So, it appears that E and I and Me & We (đ) are moving to Texas in about a month. This is a good thing, but it stings, too. Every time I move it wears on me, and it takes weeks or even months to orient myself.
I am terrified by this move.
It helps that I’m tossing out so much stuff and there won’t be much to worry about. I’ve been here four years, or three, I don’t know. But I love this place and this street. I hope the housing market crashes alongside the elections.
During COVID-times I walked about 2.5mil steps, mostly at night, as a professional nightwalker, patrolling Windmill Pointe and not seeing a single person; to see someone else, let alone more than one person, regardless of age/race/volume/countenance, during a nightwalk, is not a camaraderie-based affair… It feels bad, and harkens to an age where everything wasn’t made of foam, somehow. That said, the late-nite longboarders – this is their turf! – they were the formative nightwalkers for me, the people that showed me how quiet their fat-assed wheels are and how they can take any terrain possible. And the last part is true. I used to live in Philadelphia with my dad, and the only mode of transportation was a longboard that probably belonged to one of my sister’s boyfriends. I would bomb down these ridiculous, ancient and heavily trafficked streets made entirely of bricks and cobblestone and it’s all laid in such a perfect way that after all this time, through years of, well, Philadelphia, it still felt like riding on waves, on perfectly choppy waters.
Looking back, it was the closest I’ve ever been to suicide. Good Lord, what was I thinking? Granted, I never beefed it and thanks to my defunct left-shoulder I have a very effective drop-and-roll routine.
Oh, yeah. My blog. Vantablack Valley - a name I like, but not so much the URL. Alas, I digress from my diatribes to bring you... Nonsense, terrible English, transcripts of Mexican labororers being coaxed into reading Doctor Suess books like wetawded kids we all knew, with the bad tongues, whatever happens to them? I wonder if Speech Therapy Camp is just eugenics.
Okay, oh, yeah. Iâve had some hard times, brothers and sistahs. The kind where you go stoneface and ask yourself, âYou know what, Iâm not even going to type that question, because it reveals so much of who I am (which is bad in a prismatic, undying way), I am going to talk about, erm... Whimsical things, Dr. Suess, and his lifelong practice saving children from unimaginative ideas, bad teeth and that awful inability they have at pronouncing those letters, the Râs and Yâs and look, if your kid is like that, you should find a drastic way to ameliorate this barrage of the Worst Americana Adolescent Dialect Ever, this kamikaze-for-nights-a-la-die-Germanns.
Do teenage girls still have favorite actors? Sorry.
I am thinking of putting up a Ukraine sign. I wanted to be informed first, get all of the facts, and I’m a working man. That took me about a year just to even scratch the surface. I come home, I shower, I eat, and I don’t think to myself, awful current events sound like a blast right now. So I watch anime, or comedies, or I call friends to do something so I’m not a shadow of a person socially, even though I hate going to bars. A friend of mine, he doesn’t have a car. And he’s a father to a 1-year old baby. Prone to epileptic fits, of which he had four (4) last year, along with a shoulder that has been dislocated so many times that any simple movements create the sound of a scarecrow being taken down and kicked to death, or velcroe, or simply just human bones being crunched and snapped to nothing.
This friend of mine, he’s getting chubby and his habits are getting detrimental. I mean, if you ever get a glimpse of his back teeth you will have gazed into his future – not as a dentist, but a patient-for-life, always complaining about rice getting caught in This Year’s Crevice. Eventually this Crevice becomes infected and he starts calling around asking for “spare anti-biotics,” which he says feels lindy and that it is an aberrant, unimportant stigma in the Long Haul of Things. He speaks about 3D-printed teeth and whether India or Brazil are the best places to travel for dental-tourism. He wishes the nurses and assistants knew what the hell he was talking about when he brought them up casually.
At one point, this friend told me that he dearly wishes that, for as long as we are friends, that he wouldn’t chastise or alienate him for working at home and choosing his own hours. This was years ago. He must have forgotten.
