bang! 12/6/2013

     My trip to bang! for the first time in five years was off the chain.  I was after some lunch, having been to the post office on a day when the high was ten degrees F.  Located in a neighborhood of Victorian and other homes, the place was one where I sensed a passion for learning.  I entered into a swirl of conversation.  "What's her status?"
     "Are you teaching this week?"
     "What should I have (for lunch)?"
     "It's a real intellectual experience.  It's a parenting moment."  Yeah, I bet it is.  I ordered before another guy, who asked my server what he should have.  She recommended to him the same thing which I ordered, telling him that it's her favorite.  I wondered if I had stepped into some kind of cult.  I'm sitting in front of a part of the opposite wall which juts out.  Facing me is a row of foot square steel upper case letters.  From ceiling to floor, they spell the word "MARINATE".  Now I am convinced that I have indeed entered a cult.  (Occult?)  A guy next to me stands up.  He's on his phone as he puts on his coat.  "So, just print two copies of page three..."  bang! is forty some odd blocks north of my own graffiti- and empty 40 ounce bottle-ridden neighborhood, and here among the signs reminding me that I am in a "historic neighborhood", I have yet to hear any conversations about trasitioning from prison to a halfway house.  Instead, there are three women who appear to be in their fifties or sixties at a table in a corner.  "...marriage bed...difference in age...he's not as aggressive.  I've had wonderful moments with him.  It's a good book.  I going to recommend - it's wonderful for us.  It's called Raising Cain.  (Kane?)  It teaches boys instead of having an IQ to have an EQ.  Rasing Cain.  (The author is) Michael somebody."
     The lunch crowd is clearing out.   Individual kitchen and front end staff come out and then return toward the kitchen, cleaning tables.  Time for me to return as well, only I will be joining those outside in the single digit temperatures.  I take with me the wisdom which I have gathered.  The importance of marinating in the parenting moment.  Thank you, Michael somebody, wherever you are.  Here at bang!, everybody is somebody,

December 2013

     I'm in the checkout line at the supermarket, on the first Sunday in December.  A couple of lines over is a guy with oiled salt and pepper hair, glasses with a lot of tape on each hinge, and half his teeth on the way to where his previous half went.  As my groceries are being checked, he is searching for some cash, or a check, or a credit card.  He never finds it.  In the early evening, I am waiting at the front entrance of my townhome complex.  Someone is going to come by and pick me up.  As I stand there, one of my neighbors, a kid with my neghborhood's version of a hot rod, appears to believe that, instead of looking down the street for my friend's car, rather that I am looking in the sky at a bright star.  He tells me this, "See that star.  I've waited for four years.  I saw that star through a telescope."  He then wanders back to his place.  It's another 'what in the motherfuck' moment.  My date and myself and up at a deathburger.  Shortly after I take her hand in mine, we hear a commotion across the place.  Female voices are criticizing a family member.  He is rushed out of the place, by what I presume are the rest of his family, as if he was the President of the U.S. being hustled out a back door surrounded by the Secret Service.  I hear someone say, "I knew my Dad would try and start some shit."  A couple of mornings later, I am at my usual deathburger.  Outside, I see a couple of young guys sitting against the building, engrossed in their phones.  A third is standing outside, also concentrating on his phone.  I rarely see anyone waiting outside the deathburger at 5 am.  I can't remember the last person I saw, inside or out, much less three at once who were all using their phones.  This morning, we are visited by the technological present.  The two on the ground are now inside, still staring at their phones.  One is at the counter.  "Yeah I heard on the radio that you guys have free coffee?"
     Another couple of mornings after this, and I am downtown to grab some breakfast before a late shift at work.  On one corner of the pedestrian mall, under some shelter are standing a couple of guys.  One is younger and appears to work for an establishment, the entrance to which they are in front of.  It strikes me as if he is tolerating the other one, perhaps my age or younger but with deep lines across his face, wild and dirty blond hair, and wearing his coat unzipped in single digit air as he smokes a cigarette.  Tolerating him perhaps as long as he does not ask anyone for money, in which case he will not actually be panhandling.  Someone passes by, and the older one says to him, "Hey bud..." as if to asks for some change.  He immediately stops his request.  I don't hear the other guy next to him protest, but this guy acts as if he did.  He responds, "Okay, man, ok, ok, ok..."
     Saturday morning.  5 am.  I leave my house and spy a guy ahead of me.  In single digit temperatures, he has nothing on his head.  But he does have a briefcase.  I hear him exclaim, "Woo!" before he crosses the boulevard.  When I get across, he is headed back the way he came.   At the counter of the deathburger is a young guy shuffling back and forth.  On the counter are numbers, 1, 2, and 3.  He asks the employee, "Is there room for three trays here?"  I debated wearing my snow boots this morning.  He spots them and tells me, "Those are some nice motherfuckin' boots.  I bet you could climb a mountain in those things.  I take a bus to a train to a bus.  On board are a couple of bundled up middle aged white people.  They could be man and woman or two women.  The one who does appear to be a woman takes off a boot, and the other one apparently touches her foot to see how cold it is.  The other has a collapsible shopping cart with a cloth bang at the bottom, full of food items.  They are some kind of urban campers.
     It's a Tuesday morning.  I am working a schedule where I start a couple of hours later than usual.  So I am in the deathburger a couple of hours later than usual.  This morning is my opportunity to discover who I assume is the usual crowd, who comes in an hour or so after I usually am gone.  There is at least one guy, Mr. foot-long grey goatee, who has been here by 5 am.  Today, he's in a DEA cap.  He goes from his seat up to the counter, and comes back unhappy.  He is sitting next to a friend, who asks him, "I she (employee) messing with you?"  An interesting interpretation.  I go up to the counter myself and tell the employee in Spanish that 'the drunk does not like you.' She tells me that he wants real sugar, and all they have is artificial sweetener.  Others begin coming in, and the place starts to fill up.  A couple of transit drivers, a white-haired guy with horn-rimmed glasses.  The friend of foot-long grey goatee guy begins talking to the white-haired guy, about a neighborhood up north.  I know the neighborhood well.  I used to participate in art exhibitions there, and I know someone there who owns a restaurant.  He is complaining about developers scraping homes, and putting up condos which appear mismatched with the rest of the neighborhood where he lives.  This has been a topic of conversation throughout metro area neighborhoods for over a decade.  I lived in a prominent neighborhood and watched it change over the course of sixteen years.  Yet I was in the neighborhood he is speaking of less than a week ago, and I saw not a single home being demolished.  He claims that "They're building like crazy."  As I am leaving, I say hello in Spanish to an employee, ask her how her Thanksgiving was.  I turn around where a white haired guy is sitting alone at a small table, with a coffee.  He says to me, "Are you alright?"  I reply, "Yeah, why?"  He says, "I meant well..."

     Gates Rubber Company stands as one of the most important commercial enterprises to ever set up shop in Denver.  For decades one of our city's largest employers, Gates was a major positive influence on the development of many of our beloved south Denver neighborhoods.  Drive down Broadway, and you'll see demolition crews tearing down the last of the buildings left from gates' golden age.  In late November, demolition crews began tearing down buildings 10, 11, 13 and 41 of the once vast industrial complex that since the 20th century had spanned Broadway from Arizona Ave. to I-25, going west to Santa Fe Dr. and east to Logan St.  ...the gates site had drawn interest...as the perfect location for a vast transit-oriented multi-use retail, office and entertainment complex.  ...Cherokee Investments, lost control of their property, and the project's major developer...headed for less-complicated pastures.  ...the west side land has sat untouched...  - Washington Park Profile, December 2013
     The mayor has declared that he wants to "activate" the parks, in much the same way that he talks about activating the neighborhoods, the downtown core and the South Platte; his tenure has bee a daily scurry in search of buttons to push and levers to pull.   ...the notion of an outdoor extravaganza in Denver's busiest park...fits neatly with his declared mission of creating - sorry, "activating" - a "world-class city."  "We don;t need to have the city dictate what...constitutes 'activation' and what we need to achieve it."  ...Denver's parks and recreation areas now generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year in economic value...  ...Denver Parks and Recreation...ever-rising annual budget, now at $51 million, has prompted a...look for ways to use the parks to produce cold cash...and left neighborhood groups in the position of defending local parks against the schemes...  - Westword, 12/19-25/2013
     ...the city has started...a multicultural neighborhood watch...there is more trust to reach out to law enforcement.  "People are shocked at having new people.  They don't understand them.  It's very frustrating..."  ...the city held its first ever...ceremony...displaying the flags of 25 countries inside the lobby.  "There weren't many white faces, there weren't many long-time black faces, and there weren't many long-time Hispanic faces."  - Denver Post, 12/22/2013

