Mythville

Is the Pen Mightier
than the Sledgehammer?

  "I might do a little sledgehammerin' today, if that's okay."

  ~ Art the Architect, Dec. 26, 2011, 10:11 a.m. 

      Let me tell you about Art the Architect. Although he is at it, again, at 8:15 a.m. in America, making true on his promise (no, threat) to continue drilling through a cement wall underneath my apartment, shaking the entire complex, let me tell you about my day yesterday with the owner and maintenance engineer of my abode. Art the Architect is old, older than this here apartment, which is made of brick and wood and red tile and bolts and nails and all kinds of metal. Art the Architect apparently has a collection of water heaters in a large room in the basement of this three-floor building resembling the missile room of a Polaris submarine. And now he is "improving" it.

      Since A.A., who was born in 1934, doesn’t sign his name to anything, including the lease (he likes to talk about “personal responsibility” while failing to sign his own name to such documents because, well, “She’s the boss, my wife is the boss” ), there is some chance he’s buried his wife down there. Small chance. But a chance all of the same. Gotta keep the check comings in … of course. Of course. It’s not like Aunt Jemima signs checks to make payroll, either, right? It’s not like the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man receives any royalty checks each time “Ghostbusters” is aired on cable.

      The Architect is wiry. Wiry as filaments he always seems to be needing, in search of, sorting through his pockets for, etc., etc. Yesterday, he was seventy-seven years of age. That does not stop him from working, like a busy ant, most likely to the grave. He has a hawk face, piercing blue eyes, and a shit-load of pride about the accomplishments of his life, which are considerable. With his checkered blue shirt tucked in beneath his pulled-tight belt, limping less than usual from some kind of back distress caused by an accident long ago, dressed in sharp-looking Levi’s, he came to assess the damages of his kicking out of the now former residents who had left the one-bedroom apartment below us in a ruin of dust bunnies and at least one hole in the wall ... as well as to, you know, keep digging his hole with his sledgehammer dill.

     It had been a noisy place. All kinds of drama going on down there in the basement apartment before, but a little after when we first moved in, the one-bed basement apartment was quiet as a closed-down saloon on a Sunday morning. Those were the days. Not even the rattle of  a broom stick fallen to the floor could be heard. Since Halloween was just a few days away the couple living there had still left some decorations on the staircase leading down to the door. Some seashells, rocks. Also, they left the light on for Art the Architect. As well as the air-conditioning. On “full.”

     Slightly passive-aggressive, I’d say.

     However, they had managed to, somehow, suck the cold air out of the refrigerator. They were highly functional drunks. Although my dog, Shyla, daughter of Pasha the Trust Fund Dog, loved them both, and every morning sought out heavy petting for the love when we both got out together. But they were long gone now, thus hampering our possible social life on the fringes of New Oblivia.

     On that day, Art the Architect summed up the entry (exit?) way, the door, and then, a very, very small window space, nervously, anxiously, like my wolfie dog does when it needs to go out the magical portal to pee. Aye-Aye was frustrated, clearly, by the fact he no longer had the right key.

~

     “Sometimes I feel like this socio-political animal from the land of broken toys. An analytical being so reprehensible … it makes me want to fucking laugh hysterically and start tearing pages out of my Tea Party coloring book, setting those ablaze, and run out into the night, screaming something about Ronald Reagan, flinging the burning bits around like the Pope throwing candy out to the little boys along the roadside while on some whirlwind tour of Brazil. But, instead, I start typing words into a machine. I am some fucking fool, I tell you what … Namaste.”

~ Douglas McDaniel

“This much I know: It’s not only about how you get, but how you give back.”

~ Same Guy

~ “I’m Occupying myself right now, but if you leave your name, rank and social security number, I’ll get right back to you.”

~ Also the Same Guy, Guy

~

You will find her

beneath the stairs

staring at your feet,

but seeing your head,

all white-masked and wolfie

Ordering in, ordering out:

You'll find her naked,

running mildly about,

rocking chair and bouncy

When the pizza man

Arrives at our doors

You'll find her lighter,

mightier, than the most devout,

far better than fighters and dividers

in Las Vegan, New Mexico,

Keeping me company

When you, my love,

Have gone insane and winds,

Solar in nature, terminating

The phones with crackle

And invisible light,

Make it impossible to speak

They find her in Las Vegas,

at two a.m. times two,

turning toward the TV,

With ears for radar absorbing

The stirring sounds of the Earth

And growing sicker, each day,

For debates about the deadbeat,

For laughter on the sell-out shows,

Her old lady fur coming out in tufts,

Ready for the door to open,

Mouthing the words, “out, out, out.”

You find her brilliant, lit,

deviate with experimental DNA

and sane, still as death: listening

for the Jefferson Airplane

To land on ice,

for the sound of scraping,

for the blue-shift echo

of the first sounds of defeat,

for the skeletal sleds

Off-shore, behind

Snow-dabbed trees

in British Columbia

You'll find her in forty eight

states of being on forty eight

motel room keys, thumbing dumb,

The door monkey: O, if she can

Only solve that one riddle,

The door nob, then she

Won’t need you … we, us;

Because she only needs

The scent of roses,

The yellow pedals, in a slow,

Elegant walk, a well-timed

Roll in the grass,

The one thing you can depend

On, like the rising Sun, the spring,

The Malamute shepherd wolf-bred

version of the moonlit Angel of Mons.

~

     Which reminds me of my first metaphysical joke. It goes like this: Some people believe they can manifest everything to be true. Like, for example, stand out in front of a bank for a long time, hoping it will change its evil ways. I call this, “pissing in the wind.” However, it’s worse than that. You can pee against a brick wall for millions of years, but, despite the fact all matter is essentially a collection of porous atoms, you will never in a million years break down that wall with your pee stream.

     Okay. That’s over with. First joke-break is now complete. It hasn’t been sponsored by Gatorade. In fact, now that I think about it, the whole joke needs more study. For example, what if the wall were made of limestone brick? What if the person peeing was three-hundred feet tall? What if three-hundred people were peeing against limestone or some other textured brick for an entire century? Surely, there must be some point of break through, under the best of all possible circumstances, right? What if seven billion protesters peed against that wall every day, 24-hours-a-day style, dogs, too?

     Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit … Could “werk,” right?

~

     Art the Architect had trouble with his keys, almost habitually, since he leaves dozens and dozens of them on the floorboards of his trash-strewn auto, which used to be some kind of Lincoln Continental, but on this day wasn’t an old limo at all but, instead, a recently purchased blue Mazda truck.

     The sun was just up. It was the post-vampire hour.

     Now, at this point, I need to share some personal information. By this point of the morning, I was feeling pretty emotional. My Celt-angered DNA was roiling. Tears had been hanging off the edges of my eyelids for days. We had just gotten to know our new A.A., who had de-neighbor-ized the people downstairs. They had become quick, if liquor-licked, friends. Now, they had to leave. Jai-O and I had identified, having been chased by events all over North America ourselves for what seemed like years, and it was, quite frankly, all more than I could possibly take. I had helped the couple move out, not only because I liked them, even if they were serious alcoholics. But also because I knew there would be no peace around us until their escape was complete, because Art the Architect was throwing them out due to two-months late rent. It was my way of sticking it to the Man, who had actually been quite patient. It was his wife, he said. She called the shots, A.A. said. He was just the deliverer of bad news.”, as well as the executor of certain facts of life as well as the highly selective laws of  “personal responsibility."

    The couple said, hells bells: They had paid in advance prior to that period of personal information lateness. But now the information was now, ya know, different.

    Both sides of the landlord-tenant dispute were telling the truth. Hence, the confusion.

    By the end of this day, that is, the last time I personally saw Art the Architect, information-ally, all I could see was his cowboy boots and the lower portions of his cuffed Levi pant legs, sticking out from the beneath his new-used truck that he’d just vampire-bought at the amazingly cheap price of $1,100. It only had a little more than one-hundred-and-ten-thousand miles, he’d said, after I’d asked him, quite pointy-headed-ly, about it. I’d also asked him to increase the amount of heat the water heater connected to our apartment, actually offered. To this point, hot water in the shower lasted about four minutes. It made a shower shorter than most Beach Boys songs. But now A.A.’s boots and Levi cuffs and ant-like shins were still. He appeared to be, ya’ know, dead.

     But I, like other people in new situations and surroundings and circumstances, am quick to judge, unknowing the real story which, let me tell you, is even better.