Bronco Billy is a 1980 American Western film directed by Clint Eastwood, who also stars in the lead role. The film follows the story of Bronco Billy McCoy, a struggling Wild West show owner who, along with his ragtag group of performers, travels across the country performing shows.
The film was met with mixed reviews upon its release. Some critics praised Eastwood’s performance and the heartwarming story, while others criticized the film for being too simplistic and lacking depth. However, over the years, Bronco Billy has gained a cult following and is now regarded as a classic Western film.
In interviews, Eastwood has expressed his own fondness for the film, calling it one of his personal favorites. He has also explained that the film was a tribute to the Western genre and the cowboy way of life, which he felt was fading away in modern times.
Overall, Bronco Billy is a charming and heartfelt film that has stood the test of time and remains a beloved classic in the Western genre.
I was both delighted, unsurprised and blown away to find that this was Clintâs own personal favorite. To me, this is a perfect film- every facet of Americana loaded into a smorgasbordal mess that sticks together like hunterâs glue and shows Clint on all-cylinders but without any bleaknss, sadness or devistation; yes, it is a sad film about a sad world. Itâs about a dying Cowboys & Indians tent show with a bunch of money owed both ways and dwindling, generally mute audiences (Clint is perhaps the best âsilenceâ director there is, truly – check out the almost total lack of music in Cry Macho until he gets Back on His Horse).
Itâs about crummy, old-hat acts, scared girls who ran away from home to literally Join the Circus, and itâs about kids, and a genuinely humbling motif of doing it for the Lilâ Pards (as Clint calls them); at one point, he talks about getting more urban youth bussed to the sticks to see what âreal Cowboys and Indians are like,â and it isnât even the most delusional and misguided thing Olâ Bill does throughout. He is never a schemer, a liar or a jerk. But when you run the Big Show, when itâs your job to find men in every city to pound steel into the ground to erect the Big Tent for the Big Show, and then to be the Star of the Big Show⌠there simply must be an whole Little Black Book in his back pocket of faces to avoid, families even, and then entire cities, yetâŚ
Bronco Billy is a saint. He truly cares about the Lilâ Pards in every town, and when he meets a group of youngsters out on the edge of town looking Poor and Bored, Billy stands right in front of the sun, pops off a few rounds at some old tin cans and gives every Pard two tickets, one for them and one for a parent, who he constantly says âthey should always be listened toâ at every chance he can find to pass on wisdom. His main problem is that he hasnât paid his performers and feeds them cheap junk and isnât doing his part as a leader to get them through âanother one of those hard timesâ as a terrific Scatman Crothers says asking – for some extra scratch just to get some new shoes, or something.
Scatman speaks on behalf of the rest of the performers, who mess up often, have a high turnover rate with certain acts and is generally treated like a Big Tent Performer would should have probably considered back then before signing a contract. But at the end of the day, there is a family – it is intact, they are celebratory, there is music in the air and the woman pretending to be a Native American reveals she is pregnant to a joyous Billy, who fires two shots in the air right in the tent and talks about all the things theyâll have to do for the âlittle pardâ and how exciting it is to see a baby for once in this dying replica of nothing, repeated ad nauseam to dwindling crowds and the pull of Americana in a time when it wasnât very relevant to be patriotic and various arms of the American government were involved in some of their most infamous, formative disasters yet.
Watching Billy Bronco for the twenty-seventh or so time recently I asked myself, Do we ever see a single newspaper in this entire film? Is there a TV? Are they just totally detached from not just the current day, but the entire century plus some change and a funhouse mirror? Is this a beautiful life to life? How could I ever say it isnât?
Bronco Billy is my new favorite film – the very best I have ever seen, I think. This may change, but as I compulsively rewatch it over and over I just find it ever so much more tighter, and purposeful, and from the heart – I see why it is Clintâs personal favorite
A picture taken surreptitiously in New York City – why?
As I rest my head back, the battery-acid nasal drip just pours down my sinuses. Why?