     The next morning, I am across the street from where I live, at a bus stop.  A truck with a snowplow on the front is parked along side.  A guy in a safety vest is replacing the bag in the trash can.  It's an old, dented metal can.  The guy puts one bag inside, ties it tight, and then put a second one inside.  He does a quick sweep.  I am now sitting in what feels as if it is like a new bus shelter.  After work, I am waiting for a connecting bus, at a stop across the street from a district police station.  It appears as though someone is being loaded into an ambulance.  Behind me, a couple of guys who may be high each have a squeegee.  They are meticulously cleaning every inch of window, both inside and out.  The following day, I am on a bus home.  A young guy gets on, and begins talking to someone about running into others local to the neighborhood.  He is out of prison after a four year stretch, working at a fast food place.  He sounds to me as though he is someone who, prior to "being put up" as he puts it, learned his own rules of the street.  I hear him say that he is not a 'tagger' (someone who spray-paints graffiti, or 'tags').  He had a confrontation with a group of them.  He told them not to 'dis(respect)' him, which they did before pulling a 'strap' (a gun) and firing two shots into the air.
     The morning after, I am back at the deathburger.  Mr. foot-long grey goatee comes in, greets someone at the counter, begins looking in a couple of trash cans.  The bus takes me to the train, from which I get off and head to my bus stop.  A young guy, just a kid, comes up in boots and with a hard hat.  He tells me where he works, asks me where I work, how much I make.  He tells me what he makes working construction.  It's a dollar less than I do.  We get on the bus with a couple of other guys, one of whom is talking to the other about his opinions of life in general as a young man.  He used to work in sales, and hated it.  He's now in some kind of hospital internship.  "You know, seeing women having given birth; giving their babies a bath..."  With his confident use of the work "fuck", it's almost as if he feels the need to sound experienced beyond his years.  He conveys a life of frustration.
     It's my day off.  I am returning from a holiday shopping trip downtown.  My usual route home from downtown is a train which I take to a bus stop.  I have taken this bus before, when one former convict comes on and recognizes and greets another, asking him how he is doing.  This afternoon is another one of those scenes.  When I get home, my local news channel has preempted national news for ongoing coverage of another shooting at a metro area high school.  The school is just down the street from where I work most of the time.  One student was shot point blank in the face.  She will eventually be in a coma.

White kids with your hands in the air
I think I better beware I think you better beware
White kids with your hands in the air
Don't tell me that you're goin' nowhere

Life as Love
     "There I was without my body or any physical traits, yet my pure essence continued to exist.  ...it felt far greater and more intense and expansive than my physical being.  I felt eternal, as if I'd always existed and always would...  I was filled with the knowledge that I was simply magnificent."  "My entire neo-cortex...was entirely shut down.  I had no language, emotions, logic or memories..."  ...being granted a grand overview of the invisible side of existence.  He also had a lovely ethereal companion that floated along on a butterfly wing, telepathically teaching him..."there is nothing you can do wrong."  Today, he works at returning to his NDE state of oneness and unconditional love  by using meditation and sacred acoustics.  ...the brain blocks access of knowledge to higher worlds.  "We need to accept - at least hypothetically - that the brain itself doesn't produce consciousness.  ...a kind of reducing valve or filter...dumbs down consciousness..."  A Ph.D. Harvard-trained scientist specializing in anatomy of the brain suffered an exploded blood vessel in the left hemisphere and experienced an inability to visually distinguish edges and boundaries between herself and the outer world.  "I could actually see that my skin was not my physical boundary.  She now understands that she is part of the cosmic flow of energy, which she characterizes as a tranquil sea of euphoria.  Upwards of 8 million people that have experienced...NDE are trending toward a tipping point into the comforting awareness that anything is possible.  - natural awakenings, 12/2013
     He...even invented a machine that projects hallucinatory images directly onto the retina of the eye.  ...subjects couldn't tell the machines images from reality.
     The experiences recorded by people who have allegedly suffered a clinical death and...resuscitated are virtually identical with hallucinatory drug images.
     "The sensory-isolation experience should be part of...personal growth."  ...my journey began with a gradual movement away from the sense of physical self.  My body will become a neutral vessel...  I find any self-concept fading away.  I have lost any notion of having a body...  ...I must get back into my body.  - The OMNI Book of the Paranormal and the Mind, ed. by O. Davies, 1982

     The start of another week.  5 am.  The bus stop across the street from where I live.  The same guy, with the same truck with a snowplow is back at the bus stop.  This morning, he has just completed a power washing of the stop.  Up the street, at the deathburger, is a guy who I have not seen in months.  He is sitting at a table with his hands in his pockets.  I don't see him with food or drink.  The last time I saw him, he was sitting here with another guy.  They were both making pencil drawings on typing paper.  He was drunk and got up to take his shoes, which he had just removed, to put them on a chair under a table.  When asked to put them back on by the manager, he attempted to tie his shoelaces around his ankle.  After 5-0 was called, I headed out, only to look back and see a couple of police cars and a paramedic vehicle from the fire department.  They had all been called out for little old him.  He is back this morning as if it all never even happened.
     By the middle of this week before Christmas, in what surely must be a gesture of goodwill toward men, the transit system has elected to have its stops power washed this morning.  My usual bus stop is on the list.  The same guy cleaning the stops is here this morning, and will be back again tomorrow.  I wait for the bus upon a damp patch of concrete wall.  Along comes shuffling a little middle-aged guy with a neatly-trimmed goatee who I don;t recognize.  He's in a hoodie, and with his hands inside the sleeves.  What strikes me about him are his dress pants and loafers.  He spots the trash can shortly before he runs into it.  Is he wasted?  Has he been awake for who knows how long?  I watch him disappear as he zig-zags toward the deathburger.  The following morning, I am back at the same stop.  Here comes the same little guy.  I don't recognize it's him until he stops to say to me, "Hey, bro...".  He asks me if I am alright.  Is this a new hustle, or could he the drunks who are asking me how I am think that I am homeless?  I do carry a large bag to work, I may appear so, especially to the wasted ones.  Why else would they talk to me in this 1970s television dialogue?  I am eating some food.  He replies, "Okay.  You just getting your grub on?"  I get on the bus, and a few stops down, either a police officer or a transit system security officer comes on after some passengers.  She alerts the driver that another passenger is waiting to be picked up down the street, and who was reported to have been acting erratically on another bus.  She will follow us, and if he has any trouble with her, all he has to do is stop and turn on his four-way flashers, and she will come back on to take the passenger away.  Because that's life in the big city.  Some twelve hours later, I step off the bus back across the street from where I live.  Who passes me but the little guy in dress pants.  He has with him a plastic bag with a couple of big cans in it.
     It's the end of another Saturday, four days before Christmas.  The only person to be shot at the high school, besides the shooter who took his own life, lingered for a time.  She was 17 years old and beautiful.  She passed away this afternoon, was it 4:27 PM?  I stop into the drug store to drop of some film for one hour processing.  I wait for it at the deathburger next door.  At a table are a couple of guys with a box, with what from a distance appears to be some kind of nail gun or caulking gun.  Perhaps it's a salad shooter.  One guy is quiet and sober, the other is loud and drunk.  The quiet one is apparently complaining to the drunk, who replies that he "better quit crying.  You're going to piss me off."  He gets up once to get in the quiet one's face, before getting up a second time to yell, "Quit your crying motherfucker!"  The deathburger must be used to such behavior, as an assistant manager immediate dials 911.  In the meantime, the quiet one has walked out, and the drunk one has gone back to his burger and fries as if nothing happened.  Someone else yelled to him to watch his language, because "there's kids in here!"  (Duh.)  The drunk apologizes to everyone.  When the quiet one comes back inside, he announces in Spanish that the guy is his friend, and to "give him whatever he wants."  Shortly thereafter, 5-0 is in the house.  When the drunk sees them, he says, "Yeah, what do you want?  Did someone complain?"  The customers watch as he gets patted down.  He sits back down and mumbles something about police brutality. He then points at an officer, and says, "And you..."  The officer has his stand, cuffs him, and takes him away.  Another officer takes the box, before coming back inside to ask the quiet one if it belongs to him.  The officer tells him that his drunk pal has no receipt for it, so it will be checked in at the jail as his property.  And with that, a couple of police cruisers are away with his ass, caulking gun and all.  I pass his quiet buddy outside.  I hear him say that he's "had it with this police brutality."  Happy holidays, strange hardware bedfellows.