~

     What was confusing about the BP oil spill was this: The amount of actual spew was, well, in dispute. One side, the responsible party, estimated one amount of oil from 14,000 or 15,000 feet or so beneath the surface of the Gulf Mexico: less than we thought. The other side, and the rest of those watching and paying attention … that is to say, those who could possibly bear the weight on the eye of the hideous tele-video screen image of the disaster well into mid-summer … an image to which there was no real way to guess the broken device’s size, thought: More than we could possibly imagine was coming out of that hell hole.

     In fact, both sides were right. Hence, the confusion.

~

     By the way, I know where horror movies, stories, the very gothic genre comes from. It came to me at 3 a.m., and it made me think of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as blinded John Milton, pounding his walking stick on wooden stick on the floor, shaking silly due to the deprivation of his rapid-eye-movement sleep, muttering, “I’m waiting for the muse to visit.” Then, say Poe, opens a drawer. There’s this scratchy, pulling sound of wood-against-wood, and he grimaces, trying avoid waking this, hmmm … not sure how successful he actually was of actually obtaining such things … a raven-haired beauty sleeping on the floor. Then he pulls out a manuscript, half-finished, of poems and stories, and paper falls out. A rustling sound, loud as a Texas cattle truck going by at this hour, falls and plops a swish on the dusty floor. She rustles a bit. But, Poe’s heart racing now, nervous, because it’s not his home, it’s hers, such as it is, because she, a lady of the evening, earns more money than a poet. He doesn’t want to get thrown out. So, like a burglar, he relents. Sighs. Takes a deep breath. He decides to go out the door, into the night air a bit, to smoke some whatever passed for crack back then, to jar the brain and buy him just a little more time before the dawn comes. Maybe he can save his own life by coming up with a perfectly terrifying line to reflect his Jaggered sensibilities about God, the Devil and raven-haired women and their ever-bleating hearts. He opens the door, like a spy. It goes cree-ee-ee-ee-eek. Loud as Lord Baltimore, him once a big chief, who never said, far as I know, “May they be sorry they did not kill me yesterday” to the rising sun, if such a person existed. If Lord Baltimore ever made a noise, I hope it sounded like a Liberty Bell from hell! Anyway, Poe’s heart jumps: “Shit, shit, shit … busted.” He turns, and sure enough, there she is, the Raven. “That’s it, that’s it! Get out! Get out!” she screams, totally awake now, furious. And then she shouts, as his quill is thrown at him, the ink flying out of the bottle, splattering him, “Nevermore! Nevermore!”

     That’s where horror comes from. Not from ghosts? Fuck. They are in our heads as we creep around, trying to keep our writer-asses safe, trying to stay beneath a roof and in a warm room, and perhaps, trying to remain maybe just maybe, loved by and in the good graces of the Raven.

     But now, ah, now … Mr.  Poesy is finally ready. He clears out fast. Finds another lady of the mourning, another place to lay, from the coins he made from having his happy crapped on all too many ways before. He writes his new poem, about a Raven crying “Nevermore,“ his heart cracked-silly broken open, and the process begins all over again in dark and sad, impoverished Satanic-milled mid-19th century, red-bricked, Baltimore, or, in old blind lonely ol’ London, in Milton‘s case. Yes, the muse had come to visit. Personal demons, be loved.

     Glad we cleared that up. Boo!

~

     Which reminds me: Many Boomers today, concerned about their needs to maintain two homes, if you include the one in the woods for those special summers so they can play with their grandchildren and so on, as well as keeping their social security fueled, fortune-amassed nest eggs secure, plan on working through, quoth the Raven, “retirement.” I will not go into whether this generation ever really gave a fuck about the future, the unborn, the more recently born, or, even, their grandchildren, for that matter. Nope. Nope. Nope.

     All I can think of at first is, “Wow.” That really adds to the job-hunting crunch for those graduating from college, or, younger. As well as the more recently born. As well as how long as many Boomers might live, and considering the number of unemployed Americans there are, and how long it might take to fix the employment scenario before us, which is … according to a recent report from Eponymous the Economist … “the rest of the 21st century.”

     The next thing I can think of is: No worries. Be happy.

     Why? Well, as an artist and writer and hopeful literary immortal and all, I plan on working well past “retirement” and death itself. In my view, especially as a poet, artist, etc., the “werk” really begins after death.

     Whew. That’s a relief.

~

     Turned out, Art the Architect wasn’t dead. He was in the act of feeling much betta’. He just needed to rest his back. He does so by laying himself flat across the two front seats of his vehicle.

     Like a lot of people, AA has a lot of trouble with back injuries. My theory is Americans load themselves down with too many burdens. Live in the U.S. is difficult. The U.S., believe it or not, world, is a difficult place to live. As the Woody Guthrie song about the Okkies going to California during the Great Depression, it “Ain’t no fun if you don’t got the dough rei me.”

     AA and I had a big discussion about this that day he was cleaning out the recently made-available apart-a-mento. He was, for whatever reason, in a big hurry to share, with me, who at the time had long hair, the facts of life that we are, as a nation, a place where “personal responsibility” is Francis Scott Key. The quoth, “conversation,” was a day-long event. He who failed to sign the lease in his own name, signing it with his wife’s name, all with a series of quick apologies and explanations, kept going and going and going and … He was a veritable Energizer Bunny about “personal responsibility.” Sure, he could tell I was a little ticked my new friends downstairs had been de-neighbor zed. Sure, they were a tad still in the stages of paving the road with their own excess, and as a result, they had to leave for a new palace of improved wisdom … maybe … maybe … maybe. Also, sure, I egg-headed him on, even though I know full well you aren’t supposed to argue with crazy people, because I needed to convince him that, according to the FCC regulations, he could not hinder me from getting a wireless dish placed upon the space I rented.

     However, arguing how code is law is no way to talk to a new landlord. Like Kevin Costner might say in “Dances With Wolves,” making claims about such legal fences makes for bad future ex-neighbors.

     I did win the argument, though. I knew that while arguing my points before AA’s son, a man of my generation who actually used the internet for work and play. He agreed with me: Yeah, hard to work on the behalf of my own “personal data responsibility” without using the fucking Web at home to win such freedoms to, you know, respond to life in the U.S. to any favorable, or, flavorful, degree.

     I knew I had won when, AA’s son said, “I see what you mean,” and Art the Architect, limp and all, went flying out of the room, out the front door and up the basement stairs like, quoth, “The Raven.”

     However, when the local internet provider showed up for his appointment about a week later, he refused to take this FCC rule, that such exclusions couldn’t be made by any landlord (even though the install guy was the person who told me about this law to begin with), to heart. He looked at the situation out front, planted the root of the dish device, then, after I sighed (I guess the whole thing failed right there because I was “personally responsible” for musing about how AA wasn’t going to be happy, and this might cause the internet provider some business in the future next-apartment-dweller for the building).

     “Nevermore,” quoth the internet provider install laymo: “I’m not going to sell it to you.”

     And then, he left, pulling his wireless spear out of the ground and putting it back in the truck.

     With me, waving, saying, “I’ll be sure to recommend you in the future!”

~

   

     On Christmas Eve, Art the Architect decided it would be a good idea to punch a door-sized hole in the wall beneath our apartment. I did my best to keep Jai-O. from losing her mind from the thunderous sound it made. Sure, protested, Art did. Seemed to have trouble understanding why an unannounced sledgehammering on Christmas Eve might be disruptive, to myself and my neighbors, just a tad ... He agreed to do the work for only four hours, quitting at one ... but he's back now, jack hammerin' away, all fresh and ready to keep at it til' doomsday, this a.m.
I do remember that on the morning of Christmas Eve , I had asked A.A. if he heard any birds. He said, "No." He added he could hear the cars and trucks going by, whistling, as they do, down the well-trodden cooridor of the sound-barrier-improved highway. I also remember it was real silent, mostly. It was a nonetheless, silent morn', more or less, save for the vehicles, the hammerin, and the sound of a nearby single Raven's crow.
I asked A.A. if, at 77 years old, he could still hear the Raven. He said, "What?"

~

     There are very good reasons why people think I’m an asshole.

~

     Editor's note: Any previously mentioned dogs in the story above are dead now.

Lo, a shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific,
Self-clos'd, all-repelling: what demon
Hath form'd this abominable void,
This soul-shudd'ring vacuum? Some said
"It is Urizen." But unknown, abstracted,
Brooding, secret, the dark power hid.
----William Blake

Summoning the Muse

     It’s 3:20 a.m. in America and the juices are flowing. John Milton used wake up in the morning, full of such juice, claiming the muse had come to visit. Then he wrote Paradise Lost. One would presume the underworld spoke to him in his sleep, in some transcendental R.E.M.-state, when the subconscious was most open to the alien. But what archangels are there when you cannot sleep? It's 3:25 a.m. in America and the juices are flowing.

