Keystone Strokes

Oh, so that's what it was all about ...

One of the interesting facets of neo-conservative behavior since the election is how they are far louder, and unified, in supporting the mandates of the oil, gas and coal industry than they were before the election.

In fact, Sen. Mitch McConnell could barely restrain himself for a day after the election before he started chatting up the "energy revolution," which was, in fact, an energy counter-revolution paid for by such members of the oligarchy as the Koch brothers. Such conservative media outlets as FOXnews, the Christian Science Monitor and, big surprise, the Houston Chronicle, also gushed about the so-called mandate as if they were members of a group called Gasohaulics Anonymous.

A conspiracy? Not exactly, but an orchestrated confession? Yes, quite.

While the politics of fear -- ISIS, ebola and immigration -- stoked the reptilian hind brain of the republic -- a few hundred million campaign dollars to get Keystone passed was merely the price of doing business for some of the worst polluters on earth. These polluters are trying to disguise what has been described as a billionaire carbon bomb.

As Salon.com reported this past spring, "The Keystone XL pipeline isn’t just about oil and gas companies. It’s also about the Koch brothers and their vast influence over the Republican party. That influence extends as well to Canada’s oil sands."

The Washington Post reports: a subsidiary of Koch Industries, owned by bros Charles and David, is among the land’s largest lease holders.

Here's who would benefit from Keystone XL:

●Cenovus Energy (Canada) 1.57 million (includes rights to an air weapons range)

●Athabasca Oil Corp. (Canada) 1.56 million

●Koch (U.S.) 1.12 million to 1.47 million

●Canadian Natural Resources (Canada) 1 million

●Suncor (Canada) 986,000

"According to the Washington Post, "The link between Koch and Keystone XL is, however, indirect at best. Koch’s oil production in northern Alberta is “negligible,” according to industry sources and quarterly publications of the provincial government. Moreover, Koch has not reserved any space in the Keystone XL pipeline, a process that usually takes place before a pipeline is built. The pipeline also does not run anywhere near Koch’s refining facilities. And TransCanada, owner of the Keystone routes, says Koch is not expected to be one of the pipeline’s customers.

Still, the activist group that is publicizing the figures about Koch holdings in the oil sands – the International Forum on Globalization – is arguing that Koch will benefit indirectly. The IFG contends that the Keystone XL pipeline will create competition among rail and other pipelines and lower transportation costs for all oil sands producers, bolstering profit margins and making additional reserves economically viable."

This isn't happening in a vacuum, but there you are scratching your heads. Maybe some search terms might help: Cholla Power Plant, Navajo Generating Station, Peabody Energy, Koch Industries, Keystone Pipeline, cheaper gas, coal industry in trouble. It's all about a flood of dark money percolated to the surface in the form of what these politicians are now saying. It's a Citizens United flood that doesn't discriminate, a saturation strategy to buy any politician across the gerrymandered nation who will serve the oil and gas industry. They are out in force now championing the desires of their masters.

And they could care less if the pipeline crosses every major tributary, and every major aquifer, west of the Mississippi River.

Arizona's 'rugged individualism,' demythologized, reveals a Southwestern civilization on life support

     Exposing a myth is easy enough to do. Just takes a little research. But to eradicate it from the state of Arizona's group-think, liberating the masses into a real-world view, well, that's really pissing in the wind. This comes to me after creeping all over the web for research on Arizona's bad ol' political argument between members of the GOP who want to be governor. It's a nasty fight. The weapons are idiotic campaign commercials, usually aired around the "news" hour, that period of the day when television viewers are dipped into the shallow waters of the local newsreaders, and then, fully prepped, sent into the slick furies of the national network news.
     In between, as if the actual reports aren't propaganda enough, viewers have been inundated all summer with pretty much the same campaign commercials, over and over, with little variation ... let's face it, neo-cons aren't real well known for having a lot of imagination, variety not being the spice of conservative life ... and even the GOP party boss in the state has had enough, asking the candidates to cut it out, the negatives are too amplified. Guess he was afraid the voters might be hard to deprogram after months and months of this, and the presumptive Democrat, Fred DuVal might win.
     The point is, one Republican candidate, Doug Ducey, is accused of getting a government bailout due to the failure rates and financing, in general, for his Cold Stone ice cream franchises. Another candidate, Christine Jones, is on the commercial repeat mode over sending "Obama the bill" for border enforcement. And how either political advertisements jibe with the truth hardly matters in this, the age of repeat something often enough and it becomes true. This Orwellian reinvention of the past, over time, can get a little maddening. For myself it got so bad, it didn't even take a political commercial to put me over the edge (that is, to inspire an extended commentary). Nope, it was an ice cream commercial that boasted Arizonans are "fiercely independent."
     That's a load of crap. A common mistake about the West, in general. The American Southwest owes its very civilization to the federal government. And Arizona is completely on life support in myriad ways. For example, without water from the Central Arizona Project, a federal project carrying water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson, such cities would have never grown to blob status. Before that was built, before Arizona was even a state, the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 set up the possibility of raising federal funds for irrigation projects across the West. Because the Southwest is a drought-dry desert, and anyone who lives there is essentially receiving only slightly less life support than what's needed on the moon.