     You know what I wanted.  Reagan, Reagan, Reagan.  Reagan, the one American poet who could sing outdoors, and torchlights down the street to the end of the world.  Europaralysis?  Young Europe's blues?  Tired of socialism and its heavy hand?  Now is the time, in the eighties...to get the dead hand of the state off the necks of your people...  "...pro-growth policies in one country enhance the economic well-being of 'all' the world's citizens...all the markets of the world are enhanced.  There is a destabilizing force in the world - and it's not the democracies of the West."  - Noonan
     ...he asserts that I need to cut my hair.  ...as if he has...to lead me to...looking like a standard dude.  ...it's as if this guy and others...are telling me I need to get my act together.  To "man up" if you will.  I've had an instinctual desire to experience powerful aspects of motherhood, such as breastfeeding.  I also have an uncomfortable reaction to being labeled [sic] a man.  The author "was once described as  a 'militant homosexual' by the official right-wing publication...of the University of Illinois..."
     ...Salt Lake City on a weeknight...  Everyone had Anthrax goatees, some had implanted horns...and I was wearing this white jacket  with a gigantic unicorn with a rainbow on it...  We start playing for these metal heads.  One guy is in a wolf mask...  -  Outfront, 12/16/2013
     ...Colorado will bring shuttle buses to the state's first recreational marijuana shops...  At least three pot-themed tourist companies...are preparing to welcome their first visitors...  - Denver Post, 12/31/2013

     It's two days before Christmas.  I am standing at a train station at a community college at ten to six AM.   I am listening to someone running as fast as he can from the parking lot, trying to catch a train which is pulling to a stop at the platform.  He has to make it down a couple of flights of steps and across the platform, and he would have made it if he had gone straight to the nearest door on the train.  Instead, he turned and went to the door at the end of the train, just in time for it to close.  He has something in each hand.  In his right he has a briefcase or a laptop, and in his left is something small, such as a pair of glasses.  As soon as the train takes off without him, he throws his glasses on the ground with a big swing of his arm.  The entire scene somehow appears scripted.  The following afternoon, I am on a bus home.  I am visited by three spirits.  The first is a woman in a trench coat, and a scarf tied over her scalp.  It's red, white, and blue, and well worn.  It had a heart shape of the stars and stripes followed by "America."  The second spirit sits next to me; a skinny Caucasian teen nerd who talks about "not going back to jail."  The third spirit is another woman who gets on at the train station.  She has a Kleenex up her left nostril.  Alas spirits!  I will keep Christmas in my heart all the days of the year.   Christmas Day.  I grab a sandwich at the gas station across the street from where I live.  On these days with cold nights, the regular panhandlers are nowhere to be seen.  Yet, today there is another guy who I have never seen wandering out of the alley, into the station, and back into the alley once again. The day after Christmas, I am at my usual bus stop at 5 am.  At the bus stop on the opposite corner is the same guy from the same pickup with the same plow on the front.  It appears as if he is cleaning one bus stop each day.
     It's the Saturday before New Years'.  At 5 am, it's a very quiet one.   I'm across the street from where I live, at a bus stop.  In front of the shelter is a shopping cart, from a Mexican supermarket several blocks down the street.  Why push a cart past more than one stop just to leave it at one way up the street?  On the bus to the train station is a pair of young Caucasian adults, both with little beards.  They stick out among the middle-aged service and construction workers.  When one gets up to get off, they give each other a kind of fist bump.  When I get on a train, I see a guy on his phone.  At first glance, his cap appears to have an emblem from a police department or security agency.  It has a star outlined in yellow.  When I see it clearly, it reads, "Havana Yacht Club."  He's in a black sport coat over a forest green T-shirt.  It's an interesting look.  After work, I am downtown at a burger place which I've never been in before.  The kid behind the counter has a face so thin that it appears collapsed.  It almost sounds as if, at some tables, a line of twenty-somethings, or younger, are making fun of this guy.  I order and sit, and my burger shows up smelling like char.  Tiny fries are in a paper cup.  A guy appears and asks me to let him know if there is anything else he can do for me, before he vanishes.  People outside wander past the windows.  A thoroughly bewildered, grey-haired guy with shopping bags, a young couple, a couple of pedicabs.  Both inside and out, there are folks with a hippie vibe.  I hear someone on a mall shuttle say that Phish is in town.  I wait for the train home across from a row of downtown condo units.  The sun has gone down, and I can see into one room on the third floor.  A big screen TV is mounted to a wall.  It must be like living n a hotel room.  My train move away from these steel and glass blocks, and heads toward the west.  Toward another land.
     It's New Year's Eve.  Yesterday, my boss told me that I could stay and work an extra hour, because today would be a short day.  It turned into a ten-hour shift, during which I ran over to a deathburger.  Inside was a skinny guy behind the register who appeared to be an assistant manager.  Over his shirt and tie was a long-sleeved sweater hiding his tattoos.  He accented his greetings with a bit of a fake Midwestern accent.  On a bus home I spot a homeless guy whose entire head and face are covered in snow white hair.  He has with him a full garbage bag.  I wonder if anyone besides myself recognizes his shoes.  Between each of his socks and shoes are a plastic bag.  It's an old trick to keep your feet dry, which I learned when I was ten.  The problem is that your feet can't breathe, and they perspire.

Requiem for the Wives

     1983  I saw a band called the Flaming Lips, at an American Legion Hall in Norman, Oklahoma.  In the art school at the University of Oklahoma, I used to see a girl who was studying photography.  She had a unique voice.  It would be a few decades before I knew her name.  A few years later, she would move in with the band's guitar player.
     1985  I saw a band called Sonic Youth, at Meechum Auditorium in Norman, Oklahoma.  The guitarist Thurston Moore was married to the bassist Kim Gordon.  It would be a few decades before I understood that the bassist was also a working art critic.
     Both bands would move from their underground followings of the 1980s to major label contracts during in the 1990s.  Both bands are routinely revered as revolutionary and groundbreaking; not the least who do so being the bands who look up to them.  Both women are as responsible as anyone else for the success of their band.  I would see Sonic Youth again at Liberty Hall in Kansas City, and headlining Lollapalooza ten years after that.  I would see Flaming Lips guitarist Wayne Coyne, restringing a guitar on a second stage at an earlier Lollapalooza, and at a local in-store appearance in 2001.  These are a couple of bands which easily define "indescribable."  What I took away from Wayne's in-store gathering was an introduction to fans of his band...or perhaps his disciples.  He had clearly become some kind of leader with a spiritual kind of flavor.  He also appears to get a kick out of it, but the fans left me with an impression that they take their adoration quite seriously.  I remember thinking at the time, "I can tell that you are amused by these folks.  Just be careful.  Worshippers never take their idols lightly."
     Having left the store somewhat concerned, I believe that Mr. Coyne has done a bit of alright for himself.  He pursues a personal philosophy of "making your own fun," with which he takes no prisoners.  That which does not serve his cause, he allows to roll off his back.  Michelle has spent the past three decades documenting the band's history in the making, which so far fills three photograph publications.  As the band's stage performance became more sophisticated, she projected light shows while they played live, greeted fans, and who knows what else, alongside a dedicated crew of offstage volunteers and onstage costumed characters.  With the band, and with Wayne, she travelled the globe.  Not too shabby for a couple of kids from Oklahoma.  In 1991, a friend of my sisters gave me a VHS recording of "1991: The Year Punk Broke."  In this Sonic Youth documentary, Thurston reminisces about the band's rise to major labeldom.  This was some months or so before the band Nirvana (on tour with Youth in the doc) knocked Michael Jackson off the top position of the charts, and so the 1990s were born.  I loved the "indie" rock of the 90s, all forms, all movements.  When it went away, so did my interest in contemporary rock on the radio.  I had been collecting Lips and Youth releases, but I gave that up as well.  Puff the Magic Dragon had retreated to his cave.  In the first half of the 00s, I began listening to college AM radio instead.  I remember listening to one DJ, probably as young as I was in 1983, who spoke with perplexed frustration at his listeners' understanding of the Flaming Lips as an "independent" band.  I suppose that I am a disciple of music rather than message.  I did eventually see a documentary about the Flaming Lips, titled "Fearless Freaks".  At last, in the documentary, I recognized Michelle as the girl I had seen in art school.
     2013  A year before, I read online that Wayne and Michelle has separated after he hooked up with someone else.   This week, I read that she filed for divorce.  I immediately thought about their adventures together in this relationship, their house featured in a NYT profile.  I read a New Yorker article about Kim Gordon.  She mentioned borrowing her husband's phone and finding texts from someone he had become involved with.  She said that she eventually realized that Thurston couldn't leave their family, so she made the decision to do so.  The reporter revealed that she responded to the news of their breakup with tears in her eyes.  Thurston and Kim's enduring marriage had been a generation's example of a kind of triumph over the establishment's dysfunctions.  And Wayne and Michelle were given a cultural award from Oklahoma City.
     I saw posted online, Kim tweeted Michelle, "I am continuing to as as if everything is normal."  Michelle responded, "So am I."  It feels as if an era has come to an end.  Marriages do on occasion come to an untimely end, yes.  But these are some serious lineup changes.  Emerson wrote that most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.  I could see a Sonic Youth reunion.  And it would surprise me if the Flaming Lips didn't sally forth.  As long as Wayne continues to believe in his vision for the band.  And as long as his personal vision has followers...