Two questions, two answers, one opaque, another gross. Remember that story of the caver who fell into the Tiny Cave head-first and had to be left to die because he had positioned himself in such a way that getting out wasn’t neccesarily impossible, but potentially as deadly as that Little Finger of the Cave he thought would expand into the widest room in the entire system. A room full of real treasures, light yet Holy treasures that he could plan out over the years how to get after that one glimpse before the EMT-cavers pulled a miracle on the other end. I believe I read that they filled the cave with cement, to both honor and discourage other cavers from such a fate.
I say, let the cavers cave. They are Heroes to me. Men of impossibilities. Perhaps the opposite of how I feel towards the shit-snake Neon Dream of Evererest and similar climbs. How do I feel about Alex Hannold? Something about him intrigues me; I appreciate that he is a fellow diarist and wants to index his life and his achievements. I also find little *merit* to these climbing stunts; I see no art or even passion half the time. There are, of course, the celebratory/requisite five-minute celebrations by all the cameramen and crew and whatever at the end, after he did the impossible – with an almost *insulting* sense of shadow-autism: this is where a confusion of nerves is misdiagnosed within the autism class purely for the seemingly “dissociative” effect that one would find in both (and of course, many other) disorders. They have similar aesthetics, but I dont think Mr. Honnold has any eccentricities or matters of the soul that he is addressing with these Outrageous Climbs. I think he has a Special Brain that generally performs Unremarkable Tasks that generally make my Knuckles Act Up and I get a feeling in my stomach down to my groin. That last one is quite hard to explain.
I wish I could post photos in the current mode/place I am in. Tomorrow I will Break Bad and do a photos-only post, perhaps.
This means nothing – most people don’t want to even try to care about your poetry – unless it is “about” them. In which case, they will skim for keywords first – eyes darting. They will read the poem in full, because it probably isn’t too long. They might say “hmm” or “wow” or some variation of those two. But they won’t say anything you want to hear. Or maybe they’ll genuinely connect with it deep in their hearts and since you’re a good poet they will be enraptured by your stylistics and the kind of internal rhyming that doesn’t sound like rapping but a Shakespearean upgrade. Maybe they will tell you they can’t read English. Maybe they will make fun of you.
Maybe they will make FUN of you.
THE JIMSOMWEED DEALER
a poem by HYPER2SENSATIONS
why is my room getting smaller
when the wind wants nothing to do with me
cuz i’m running out of wood
because i lost a fight to a smaller tree
my hands are made of rubber
and my arms are made of skin
I took out all my muscles
because they were trying to keep me in
do you believe that what I said about earlier
when I said that I was saying what I said later
afterwards my house is turning on me the floor
bubbles out and it knocks me down and every man
that comes to fix it says he needs to call another
man downtown I wont work for free I wont work
for me I just work to work and Iâm going berzerk
The Decrepit Man as Hell
a poem by Jingle T.
good morning
there are pixellated stallagtites everywhere in your baby's nursery
& spotted plants of Real Wisdom and Ancient Mystery
it hurts
I have had to nix the bad parts
I've turned a clit into a labia
I made a bad joke early in the morning
with tremendous eager the son tries to control any electronic in reach to hit the worst buttons
I went to a clothes swap earlier - must have been the only straight guy there - it was a nice time. I couldn't help but notice that most of them had bad or unremarkable skin - sometimes you can't help it - other times it is the pernicious Call of Coke and Booze that dries 'em out as if to be sold as beef jerkey in a couple weeks. I kid, I kid - most of them looked fine. My GF looked the hottest - she looked like she was the most Summerized already.
A Poem – Untitled
by Ping Watt
chowder skies and polarize
the world is not a clown's eyes
but a hurling bag of coal
a chawing bag of Hell
left out to curl and write the Law
to ring that sudden bell
and to ride that random bull
Let’s see – what else is on the docket. I am compulsively buying Very Cheap DVDs as I have decided I like how they look on a 12″ screen. I think I may have gotten my girlfriend pregnant – again – the last time we had sex. I’m working on a lot of projects, including:
a 2xLP
a film
another film
two scripts
a rewrite of a 405-page book
get clean from my nasty habits
not get my girlfriend pregnant for like, a month or two.
have another boy, and by then I will know it is time for a Girl.