     But you really have to worry when the Washington Times, founded by a strange South Korean cult leader, and  is therefore as cranky and dilute, intellectually, as an inflatable pig, starts to pay attention to western politics. Such was the case when the online opinion editor Monica Crowley wrote on July 16, 2014, that the American West is "a region that remained most faithful to the nation's founding principles of personal freedom, rugged individualism and economic freedom." Clearly, as she raised the ghosts of Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and their rejections of "Big Government," the opinion editor for has seen too many John Wayne movies. Arizona born, but raised in New Jersey, her vision of the West is nothing short of infantile. In addition to being legally blonde for the right-wing newspaper in Washington D.C., Crowley also is a "foreign affairs analyst" for FOX News. Analysis, off these shores, no doubt inspired by Rambo fantasies. Because the truth is, regardless of the Orwellian pipeline of the right, leans more toward the reality that politicians will pretty much kill for their piece of the federal pie.
     For example, in 2011 Cronkitenewsonline.com reported "Federal funds flowing to Arizona have doubled in the past 10 years." Citing the U.S. Census Bureau, the report states "Arizona residents, governments and businesses received $64 billion in federal money in fiscal 2010, more than double what the state received in 2001 ." (This year it was reported that Arizona ranked 10th in the nation for federal funds.)
      That amounts to $10,080 per person in Arizona. The national average is $10,460.
      "The biggest increase in federal funds to Arizona over the past decade was not in salaries or welfare payments, but in federal grants to the state and to local jurisdictions, which grew from $5.4 billion in 2001 to $14.4 billion (in 2010)," the report states, a 164 percent increase that occurred while the state's population grew 20 percent, from 5.3 million people to 6.4 million. The very notion that Arizona is "fiercely independent" doesn't score very high when, according to Ballotpedia.org, the state is No. 8 in the nation in terms of federal aid to state budgets, more than Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. The very notion that these staunch tax resisters live out in the boonies, far from the corporate city enclaves of Phoenix and Tucson must be dispelled when seven of 14 Arizona counties are above the national average in terms of receiving federal funds. The largest is Cochise County in southern Arizona, which receives $23,531.74 per capita.
      How this could be is the root of the myth of the West as somehow being some kind of island of do-it-yourself virtues, and also helps to explain why Arizona continues to breed such weird political animals. All kinds of ironies persist. State residents, consisting mainly of conservatives and so-called "independents" are unhinged from the truth by politicians playing either a pretty cynical game, or, are so dyslexic over the state's real history they have merely swallowed the Kool-Aid. The truth is out there, somewhere far in the southwestern deserts of the state, waiting to explode like some kind of unexploded ordnance on the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range, 1.9 million acres of bomb targeted rock and dust roughly the size of Connecticut (so be forewarned Yankees). Yes, Arizona's elected are pretty strong on defense, the largest portion of the federal budget, and, a huge part of Arizona's economy.
     When asked about why Cochise County receives $23,531.74 per capita, the finance director for the county, according to the Cronkitenewsonline.com report, "attributed the disproportionately high federal purchases and salary payments in the county to the Fort Huachuca Army Base there." In addition to that southernmost point surveillance and communications post, the cities of Phoenix and Tucson are also on the life support systems offered by the military industrial complex, And it has come to the point that it's more than just doing what's right for national defense. For example, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) did gymnastics to land the $1 trillion F-35 aircraft training site at Luke Air Force Base, despite once calling the program's price tag "one of the great national scandals."
     McCain was in no mood for mythmaking when he told AZ Capitol Times that "potential defense spending cuts could cost thousands of jobs and $3 billion to the state's economy." Yes, it takes a little manure to make the grass green, and rainmaker McCain did all that he could to plow the field. He inserted $14.3 million in a 2003 defense bill so Sun Cor Development could get its way to buy 122 acres around Luke Air Force Base. At the time, McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers explained the senator "wanted to prevent the Pentagon from closing Luke." (That worked out okay, but Sun Cor went belly up in 2012.)
     Indeed, pork knows best. According to Forbes, as a percentage of GDP, Arizona is among the top 10 states (ranked No.8), receiving nearly three percent of all defense spending, $2,321 per resident. Tucson is among the top 10 for military spending or contracts, receiving $4.9 billion per year. The entire state accounts for 96,000 jobs, $9.1 billion in annual economic output and $401 million in state and local taxes. It's no wonder that politicians (even democrats) defend this militaristic welfare system even when, for example, the brass is saying it doesn't need the aging A-10 Warthog attack planes anymore, they will lobby and legislate to keep the funds coming in for another year.
    Yes, the myth is easy to dispel but hard to eradicate. As Phoenix Business Journal political reporter Mike Sunnucks wrote, "Despite its conservative politics, Arizona has always been a huge beneficiary of federal spending."
     Show us a candidate who believes success in business entitles them to an elected post and I'll show you a politician who has found ways to make government work for themselves. And show us an opponent opposed to Big Government, and I'll show you a politician afraid to speak out against the defense budget. Yes, when the mists of myth clear, the storm still rolls on.

The Day the Tornado 
Struck the Burbs 
in the Arizona Desert

Yesterday came suddenly, sang Paul McCartney all those years ago. I was 12 years old, no doubt watching "Wallace and Ladmo." Little beep, beep, beeps went up on the TV screen (if those weather system warnings on the bulletin bar on the bottom screen actually worked like that, back then). Hard to remember ...

I had just moved from Texas to the Country Estates subdivision at 58th Place and Shea Boulevard six days before. On the seventh day, the rain came.

Well, not so much rain. At least, not at first. The details of that day still linger. The visual impact the storm of 1972 created is still in my expressions better than any DVD could possibly replicate. More than 40 years ago now. Imagine. See it. Feel it. Almost smell it. The ozone in the days of Oz!

Back then a new plat in the Country Estates subdivision was like a cookie-cutter parcel of the moon. Sure, there was mesquite all over, but once the fences sliced-and-diced the place, all of the new back yards were, until the landscaper arrived, squared-off hotbeds of fine whitish, powdery dust. On that day or any other, the dust would get stirred up into swirls of volatile air, called "Dust Devils."

Arizona still gets "Dust Devils" now and then, but with the paradising effect that's gone on since these bad 'ol days, the name is being lost with all of the horny toads, rattlers and coyotes running for cover from civilization. Suddenly, it gets windy. Then, it's not. You'd hardly notice it. But on that day, June 22, 1972, the whole greater Paradise Valley area, basically the Indian Bend Wash basin, from Mummy Mountain to the McDowell Mountains, was a whirling set of such dervishes, a practical ballet performance, as weather patterns go.

Anyway, I tell this story to newcomers to Arizona a lot because it teaches something about the monsoons (which this wasn't) and the history of Scottsdale (a lost great body of knowledge that exists, if it exists at all, in the archives of the old Scottsdale Progress and the Scottsdale Historical Society).
The story doesn't actually begin with myself watching "Wallace and Ladmo," the old TV kids show, but with what I was doing when I came home as I was watching Wallace, and, of course, Ladmo.

He was mad about something, dad was. Not Ladmo and his Lincoln-esque top hat, where is Waldo shirt. He was upset, you see, because he just got back from talking to some insurance agent. The story begins when my dad said, right after coming through the door: "They wanted us to buy flood insurance. Those (bleeps!). Don't they know this is the desert?"

Country Estates is on the northern banks of the Indian Bend Wash. With the exception of a few golf courses, as it flowed to the Salt River, it was still a desert wash with mesquite and sage and rabbits and mice and prairie dogs. In the spring, lots and lots of butterflies. When it rained, even the slightest, downtown Scottsdale would be in need of Noah's Ark.

The next start of the story, after the beeping TV warning, after my dad's now famous last words, flows in this direction: Hail stones, the size of golf balls, plopping, puft, puft, puft, into super-heated, white hot dust. Then the wind came. Then came some more. Every dot of dust and debris not tied down flew by sideways by the windows, as if the Creator were converting the new suburban environment into something akin to a black day on Mars.

The roof began to wail. Fences picked up and were lifted off as wind sails in a scene from the black-and-white segment of "The Wizard of Oz."

Then, I look out the window, and saw a tower, a dirt vortex, well up into the sky, up and out of the frame, cascading off nearby Mummy Mountain.

Now, even before this, tornadoes have freaked me out. Sure, Dorothy's little house-spin into the air, up and back and down into Oz, always left a strong impression. But also this: Members of his grandfather's immediate family, including his mother and father, had been killed by a tornado in West Texas (and he had to raise his younger siblings by himself as a teen). So, fear of tornadoes is pretty much in the DNA.