Brother Love
November 2013

November 2013

     I'm on the bus home from work after another Saturday.  At one stop, a passenger gets on who looks just like the late Jerry Garcia, with an orange bandana and an orange T-shirt with a motorcycle on the front.  He has with him a collapsible shopping cart and he uses a cane.  I get on a connecting bus, along with a thin young girl.  I hear her make a call on her cell phone.  She is telling someone that she was on her way to work, when she discovered that the buses "are fucked up."  This weekend, the light rail system is closed due to repairs, all the way from downtown to the north.  She is telling someone that she decided not to go into work today.  I am thinking, if it were me, and it has been me more than once, I would find a way to work.  She hangs up, and a few minutes later, she makes another call.  She is now telling someone about her place of employment.  "I'm a stripper.  I could go in once a year if I wanted, and they would still keep me.  We have a girl who comes in and dances once every three months."  I hear her say that she likes the old guys the least, but enjoys telling the other guys how sexy they are, because this is how she makes more money.

     People were driving intellectual bulldozers and knocking  down rotting old ideas.  Richard John Neuhaus indentified  the collapse...of the secular enlightenment...  Paul Johnson identified...man's tragic falling in love with the state...  George Gilder wrote...of the humane nature of the free market.  Michael Novak noted the collapse of the...assumption that...education...can or should be value-free.  In another era various factors would have inhibited...a street person who waited until nightfall to roam the streets outside the EOB.  He mumbled and was obscene.  ...but this was the eighties, and the work of homeless activists had convinced the unstable that they had a wholesome...job to challenge society's complacency and agitate for the dispossessed.  In Washington in the eighties the insane were only used...cruelty in the name of a higher compassion, engineered by those lauded in the press...
     ...the president...was supposed to order...but...he didn't seem to know what to say.  He stared up at the menu and then at the young black girl at the counter...  He looked at her, she looked at him, he looked at the menu.  He didn't seem to have the faintest idea...  Someone whispered to him.  He seemed to be relieved to hear he could get a hamburger here.  - Noonan
     Activists with Occupy Denver have boycotted and picketed downtown businesses that supported the...Unauthorized Camping Ordinance...  ...restaurants rescinded their support of the ban after months of protest...one day before...an international boycott of...30...restaurant locations.  ...the number of homeless people in metro Denver has been stuck on a plateau of about 12,000...notably higher than it was five years ago.  "A whole lot of people are falling out of the new economic system."  ...more educated and skilled people fall into homelessness in recent years - "people who have never experienced poverty."  Part of the problem is a metro-wide dearth of affordable housing.  "The City and County of Denver have not improved services at all.  They think they're in their perfect world and the law is perfect."  - Washington Park Profile, 11/2013

     The next afternoon, I am on a different bus home, sitting in front of a couple of guys who are having a conversation.  "Fellowship, mentorship, sacrament of life."
     "What are the facts of this passage?  Where does it fit in scripture?  How does it fit in this passage?"
     "Exegesis."
     "What does the Holy Spirit call me to do."
     "Who, why, where, what is going on?  Personal reflection.  How does God speak?"
     "Just by reading, I believe in Jesus."
     "My wife and I started reading a book together.  It starts by naming the problem: that there is a lot of cultural Catholicism going on.  Do you have a personal relationship with Christ?  For the Catholic, for any Christian, the foundation has to be that relationship with Christ.  ...the cart before the horse...  Then the sacramental life is meaningless.  It's helpful as a Catholic that there is [sic] some areas of growth."
     "...in America.  We're so comfortable here.  I wrote a study on the letters of John in the book of James.  I came up with some names of different types of Christians.  ...people who go to church for the social aspect of it.  They serve on committees."  The next morning, I am on a bus for a short ride up the street.  The entire interior smells like carbon monoxide.  When I get off, I am halfway across the street before I no longer smell exhaust fumes.  When I get to the bus stop bench, a guy comes by and sits down, and asks, "'Scuse me, do you have a dollar in coins you can change me?"  He even offered to give me a dollar for a quarter.  I decline, and he is on his way, wherever his way is.  After work, I am on a bus home.   I have stumbles into some kind of archetypal example of the reason I do this blog, whatever this blog may be.  I sit down and immediately can not tell where the odor of an unwashed jock strap is coming from.  Just then, I notice that the guy sitting across from me is wearing a pair of dress pants with a tear the entire length of his fly on the left side.  I can see, inside, his leg and underwear.  It's the very first pair of dress pants with such a tear which I have ever seen, on or off a breathing person.  He can afford Eurospecs, but not a pair of pants.  I can only suppose that, in some kind of class context, he believes that is keeping it real.

     I looked at Darman.  He looked like...his toes have been stepped on by some fat fool.  The president leans slightly forward.  "You know...we broke up the three-generation family."  Darman can't stand it anymore...  "Well I think Mr. President that technology played a part...mobility, the enabling of the American family...to leave one part of the country..."  The president nods.  "It was the rise of the city too," he says, "...then the kids in the Midwest left..."  - Noonan

     I'm on a bus home after work with a goofy-looking guy in olive socks and some kind of Peter Max hoodie.  It's sounds as if he is on the phone with a young child, perhaps his.  "I'm talking to you, sweetie, not the bus driver.  You can't be by yourself, sweetie, I know that."  After some connections, I step off the last bus across the street from where I live.  At the gas station are parked a couple of police cars with bike racks.  Two officers are just now mounting bikes.  They head up the broken concrete of the boulevard's sidewalk.  I've seen bike patrols on the pedestrian mall downtown...during the summer months.  This is the first which I have seen outside of that time and place.  And on this boulevard, in their jackets and helmets?  The following morning at 5 am, a couple of streets from the same gas station, right where the officers would have passed on their bikes, an intersection is completely blocked off with police cars and road flares.  I see no cars which have been in any accident.  I make it to the train station around 5:30 am, where a tiny teen or woman in a plaid hoodie covered in peace signs is asking for change.
     The next day is my day off, which I employ in the service of a little shopping.  Across the street from where I live, sitting on a low concrete wall are five or six drunks of various ages.  One is standing and leading a discussion, which appears to be along the lines of what they plan to do this fine day.  The sun is out and it's beautiful.  I hop on a bus, and a teenaged couple get on.  The guy is telling the girl how a couple of his friends "were all mad that I went to jail."  They then dropped by his place "to beat the shit out of" him.  The girl laughs at this before they get off.  What did his 'friends' expect him to do, go on the lam?  I get off at a big outdoor mall/condo complex, and I stop into Target for a new pair of pants.  I swear to God, the cashier (who has a name tag which reads "new team member") has a necklace with a big silver unicorn pendant.  I stop into a huge health food grocery where such events as cooking demonstrations are held.  I have lunch at a pizza bar, where a customer is telling one of the chefs that their "sea salt is much better than" out on the east coast.  A dad comes by with his two small sons.  He interrogates the older son about a stain on his shirt.  On the way to the stop for the bus home, I find a small piece of paper, which reads, "Johanna, You have done such a great job in learning and understanding the stores Key Metrics and KPI.  You are a real asset to our store and we are so proud of how much you've grown over the past year.  We look forward to all you will bring to our team in the future.  Keep up the great work!!(and dancing)  -Your managers"  Back in my neighborhod, at the stop where I change buses, is another gaggle of drunks.  One is polishing off a tall can of beer, another is telling the rest 'fuck you', and a third runs up to the passenger window of a truck which has pulled out of a driveway.  The passenger gives him a styrofoam container, and from it he hands out hamburgers to the others.