     The world is somewhat limited in its possibilities. It's 3:36 a.m. in America, but you're not in New York City. You are in the suburbs. You can choose a night book written by William Gibson or, you can scan the desperate airwaves of cable and, after getting sucked all the way through 3:38 a.m. in America, you find Youtube.com. The visions are weird and wild and phantasmagorical. Milton should have had such an easy access to Hades, such an easy substitute for dreaming.

You are in the place where, in the full of the moon, paranoia has gone pop.

Do you ever feel drawn to the dark, to the weird, to the hidden? When

channel surfing, do you stop at the sound of Leonard Nimoy’s voice

announcing that he’ll be “In Search Of ... " those ancient alien visitors

who taught astronomy to the Mayans?

Do you watch “The X-Files"? Did you see the first episode of "The Lone Gunmen"?

Do you know

for a fact that a cabal of Freemasons established the United States and that

their mystic icon for the coming New World Order--the pyramid with the

all-seeing eye--now resides on your dollar bill? Oh sure, most of you now, are taught that the day after you are born, by moms and dads who know full well ... It can happen here.

And if you answered “yes" to

any of these questions, you already know where you belong: on Facebook.

Sure, normal people use the internet to shop for Pez dispensers and track their

stock portfolios, but the online world really comes alive when visionaries,

wackos, the slightly mad and the completely daft get to play show and tell or figure out new ways to combine the word, "Occupy" believing they can fix something.

In the new century, paranoia has gone pop, and the mainstream media is

advertising GOP clowns, qualified loonies to keep up with the demand.

Fringe thinker politicians have a new role as content

providers to the internet's economic and commentary dysturbia. A newspaper in Maine once advertised for an online security and privacy reporter with the come-on,

“Are you paranoid?" Well, of course you are. After spending time surfing any social network you may choose to roam,who wouldn’t be? In a networked society, one man's conspiracy is another man's social network.

The province of the conspiracy theorist has been taken over mainstream media.

It is in search of the proverbial ghost in the machine. They tease out releases from the CIA, the FBI or the National Security Agency, or go to rich “open source intelligence" sites to keep a running tab on Echelon, a global electronic

surveillance system that reportedly monitors e-mail and is said to be

operated by the NSA, or, crazy invisible planets about to crash into the sun.

It's 3:34 a.m. in America and you are the dis-invited guest, the Occupier, in the "abominable Void."

      Maybe there's a baby in your arms. A new one that you keep up, an excuse for this zero-hour mania. Before you got up to greet the demons, you analyzed--processing, processing, processing--like a cell phone with too many apps. There you are, your leg bouncing the baby on a frenetic automatic pilot. The baby has fallen asleep, but you have not, the leg running in a quick and nervous tap.

Funny how there seems to be time for everything when you don't sleep.

There's books and poetry to write and read. There's gnawing delays to do just that, too.

The 21st century beckons and your countrymen are mired in counterproductive slumber.

      What's going on? It's not the deep doubt of back-taxes keeping you up, nor is it the novel you've written in your head in a guilty display of personal possibilities and desperate failure. What's going on is this: Caffeine. A lot of it.

      It's 3:41 a.m. in America and this vibe is running through you fully sanctioned by the United States government. Two things split the yearning mind of the 21st century. One of them is recovery, the other is full-scale, foot-to-the-floor self-abuse. In the new century, everybody is recovering from something. If not, well, get a life! But if you quit crack or cocaine or nicotine or that special porn site or energy drinks or simply keeping up on the news, you need to fill the anxious void.

      There are few sanctioned methods of abuse in our society. We've declared war on the druggies, smokers are being run out of town and soon they'll be walking the plank. But caffeine, well, we provide more rooms for that now in the form of coffee houses than all of the opium dens of 17th-century China.

      Caffeine is an alkaloid that acts as a mild stimulant. In mild doses, that is. What if you get up in the morning--presuming you have slept at least once in the last 30 days--and order a triple espresso in a dirty paper cup? It's certainly raw enough to seem dangerous. It's black pit stuff, like tobacco spit or industrial waste, a noxious brew so thick and powerful it makes you sweat at the first sip. Unlike your standard-brand, construction worker's coffee blend. With that big flask, once the thermos is finished, you spend the rest of the morning making trips to the latrine. Espresso has very little liquid to dispose of.There is compression. With very little energy wasted on processing. 

You get more bang for the buck. Don't get me started on taurine ...

      In recent years we've tried, but failed, to find a good reason to squelch caffeine fiends. The drug increases blood pressure, stimulates the central nervous system, ignites a spark plug in the heart and lungs. But the Victorian elements in our society have found no way to suppress the stimulated. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration keeps caffeine off its "generally recognized as safe" list, but acknowledges no clear evidence of hazard at normal levels or use.

      But it's 3:46 a.m. in America and the fiend in you is wondering if you are normal and, perhaps, a victim of a conspiracy.This is the way we are to become more productive. If we can focus, without sleeping, then maybe we can compete with the whole emerging, coffee-producing emergent united nations against us. Have a Red Bull, drink five of those five-hour energy drinks.

Give the extra hour to charity this Christmas.

      It's 3:47 a.m. in America. Do you know where your muses are?

Coming soon to an eBook reader near you ... meanwhile, back at the Ranch

~

Editor's note: This One was written in Denver,  just prior to the Democratic National Convention

Not Another Parking Lot for Words

Made sure the windows

were all wide open

for this brittle haus warning,

God forbid the warming, should we

ever break dead with reclaiming

witches reclaiming their food

for thought and kindness I offered,

them never tasting the bread ...

They insisted they could save me

and then, the saving being done,

called me the devil, the devil,

the devil, three times,

before they were One ...

And compassion is a virtue

sold out in short supply,

gathered in plenty

And there you were, with my backlit

ghost behind the suffused

dark arts behind the computer

screen’s white apple byte light,

the difference between innocence

and knowledge being sub-atomic,

it’s positively Platonic,

allegorical, hysterical ...

when you ask for a cigarette

since it’s my personal policy

to only give out one Spirit

per hour to the hopeless ...

(I mean homeless) ... and if they

claim to have hope I give them three:

That’s how homeless hopelessness can be.

So it’s back to my parking lot for words,

worlds within worlds,

but way far from the gypsy cafes

as Napoleon, fresh face-i-fied,

sleepwalks into Starbucks to be reborn

in its iconic cup of Gaian

corporate glee, which may be good news,

just maybe ... since I saw

a Thunderbird in my dreams,

then his shirt logo of the same

damn military echelon of wings,

eagle spread winking,

he, a soldier sure, retired, moneyed,

yes, a super serene Baby Bomber ...

A crier of you know what? ...

Can’t you hear their birdseye cries,

they are, bling-winged batbirds who cry,

repacking themselves, after landing,

in their imperial cruiser esuvees:

I saw a documentary

on their disappearing, once,

on mah MTVeeee! I guess I need

them more than they need me.

Then one more comes in,

a walking zombie cell phone call

after parking a black hawk

Land Rover, gee ...

she has camo flag pants in tune

to those photos on the big electronic

BBS .. SBB...Bss...BS...Bs...BS...

of Iranian missile launches

all doctored up to be seen

by this property, this land

for you and me ...

(Hey man what’s the plan

what was that you sai-i-i-d

sun tan, sun man, drinking head,

lying there in bed?

You who tried to socialize

but couldn’t seem to find

what just what, Jethro,

you were looking fer,

that sumpin’

on your mind)

But a big heron circles

over Starbucks, wide white

sailing, neither failing

nor flailing

with black-tipped wings

... and just as strangely

I almost missed, the ponytailed

programmer in a Prius

as a potential friend

to send this give up, this smoke,

this one-per-hour cigarette of hope

to a guy wearing a turqoise bracelet: Hey! Hey!

Hey ...

I just got a medal in my dream:

A Thunderbird re-e-e-e-ward,

and another laugh, a smile,

from a strong blueish blonde blondee

bird driving a white trash Ford

~ Denver, Colorado

O Maggie, 

What Have They Done!