So, what did I do? Run? Scream? Duck and cover? No. I decided to go outside and get a better view. Went through the front door. Looked up. It was a big, brown, swirling behemoth. Or, that's what the eyes, as dust bits pelted hid face and sandblasted my hair and my mother screamed "Get back in here!" - that's what my eyes still feel, see and remember.

There was no time to do the classic, heartland-style, get-into-the-cellar maneuver. No time to even get into the hallway, away from the windows. But by God's grace (as well as the seeming lack of it) the tornado hit the house across the street, destroyed a roof, killed their dog, hopped then over the entire Country Estates neighborhood, and then landed again, turning Shea Boulevard and points northward into a Vietnam era-, Robert McNamara-style playground pathway of near total destruction. Hundreds of homes had varying degrees of damage. Uncounted numbers were rendered, national-TV-news style, into images of flattened rubble.

Then, the winds passed. A half-mile away, looking toward Shea, a boulevard named after a Union General at Gettysburg, you could see nothing but the wrecked frames of bombed-out homes and flashing red emergency lights.

Then, it began to rain. In fact, it rained for a day. In fact, it rained four inches in four hours. The Indian Bend Wash became the Indian Bend River. It must have been a mile-wide muddy river, too. But our family never knew. We couldn't even step out of the door for three days as the wash, our street, now a river, flowed on by with every bit of debris and clutter it could pick up. A wash. Indeed! A major Maytag this so-called "Paradise Valley" will always be, say, every hundred years or so.

Now, we could go on and on about not having electricity or water for a week. Or, about how some official landed in a helicopter behind their house, looked around, and then left. How I believe it was the governor come to bless them with his utter and useless amazement. I could thank the Lord for sparing them but punishing the neighborhood with a kind of creative whimsy, and yes, a cosmic sense of timing and selectivity.

It was, after all, right after the first official day of the summer. You could talk about solstices and the equinox and all ...You could ask, why them, but not us? It would be futile, of course, unless you have lived it, to try to fully explain the impact of this storm on me, my family, and yes, this burgeoning city called Scottsdale. The number of times I have told this story to people:

The day we faced the tornado: I saw it in the window. Dust was blowing all around, saw it there, bigger than the black and white version in the Wizard of Oz. Him ran outside. Him remembers pinpricks of dust hitting his face and his mother screaming to get into the house. Him, big heap tornado boy, leaned into the wind. It ran hot and cold. The tornado high in view, A roof off a house down the street, and went back inside, barricaded in the hallway, or tried to, but there wasn't enough time. God knows what was running through him big father's mind because his father's family had been killed by a tornado in West Texas. All that is known is after the winds died down, after the new saplings were pulled out of the ground, after it seemed liked the wind picked up their back yard and deposited it somewhere west of their neighborhood ... the change had begun.

Oak Creek Fire

Set the silver watch

to the price being right,

the Oak Creek Canyon fire

needs to die tonight

As the rain dancers gather

for a fly above the San Francisco Peaks,

in the valleys the clouds,

seeded by puffs of purple smoke

collect and circle

to the holy resolution

for a secret peace,

the gravity running to ground,

life as electricity for a brief lease

as minotaurs tower and Kachinas

yearn to speak to lost souls

drying like water in their graves

Five miles east

wind in my face

and the fire plume,

a violet volcano

Five miles east, but close enough,

the white wash coat of burned juniper

forcing the Saturn in the nostrils,

the mountain fizzling out

in a downpour, monsoon downdrafts

blowing ash into a many shouldered beast

We went home and made a list

of what we would need when

the call for evacuation came,

craving a disaster to bring

the memory awake, the dreaming down.

Great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk

their way across the red ridge,

red with weather; precious things

shake in their cupboards, forgotten.

Lightning pounds the mesas,

the wind pushing down in atomic bundles

of white orange flasks of violence,

a curtain on the sun, a dirty window of light,

a blowout of compressed desires

pressing the sky, re-animating us

Street Sweep

Exhume the dust for me

as you go by, a symmetric stormy monster,

a dinosaur adorned in flashing alien lights

yellowing out my bedroom window

as you sneak across the road in a roar

turning up the dirt, the street sweeper

O sure, everything is allowed at the service

of the oil age, automatic as the agonized sky,

a pusher man prone to the wheeled Brontosaurus,

clouding up the gassy metrics, a ton of dunes

ruining the atmosphere already

increasingly painful to breathe

Your weekend worship of the highways and byways,

the white salts and manicured molecules

spun up by tires and thrusts and egos

turning the corners hard, the insecurities

of motorized minds, tarnishing the trashy homes

with insiders hardly aware of the poisons

foisted upon the detritus of man,

blending with throat burns and sneezes,

the polychemical wheezes for a death dance

dialed up by the need for speed,

for time machines littering the pathways

running over the civic plan lands,

creating scars on kites, noxious fumes

for birds, sick on the way to the animal hospital,

the skies gone brown, gone to paste,

the karma kills of what comes around,

goes around

All typed up in Courier,

the ink is dry as the messenger

is hung from the brittle forest

of toilet paper and trees

The ax men came by this week

and cut the lone tree on the block down;

must have been more than an half-century old,

and this typewriter is my counterweight

Stiff in the wind, drying fast as central California,

the last water is water that won't last,

and the centrifuge of the rude work crew,

hooped and howled when they chopped it down

The undeclared war on nature, represented

in this microcosm of pointless foolishness

was at the service of the power company

and the shade is gone and my heart is numb

For war is peace for satiated kings and queens

selling us sweet drinks to suck down

or the big high five with unwashed hands,

the blood and guilt gone soft

as the lost daughters and sons

circle the dead branches, the stumps left over,

speechless and mute; the shade

lost and gone as the seizure winds

crossing the mountain ranges,

stirring up heat and dust ...

Soon, they'll be begging for the stuff

from shore to stormy shore

Mythville Books on Google Radio Free Arizona  Examiner Twitter Mythville  Twitter Advocate Interactive  Bards of Mythville Son Mythville  Topical Techno 2020  Facebook As Performance Art: Parking Lot National Park  Mythville on Myspace
 Mythville Book Store Memory Echoes

 Douglas McDaniel on Linked-In

 Last Water

Oak Creek Fire

Set the silver watch

to the price being right,

the Oak Creek Canyon fire

needs to die tonight

As the rain dancers gather

for a fly above the San Francisco Peaks,

in the valleys the clouds,

seeded by puffs of purple smoke

collect and circle

to the holy resolution

for a secret peace,

the gravity running to ground,

life as electricity for a brief lease

as minotaurs tower and Kachinas

yearn to speak to lost souls

drying like water in their graves

Five miles east

wind in my face

and the fire plume,

a violet volcano

Five miles east, but close enough,

the white wash coat of burned juniper

forcing the Saturn in the nostrils,

the mountain fizzling out

in a downpour, monsoon downdrafts

blowing ash into a many shouldered beast

We went home and made a list

of what we would need when

the call for evacuation came,

craving a disaster to bring

the memory awake, the dreaming down.

