them as they do unto us?

my head is filled with the theoretical moral good i’ve been taught through the wisdom of the ages, while in real life i see what those in power actually do - and these two views are diametrically opposed.

it’s almost as if our rulers use the teachings of non-violence as a tool against us.

why can i not do to them what they do to me, or do to others in my name? especially when they’d stop doing it if we did it to them in return as punishment for their actions?

it’s the old question of what would you do if you could go back in time and stop hitler. well, we have hitler types in power now, and no one’s doing anything. the people who were elected to stop this madness - our congress via impeachment - are not only NOT doing it, but are busy bloodying their own hands instead.

since voting didn’t work, some say we must stop this through civil disobedience and mass protest. but americans are too busy being “Good Germans” for that to work - all they seem care about are their creature comforts, their cell phones, SUVs, designer jeans, and the latest Britney Spears horror show.

how does one go about waking the american public to crimes being committed by our government officials who weren’t even elected - especially when the newspapers and tv news shows that are supposed to enlighten us are owned by the very class of people perpetrating the crimes?

these questions torment me because even asking them violates everything i know to be good, true, moral, and civilized. it’s even worse because i come from the hippy generation who thought richard nixon was as low as you could go - if only that were true. “peace, love and understanding” definitely isn’t working.

and so the loop loops back - what can one do in the face of our uncivilized leaders murdering millions? one thing that comes to mind is our original american revolution where we had to declare real war against very specific british wrongs. but how does one go to war against entrenched evil within our own borders, especially when the bad guys own the police, the judges, the colleges, the army, the money, the electricity, the weapons, the media, the roads?

just asking questions like these can get you labeled as a terrorist these days - which scares me very much because with our new patriot laws, they can pick up anyone they want anytime and anywhere they want without saying why, or even letting anyone know who they’ve arrested or where they’ve been taken. they make speaking up frightening, they make silence seem safe. but in the face of such fear, my keeping silent would scare me even more - ethical moral civilized thinking people do not live their lives in fear of bullies - they band together and do something about them.

but the most important question right now is this - how does one stop evil without becoming evil oneself?

collage by smith

foto by u.s. navy

too tied up within over the war news and the black shirt college gestapo security police tasering a student who asked about impeachment, so here’s a taste instead from my bad boy memoirs we’re working on - we’re calling it “Criminal” by Smith & Lady - this segment is from 1963:

Pam was a huge breasted person. She wanted desperately to have sex with me. She was 16, a year younger than I. In retrospect, she might have already been pregnant, might have been trying to make me the father. I was home on my first leave from the Navy. Before I’d left for boot camp, Pam took off her bra and showed me her breasts and said, “I want you to have something to remember, something to bring you back home.”

Very effective technique.

The night I have first sex, we are at my folk’s house. My parents are out playing poker. My sister’s home. Pam and I are in the bedroom. Pam’s insistent, wants sex. I’m scared as hell, never having done it. I’m also scared of getting someone pregnant. I insist I have to go out and buy a condom, and leave her there naked in my bed. I’d never purchased a condom before – awkward and embarrassing, worse than all those condom purchasing scenes in the movies. On the way back, I want to make sure I know how to use one. I pull off the road, unzip my pants, give myself an erection, and put one on in a trial run. Then I drive back, ready to have sex in my bedroom. But my sister keeps banging on the door to irritate us. I get Pam dressed and take her in the car to where my parents are playing poker. I ask them for the keys to The House of Mavericks, their low-end used stuff store. I take Pam there and we use one of the used beds they had for sale. But part way through sex, my first sex ever, which seems to be working fine, the bed breaks. The mattress crashes to the floor at an angle, but we keep on, finish, laugh, put the bed back together, give my parents the keys, and drive home.

My second sexual experience was that same leave. I’d answered an Elvis trivia question on the radio (answer was a song titled “Summer Kisses, Winter Tears”) and won a life-sized cardboard cutout of Elvis in his Flaming Star shooter pose. The local president of the Elvis Presley fan club called me saying how much she wanted it. I’d never heard such a sexy voice in my life, so I found out where she lived. I went over there one night, put Elvis inside her screen door, rang her bell and left. She invited me back over for sex. She was 33, I was 17. She was large. Her teeth weren’t very nice, but she was a good person. She’d had a hard life. When I was at the Naval Academy, she sent me nude pictures of herself, and I thought that was a nice, friendly sort of mail to get.