Counter-Occupancy as highly visible performance art ... How 1970s can you get? ... I guess that's why they that call it a developing (or, devolving) nation ... Hope the Brits don't get all Falklands about this ... Navies do poorly in the desert, in general ... and they were the first to drop out of the Iraqi campaign, as I recall ... so keep it clean ... You guys, with the queen and all ... not that there's anything wrong with being queen ... O sure, the post-Roman Empire BeePees has been stuffing the Tory box with mapping games, gerrymandering the whole region, creating a pre-World War I-like condition for those of us living in the 21st century, keeping the oil prices high ... (Okay, who knew, but ...) ... for the Standard Oil boys for long enough ... Back down, bull doggy, back down ... it's only a fucking building! You haven't really been much of an all-the-world's a staged event, anyway, that much, since the days of Marcus A. and Nero ... Maybe it's time you people got a little isolationist and do another proper take on your own revolution? ...

Note the highly staged photo, with the "going through the garage sale queen picture" indicator ... This is as Mythville as it gets, O students of mythology and politics and war and, you know ... peace ... 

Doesn't it just make you want to topple a Saddam statue or something?

Ask yourselves, Monty Python ... What would you do if you were Histler ... take a deep breath and try to keep your oil in yer pants, will you?

~ Nostradamanonymous

~

Meanwhile, with his books still selling hot at the local Wal-Marts near you, and Michael Jackson clogging your bandwidth veins back in America, we return you to your regular programming ...

Newter This! Part One: 

The Schoolmaster's Muster

... uh ... Master Plan!

Bath Party Solution No. 1? How about a "Fix the World's Problems" emergency noise installed in every classroom? It would work this way, because Newt, as a fucking bazillionaire historian, and world's most overpaid high school teacher, is too busy to possibly criticize members of his own congressional do-nothing fuck voting blockhead brigade to possibly write it down ... anyway ... I now reveal it to you ... sparing everyone the, you know ... secret handshakes and all ... Have our kids, between classes, listen for the "Fix the World Problems Emergency Noise," and when it goes off, all of the little school children in the world, going well into the future, would have to, you know, instead of going to class or skip out of class to smoke crack to kill the pain or, eat at McDonald's across the street, because, you know ... we can't afford real school cafeterias anymore, because we cut back on education ... have all of the kids fix the world's problems for five minutes ... and then, go back to class  after the "Fix the World's Problems Emergency Noise" ceases  ... Because members of my GOP and Democratic administrations, as well as this new Tea Party junta ... can't take time to do it. 

We are all too busy creating the world's problems!

Occupy Photo Radar Land

Special historical note about this Sen. Barry Goldwater statue in Paradise Valley,  Arizona,  where they pioneered photo radar for traffic calming. I agree with traffic calming. I mean, jeez, slow the fuck down! However, it used to be that if people at the traffic court pay window testified they weren't driving, that it wasn't them driving at all, "who is that guy, anyway," "I loaned out my car that day," and so on, when they went to town hall to pay the fine, they could get away with it, and not have to pay. But a protest of speeders going over the limit in those "V-for-Vendetta," Guy Fawkes evil clown faced smiley expressions: Priceless. I have no idea how they'd sort that out at the ticket window. Especially if, at the window, they are still wearing the mask.

Yesterday, it seemed like money is some kind of gravitational virus working in a disorderly fashion

for living things. Today, it seems like order imposed creates chaos, money is necessary, feeling better all of the time, and gravity is no longer the only law of the universe right now, that there is such a thing as dark matter, and the red shift is on, with the universe expanding at an ever-quickening rate all of the time. For me, this says two things. The first is, were all as more porous, spread too thin, in fact, and there is a danger of being completely pulled apart, at some point ... and the sun must be getting pretty bitchy about the extremes, as well. The second is, what can I do about it? Nothing, that is what. Drawing a complete zero, a less-than, even, on the whole thing ... and third, humor is everything, and the fourth thing is I forget what, ooops.

"Okay, let me get this straight. Am I supposed to arrest someone with an Arizona voter-approved medical marijuana card, or, am I supposed to write people up for being in bad shape on lithium ... or that third other drug they have prescribed for depression since Nixon sprayed all of the Yucatan with peroquat, or was that President Jose Cuervo, high on tequila sold on the off-ramp in New Hampshire?

I forget ... oops!

Occupy Congress First, Stupid!

"My mom was a victim of the economic crash created by banksters and other financial big-wigs playing their rich people's games. I passionately believe she'd still be alive if her job hadn't been eliminated. I passionately believe my mother would still be alive if, three days later, she hadn't been evicted by her realtor landlady who was undergoing her own house foreclosure so that she (suffering landlady) could live there instead. Those who pushed the economy into free fall killed my mom as surely as if they'd put a gun to her head. Oh yeah, this time it's personal."
~ Jaimie Ondrea Dunn

~

The best thing I heard all week from a talking head on one of the cable TV news shows was this: "The problem isn't scarcity. The world is abundant. The problem is distribution."

And Now for a Few Notes on Occupying One Percent
of Time Magazine, Where It's Currently Hip to Be a Contrarian Economeiser

     There have been many times rock’n’roll has saved my life … but … this has been inhibited by certain destructive activities, including: Whenever I have read any issue of Time Magazine during the past year. For example, there is the examination of the strange false rhetoric of columnist Joe Klein. For example, during the fall peak of the Occupy Wall Street movement, he apparently was inconvenienced by its truth, as well as its rhetoric and lack of singular clarity. Now, my problem is, while listening to the Jayhawks’ album, “Smile,” I now choose to respond to something Klein has written. This event, two days after I watched the DVD, “All the King’s Men,” which was based on a great book loosely based on the Louisiana man-of-the-people politician, Huey Long, who, before he was assassinated, spoke up for the “hicks” all of his life, corrupt as he was, doing great things for “the people,” in other words, the 99 percenters, against the big powers of his day, including Standard Oil, as well as their political lackeys.

     Well, I’d have to say, “Mr. Klein, Mr. Chairman in Pandemonium, is no Robert Penn Warren. I saw Robert Penn Warren speak once, and Mr. Klein, Mr. distinguished Chairman in Pandemonium of, ya‘ know, Hell, couldn’t carry his sharp as a spear pen, keeping it warm for him as Mr. Warren, or a million other fine writers, personally went to the limestone walls themselves to pee against their own personal places of power!”

     Mr. Klein appears to be a mere contrarian at court. A front-runner. The type of guy who, having already failed to notice the zeitgeist for Time, decides instead to write something apparently supporting the one-percent, pissing off, thus, the 99 percent, in order to get more hate mail and therefore, keep his job.

     Anyway, world-weary as I’m feeling right now, I can’t “Smile” about Mr. Klein’s wisdom (a generous use of that word right now), or, his “wit.” He’s really not very funny. Tries to be. For example, in his Oct. 31, 2011 one-page piece, which takes up a little over one percent of the 94-page issue of Time, the headline, which I doubt he came up with, is “An Implausible Populist: Obama hopes to join forces with the protesters, but his record tells another story,” … which, finds fault in some book about Obama’s economic policy because it failed to “check the proper spelling of legendary banker Walter Wristen’s name.”

     I mean, only a fuck face from hell, a one-percenter insider himself, would ever think any banker, other than maybe the Monopoly Money Guy or, and this is still a stretch, someone named Rothschild, or Morgan, another good example, is well-known by enough of the 99 percent of us to ever be known as a, quoth, “legend.”

     When I’m wearing my rock critic hat, I cringe whenever I see the word, “legendary.” Because it’s about as useful of a word, once you analyze the term as “behave,” as in what are parent’s actually saying when they tell a child to “behave,” Peeing against a big white limestone wall of power is a kind of behavior. Publicity people promoting their hot new bands use the word, “legendary.”

~

     This just in: It is November 5, 2011, Guy Fawkes Day, and there is snow on the plateau. First snow of the coming winter and it’s a tad early, I’d say. Just as the “freak storm” that hit the North American Northeast about eleven days ago, maybe twelve, was described as being a tad early. Personally, I find the term, “freak,” a bit insulting to both extreme storms and “freaks.” Someone (not me) should write a strongly worded letter. Someone in a position of far more significance and readership and therefore power, such as Joe Klein, who should be writing about climate change instead of inside-baseball shit, for his one-percent use of the page he is given each week for Time Magazine. But Joe Klein is only in-touch with the Washington D.C. insider. Yes, everyone on the Earth thinks they are an economist. It’s hip to be so cardinal square. But there seems to be more important matter at hand, right now, than dollars and cents. The time and money people, nonetheless, are trying to keep, even on a sweet sad Saturday, their grip on “winning the future,” as Obama put it in a recent address about the economy and jobs and gross national product and all, earlier this fall.