Great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk

their way across the red ridge,

red with weather; precious things

shake in their cupboards, forgotten.

Lightning pounds the mesas,

the wind pushing down in atomic bundles

of white orange flasks of violence,

a curtain on the sun, a dirty window of light,

a blowout of compressed desires

pressing the sky, re-animating us

Street Sweep

Exhume the dust for me

as you go by, a symmetric stormy monster,

a dinosaur adorned in flashing alien lights

yellowing out my bedroom window

as you sneak across the road in a roar

turning up the dirt, the street sweeper

O sure, everything is allowed at the service

of the oil age, automatic as the agonized sky,

a pusher man prone to the wheeled Brontosaurus,

clouding up the gassy metrics, a ton of dunes

ruining the atmosphere already

increasingly painful to breathe

Your weekend worship of the highways and byways,

the white salts and manicured molecules

spun up by tires and thrusts and egos

turning the corners hard, the insecurities

of motorized minds, tarnishing the trashy homes

with insiders hardly aware of the poisons

foisted upon the detritus of man,

blending with throat burns and sneezes,

the polychemical wheezes for a death dance

dialed up by the need for speed,

for time machines littering the pathways

running over the civic plan lands,

creating scars on kites, noxious fumes

for birds, sick on the way to the animal hospital,

the skies gone brown, gone to paste,

the karma kills of what comes around,

goes around

All typed up in Courier,

the ink is dry as the messenger

is hung from the brittle forest

of toilet paper and trees

The ax men came by this week

and cut the lone tree on the block down;

must have been more than an half-century old,

and this typewriter is my counterweight

Stiff in the wind, drying fast as central California,

the last water is water that won't last,

and the centrifuge of the rude work crew,

hooped and howled when they chopped it down

The undeclared war on nature, represented

in this microcosm of pointless foolishness

was at the service of the power company

and the shade is gone and my heart is numb

For war is peace for satiated kings and queens

selling us sweet drinks to suck down

or the big high five with unwashed hands,

the blood and guilt gone soft

as the lost daughters and sons

circle the dead branches, the stumps left over,

speechless and mute; the shade

lost and gone as the seizure winds

crossing the mountain ranges,

stirring up heat and dust ...

Soon, they'll be begging for the stuff

from shore to stormy shore

Mythville Books on Google Radio Free Arizona  Examiner Twitter Mythville  Twitter Advocate Interactive  Bards of Mythville Son Mythville  Topical Techno 2020  Facebook As Performance Art: Parking Lot National Park  Mythville on Myspace
 Mythville Book Store Memory Echoes

 Douglas McDaniel on Linked-In

 Last Water

Street Sweep

Exhume the dust for me

as you go by, a symmetric stormy monster,

a dinosaur adorned in flashing alien lights

yellowing out my bedroom window

as you sneak across the road in a roar

turning up the dirt, the street sweeper

O sure, everything is allowed at the service

of the oil age, automatic as the agonized sky,

a pusher man prone to the wheeled Brontosaurus,

clouding up the gassy metrics, a ton of dunes

ruining the atmosphere already

increasingly painful to breathe

Your weekend worship of the highways and byways,

the white salts and manicured molecules

spun up by tires and thrusts and egos

turning the corners hard, the insecurities

of motorized minds, tarnishing the trashy homes

with insiders hardly aware of the poisons

foisted upon the detritus of man,

blending with throat burns and sneezes,

the polychemical wheezes for a death dance

dialed up by the need for speed,

for time machines littering the pathways

running over the civic plan lands,

creating scars on kites, noxious fumes

for birds, sick on the way to the animal hospital,

the skies gone brown, gone to paste,

the karma kills of what comes around,

goes around

All typed up in Courier,

the ink is dry as the messenger

is hung from the brittle forest

of toilet paper and trees

The ax men came by this week

and cut the lone tree on the block down;

must have been more than an half-century old,

and this typewriter is my counterweight

Stiff in the wind, drying fast as central California,

the last water is water that won't last,

and the centrifuge of the rude work crew,

hooped and howled when they chopped it down

The undeclared war on nature, represented

in this microcosm of pointless foolishness

was at the service of the power company

and the shade is gone and my heart is numb

For war is peace for satiated kings and queens

selling us sweet drinks to suck down

or the big high five with unwashed hands,

the blood and guilt gone soft

as the lost daughters and sons

circle the dead branches, the stumps left over,

speechless and mute; the shade

lost and gone as the seizure winds

crossing the mountain ranges,

stirring up heat and dust ...

Soon, they'll be begging for the stuff

from shore to stormy shore

Mythville Books on Google Radio Free Arizona  Examiner Twitter Mythville  Twitter Advocate Interactive  Bards of Mythville Son Mythville  Topical Techno 2020  Facebook As Performance Art: Parking Lot National Park  Mythville on Myspace
 Mythville Book Store Memory Echoes

 Douglas McDaniel on Linked-In

 Last Water

Baseball Dot Lit ...

Taking Stock of Bonds

Ten warm-up pitches

ascend ten Dante-esque

levels up the screen

behind home plate

and Barry Bonds

took a look

and his mega-salary

was mistaken for humble

and human; his life as pure ego

was at stake, make no mistake

He waved to manager Don Baylor

in the opposition dugout

in the sunny half-joke

in spring training in the desert:

hard to reason with the risk

of certain beaning

as limousine Barry

goes up to the plate, the pitch,

and Bonds does straight-into-the-air time

and lands back down to do the earth dance,

an element of fear enhanced, gets up

and his earring shines from some light

beamed from far up in the sky

since, with nobody on, there are only

so many points a ball can be thrown

through the atmosphere as the next pitch

was down the middle of the strike zone

After Bonds had swung it landed near

a western wear store west of Apache Junction:

So much for the element of surprise

Later that day at the ballpark, frankly,

Barry Bonds almost trampled my son

trying to get his autograph

and my kid said, What a jerk!

It made me so proud

Practice

How many brain-dead

baseball diamond drills

do we need to run, rookie?

Do we need to purchase

for you an insurance policy

to protect you against

the sorcery of blurring

curves, the chin music

of mommy balls

coming in fast?