     The monthly dinners...range from $69 to $95 and each feature different mountain cuisines (A Night in Bavaria...A Night in Spain...Foods of the Pacific Rim...)  "...definitely hit the Cloud Nine Alpine Bistro at Aspen Highlands; that's where we like to go when someone's rich parents are in town for a visit."  "...we have an inordinate amount of weed shops, which is kind of fun."  "Basically, our entire economy revolves around recreation, beers, wine, and spirits."  "...we're best known for our Dirty Hippie, a dark American wheat beer, and this year we're also canning our Hula Hippie."  "The locals still use the old run names - and we still call it Purgatory...so don't get confused if you hear people talking about 666 and stuff."  "...get yourself a pair of custom skis...  Each of us at the brewery got a pair last year with the...Brewing logo on them, and...have revolutionized my skiing."  ...try the five-course wine-paring dinner...at nearly 12,00 feet, it's billed as the highest-elevation restaurant in North America.  "...half-off deals at happy hour..."  "...barbecue and bourbon..."  Try the Face-Down Brown, a 2012 Great American Beer Festival gold-medalist and 2012 World Beer Cup gold cup winner.  "I have some other spots I love to hit, but that's not something I can disclose.  As a local, I'd probably be shot if I give up too many secrets."  - Westword the edge Winter Activity Guide 2013-2014

     It's the beginning of another week.  I am across the street from where I live, at the bus stop.  At 5 am, I think I hear a voice from the side I came across.  Someone is barely saying, "Hello...  Hello..."  At the deathburger, along with the usual smattering of regulars, there is a young couple asleep in a corner with their heads on a table.  On the table next to them: a backpack, a plastic bag with clothes, and a pair of bifocals.  Standing next to the Redbox is a guy looking at the texts on his phone and rocking back and forth.  The speakers are playing J. Giles' "Freeze Frame".  I begin dancing and singing along.I tell someone sweeping the floor that this is an old song.  She asks me in Spanish, "How old?"

     Pornography is highly addictive...  "I felt like I was in some sort of trance.  I would literally shake and develop pains in my head."  ...feelings of isolation...anxiety, depression, and anger.  ...suicidal tendencies.  ...imprint and alter the brain...  ...promiscuous, sexually violent, and emotionally and psychologically unstable.  - The Watchtower, 8/1/13
     What did she believe?  She...was...a well-dressed woman who followed the common wisdom of her class.  ...she disliked the "contras" because they were unattractive and dirty and probably raped people...  ...she was angry with her daughter Patti, she gave "The Washington Post" an interview that made my skin crawl.  ...she said...  My mother was kind and considerate and loyal...nothing like Patti...  ...asked about Patti's absence.  Ron more than makes up for that, she said.  Nancy will react to a problem by wanting to do away with the person who created it, or by simply trying to change whatever course or direction that caused her husband to be criticized."  ...(he was going from plant to plant for GE, shooting the breeze with the workers...he spent the years...with...the normal people of his country.)  ...people were afraid not to like him.  ...because his goodness was so famous...part of the air of the place...to dislike him was...admitting a serious inner flaw.  - Noonan

     Waiting for the bus across the street from where I live.  5 am   From the side I just came I think that I am listening to a barely audible voice saying, "Hello...  Hello..."  Hours later, I'm at a bus stop after work, back in my neighborhood around 8 pm.  The stop is across from a new Walgreens going up.  Joining the moon in the air, making circle after circle around the site with its searchlight beaming down, is a police helicopter.  On the bench is a guy in a jacket with colors of the city's football team.  He has a purple backpack with "I support breast cancer research" written in marker.  He's carrying a rake, with a couple feet of the handle held together with duct tape.  He says to me, "Smokey's lookin' for somebody.  I'm glad it's not me."
     It's my day off.  I am headed across the street.  Coming across the intersecting street is a bald guy with a cane and a bottle of iced tea.  He sees me and tells me that I don't look happy.  When I came back from across the street, I see the same guy siting on the curb next to the fence of my neighbor in the unit next door.  He says to me, "You don't look happy, buddy.  What's wrong?"  I tell him, "I'm just fine."  When I get inside, I look out my back window.  I see him get up and go on his way.
     The next day, I'm on a bus home after work.  Sitting in front of me is a young guy in a blue bandanna around his head.  He recognizes a girl he knows.  They begin discussing which drugs that social services look down on more than others.  The guy gets off, and another girl gets on.  She has attractive dark hair.  She also recognizes a guy, sitting behind me, tells him that she lost her phone.  He tells her about his new bike, that he wants to find the bike trails.  She tells him that she couldn't sleep because she has "been thinking too much" about something which doesn't really matter."  He tells her that she has been hanging out downtown, doing drywall work, mentions something about everything being so commercial.  He has a friend with a one-bedroom studio rental.  He himself is never home because he works all the time.  He tells her that he's added up all the "bills and shit," and decided that it's impossible to live in minimum wage, costing at least $2,500 per month to live.  It sounds as if he is going to try to sneak a ride on the train without fare, only to the next stop.  He tells her that they will go out for ice cream when he gets a chance.  He gets off, and at the next stop, so does a white-haired woman in a fur leopard-print coat, a T-shirt with the face of Marilyn Monroe, and with a walker.
     The morning after is another Saturday.  5 am  At a bus stop just up the street, I get off in front of a shelter with a guy curled up asleep on the ground inside.  I don't see a winter coat on him.  When I get across the street, I hear someone coughing at that stop some minutes later. Perhaps he is awake.  On a bus home after work, I am sitting behind two women who are friends.  One considers herself a conservative Christian.  The other one tells her that she is bisexual.

     Over the past year, some of our favorite bars have been the focus of facelifts...mere shadows of their former skanky selves...and certainly no longer qualify as dives.  ...while it's hard not to appreciate the new bathrooms, the place now seems flush with success.  ...an...upscale atmosphere...but not the dive we loved.  Dive bars have been ruined by hipsters.  According to the "New York Times" this weekend...  "Too much of urban life revolves around never feeling less than fully at ease.  The logical extension is to 'curate' our urban spaces like style blogs or Pinterest boards representing a single, self-satisfied and extremely sheltered expression of middle- and upper-middle-class sensibility."...  Census Bureau statistics showed that Denver was the top gainer of young adults, a fact that city boosters keep touting.  - Westword, 11/14-20/13
     ...lesbian and gay bars created our modern-day culture...  The lesbian and gay bars are the first place we go...in a new city, to narrow down our niche, to...introduce straight aquaintances to...our lives.  ...our sub-scenes...our gayborhoods...came from our bars...  That place where...we...hang out with people who "get" us...  LGBT bar owners and managers have sometimes been looked to as political leaders...  As a teenager...we...met...to rally the group and introduce our straight female friends to our world...  That was 2003, and ten years later...the throngs...far more representative and diverse than my own generation's - have grown exponentially.  It's a good thing when communities have special places...where...influence is not based on being politically inclined.
     ...now the most unabashed same-sex couples can hold hands walking...  "Our community has...changed the way gay bars do business."  ...including summer pool parties, new staff and a new monthly Sunday night party...a male revue show...  ...Scruff and Growlr, mobile apps that connect his customer base when they're not in the Uptown establishment.  ...undergoing a remodel.  ...to...keep true to his brand while expanding his base - a thin line to walk.  "Muscular, classy.  Industrial, but not cold."  ...the recently reformed Colorado GLBT Tavern association...  "Denver is growing and changing faster than the city can handle.  ...our role is going to shift."  "The atmosphere in Denver is more of a production,"...comparing the metropolitan scene to that of his rural college town.  "I feel more judged in Denver.  ...he's seeing success in  what he calls an upscale neighborhood bar.  ...destinations rather than haunts.  "The gay bars (of the past) ran their course."  ...in almost every instance an LGBT bar has closed, it's been replaced by straight establishments.  "We have to turn this place into Disneyland every night."  - Out Front, 11/6 - 11/20/13