     “Future”? What future? Without addressing climate change immediately, Mr. Pandemonium Chairman, what kind of future do you have in mind? Both sides are right, hence, your confusion, about the economy, which is clearly beyond the mortal consideration of any one mind.

Get over it. Get over it … so we can move on …

~    

     Anyhow, on the face of it, the use of the word “legendary” is short-hand for “I have absolutely no new information or light to share about this person I am now mentioning, if only because I am writing on deadline from an ivory tower right now and, well, I have a lunch appointment I have to get to downtown. And with all of these bad-smelling protesters outside, I am going to be late … and anyway, I have never misspelled a name before in my life and all … and anyway, if I did during my tenure at Time Is Money Magazine, there are about a zillion copy editors and proofers and control ‘freak’ editors to pluck it out …”

     Have I ever heard of any “legends” about “legendary banker” Walter Wristen? No, I have not. Never even heard of him. Not surprising, that. Am I an economist of any sort? Nope. Nope. Nope. Saying anything, quite honestly, prior to this year, about bankers, is a pretty new terrain. But I have seen Mr. Klein on various talking head broadcasts, ivory towering, and, well, I have never given him much thought. As a head talker, that is. Hardly, you know: Legendary. Not even colorful. A pretty drab man. Just another, as Ryan Adams might sing … another “political scientist” who lives, as that fine song goes, “on the edge of town.”

     More interesting, and more “legendary” is the Geico.com insurance Gecko featured on another page, also taking up a little more than one percent of the Oct. 31, 2011 of Time, on the page opposite of Klein’s column. “Geckonomics,” the advert states. “A case study,” the ad quips, “… in Saving People Money on More than Just Car Insurance.”

      And time, one hopes … dreams, in fact. Gotta make good time, right?

      And as the Jayhawks are getting the loud on, I realize: Hey, the Gecko is funnier than Joe Klein! If I’d just looked at the advertisement and spent less time and money on Time, reading Joe Klein’s work today, it would have saved me a tremendous amount of time in my life that I will never get back.

     Because (boy, this is really starting to feel like “werk” now) Klein also has had something rhetorically useless to say about some arcane appointment, about some Washington D.C. insider sort named to something called the National Economic Council. Look, angels, I’m no Klein or Robert Penn Warren or even a funny Brit Gecko, but I do know a few things about journalism and how, on the national level, it has failed us all. Or, at least 99 percent of us. Klein has been kissing up to power with his pretty pen. It’s what pays for his, well, high position in life as false scribe of phony, not-very-funny rhetoric. For example, about this Obama appointment for this thing called the National Economic Council, it dismisses the “atmospheric intelligence” of this guy, Lawrence Summers (Klein’s legendary, Okay, Okay, Orwellian phrasing here). Then, Klein writes, the appointment has the “emotional intelligence of a gnat.”

     For me, this is an insult to all gnats. The National Council All About Gnats should be disgusted with being compared to a man who, apparently, this Summers’ guy is, “prohibited the government from regulating financial derivatives.”

     Yeah, that sounds pretty stupid, I guess. Whatever derivatives are. We are all supposed to know because, clearly they are all part of that zombie-technology machine that has actually now, count them all, emptied people from their houses, their jobs, their homes, torn up families, caused suicides, long lines at the food banks, shootings at Wal Marts, assassinations at strip malls, started some wars, choked off others … but sure has fed a lot of bitchy talking heads to yell at each other on the different network shows currently still not discussing more important things all day, all night, such as, the current weirdness of the “atmosphere.”

     My question is this … Who the fuck is speaking up for the gnat right now? Joe Klein? Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. These days gnats are like girls gone wild. He’s not even speaking out against the magical television salamander Geico man who is a spokes lizard for car insurance we are all forced to buy; in many cases even if we don’t even own or drive a car!

     Try to get flood insurance!

     That, as Fleetwood Mac might sing, “Is not that funny, is it?”

~

Previously Unreleased Material That Has Not Been Written, Much Less Published:

The Pedestrian Peace Piece, aka, Public Transportation in Small Town USA, Aye!

~

Climate change and the subsequent social disorders it creates, is the No. 1 story, and No. 1 security threat in America this week, the next, the next, and then, the next ... and it doesn't look like those facts are going to change soon, politicos ...

~

Time to bring the boys and girls back home? ... Well, according to the Huffington Post ... "Military Spending Waste: Up To $60B In Iraq, Afghanistan War Funds Lost To Poor Planning" ... seems to me the storm-wrecked nation could use a little nation rebuilding back home ...

~

Currently working on: "An Apology for Walking: A Pedestrian's Galaxy Guide to Provincial Tactics in Avoiding to Get Hit By Weaponized Bus Drivers and Other Weapons of Mass Public Transportation." ... But before I post it up for free I'm going to put it up for auction on eBay to see if I get any fee-based interest there ..

~

Sure, it's looking like snow here in Arizona, but yeah, I'll wear my blue Columbia rain gear out to breakfast this a.m., as a symbol of mutual support for my brother and sister journos out there on the East Coast, fluttering in the breeze and waving their arms in the wind to entertain us. Sure, I'll do that.

~

Now featuring "reality lit" and poetry by author, poet and Bards of Mythville singer/songwriter Douglas McDaniel ... http://mythville.blogspot.com/

Beloved

Revolutionary

Sweethearts,

Unite!

Down the Road

from Crawfordsville

Somewhere at the end of the road

Down where the railroad used to go

In her trailer she slept with a frown

Trying to stare her demons down

The statue of libertines came around

The wolf had already walked the town

I wrote poetry without much sound

Except for a laugh

from all of the dumbing down

Down the road from Crawfordsville

the broken motor man turned to stone

like Apache copters a'rotoring on

and wagons circling from raging clowns

they argued the point

till the town burned down

Though they paid the rent

for ten dollars a week

the world was shred

by wolves among sheep

as smokes he borrowed

he burned to keep from weeping

and anhydrous ammonia

came up from the deep

and she worshiped her stars

when lacking sleep

while pine needles fell

in symmetries at her feet

before the dogs all howled

in the morning light

down the road from Crawfordsville

They all got a book out

about self-proclaiming,

about water-board wording

and daylight savings,

burning bushes, barns,

the hay needle's laughter

about the unicorn dying

while the Republican Party's

secret headquarters

has gone to rust

down the road

in Crawfordsville

Yeah, down the road

from that tiny Ta'Iowa town

a pig farmer named Lester

is happier than hell

He's driving by

with a sleeping hawkeye

his parallax view

can tell no more lies

and the good book sold now

to the controverted

stands in the way

of truth's memory

of the local sounds

in Crawfordsville

Cardinal square in sharp-cut corners

the coroner croons with each hard winter

turning summer waters cancer cluster bitter

Down the road from Crawfordsville

"climate is dead" for the motorhead,

fertilizer falls from the fire-up sky,

we need not ask for the season of why

Down the road from Crawfordsville

the maharishi's prayer is for a limo

in need of more corn-fed gasoline

and up the road: the Wal Mart roadkill

is churned up dust from that shuttered

restaurant full of crap for the ghostly haunt

Down the road from Crawfordsville

that old shack is burning still

with bushels full of Monsanto seed corn

breaking your teeth on porky porn

as the Synergy trucker waves goodbye

but even with buckets full of energy

we want heroes, well here are three

with eleven cups of free coffee, cigs,

some sanity for satiety, a kind kinda

Fire Safety Week society

for squeaking toys and dogs

to run free

Down the road from Crawfordsville

there's good folks out there, out there still,

while the eye in the sky is scorching 'em dry

they don't even ask the reason why

since loose lips sink ships, Holy Reagan cow!

The washing machine's roll is terror, Wow!

But the tenderloin's pound is a tender drum

of country folk who ain't ho hum

Can you hear them tommy tum tums

of the super farmer's food taught, like magic,

by a hand-held Fibonacci sequence tool

Down the road from Crawfordsville

the Big Box trucker armies

broke 'em up bad,

so forget those things

you learned in school

about how Frodo kept the ring

and the Golden Rule,

about how mega Hertz

made German tanks,

cause techno Teotihucuan

gives good thanks

at the dinner table, to the cops,

to your loan at your banks

Just let it roll by, let it fire its blanks,

'cause down the road from Crawfordsville

you can still greet the sun in sacrificial light

and the morning moon will come a day too soon,

so swim with the shore you supper fools ...