Spring training

is the hope-forming time

to scrunch scar tissue,

to test aches subtracted

from the totem death-dance

of old brown city street snow,

of writer's block shaped

into three white bases,

to take into our nostrils

the sweet fragrance of March

And after the vets have tapped

the buzzing fridge of free cokes,

turning terminal pains

into mere dietary disease,

we must line up trainer's tape

to meet and meet together

at the left-field foul pole

to intensify the muscle memories,

the heated up PFP, PFP, PFP ...

the endless ritual

of pitcher-to-first,

pitcher taking the lob,

spiking the bag

This is how we practice

each thin temporal moment,

experience to ascribe antidotes

for thoughtlessness into decisions

because only repetition can influence

our grace before ownership's

remote octopus lens

so if we can make it to October,

if we get lucky,

maybe you'll thank me

So don't be a loud-mouthed rook

wasted for higher purposes

beyond the reasoning of mere mortals

Don't talk back to me!

Don't think to much!

It's bad for everyone concerned

Don't carouse with wild women

sent to stand on your bases

and don't talk money with me

We pay you plenty

and candy comes after

Because I knew John McGraw

Who fussed himself silly

Made teammates enemies

But they played great

Despite his tyrannical self:

Gawd how I loved his glare,

like Joe Torrie's blank stare;

a poker face almost saying, man,

I loathe baseball, I wanna go home

I heard stories about such skips:

See, this pitcher, this catcher,

they hate each other, so they throw

harder and harder to each other

and surely at some point

there's got to be a limit,

a point where their palms

turn red, maybe even bleed

until all innings end, unforgiven

By the time they get back

to the bench they are screaming

at each other so ol' skipper

comes over, spits, and says,

"Okay boys, you go back

into your pretty clubhouse

and have at it. May the worst

man win. I'll warm up Johnson

and Mack, get the equipment on."

So the two embattlers

go behind closed doors

and end up killing each other

The general manager calls

new recruits up from Triple-A

to replace them both:

Everybody wins

My Cup of Coffee in the Majors

A shadow passes on opening day

as the umpire screens the views

of new scores coming in,

old scores settled long ago,

as the heartbeat of the homeland

counts the day's receipts

checking for signs of mischief,

as angry Aztec gods

make a point, hiring lawyers

for copyright violation,

as spring birds bunt,

turning snow into drops

of sugary sweet wine,

as the ball comes down

the third base line

with just enough gust

to push the ball foul

as ice cold beer sales

flow into the face

of forever: O sure,

I had a cup in Euphoria

but didn't stick for the Stixx

and the banks were all closed

at sunset and I couldn't

get a grip and the previous

night's bright lights

could have been a trick

Sandman

Sing a dainty dirg

for the New York Yankees,

but note the fact

the sun arose the next day

are all the victories

stand, sure as yellow sunflowers

in the fall, falling away ...

Now that the best team

money can buy needs

first aid from the tip jar

for the daily

emergency management

donut fund, the Bombers

and the Joker

are on the run,

and the gangster managers

of U.S. Banks are running

from pranks organized

by mischievous teenagers

running out of bullets

playing digital games,

the bragging rights

now a toss up into the air,

a toxic point-and-shoot affair

of agents so say it ain't so

the best team in baseball

needs to reload, since the Sandman

can no longer come in the Ninth

to ice over the Show

and those who gave a flying f ...

about football can stand

and listen to make sharp yelps

about how I'm paying my own price

with wobbly knees, posts as painful

as typhoons out of season

as we ask a Navajo woman

draped in a royal blue

Dallas Cowboys' number nine jersey

in a defense against the sound and fury

of the noise of the laundry room,

focused on her cell phone like a weapon,

a fence against the outside world,

which sends in scores and more

as the rocking horse hick drones

on about how much his Saturday morning

hangover hurts over the radio,

and neither of us can see the country

crooner because today, sponsored

Ford trucks, is the anniversary

of the day I confessed to crimes

I never committed, places I never

will see, to things I can't remember,

forces I have no knowledge of, waves

I can sense but not see, feel or hear

churning up the winds, the rains, the snows,

falling from above, pushing up from below,

in patterns beyond my science,

no longer local, just passing through,

not on the ball, like Lucy removing

the football to make me look like the fool

after your ice-cold Bud is just another

beer can on a giant empty parking lot

where gas-guzzling lads, ladies in cheerleader

uniforms are stripped, cloned and sent

on their way for a full day

of prayer and fasting, knowing:

The sports godz have had their say

Flame Delhi

You made sweat dry in the strike zone

at great, zipping distances

And the copper company in Harqua Hala

Gave you a lifetime guarantee

If you loved baseball like life

Back then

The desperate diamond of cliche and stone

Wasn't so hard on your clay feet

If you wore black-laced boots at the top

of the mound

The heat would leak out in the sunshine and fame

Screamin' your name, ol' Flame

You came to Arizona long before Prince Hal

And his black-soaked bum friends

came to play ringers,

Cheatin' ore boys outta their nickel wages

They were cruel men, never shaved

They were thirsty renegades, restless;

With neither the guts nor style

For California

But you were good, solid folk

And when seven hits in three innings pitched

Was all you could squeeze outta

the shoulder at Comiskey

You returned, the nine-point-zero hero

of Harqua Hala

Cashing in your guarantee

The company re-armed you

with an engineering degree

and you built boats boats in San Francisco Bay

To keep the boys dry during the Great War

Ballpark Receipts

Read my memorandum

regarding the way echoes

in spinning wheels across

the desert of empty words

between the lines

of the "National Anthem"

populate the aisles

at the ballpark

filled with people

lucky enough

to afford to see you

I was wondering

if I can get my quarter back

or at least a phone call

in the bullpen

to get back into the game

See the falling stars

the dead lights of stars

falling off the diamond

the millionaire stars

with big broad foreheads

stunned into silent speech

taking the fifth,

announcing asterisks

for records erased

for their little lies

the Jose Consecos twittering

their tweets in the long hall

near the dugout, ducking

the limelight to get legal advice

where Will Clark once asked:

"Can you imagine hearing that song 

one-hundred-and sixty-two times

a year?"

In the press box the muffled

crowd sounds are a continent

in sway, swinging left or right

and  a hard-boiled cynic sports writer

comments, "Just like the Branch Davidians

when you just felt as if something screwed

up is going to happen, you just know it."

Barry Bonds' last home run ball

is running, still flying around,

on sale at America, up for auction

as a foul ball strikes the plexiglass

and more dead light falls off the diamond

the entropy sponsored by Bud light

Security has been tight

at the Ballpark in Arlington

since nine-one-one, as the FBI

shanks off a few foul tips,

and home base is buried in red dirt

as the manager goes to speak

to the pitcher, who has big ears

about everything from Hollywood

to Homeland Security

as the scoreboard's eternal

motor churns and churns and churns:

"Braves two, Reds two, in the Fifth

and the apocalyptic ghost of Ty Cobb

goes on an invisible walk

to get his free suit

at five-hundred feet

and it's beginning

to look like rain

Regarding this invoice

about the day I got lost

in the dugout right

before the endgame began,

or do I have to wait

for the eternal

seventh-inning hook?