     After being called in to work on my day off,  am on a bus home.  Instead of overhearing the usual conversation about prison, I am listening to a couple of women discussing a grandmother's recipe.  As I begin falling asleep, some kids get on.   I hear one tell another, "There was a fire at school."  A grizzled guy sitting up front in a green plaid shirt and prescription sunglasses is sucking a toothpick.  Behind me, I hear Spanish.  On the local evening news, I see a TV reporter standing in front of the "medical marijuana" dispensary across the street from where I catch a bus most mornings.  The report says that this and some other such establishments have been raided.  I hear it secondhand that the place I stare at most mornings, before the sun comes up, is the "main' culprit; and that the charges are conspiring either with gangs or with drug cartels.  World class city indeed.
     A Colombian national was arrested last week in a Cherry Hills Village home for illegal gun possession in connection to a federal raid in metro area medical-marijuana businesses.  DEA agents in partnership with local law enforcement...executed...16 search warrants in the case.  ...in connection to VIP Wellness...  - The Villager, 11/26/2013
     There's a casualness...that makes throwing a party as easy as string lights, roses from the garden, and farmers' market peaches...  ...we peek inside a perfectly appointed Cherry Hills home...  Some homes are so perfect...every co-ordinating throw pillow...that it looks as if the design fairy...waved her magic wand.  - 5280 Home, Summer 2013
     The following day is my actual day off.   I grab a bus down the street, for lunch to go at a place next to a gas station and across the street from a bus stop.  As I head toward the lunch place, a drunk who is regular to this boulevard sits on the curb of the gas station, next to a woman.  He lifts his head and says to he, "Hey bro...hey bro..."  By the entrance is a group of other regular drunks.  I have read about this gas station on my neighborhood's social networking site, about the manager working with police to prevent panhandling.  It hasn't eliminated it, and I can see how customers may feel intimidated.  It makes me wonder why drunks pick this place to hang out.  With lunch in hand, I'm off to the post office.  When I get back to this corner to catch a bus back up the street, most everyone is still where they are.  At the bus stop across the street is someone yelling across to someone else at the gas station.  The guy at the stop gets up and walks a few steps before throwing his pack on the ground.  He sits back down, gets up and gets his pack and leaves.  I get to the bus stop, where a guy in a wheelchair comes up to me and says, "You know Sheila, don't you?  You know Sheila?"  I get on the bus when it comes, and I head up the street to the drug store to pick up some pictures and Christmas cards.  Outside of the entrance are sitting yet more drunks.  I watch one of them inside, looking around with an unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth.  He leaves without purchasing anything.
     It's the end of the week, and after work I am on a bus home which I am usually not on.  This afternoon, I am headed for a magic outdoor mall and condo complex, to pick a few things which are not available at the supermarket next to the trailer park.  I wonder what the trailer park residents, in their sports team gear and foot-long beards, would do in this other neighborhood?  I wonder if the two came into contact, like matter and anti-matter, would the combination explode?  On this bus with me this afternoon is the local drunk I saw on the curb ("Hey bro...  Hey bro...") a few days ago.  He gets off on the boulevard which we share.  He has a wooden cane which is worn at the handle.  When I arrive at the mall, I stop into a liquor store.  Instead of 'Hey bro', the clerk says, "How are you, fine sir?"  Two neighborhoods separated by just a couple of city blocks; two separate dramas running concurrently.  I run into a health food supermarket next door.  In a hot food buffet section at one end, in front of a pizza bar, is a string quartet playing traditional Christmas tunes.  The customers at the bar are turned around on their stools, facing the musicians.  They applaud at the end of 'O Little Town of Bethlehem'.  I am reminded of the Titanic.  Outside are streets lined with leafless tress wound with Christmas lights; a cardboard cutout, on a metal stake, of a couple of women doing yoga.  It's posted in a small dirt lot.  The following day, I will see the 'Hey, bro' guy yet again, on the bus I take to grocery shopping.
     It's the Monday before Thanksgiving.  5 am.  On the bus bench across the street from where I live, where drunks will hold court, is a Boy Scout T-shirt.  At the deathburger up the street is a guy I've never seen, in a seat with his head on a table.  On the way from there to the bus stop, I pass a guy with a foot-long beard in  camouflaged pants and a leather coat.  Drunk dynasty?  A couple of mornings later, the T-shirt is gone from te bench.  In the shelter is someone else from central casting.  He has shoulder-length hair and a small duffel bag.  He asks me if the bus is still running.  (?)  He then wants to know if I have a cigarette.  I tell him that I don't smoke.  He finds a butt, and then asks me if I have a lighter.  I remind him that I don't smoke.  He then begins speaking gibberish.
     The day after Thanksgiving.  I am on a bus to work a late shift.  Up front is a guy in a 1940s hat and with a cigar in his mouth.  We both get off at the train station and head over to the platform, where he makes a series of ninety degree turns in order to get out of the breeze and light his cigar.  When I get downtown, my favorite breakfast and lunch place is closed for the Thanksgiving holiday.  Instead, I land at Chillis.  It's a groovy family crowd.  My server calls me "bro."  He wants to know if fries are okay with my burger.  I say sure.  He says "sweet.  Back with that in a few, bro."  Seated in front of me is an elderly African-American woman sipping orange soda out of a plastic beer mug.  She doesn't see her server come up behind her.  She stops just to ask, "So what have you been up to today ma'am?"  She clearly was not expecting this greeting.  My own server comes back to ask, "You want some more diet soda, bro?"
     Meanwhile, the following morning is another Saturday at 5 am.  At the deathburger I am listening to a regular guy with a foot-long beard and deep red skin.  "$!.39 for a can of beer.  Frank's not there anymore."  Eleven and a half hours later, I am right back at this very same spot after work.  Among this neighborhood's family crowd is a pair of middle-aged women sitting at a corner table.  They could be twins, if not sisters.  One has makeup on and has a cute face.  The other appears as if perhaps a car ran over the part of her face between her nose and her lower jaw.  They both act as if they are some kind of burnouts.  The first one goes to her car, leaving the other at the table.  Another pair comes in, this one male.  One has a T-shirt, with "SEAL" on the back.  The other is older, has bloodshot eyes, and also sounds as if he is a burnout.  He says to the tounger one, "You know how mad I was when I first got out of jail?"  When I look back at the remaining sister, I notice that she has a laptop plugged into an outlet, which she unplugs and takes with her as she goes outside.  I notice another couple with their laptop plugged in.

     mushrooms like Frequent positive feedback  be very VERY tolerant of your mushrooms  ...give them free condoms...  EVERYONE GETS A TROPHY!  MUSHROOMS DO NOT LIKE CONFLICT...  It's easy to be a mushroom in today's culture with government, big business and special-interest groups trying to force-feed you their agendas.  The abortion industry is getting a lot of help from pop culture and mainstream media...  ...forced abortions and sterilizations, mandatory birth control, and follow-up healthcare...  The time has come to eliminate...population control itself.  ...the concept of "population control" is not only outdated, but actually contributes to conflict in the world...  - human life alliance
     "...clergy end up performing the predominant amount of...mental-health care...in this country.  ...a lot of people naively go into the clergy...  And they're also all of a sudden the CEO of a company...and most of them have little or no training on how to plan a budget.  It's...an isolating facade that both you and your family have to put on."  He'd been raised...with exciting rock music, an extension of the Jesus movement of the 1970s, and mentored by pastors who could inspire large groups of people with the common goal of loving one another.  Over the last decade, the "new atheism" movement has been gaining an incredible amount of traction.  ...has become a loud voice at the 21st American dinner table.  "A lot of people say that atheists are the new gays," says...star of the one-woman show "Jesus Loves You (But Hates Me)"  - Westword, 11/28 - 12/4/2013

October 2013

     It's the end of the first week of October, and the first morning when a winter coat is necessary.  5 am  At the bus stop across the street from where I live is a middle aged guy seated on the bench, wrapped in two blankets.  He has another blanket in a plastic grocery bag.  When the bus shows up, he gets on with the rest of us.
     I read a post on Nextdoor Westwood, about a recent graffiti arrest in the neighborhood.  In a posted letter, sent to the court handling the case, this neighbor claims that she read on Wikipedia that "the gangs" claim as their territory all the municipal territory west of downtown.  I wonder what use "the gangs" have for Wikipedia.  Western municipal Denver.  That's a lot of Nextdoor neighborhoods.  The tagger crew member who was arrested got my recycle bin.  Every couple of weeks, when the bin is on the curb, it represents.  Life in "the gangs" can't be anything like Dr. Evil's hideout.  One recently cleaned out "gang house" in the neighborhood was found to be without working plumbing, and hence feces on the floor.

     ...a set of behavior patterns of a lower-class milieu...can often develop self-respect and dignity only by rejecting the larger society.  ...the lower-class population...either cannot or do not want...middle-class values...  ...eventually, we shall have to give up the pretense that nineteenth-century free-enterprise ideology can cope with twentieth-century realities...  ...the lower-class population's involvement in the neighborhood is...neutral, and more often negative...  - Urban Planning and Social Policy, ed. by B. J. Frieden and R. Morris, 1968
     I think miracles exist...saints performing wonders.  I think the saints are with us, watching us...  The Blessed Virgin...she's very much on the scene...a friend to mankind.  Which is the reason I read the tabloid press - it keeps track of sightings.  "...hi, Mike...OMB.  ...in welfare reform is the fourteen-year-old-kid...encouraged by this...government...to take steps...harmful to her.  She's had a baby...just made her mother a grandmother at thirty..."  ...says Doug...of OPL, "...how to...encourage those values by which all of us of all colors have lived...for centuries."  "But without being labelled irrelevant to the debate or sentimental about  past that never was," says Jodi...of OPL.  It  was music to my ears.  ...trying to understand America.  - Noonan