Down the road from Crawfordsville

worms from the air get carved up, cool,

the super farmer's just awe right

'cause disinformation is far outta sight

and William Shatner just plain lied

to those poor folks in Riverside

and east to west the buffalo returns

to beat the dust from the Bible belt's urn

Down the road from Crawfordsville

a bard's lament is the ever-giving quest,

despite the wormwood, yer guns, yer tongue,

you'll give great thanks when mourning is done,

when her sacrificial second sight is Mary singing

about storms to come, about enough blood to drown

the terrorists of shock, awe, the dumbing down,

just can't avoid the daily bank scam man

who hits the train station burned to the ground

and the bump in the road will kill you if found

Meanwhile the ranch gets saved up the road

from Crawfordsville, where sileage choppers

look like haircut machines by day, E.T. by night,

like giant Sandworms harvesting spice,

and the golf course tanned Dan

is a thousand miles away, tinkering

with puppets to sway, like bobcats

shot and killed and made into hats,

the collection plate is eternal

as the frightly nightly news

the heroes go on despite these views

when asked how she feels she sighs and says,

"Peaceful," she says, "and peaceful is nice."

~ Ames, Iowa

Note: The first private meeting of what would become the Republican Party came when Whig Party defectors met privately in Crawfordsville in February, 1854. The meeting was to lay the groundwork for the creation of a new political party. The first public meeting was held in Ripon, Wisconsin one month later.

M'Shi Ha M'Shi 

Shi Melek Shamayiim

Each day is a birth, an adventure, followed by the personal apocalypse, leading to revelation ... then we sleep, in dream, a kind of pyrotechnical death ... then we are reborn ... hopefully learning from yesterday ... doing it all over again ... each day ... Each Day

~

To be higher,
than my own mind,
up the stairs, in a tree,
singing sweet electricity

~

M'Shi Ha M'Shi Shi Melek Shamayiim

 ~

Currently a mayor of maybe 100 monkees, which was the plan all along ...

~

Have you noticed that most of those things we call terror or security or surveillance are essentially zombified zero-tech fear-brained zoo animals intended, successfully so, to scare only you, are only automated devices signifying nothing ... or is it just me?

~ 

M'Shi Ha M'Shi Shi Melek Shamayiim

~

 They found him beneath the stairs staring at your feet, but seeing your head,

all back-masked and Beatlesque

Ordering in, ordering out:
They found him naked,
running mildly about

They found him lighter,
mightier, than the devout,
in Las Vegan, New Mexico

They found him in Las Vegas,
too, too, too, turning off the TV,
staring back at you.

They found him on a tape recorder,
after having recorded,
a mad chant to an enchantress

They found him, laying on his back
on a mattress, having failed to pay,
with coin, to breathe Fox News air

They found him everywhere:
In journals, on bathroom walls,
on the covers of novels unsold

They found him brilliant, lit,
deviated and sane: They found him
listening to Jefferson Airplane

They found him scraping ice
off some shorecraft
in British Columbia

They found him with forty eight
states of being on forty eight
motel room keys, thumbing dumb

They found him at the Ritz Carlton
chewing Wrigley's authentic
chewing gum on the run

They found him totalled
in a Thunderbird car
he called "Blue Desire"

They found him riding
the next red micro-wave wave
raiding irradiated green wire


They found him giving back,
the gift that keeps on giving ...
They found him. They found him.


They found him, finding you,
spitting blood on a white napkin,
they found him, finding you.

~
These governments and their sociopathic corporate supervisors cannot possibly be  telling us everything they know, or, perhaps even more importantly, don't know, about the radioactive plume as it falls into the Pacific Ocean and gets carried into the breezes, and in the sea currents, west, toward North America ...

~

People should A) Follow their own advice; B) Remember the counseling they have already received, and C) A and B

~

Yes, during the hay ride, Prince Albert in a Can did notice that, in fact, there were going to be some obvious socio-economic-political differences between he and his Iowan hay ride mates ... but when that girl started to roll in the river of piss on the sidewalk in that little town, in front of that burned out old bar, he really began to see: "This was never going to work ..."

~

All dysturbia is willing to do for the dangerously mentally ill is to hand the sick an organ grinder, a corner to lay in someplace, sometimes, or ... offer essays on the hows and whys the SMI went mad and killed all of those poor people, and so on ... Meanwhile, Mr. Mitch McConnell roams the land, going boom boom in giant, reptile footsteps carefully covered by FOX NEWS NATION! ... And Sarah Palin

~

Now what? Really? More need for real education, the end of still more superstition, false propheteering, a more inclusive idea that we, as a planetary network of global citizens are in this together, stupid ... that's what! A new revelation is at hand is ... "what" ... all religions are One ... really is time to think how hot this singed ball of life is, that's "what" ... Motherf***er.

~

The wolf is having a nightmare now. See what we all did!

~

M'Shi Ha M'Shi Shi Melek Shamayiim

~

V

Image by the late Fritz Scholder

  

A Conspiracy of Ducks

The entanglements of the Spider Woman

led me here to tell you of too many things,

but hear me now and keep all a secret:

Only half of what Soutenang spoke

of yesterday is Wormwood true:

Tomorrow it will all be a lie.

The company we keep must shift

from year to year, day to day, hour by hour ...

Shush, my sweet, silence! Everything and nothing

we say can ever be heard or listened to, or, known.

This is the shady place, dark and in smoke

where the paranoids go pop to meet on the street

of the most disowned, dark and unfavored muses.

Networked societies throughout history and herstory,

powered in the puppeteer's mechanized iron arms

are frightening to the uninitiated anxiety angels

of change ... Trust me. And trust me alone!

I like it on top that way ...

Damn you! We've been discovered!

Who talked! Who!

If not for my dragon visage they would not run.

I did not kill the three headless women they speak

of in the shadows of the dying afternoons ...

Now I need a new cave to breathe my fire from!

Fore they will chase me down and kill the truth ...

I weep for them. They do not know what they do.

II

These crystalline stones in the center of the Earth

contain values within values leading to absolute nowhere.

These mountains will tell you nothing, my final secret,

without the keys forged in the four corners of my mind

and if I squint my leaden cold eyes tight enough,

the Sarcosuchus of my dreams held in the sarcophagus

will once again share a dream with the Eddie Allen Poe

ravens tweeking in the deep dark wounds of our dreams ...

These ravens speak just as we do, just as all of the birds

of the world understand in accordance to our mutual

misunderstanding, just as I keep my watch stuck on eleven

to remind me how real the hour is, the day is, near or far:

Your heartbeat will tell me the rest and the black helicopter

is just a fairy tale, a whiff of helicopter blade, echoing

in your circuitous canyons and endless energy fields

of mere rumors repeated, for sales purposes, only to be

maximized in the marketplaces for my profit,

and my profit alone.

III

I saw three ghosts

through the window

and they were posing

as three nude females

as if it were part

of the same damn plan.

I saw them again

in the fanatic swirl

of teenage faces,

happy and light

and forbidden.

Finally, they appeared

as blue topped, short-cropped,

senior citizens who could give

a damn about your generation,

who were around long enough

to catch the last sweet scent

of the wild white roses, caught,

tight in the controlled gardens,

imprisoned, elect, in enlightenment

and mutual decay.

IV

Despite fundamental needs of fear

and the aquamarine teardrop

of your sad eyes,

when my MIB sunglasses

fell into my tortilla soup

my personal cosmic rodeo clown

was kicked out of the bucket

by the Bull, and the cartoon cowboy,

listening to Jefferson Airplane,

fell down the hill with laughter,

because, see, the movies

don't show you their eyes

behind cool black shades

to keep you believing

in the narcolepsy of suspense

about inhuman Blackhawk riders

who quite literally actually really

need to feed and fight and feel and pee

like children, too.

And that Spider? It shudders

to our mutual Sarcosuchus,

running to underground homes

to atomize quick harvests of love,

just as the secret government agent,

quietly, soulfully, somewhere in some

movie theater near you is weeping,

sentimental, quite literally sorry

as he or she watches the slow motion

action of the sequence about the birth

of baby ducks in the spring.

(Editor's note: In the ongoing effort to prevent American voters from sinking into the poppy-filled fields of forgetting, here's another excerpt from my book about the end of the 20th century, and the beginning of the 21st century,  " 23 Roads to Mythville. " This chapter,  "Denial of Access,  " could have also been called,  "I Should Have Known My Days Were Numbered When I Tried to Pitch That Story About Echelon Dot Calm. "")

The date is Dec. 13, 2000, and the Internet landscape is teetering on the brink of the big die-off. But McDaniel and his co-workers seem secure, successful, self-satisfied, most certainly self-congratulatory, on top of the e-publishing world. Or so they believe. Even as the U.S. Supreme Court is deciding the result of the presidential election for them all, ruling on that very day that all uncounted dimpled chads are null and void, they are so self-assured they barely even conceive of the dissonant vibrations emanating from the very core of the earth.