If Christy Mathiewson

refused to pitch on Sunday

why should I?

Babe Ruth

Charismatic Babe Ruth runs hard and burns,

going good on subatomic energy, good as gasoline,

the homer baby of Babylon, playing Baal

in front of the unholy fences, no longer

a young being bowing to the crowd at Fenway,

during the later years as the unberman hero

at Yankee Stadium, which he built swinging

his bat like a hammer, a mirror to his time

when photos featured haggard stares

a prima donna, manpower in his belly

raging in the rag time, taking in a plug,

feeling his impatient behemoth beneficent guilt,

his soul a razor, at war with gravity,

thinking about walking unlimited miles

to whiskey in the bars near Central Park,

searching for the living among the dead:

History comes in threes, a Roman Catholic thing,

as there are as many anti-christs

as the uncountable stars in the sky ...

O great genie, over the fence man,

a poor boy but genes set right,

his fine-tuned antenna to the natural world,

his roaring twenty appetites scorching

Victorian-styled city streets,

humming New Orleans Dixieland rags ...

all on fire, unsatisfied, kicking the clay

out of his cleats,digging his pigeon toes

into the box, pointing toward

centerfield bleacher dandies

Go ahead and ask me if it matters:

I provide power: Power! Built this damn house

and they gave me everything but wanted I wanted,

to run the team, to be free to walk alone

in the back alleys at night to speakeasies,

to get a big drink so I can forget

that blond broad's name, to remember

who really loves me, though they all say

they do, but some future historian

may suppress my true memory

in order to maintain my superman myth ...

Good thing the common folk understand everything,

that it's no great feat: I just do what feels easy

Duly warned, returning to the box, straining

to keep from scratchin', spittin', and hell,

even sweatin', and thy mind off drinkin'

Next pitch, I hit it foul, but you won't

read about it here, kindly change all

strike counts to zero ...

Did he command the universal flux

cavorting with whores along Congo Square?

Did he find his Elvis there?

Black holes subtract starlight,

animal magnetism flirting, flicking,

kissing bits with flash powder,

avoiding the good Cardinals' cathedral,

igniting the musty atmosphere,

slouching toward home plate to be born,

uttering God's inviolate immaculate

sense of a woman's softest parts,

penetrating the thin veil masking

man made laws we believe, tentatively,

to exist: He had the heart of an anarchist

Concussion Discussion: Now That the Days of Football Are Hardly Over ...

By Douglas McDaniel

This wasn't hell, and it certainly wasn't war, either. But it is one of those weekends without football, and this may cause you ... dang, what do you call it? ... stress.

Let me recall some glory daze for you ... Hope there is enough beer in the house as you read this ...

Though militarism is a big part of the entire package, from the day we first lineup in a row, in Napoleonic battle formation, to the Sunday morning salute of your favorite NFL stars when they score wearing the beautiful, localized civil war uniforms, in the bright or dark colors of the cities and states they may or may not represent until the multi-million-dollar contract to serve runs out ... It was football practice for children, for young teen males of the species.

Pop Warner football practice. I was in the eighth grade, at a tender age. And if there is one person on Earth who I hope is experiencing a big fine from the commissioner of life right now, it's this football coach who, being some kind of Vince Lombardi wannabe freak, a winning-is-everything style commander, who was was yelling at me, his face in my face mask, about my unwillingness to be all of the middle linebacker he wanted me to be: That is, someone who would stick his head into the available daylight of the line, therefore, with any luck, crashing into the oncoming ball carrier, thus bringing any ball carrier down with tremendous might, and to any more good fortune, pain. Risking my neck, naturally, not his. Not the football coach's pain, a fellow player's hurt, a teammate.

I mean, I was more of a just-give-me-the-ball and I will run-with-great-fear-from-anyone-and-anything-trying-to-hurt-me-that-way-sort-of-a-player. It was just not nice to hit the solidified, rock-hard, ground-down and dirt -of-the-desert practice fields in the water-short state of Arizona.

No, I wanted to fly. Painlessly. Over the rock and dust and stupidity of mankind. Especially the bullying kind.

"Are you a pussy? Are you a pussy?," Mr. Whistle screamed into my face mask. This is what my parents were getting tonight in the glowing red and purple and orange duskiness of the southwestern sky for the Pop Warner fees they paid for me to experience this disgracing and dressing down by a crazed lunatic dad with a whistle. I remember his name now. Same as a famous Republican politician. Yeah, he needed a big fine from the commissioner of life. That's what I want now, with interest. And if I got the hear-ye, hear-ye of this type today of that dirty-bastard-with-a-whistle's scold, I would go South African dance style into that brilliance of the evening, a wildly moving ever lengthening shadow moving to the music of dream time, an emergent angel quite satisfied by news of the event.

I mean, there I was, my manhood being challenged by this asshole, and I'd barely even entered puberty to that point. Am I a pussy? What kind of question was that? He had no right to challenge my manhood. I was just a boy with beard growing each day that I was still quite uncomfortable with. I didn't even know what pussy was, for that matter. Some kind of cat thing, much less a word to inspire much motivation for the likes of me.

"Are you a pussy? Are you a pussy?" I can still see him, there, now, forty long years later. "Are you a pussy!"

What would I answer if I could stand in that spot, knowing what I do now today? After a knee surgery from playing in high school. The other creaking hurtfully on cold winter days. Numerous concussions suffered at an age barely conceiving of the the damage that might be the entropy of what I am as a half-century old man, limping around, clearly unable to fly? All for football, which I loved, back then. Not now.

What would I say? It would be this ...

"Well, coach, during the kickoff at the last game we played, there was a serious incident that occurred. Maybe you noticed. Maybe you didn't. In the case of the latter let me try to explain it to you. We kicked the ball to them, right, and then the two lines for the return and defense of that action began. Running as fast as they can, they collide. Usually, this occurs, as far as we have been told by medical science, without too much incident. But, to me, especially looking at it now under these here lights at Paradise Valley high school as we practice, this is definitely not the case.

So let me explain further and maybe we can come to some kind of agreement. What happened at this particular kickoff collision, there was a big clash, and a kid on the other side,  a child under the age of eighteen years old, started mooning and swooning and groaning like a wild, quite insane, dumb pig. Or, better yet, cow's confused "moo, moo." It was the sound of a young athlete whose brains had apparently been smashed in, and I believe the term might be familiar to you as this: He had received a concussive blow, and now he was running, crookedly, to the wrong sideline, confused and looking for someone to help him.

Do you remember? Can we ever forget? Well, tonight, being a pussy and all, I can. And so, for the better part of the night, as you ask me to stick my own head into the line, as your appointed middle linebacker trying to fulfill your Vince Lombardi dreams, as you live vicariously, through me, I must give this here scene all pause, for a little bit of time, my own motivations, lack of enthusiasm, and so on, to avoid having the same kind of thing happen to me.