     At work, I found a couple of bills of foreign currency.  After work, I took it downtown to a bank which exchanges foreign currency.  When I walked in, there was an employee at the front of the velvet roped line.  He was asking each customer as they made their way to the front how their day was going.  The teller asked me where I got Australian money.  I told her that I won it in a dice game with a guy from Australia.  As she was showing another teller what Australian money looks like, one of the managers came over to introduce himself.  (Because the teller asked me if I had an account there and I told her that I didn't?)  He told me that the bank had seen a lot of Australian money lately.  I told him that there must have been a convention in town.  He asked me how I got Australian money.  I told him the dice game story.  He shook my hand and congratulated me.  It didn't appear to bother anyone that I procured money in a wager with a tourist.  At the exit was a guy who wanted to know if I wanted a free bottle of water.
     On a day off, I am coming out of a movie.  The theatre is located in one of those outdoor mall/condominium complexes.  It's huge, with hype of equal size.  It's just the kind of place to attract a broad spectrum of ridicule, with its themed festivals, its themed outlet store, its themed burger places with its clueless employees...  But on this late afternoon, in early October, with temps in the 70s F, the sun is casting its long last shadows of the day down on a huge lawn in front of a row of townhomes.  There is a row of turning trees.  A couple of teenaged girls have the place all to themselves as who surely must be their older brothers, from an open window, are cheering on the Broncos tied with the Cowboys late in a game on TV.  Did whoever designed this place imagine such a scene?  I don't want to get on the bus and leave the girls.
     I have another day off a couple of days later.  The place across the street, where I have been getting my hair cut, is still closed after their posted hours announce that they should be open.  This prompted me to go to the internet to find the next closest hair cutting place, which claims that the next closest place to my home is downtown.  Neither the place across the street, nor each of the two I found just as close, are listed online.  It's as if my neighborhood is digitally invisible.  By the middle of the week.  I am walking up the boulevard to catch an earlier bus than usual.  I pass a billboard in Spanish advertising a fight on Pay Per View.  I can see in the distance ahead a silhouetted figure in the dark.  Someone with shorts and dress socks.  When he gets closer, I see that he also has on a sleeveless shirt.  It's 51 degrees F this early morning, and I have on my hoodie under my windbreaker.   He asks me for a cigarette.  I tell him that I don't smoke.  He replies, "Well can we start?"  On a train home from work later in the afternoon, i am listening to a high school girl tell a couple of her friends how she shoplifts a few hundred dollars worth of merchandise from each of three of the city's most prominent shopping malls.
     The next morning, I get to the bus stop across the street in the nick of time.  A bus comes along which reads "not in service."  Right behind it is a bus which is in service.  I wonder how many people missed it.  Luckily, I do catch it up the street and get on a connecting bus.  As we are pulling into the train station, the only guy I have ever seen in a suit on this bus begins asking, "Is this the train station?  It's so dark, I can't see my stop.  Is the train station next?  Does the bus swing around and go back the other way?  Does it continue on the same way?"  He decides to get off, and appears to be carrying a bible.  When I get home after work, there are three girls outside, who don't live in my complex.  The youngest one has food all around her mouth.  The oldest one, who tells me that she attends the middle school a few yards away, goes on to say that she is looking for a friend from school.  I go inside and begin eating dinner.  Someone begins ringing my doorbell non-stop, leaning on button during the final pushing.  Somehow, I know that it is the oldest kid again.  When  open the door, she wants to know if I have $1.49.
     The following morning is another Saturday at 5 am.  I see a rare homeless guy asleep, sitting against the wall of the deathburger.  I catch the bus to a train, to a connecting bus.  Sitting in the seat behind the driver is a middle-aged guy with a cane...who has a face which appears as though someone beat the hell out of it.  He has bruises everywhere, across his nose, a right eye swollen shut, and cuts with big scabs as well.  When he turns in my direction, I see the full damage and I recoil.  There is a small bandage on one knuckle of his right hand.  He does not appear to be in any pains, and appears to be wearing a long sleeve knit shirt or hoodie.  When someone comes on, he moves his cane, and I see the top he is wearing is torn completely down the front, exposing his skin.  He takes the left side and pulls it over to cover himself.
     ...the forest with the wandering, ascetic seekers, the Samenas.   These strange, self-denying men are "worn-out...neither old nor young, with dusty and bleeding shoulders, practically naked, scorched by the sun, solitary, strange and hostile - lean jackals in the world of men." - If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him, by Sheldon B. Kopp, 1972
     Local people...speak of a "mi-go" or "mi-teh" (wild man); a "kang-admi, kang-mi," or "animas" (snow man), or a "van manas" (forest man).  ...in Garwahl...they are "mirka."  The Lepchas of Sikkim speak of the "harram-mo"...  - OMNI 10/1979
     On my day off, I am on my way to run just a couple of afternoon errands.  I am waiting at the bus stop across the street from where I live.   Sitting on the bench is a guy with a grey goatee, no socks, and has a wicker basket.  A younger guy comes up to the stop and greets the first guy.  The younger guy says that he just finished a 14-hour shift at the gas station next door.  He has a tall can of beer in a bag, and he pulls out a tiny airline bottle of whisky and takes a sip before handing it to his pal.  The young guy then takes out a small pipe to light up some marijuana.  Just then, the bus shows up.  I look at him, and he says to me, "I got to drink this can of beer."  The other guy isn't going anywhere either.  I get on and up to a stop for a connecting bus, which quickly takes me out to Caucasianland.  I go into a deathburger for lunch.  It's full of white people.  Some guy at the counter is giving very detailed instructions for his and his daughter's order.  At one table, with her parents, is sitting a middle school girl in a jersey for her local sports team, with the name of the HMO which sponsors it.  At my table, directly above my head, is a flat screen TV with Jay Leno on it.  When I get back to my neighborhood, I am waiting for a bus back to my home.  On the bench is a young, drunk couple.  The guy is whistling at the occasional car and flipping it off.  He goes across the street, through moving traffic, to the drug store.  His girlfriend is yelling at him from our side of the boulevard.   He comes back in a few minutes with a pack of cigarettes for her.  Was she yelling to him what kind to get?

     "The reference to hardworking Americans."  ...I was using proletarian imagery against Communists, which is one of my favorite things to do.  "And no men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who have worked hard for what they have.  None are less inclined to take what is not theirs."
     "What's wrong with that?" I said.
     "It sounds anti-rich.  It sounds as if you're suggesting the wealthy are not to be trusted.  You are clearly ascribing certain virtues to the poor that you by implication deny to the rich.  You don't think there's a contradiction between our promotion of economic growth and our lauding of the special virtues of the poor?"  - Noonan
     ...I got to know some of the other patients in the psych ward.  ...many were like me - young professionals overextending themselves and suffering from burnout.  We tend to live in a world where good is often not good enough - the new American way.  ...as a mental health case manager, I was terrified I would run into one of my clients.  -  Out Front, 10/16 - 11/06/13
     ...men of life long calling (or penance) are easily recognizable, adorned with many tokens, the witness of many wonders, the hero of many adventures.  "Priests and magicians are used in great number."  - Kopp

     This week is headed toward the finish line.  At 5 am, I am waiting for the deathburger to open as the morning manager shows up.  She waves to a customer who I have seen around.  He strikes me as a local burnout.  She knows him by name.  Even with white hair, he appears to be only in his early fifties.  His face has exhaustion all over it.  His eyes droop.  His speech is slurred.  He opens the door for her, asking, "Yyouuu waant iin?"  When I get to my usual bus stop, someone is asking the guy in the green chef coat where the bus goes.  He mentions his job, something about "feeding the kids."  I wonder if he works in a school cafeteria.

     The guru will appear in many forms.  He may wear the garb of a simple teacher or an itinerant healer.   Or...with the dramatic force of a prophet, a sage, or even a wizard...  He will fit cultural expectations.  ...he engenders...responses to his radical...strangeness to all rules and traditions.  Arising in a revolutionary context, he sets himself against both the patriarchal domination and the bureaucratic legalistic defining of power.  ...overturning...the meaning of life.  - Kopp
     "...the deep knowledge...that one's country...and that democracy is worth dying for because it is the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.   ...and they were happy to fight tyranny..."  Deaver's office kept telling us to put in the phrase "pride and purpose."  Advance kept telling us to put in "selfless effort" and "impossible odds" and "indomitable will" and "courage" and "bravery."  Everyone wore Adam Smith ties...eagles, flags, busts of Jefferson..."Him I'm a free-market purist!"  "Hello there, I believe in judicial restraint!"  You'd be in someone's home and...see a...copy of Paul Johnson's "Modern Times lying half open...  Everyone had read Jean-Francois Revel's "How Democracies Perish" and could discuss with ease Jean Kirkpatrick's analysis of authoritarian versus totalitarian regimes.  In the Reagan years you hated to go out on Saturday right before the McLaughlin show...  There were words.  You had a notion instead of a thought and a dust up instead of a fight, you had a can-do attitude, and you were in touch with the zeitgeist.  A moderate was a squish and a squish was a weenie and a weenie was a wuss.  - Noonan