Gathered in a large enough quantity in a hotel meeting room, they, the full-time, well-paid employees of Access Internet Magazine, create a convincing air of self-confidence, of go-go e-business wiles, high on the Net-savvy narcotic of the zeitgeist vibe. Sure, some of them worried about rough times ahead. At least McDaniel did. Yet, even considering his natural pessimism, it would have been hard to imagine how quickly things could change.

So many start-ups, as in new magazines, whole living cycles, forests of ink and paper, so many all come and gone. McDaniel had done them all: multi-million dollar projects, national monthlies, regional rags covering sports and art, grass roots enviro’ ops out in the desert, entertainment weeklies, all gone. Killed by everything from the Gulf War to a Major League Baseball strike. And now, the looming dot-com bust. All due to the inherent liabilities of having too much investment capital to burn. Due to wannabe publishers who always believe they are capturing the so-called crest of the wave. Until, that is, the wave, the demo, crashes on the shore.

The next wave is on the way. But it’s too late. Ink on paper just can’t adapt in the stormy seas of the new century.

They are at the annual sales meeting for Access Media Inc., just before the lavish Christmas Party on the far end of a Boston suburb. It's December 13, 2000. Publisher Mike Veitch stands in front of the magazine’s blown up cover featuring then president Bill Clinton: who could likely barely work his e-mail. At least that's what the cover shot of the stumped and befuddled president seems to depict. As if he is looking into one of the impenetrable miracles of our time. Like he fit the demo of newbie readers to "America’s Guide to the Internet."

It's December 13, 2000, and if anyone had turned on any talk-radio station, they would have heard a war of words over Clinton and Gore, Bush and his Supremes, a howling that hadn't been heard since, well ... hadn't ever been heard.

But Access staffers, mostly those on the advertising side, had come from all over the country after a remarkable year of growth and, apparently, breakthroughs in publishing. It was a day to be catered and plump. You might have wondered, with so much growth in circulation so fast, from 4 million to 10 million weekly within a little over a year, if they had a bigger audience than the president on any single day of the week. Whole suburbs of newsreaders, gadget fanatics or, more likely, grandmas wanting to know how to receive photos by e-mail of their grandchildren, practical professionals wanting to know the latest investment site, moms looking for cooking sites and so on … a demographic that was nothing less than a cookie-cutter composite of the whole country: But the emanations of the earth, well, that was somebody else's business.

Access was riding the crest of the Internet wave, but it was trying to hit an impossible moving target. The first weekly publication of its time, it attempted to cover the entire mélange of the fab electricities in the air as they crossed over into the mainstream. But it was like chasing a lightning bolt with a dinosaur.

Even as Veitch was self-congratulating the rotunda roomful of attentive ears, maybe 150 people, for publishing Access on a weekly basis as the third largest weekly in the United States, a circulation of nearly 10 million, all distributed as an insert through newspapers across the country: something was wrong. Even as the hotel was notable, from the outside, for huge radio tower landmarks, much older than the Web, that served as testament to the long history of Route 128’s silicon valley of telecommunications wizards, mass marketers, open sourcerers, dot-com rebels and computer-related trade ’zines out the ying yang: something did not compute.

So powerful and amazing is Access, Veitch tells the group, one Access expose had uncovered some invasive America Online malfunction, which was then fixed by the safe-surfing company because it had been first criticized by one of the columnists.

"The simple and direct way we have helped people in their lives," Veitch says, "is what journalism is about."

McDaniel, inspired by Veitch's soliloquy, could barely contain his excitement. He thought of the 100 monkeys, and there they were, right in that room. The vibrations of the earth seemed to be churning in him, and he couldn't be silent anymore. When Veitch asked if there were any questions, McDaniel took his turn to speak in a rambling soliloquy of his own. The first part of what he said, he doesn't recall now, but he always knew how it was going to end.

"The real question isn't how we are going to turn all of this paper into gold," he told the group. "The real question is: How do we turn this gold into soul?"

This was followed by a long, slow, deep, most surely stunned, silence.

When the group broke up, no one spoke to McDaniel. In fact, they didn't even look at him.

Maybe a week later, in the red brick office park that was somewhat secluded on the Charles River in Needham, Veitch would call McDaniel into his office. It wasn't for an executive-to-employee lashing, exactly, more like a "come-to-Jesus." Veitch boasted about how Access was conceived of, as a business plan, on a single sheet of paper, a metaphor for the integration of all media.

"Access is the first fully integrated mass medium of the post-Internet era," he says.

McDaniel responded with 50 ideas of his own, none of which would fit on a single piece of paper, then dutifully returned to his cube: the human search engine.

Being an editorial staffer at Access was like being the subject of some unprecedented behavior experiment. They were, basically, paid to surf. Paid to be led through the bottomless eddies and channels of the World Wide Web. Visitors to the office, especially journalists from other newsrooms, often commented about how creepy the whole thing felt. Newsrooms, after all, are usually boisterous places. Considering how tightly Access staffers were packed in after growing from 24 or so to nearly 100 employees in less than a year, it was if nothing else an intimate situation. By this time, Access Media was an atypical cube farm of too many employees cramped into a honeycombed beehive. Basically, what you could get with a $27 million venture capital investment, spent over a year and a half or so. Yet, even with so much electrified density, even with so much juice, it could be quiet as a library.

Employees were more likely to interact from the computer, often by Yahoo’s instant messenger service, often without speaking to anyone, in person, all day. Human search engines paid to be hooked into machines and surf the Web. Like something out of "The Matrix." But it wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of people in their lives. They weren’t disconnected from humanity. In fact, McDaniel may have never come in contact with so many people in his life. It seemed to work, until, for McDaniel, more than 100 e-mail messages were received one day, many of them from struggling dot-coms in need of publicity for their shopping sites, especially before the Christmas push. Or from other editors, wondering why he hadn’t gotten back to them. McDaniel tried to respond back to them with missives about his doubt and fears about what was really happening in the Noosphere.

Considering the extent of its weekly circulation, maybe 20 million people in affluent suburbs across the nation who may have been actually looking at it at the same time, and the high-priced talent (USA Today online staffers, mainly) who were brought on to head up a new Web-page undertaking, one might have hoped that it could have accomplished more than the mere tweaking of your home computer’s keypad control. Considering all of the computerized wizardry of the place, it could have accomplished pretty much anything it wanted. For McDaniel, it was as if Access were a kind of revolutionary force bringing the liberating Web to the masses. That was the best of what he could hope for.

He kept thinking: How do we turn all of this gold into soul?

But forces much, much larger than a mere circulation of 10 million were at work, almost invisibly. The big die-off first sniffed out by Fuckedcompany.com was becoming apparent. First, Access Internet Magazine scaled back its online operations, laying off 21 employees shortly after the beginning of the year, mostly those who worked for accessmagazine.com, about 25 percent of Access Media’s payroll.

Veitch would eventually be pastured into a role as an adviser to the company and board member. John Jay, president of Access Internet Magazine, and Larry Sanders, president of accessmagazine.com, left the company.

Sanders came from USA Today online wars to start up the Access Web site’s expansion during the Internet gold rush heyday. They were predatory times. So he tried a sticky hit style, the "roach motel" approach, attempting to "drive them" like cattle. That was common nomenclature in Access executive culture: This whole idea that people, somehow lacking any choice in the matter, could be "driven" into its Web of multimedia ventures. For bizarre reasons, the site never drove huge numbers, and for a long time ended up with fewer hits than most alternative zines, especially considering the self-marketing possibilities of sending out 10 million flyers ... that is, the magazine itself, with the Web site’s URLs at the top of each page and the banner. For whatever reason, readers felt little need to get the same thing at the Web site, too.

By the end of 2000, the company had been working on plans for a national online advertising network and new e-mail products, but scaled back as the Internet tide changed. A new investment from General Atlantic reportedly served as a blood transfusion of less than $1 million. Access had previously raised money in August 2000, when investors contributed $17 million. Employees were always told $27 million, but who knows how quickly $10 million bucks can go up in smoke. Other venture investors in Access Media included Sequoia Capital, One Liberty Ventures, and Labrador Ventures. Individual investors included former Time Warner co-CEO N.J. Nicholas Jr. and E-Trade founder Bill Porter.

The cost of newsprint (about a half-million dollars per edition) and the decline of the Web as an item worthy of mass media interest, especially in terms of potential advertising dollars, were also to blame.