Now, if you would like, I can just give you my helmet, and you can put it on, and you can stick your, or your child's own head into that hole to smash it into the oncoming ball carrier. Then we'll see how that goes. Okay?

In fact, here: Give me the ball. Don't just look at me like some kind of time-stooge. Give the ball. Give me the damn ball! Okay, here's my helmet (a trade that helps both teams, so to speak). Now I'll just walk to the other side of this here line drawn in the sand on the sun-punished ground at this north Phoenix high school. Next, I'll just have the center hike the ball to me. Then, you chase me around. Try and catch me. Since I run out of fear and you are old and slow; here, apparently, to fulfill some false notion of parental volunteerism, trying to live out your failed dream of being a college or, no (can it be?) NFL coach, you can just have the time of your life. You'd probably love smashing kids half your size, anyway.

Because I can tell you one thing: People like you scare the shit out of me. That's motivation enough. And before you completely ruin my passion for the game, maybe I can ease this harsh meme about the kid last week who lost his mind, who had to go to the hospital, in fact, due to his concussion. This will be done by my running away from you. Out of fear. Because, quite frankly, I find getting tackled quite inconvenient. If you do stick your head in that hole, well, good luck to you, then you will butt heads with your own son, who you have made center.

Meanwhile, I will be weaving, duking, moving fast around you, running by, not through people. Eyes one way, body, the other, quick at the cut. More like the cavalry rider, I suppose, in a military battle, as opposed to sick pawns in the drama of the bread-and-circuses commandos of life like you!

~

My earliest memory in life exists on film, a wall image projected in the 1960s in the family home, as a family movie, and I was a kind of crazed child actor, both a musician and an athlete, as a tyke dancing around, a spinning dervish, a handful, for sure.

Well, I can't remember the actual so good. It's the concussions, maybe. But when I was very tiny, I used to run around the house with an Easter egg thingy that made music like an organ grinder. I apparently could walk at a very early age. Hyper as hell. Must have driven my parents nuts with this organ grinder Easter egg thingy. So I'd dance like I needed special drugs to stay sad, crash into chairs and tables and walls, turning the egg, shaped like a football.

How did I know about football? Must have been on black-and-white television, most certainly. Apparently, as my mother told me, I was in a shopping basket at the grocery store. A little tyke, still, obviously. I saw this big African-American man. I blurted out, "Look, mommy! Football player." She was pretty embarassed about that. But this was in the north part of the city in Arizona. He probably was a football player. Such intolerant sunshine states barely tolerbrate a minority who isn't in a sporting uniform ... in the service of the military-sports-capitalist-commando-complex.

I'm quite sure I showed no interest in the game while we lived in the desert suburb built north of Phoenix in an area known as Deer Valley from 1960 to about 1968 or '69. I played baseball in little league, but I had no idea what I was doing out there. The whole idea of someone throwing a round rock in my direction terrified me, quite frankly. I used my dad's old four-fingered glove, which was flat as a pancake. My dad had used it in the 1940s. It was some relic. The other kids had five-fingered gloves. So my parents weren't too knowledgeable about athletics, either. No, we were a family of readers, math-wise marching band geeks, we McDaniels were.

But I must have had some special gifts, being able to walk early and all. I remember putting on catcher stuff in little league practice once. Then, I climbed up this fence at Shady Glenn Elementary School, out there on the edges of the desert in this neighborhood in north Phoenix, where there was nothing built north of our home, and got some laughs from the coaches when I climbed the backstop fence and acted like a monkey fool.

Then, during a game, one of my first, I was put out in center field and someone hit a ball in the air to me. I caught it with that frayed four-fingered pancake mitt. People started clapping and yelling. I had no idea why. Such things are considered a small miracle at those pre-T-ball ages. Usually outfielders were disinclined kids afraid of ground balls. When the game was over my parents were overjoyed at my heroism, but still I had no clue. They said I'd made an "out." I'm quite sure my first thought was, oh, that doesn't sound good. But they said, no, it was amazing. They were so proud.

As far as I can remember this was the first time I'd achieved anything in my life. It felt like a sunshine smile inside to be recognized like that.

~

It was a dream and I was late, walking across a barren urban landscape in my football uniform. My helmet was on ... Polo palace ... offensive line as a chain gang, pushing and pulling. A few people watched in lawn chairs. The skill players had no uniforms, and only seemed to be there as stars on the move played to a small audience of people in folding chairs ... They artfully acted out the old ritual and dance of the game like it was some kind of museum piece on a post-apocalyptic set. The skyline of Phoenix was broken, like a ruin, with a lot of cleared-out space around, looking like London a few years after the Blitz ...

~

Then, we moved to Dallas. It was the late 1960s. We lived in this much bigger house in North Dallas and this neighbor had something called a "Cowboy Antenna" on his roof and those people were the envy of the cul-de-sac. We still knew nobody in the area and when a family member came to visit us we were driving in the car and they asked us if we were going to become Dallas Cowboys' fans. We all said together, "No way!." Coming from Phoenix, which had no professional team, we were drowned into incredulity at what became of people who had become sports fanatics. The obsession was strange.

But then we got a free Dallas Cowboy sticker with the star as a gas station giveaway. My mother gave it to me. Then, we went to the gas station again and they gave us a Dallas Cowboys drinking glass. My mother gave it to me. From that point, it was all over. The glass had the old-school Cowboys image of the 'poke riding a horse on one side, the silver Lone Star. I drank, and it was as if I'd become enchanted. At that point in my life, the only other thing that really moved me was the song "Help!," by the Beatles. We listened to their music at my next door neighbor's house. We'd listen to the Beatles, and then, Led Zeppelin's first album, which, to me at first listen, sounded like a bad car crash. But still music had made much more sense to me.

Now, my parents were obviously quite concerned with me from the day I was born, since I was a breach birth. I couldn't do much as a little tyke but play in the dirt, catch lizards and put them in coffee cans or dance around like a damn fool with a musical Easter egg. Apparently, they were amazed I'd be able to read or speak much so I had some kind of learning disabilities that appeared to be a mystery to everyone. To reverse this frustrating problem to my parents who, on my dad's side, was a brainy computer engineer, and my mom, a wannabe librarian, they bought me books if I showed interest in anything: Dinosaurs, World War II, whatever ... I kept this fascination and stirring I felt at the first notes of "Help!" quite secret. I was quite sure my quite arch-conservative parents from deep south Texas wouldn't be buying me any books about those guys. Once, when we were waiting for my dad to come out of work at the General Electric plant in Phoenix we heard over the radio that one of the band members, John Lennon, had said they were bigger than Jesus or something like that. Nope, I was pretty sure to keep quiet about all of that music stuff. It seemed to get my dad all riled about when we watched the Ed Sullivan Show and saw all of these hippies playing crazy music. Yeah, at I was at least smart enough to stay mum in that category. Didn't want to get slapped for it.