I went off to Navy Aviation Electronics School in Memphis. I sent Pam money back every paycheck because we were going to marry. She was banking it. Come Christmas, I’m going to fly home using part of the money she’s banked. Only there’s no money, and no girlfriend. She was pregnant at the time we made love, or very soon after. Now she was living with an American Indian and wasn’t speaking to her parents. Her mom and dad felt so bad at how she’d treated me, they flew me home for leave. I had dinner with them. Got the whole story, where she was. I went over to the Indian’s place. Pam and I went for a walk. She had this huge belly. I talked her into letting me take her back to her parents for dinner that night so they could reconcile. After dinner, she and I necked and petted in the front seat of my car. It was the most erotic thing to have this huge bulging creature of big skin everywhere. I never saw her again, nor her parents.

foto by smith

foto by smith

i’m hungry all the time now - think it’s psychological, due to having no home for 14 months and our impending return to the united states. lady’s started nightmaring again as well - again due to not wanting to return to the united mistakes of americant. she had nightmares when we first began our relationship (before she learned she was safe with me), but they disappeared after we paid off all our bills and left the country.

i’m also having trouble sleeping for the same reasons - my body doesn’t want to be me, tries to squirm out from within. i lie in bed and twitch, changing positions until lady gets ready to kill me. then i come out here and rest my 6 foot 3 inch frame on this 4 foot couch. after a couple hours i’m so tired and ache so much i go back in and fall asleep in bed.

it’s hard to return to a country that’s killed over one million iraqi civilians for oil. even alan greenspan - 18 year chairman of the federal reserve board - admitted today we’re only there for the oil, and no one can call him a traitor or a liar because he’s a conservative republican and the ultimate washington insider. thank god for greenspan, the first person in washington i’ve ever seen speak unvarnished truth.

speaking of going, i wrote this after mom died june 2005

No Wailing Offense

There will be
No tears
No wailing
No gnashing of teeth
When I go
When I’m gone
When I die
When my flesh
Is sold
For packets to eat
Or door stop
What knot
Plot not
Best to burn me baby
Use me as sand
Grit to rough the bland
Just call me
Oyster helper
Pearl point
Beginning irritant
Smooth in end

foto by smith

foto by smith

“It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine” - REM song.

poet friend cheryl pointed out my 15 year estimate to the end of the human habitable world was optimistic - 2,300 years ago the mayans predicted the world would end december 12, 2012.

that’s 5 years 3 months from now. and here i was worried about my future - heck, i can fake it that long.

i checked it out: december 21st, 2012 a.d. (13.0.0.0.0 in the long count) is the conjunction of the winter solstice with the crossing point of the equator of the milky way and the ecliptic path of the sun - at which time the sun is supposed to reach the peak of its worst sunspot activity ever which will produce earthquakes and flooding on earth.

this happens once every 26,000 years and will occur at 11:11 am gmt, at which time we pass from the age of pisces to the age of aquarius.

cool. i’m impressed that mayans knew enough to predict the winter solstice 2,300 years down the line, although today’s scientists do point out that the mayan calendar is 34 seconds off in their prediction.

so we have 12.21.2012 11:11, though i like the mayan’s 13.0.0.0.0 better. 1 2 3, what’s in it for me?

the mayans say the fifth world finished in 1987, while the upcoming sixth world will start in 2012 - which means we’re presently in the 25 year gap between worlds… maybe that explains the horrible music on the radio since 1987 (we need more Meat Beat Manifesto).

the 2,300 year old winter solstice prediction is fact, and the precession of the stars moving to aquarius is fact. some folk say since the mayan calendar ends then, the world ends. but they’re missing the point - the mayans don’t claim the world is ending, just that we pass from one age to the next. and they say to make this passing properly, we need to move away from our materialistic consumer society and move back to harmony with the earth. that’s a laugh - not a chance of it happening. we will continue to rape and eat the earth. so maybe it will be the end of time after all.

so, that’s the equation - the mayans’ mesoamerica versus our mess of america.

foto by smith

foto by smith

i don’t kill things, except mosquitoes that buzz my body and flies that try to dive bomb hot chunks of flesh from me… i’ll gladly squish em and do victory dances in their smeared juices. and yet just now i rescued 3 flies from the swimming pool - lifted them out and let them fly free. maybe now if they come in the house and see me, they’ll recognize me like the lion did the mouse that removed the thorn from his paw, and thank me instead of stalking my flesh.

this brings to mind an interesting thought - hope.

those yellow jackets and flies i’ve rescued from the water were dead meat until i came along - their world was ending no matter what they did. then by sheer chance having nothing to do with their needs, i wander by for entirely non-insect reasons and pluck them from death and sit them on growing green leaf to recover and live another day.

our earth as a human nest is dying from fevers we’ve caused. no matter what we do to make it better, we’ve but 20 to 50 years of viable human habitat left - and we’re not doing a darn thing to make it better, in fact we’re doing a lot to make it worse, reducing our usable years by 33%. personally i believe it’s mad max-ville 15 years down the road. does anyone really want to live in mel gibson world?

so it seems our only chance for survival is for some cosmic smith to chance along and lift us from our self-made pool of death.

don’t know about you, but having to rely on something like me to be our only salvation is truly frightening. in real life, if i were supposed to come along at the last minute to make a happy ending, it wouldn’t happen because i’d be off on some mythical mountain getting stoned on magic mead with the rest of the godz.

foto by smith