It could have been, and very often was, a media project that exemplified the realm of possibility for its time. Access could be just about that, access to the new world of megamedia, to the glittering electric palace of wisdom (at least as far as the Internet could provide). But the focus group directives thought otherwise. Such events, with so-called readers paid and given a sandwich to say "yeah, sure, I read the magazine," revealed an apparent need for the editors to dumb-it-all down. The average reader, apparently, could barely grasp a slice of what was going on out on the Web. The focus group directive became a tiny little hole indeed, a limitation for depicting what was really out there on the Web. If you are less outrageous than the FOX Network when dealing with Web topics, well, you get the picture …

But in December of 2000, even as Florida presidential election embroglio roiled on, and angry e-mail bounced around in incredible viral swirls of angst, McDaniel and the editors of Access Internet Magazine were debating whether or not to veto listing the URL for a short, but relatively dated, "South Park" film depicting a rumble between Santa Claus and Jesus Christ, an animated fight between animated good and animated evil. And while the real Internet buzzed with conspiracies, overworlds, underworlds and terabytes of skin, it was decided the short film was just too riske’ for the supposed audience of Webizens they were trying to reach.

McDaniel argued (and argued): The Web is far, far weirder. And the geeks and wizards are moving into the mainstream.

As it turned out, nobody really got the shot in the arm they were looking for. Access included. But maybe in some small way, the Noosphere moved just a little further along. In a little more than six months after the beginning of the new year, Access suspended publication. The last posting on its Web site read: "Access Magazine has suspended publication, due to the continuing uncertainty in the economy." Apparently the business of producing a for-print mag announcing the dawn of a new media era is just a little too much like being a Trojan horse. McDaniel guessed once readers figured the Internet out, "they just don’t need ink on paper anymore."

A few days after Dec. 13, 2000, a mere six months before the magazine's demise, such statements increasingly began to rankle McDaniel's bosses. The whole "gold into soul" episode was no doubt still on their minds. His gloomy pronouncements about the imminent demise of shopping sites that were about to be touted in the Christmas shopping issue; how the whole shebang would be up by the end of the first quarter of 2001; how the ever expanding network of geeks would be the only ones worth writing for when it was over; it all led them to write him up on the "Vision" thing.

One day he came to the office, muttering something about how he'd seen a solar storm over the Merrimack River Valley. " I saw a lake of fire in the sky," he said. He rambled about how Verizon rhymed with Urizen. How the nation could be divided right down the middle between the techno-haves, who lived in the cities on the coasts, and the more conservative have-nots, the landlocked crowd, and how the presidential election had split the electorate the exact same way. Liberalism on the Internet, he said, was spreading like a virus, but the forces of Urizen were working, even as they doddled on the latest new doodles, to take it back. He railed about how the Hopis were going online, and this signalled the end, for sure.

All true, but scattered, a victim of too much information. Like the Web itself, his mind became a human search engine's cache of non-linear connections.

On January 1, the Frankenstein that Access created was let go. Sent, once again, falling into the Void. In a pathetic act of vengeance, he went home, closed the door, turned on the computer, and posted the following message to everyone he'd ever met on the World Wide Web:

"Predicting the future is only an act of hubris, and it’s a symptom of spending too much time on the Web to believe you are better at it than, say, throwing darts on the big target of possibilities. Techno-savvy prognostication is standard practice for the highly sought out members of think tanks and leading edge members of the digerati fringe. As one attains greater tools and more power and believes something other than simply being human is happening to him, as he deigns himself to have a greater awareness and insight into things, it’s nonetheless an act of folly. Still, we try.

"It’s no accident that the spirit of Prometheus, that Greek deity who gave fire and the alphabet to human beings, who then went on to speak and build things, much to the consternation of Zeus, is now recognized among many techno-wizards and members of digerati to be a technology god who is sometimes referred to as 'one who sees far.' The hubris is derived from the resulting megalomania inspired by tools that provide a supposedly superhuman reach across the networked world. Which is what made Zeus angry and perhaps a little jealous, incensed enough, at least, to bound Prometheus to the rocks on the shore: His real concern that humans, believing themselves to be Gods, just might foul up the whole hierarchical system of nature. But Prometheus refused to bow to this higher power just as many of us refuse to recognize that, despite the heady intoxication of so much technology converging on our desktops at lightning speed, we are all still pinned to one big rock in space.

"In 2001, the architecture of the Web will continue to evolve by the very same seemingly random patterns, the ebb and flow of living things and forces that dictate events on big rock in space. By known economic and social patterns that repeat throughout history. By natural currents that are all quite mysterious to even the most profound and comprehensive thinkers about what’s going to happen next in cyberspace, which is as equally pinned to the real world as Prometheus. In fact, many of these mighty ones are falling, or about to fall, even as I write this, because they believed they had the secret key to the Emerald City, convincing a lot of others to come along.

"In the upcoming year, many of the most notable pioneers of e-commerce will lose their grip and slip into the abyss. Only to replaced by the vultures and transformers of their best ideas, usually by corporate nation-states that had long recognized the strength of being tethered to material things. In short: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If you don’t believe it, look at the revenge of the brick and mortar stores as they restore order at the online shopping mall. It has always been that way. Why should the Web be any different?

"In 2001, the Web will seem more human, but only because humans will seem more robotic, that is, they’ll morph into cyborg citizen-servants to the emerging order of the electronic beehive. Space will continue to fuse ubiquitous cyberspace to the collective mind of the earthbound. Reality and unreality will become harder to discern. Especially for those who don’t have a proper grounding in the physical and metaphysical laws at work on both ends of the spectrum. Many might believe, for example, that Martin Sheen really is a good president. Others, seeing this trend, will take advantage by creating all kinds of multimedia assurances that, if propagated to enough people, will enable them to achieve any cynical end they might desire.

"The next-generation Web will seem more virtual, and the real world will be more often referred to as 'just like the Internet.' But by the end of the year, closed networks and intranets will be more prevalent. From that point on, the World Wide Web will become fractured, disordered, and many will complain. Hyped all year already by those it might serve, for calling for security and privacy, the Web will become less a tool for communication, more often a function for those who command, those who control. Most will comply and register for the Mark. Greed and self-interest will rule a society dictated by this fact: Bar code is law. Technological man will, after all, have no choice if he wants to feed from the mutual marketplace of e-commerce.

"This loss of a sense of an online community, this descending into electro-tribes, set into motion whenever a comprehensive hegemony dissolves, will be reinforced by gated communities created out of the desire to re-establish bonds with our fellow man. The digital divide will widen. The technocrats will only get stronger. As resources become more and more scarce, and global warming moves closer to its inevitable redline say, 50 years from today, those who dictate the architectures of technological space will find themselves to be increasingly able to drive people like cattle to the diminishing safety zones of survivability.

"Conflict will arise out of the resistance to this, but the system will only fracture more as a result of this literal cyberwar between the competing hierarchical layers of technocrats, corporate interests, governments and its cyborg servant class trying to just keep up and survive. It will be too bad. We could have all got along. We could have put the automobile to pasture. Finally, a large number of enlightened ones who are scrambling, even now, to discover practical ways to unplug from this insanity we like to call 'civilization,' will find a way to connect in a mutually effective, quite spiritual way. The wisdom of this passion for self-sufficiency will only become apparent when the lights go out, when dwindling resources for fuel and then, cheap electricity fails to feed the system, which collapses from the weight of too many voices, too many demands, too much desire for more civilization, more production, for its own sake. The neo-Luddites, though quite techno-savvy, will be the meek who inherit the eventual earth. After all, small is big, slow is fast, spirit is all that remains, and ever shall be, on terrain both cyber or dirt real.

"Of course, since I’m only a mere human casting you this Web of apocalyptic imagery with a gnostic’s mysterious writing machine, quite the opposite is equally likely to happen. What do you think I am, the Wizard of Oz?"

His message to the New Year complete, he then crumpled into a ball. When he awoke, he found himself unable to lift himself out of bed. Information overload was a real disease, he'd decided, then and there. Within days, his entire life blown apart, he bought a train ticket to take him far out West, careening down a slice of rail line into the Void as waves of invisible solar storms pounded the earth, casting untold vibrations into the very core of the wired century. He jumped on the train, leaving pretty much everything behind but his laptop; leaving everything, turning it all in, lugging his machine and still wondering: "How do I turn this gold into soul." 

~

 

An excerpt from "23 Roads to Mythville," a "reality lit" novel by Douglas McDaniel