     It's a Monday at 6 am.  I am at a train station.  There are three young adults together, two boys and a girl.  The girl looks cold on this frosty morning.  One of the guys is wearing a pair of knit sweat pants.  The girl gives him what appears to be a pair of khakis, which he puts on over his others.   Both boys are now wearing khakis and black hoodies.  On Thursday, I am in a deathburger behind a guy with a grey beard, and a "Tony Hawk" backpack.  A young guy comes in.  He flashes an employee a peace sign and tells him that he is "waiting for the bathroom."  (?)  He goes in, comes out, and leaves.  At the train station is a guy with a towel under his cap.  The following day is my day off.  The Jehovas Witnesses once again drop by a bus stop near my home.  Three middle-aged guys in suits and ties, in a white SUV.  I am on a bus coming back from grocery shopping.  We stop behind a police car which is parked behind another bus.  Some passengers from that bus get on ours.  One of them says something about a fight on the other bus.  The following morning, at ten to five am, I just make the bus at the stop across the street.  At this hour, from this bus, I never see anyone get off at this stop.  It's just folks on their way to work or somewhere other than here.  This morning, off hops a couple of local drunks who I see around here all the time.  This is the first time I have seen them get off the 4:50.
     The following day, later that night, there is loud drunken angry arguing across the street from where I live, around 9 pm.  The next morning is the Monday of Halloween week, but even for my neighborhood, this is no excuse.  I am walking as fast as I can up the street to try to catch an earlier than usual bus.   Shuffling down the sidewalk across the street is someone in a hoodie underneath a T-shirt.  Whoever it is walks as though they may be seventy years old.  Some of the neighbors on my neighborhood's social network website are responding to a single neighbor's comment about the neighbor's kid spotting a push cart ice cream vendor wearing a firearm.  The argument has become racial.  The neighbor with the worried kid has been accused of having a "cookie cut life."
     Yet another Monday morning, and I am on a bus which I used to ride early in the morning.  It's six am.  Do you know where your inner child is?  A passenger gets on who looks as though he is a classic dork.  He's in a knit cap and winter jacket of the city's football team, a laminated bus pass around his neck, glasses and pencil moustache, and holding a Starbucks coffee.  Is that a wedding band on his finger?  What a catch.  I don't know if he has a bike on the bus bike rack, but he has a headlamp over his cap.  His voice carries back to me.  He has struck up a monologue with the woman seated across from himself.  He begins by Monday morning quarterbacking the team's quarterback, mentions that he had three of his wisdom's out, that he vacations in Mexico with his family, that he has an X-box, what his favorite TV shows are, that he likes pink as a color for breast cancer research, then goes back to talking about the football team.  It's been forever and a year since I've seen the likes of him.  I'm surprised he didn't mention something about military history.
     After work, at the train station, I am at the gate for a connecting bus.  In front of the door of the bus is standing a guy who makes a face at me, before he tells me which bus this is.  He is holding a pair of sunglasses on this completely overcast day.  He shuffles off to the next bus gate, next to a guy who looks just like him, before he put his sunglasses on.  The following morning, at the train station, I see a transit system security officer on the platform speaking with a guy who looks familiar, who has a foot long goatee.  Either the goatee guy asked him, or the officer told him, where to go from here.  The goatee shuffles off into the parking lot.  The following morning is the day before Halloween.  5 am.  As I approach the deathburger, 3 others are converging upon the same establishment.  The two have on orange knit caps.  Not for Halloween, but for the city's football team colors.  One even has an orange key.  I hear one yell at another something about whisky.  A regular customer lets me in a locked door, before I open the other one for the trio, one of whom replies, "Right on, John."  They appear to be on the way to a job site.  One has a small cooler with chips and cheese.  He tells the other two, "I used to sell burritos out of this shit."  They consider the best meal deals and order.  One asks for extra cream twice.  Another only wants a Sprite.  When the bus comes, it's packed.  At one stop, I give up my seat for a girl wearing no coat and a thin green shawl.  When we get to the train station, my train stops as a guy with a bike gets up to get off.  The door opens, and before he can make it off, the door closes.  He and I each press a button to open the door.  The train pulls out...
     I get off at a train station which is a world away from my own neighborhood.  Women in coats with fur collars and high heels.  SUVs slowly circle the lot as they seek out a parking space.  'A key map, a CNA licence.  These will allow you to work in private care.'  I am on a connecting bus to work.  One hospital worker is talking to another.  'Student nurses are terrible.  They pour hot chocolate inside the trash can.  They kick towels under things.'  The one with the insights actually works in cleaning services.  She was under contract someplace for fifteen years before she was let go.  Her husband, who is in a wheelchair, somehow fell down.  She took him to the hospital, and while there, put in an application, where she is now gainfully employed.  The following morning is Halloween.  It's 4 am.  Chilly, windy, dark.  The leaves blowing across the parking lots sound exactly like running water.  In one parking lot are three silent police cars.  From the bus to the train, I get of at the city's uber-fabulous technology park.  A deathburger there has a heightened decor and a larger kitchen and dining room than the one in my own neighborhood.  I can tell that the staff served a more sophisticated clientele.  Yet, the staff speak to each other in Spanish.  And they have a homeless guy outside looking in.
     When I get to my stop, the bus comes and pulls up.  On the front is displayed, "not in service."  It was driven from the garage all the way here this way.  After work, I head downtown, where a smattering of Caucasians are dressed in their Halloween costumes.  A gaggle of males are playing guitars on the street, one in a witch hat.  Next to my bank is a bar, outside of which is a guy handing out coupons for happy hour.  "Happyhourguyshappyhour.  Happyhourguyshappyhour."  The cross street is blocked off by a fire truck, and street traffic is being diverted by a police officer, down the lane reserved for the mall shuttles.  For a moment, the shuttles are stacked three deep.  The driver of ours  is standing outside on her phone, her head sporting antennae with fuzzy tips.  She yells at a driver behind us about the jam up, and says that she is trying to call a transit system supervisor.  Just then, the jam begins to move.

"Notes from Commender's Meeting October 30, 2013"
     At a residence in my larger neighborhood, A recent no knock warrant netted a cache of weapons.  Group is associated with...graffiti vandals...  - Nextdoor Westwood

Body Mind Spirit 'Buddy Burger'

     Sunday, September 8th 2013.  I made my way to the annual "Mind Body Spirit Celebration Fair", a market full of "holistic" items and services: tarot, healing crystals, prayer flags, UFO books...  On my way to catch a bus out of downtown, I stepped off a train to discover that the pedestrian mall shuttles were suspended on the northwest side, due to yet another marathon.  Young drifters who appeared decked out as their own personal concept of 'the drifter' were just rising, along with some actual homeless.  Among this smattering of residents on a downtown's day off, I am passed by a beautiful young woman in a white knit skirt and halter.  She is relating a story to a male companion, perhaps about a previous evening's encounter.  She is telling him about some guy who was at some point, whispering to her, "Come here.  Come here.  Let's fuck.  Come here."
     An hour later, and I am some forty blocks to the north.  I am off the bus and walking to the festival with a woman who tells me that she has been called into work the concessions for the event.  The parking lot is filled to capacity.  The lady tells me, "Everyone wants a reading, their palm read.  They want to know their future."

Saturday Noon  Room 2
     ...the spiritual essence of the horse lives in every one of us.  Horses greet us as multi-dimensional healers...
Readers
     ...a Crystal Resonance Therapist (CRTh) certified by...co-author of "The Book of Stones."  Intuitive readings...are always angelically guided...  Higher self clairvoyant empathy.  ...spontaneous oversoul merge...  ...has channelled Marstuthnick...  Marstuthnick, or Nick for short, has never incarnated.  ...a visionary Master Palmist...has documented over 50,570 palms, with an accuracy rate of 90-95%.  ...a "Medium at Large" comes from a family of women who hear voices.  ...specialty readings such as Flow Readings (multiple past lives); Crossings (between 2 people) and Health Readings.  - Celebration Fair program

     After the festival, I had an hour before the bus home showed up.  At the bus stop, a kid came up to ask me if I had three dollars for he and his two cousins to get home.  I'm in a neighborhood of grade school hustlers.  He rejoins his cousins as I watch some guy give them money.  They should have instead called these boys in to feed the hungry metaphysical diners.  With an hour to kill, I step into the Red Roster Diner next to the bus stop.  I begin to read my festival program, but quickly find that listening to the cook call out orders (such as the rooster burger) is much more interesting.  I already like this place.  A waitress picks up a plate from the kitchen, with a huge burger and a mound of fries.  She tells the cook, "The buddy burger doesn't come with fries."  I finish my snack and head out, taking a look around at the other shops in this small center.  From a liquor store, I watch a homeless guy come out of a liquor store with a tall can of beer in his hand.  His backpack and sleeping bang are on the ground.