But when I showed an interest in football, my mom started buying me all of these books about football. Indeed, I was reading about it well before I was actually playing it with the kids out on our front lawn in the cul-de-sac in north Dallas ... Heroic stories about the stars of the game like Gale Sayers, Jim Brown, Johnny Unitas and Jim "Night Train" Lane. So that's how I learned how to read.

But I still wasn't very good in sports. I hated baseball. Hitting was always an awkward experience and I'm pretty sure I didn't start hitting the ball until well into my teens. Once my parents bought me these black plastic cleats and when I was out there on the field my feet would bake and I couldn't figure out what was going on beneath that hot Texas sun. God, how I hated little league well into, say, the fourth grade. In fact, I pretty much hated any social activity I was drafted into by my parents. I hated wearing my Cub Scouts' uniform to school. I would strike out on purpose. But I did start to show some knack for games, imaginary play and playing the saxophone, which I lugged to school each day: hated that, too, of course. To this day I believe I was destined to become a musician, but that never really happened. A wasted life, most assuredly, I was being led astray by an athletics mad world! My most prized possession was a small box transistor radio where I would listen to FM music late at night, quite secretly, of course.

~

I came along in my football uniform, and continued across wide urban fields, like old wrecked Detroit, to find a small, but colosseum-like structure, where the stairs led into the core of the Earth, with multiple layers connected by twirling stairwells. At each level, two things were evident. The first was an incredible number of beautiful women leading crowds to two things, healthy food and strip club venues ... simulations for Ford truck driving commercials ... intravenous beer commercial substitutes ... People constantly telling me I'm late ... A song, anthem really, intended as a tune to cure football madness ... This wasn't a game on. It was some kind of mass therapy session.

~

However, when I think about it, I had an incredible winning percentage, in football, lifetime. The first teams I played for were fifth- and sixth-grade teams in Dallas: at F.P. Callet Elementary School, on the north side of town. I had learned to play football with the neighborhood kids on the cul-de-sac we lived on, and I had become a huge Dallas Cowboys fan, even keeping a scrap book of photographs for the team's 1970 and '71 Super Bowl seasons, and learning more by playing a dice-oriented strategy football game featuring teams for previous years produced (sponsored) by Sports Illustrated. I would play these games for hours with my brother, my friends, and when they weren't obsessed enough I'd create whole leagues, keeping statistics of my own, by myself. In addition there were cool strategy games featuring card overlays back then, with little devices to create variables once produced by dice, to offer more spontaneity. So by the time I was eleven or twelve years old, I was a regular Tom Landry, mastermind innovator football coach for the Cowboys, in my own mind.

But I had to really work to make my second great achievement in life occur. That is, to get noticed enough to stay off the bench. Since we were new in town, having moved to Dallas from Phoenix in the late 1960s, I didn't have many friends or peer support despite looking great in football pads. Nobody knew who I was, and I had difficulty speaking. Shy. Not showing much interest in classes, and during this age of confusion in Dallas, with schools moving African-American teachers into classes, and my fellow students showing a parental fondness for their parents' extreme right-wing values, being abusive to the teacher of my beloved music classes, who were black, and feeling of extreme confusion about the whole deal, embarrassed for the whole scene, how ugly it was becoming, how I wished the kids would stop being so mean to my music teachers, who were really knowledgeable about the topic, seemed to me, and me being so polite, as I was being so raised by my parents. I hated my classmates, who were, if I understood anything at all, being raised to become lifetime bigots ... Anyhow, no great achievements in life were going to occur at F.P. Callet by 1970 under these social conditions, and if not for the coming of the Three Dog Night hit, "Joy to the World," coming on my little transistor radio, I might have become someone who had no hope at all, as opposed to someone who would probably need special drugs to say sad ...

Okay, where was I? Oh yeah, great achievements ... We would play football all day on the curved grass lawns of out on the neighborhood cul-de-sac, using the equally arched sidewalks leading to our big brown-bricked houses, for goal line markers. And, consequently, as we landed on them to score, somewhat ambivalent to pain. Which is necessary in life, in general, I've found. Anyhow, I was learning to catch and throw and block and tackle and all, at an age when injuries other than scraped knees from scoring were rare, and by the time I was in the fifth grade I was one of the best players on the block, being damned fast as a runner, a peculiar commodity, that, in terms of pre-teen life male values, on my block. I ran out of fear, of course, getting tackled being inconvenient. And from reading my books about Calvin Hill and Gale Sayers and Jim Brown, figured out if I stepped one way, looking that way, too, then going the other, tacklers would tend to fall flat on their faces, and I would thus be saved ...

But when I joined the fifth-grade team, the coaches were in no way planning on giving this nerdy, shy, quiet kid the ball. Since I was bigger than other kids my age, and I had been given football pads bought at Sears that had a neck pad to prevent backlashes, was being bred as a young offensive lineman and defensive tackle. This was fine with me, since I loved Bob Lilly, the future Hall of Famer, No. 74, for the Cowboys. However, I wasn't named to the first team at first, even though I was first chair as a saxophonist, and the dichotomy of these two worlds seemed pretty as above, not so below to me. Finally, I went home and wept about it to my mother and she responded with a strange story about my dad. She said it was okay for men to cry. In fact, she had been surprised to find my dad crying when she came into the room while he was watching the funeral ceremony after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Thinking about it now, I could see why that was a marked moment for my mother. My dad, coming from deep south Texas, was arch-conservative and used to take me around our north Dallas and Phoenix neighborhoods as tykes to do door-to-door campaigning for Barry Goldwater (who we called "Goldwahwee," apparently, as kids, my brother and I).

Next, being consoled about this strange political fable, my mother bought me yet another football book. It was written by Bud Wilkinson, the big winning football coach for Oklahoma, and featured detailed instructions, with diagrams, for every football action imaginable, including how to kill a guy by tackling low.

Suitably informed, I can remember the practice ... a bright sunny day in Dallas. We were doing tackling drills and I correctly, Bud Wilkinson style, picked up a kid much larger than I, throwing him to the ground, flattened and weeping. I can remember laying there. On my back. Quite satisfied. And I was looking up at the heavenly sun, the coach looked down on me, a silhouette with a whistle. He was smiling, obviously amazed. "Who are you?", he said. I said my name. He pulled me up. From that point, for the rest of my organized life of playing football, I was a starter.

That F.P. Callet team, during the two seaons I played there, only lost one game, an across-town match in west Dallas in the rain. They had a big tall and fast kid who couldn't be caught. So I faced loss only once in Texas: a career 20-and-one record as a Texan. Then, as a freshman at Chaparral High School, our team went 8-1-1. We went 6-4 as I moved on as a sophomore/junior squad ... (for now I will skip until later my junior and senior years for the big juicy part to come later) ... (The, you know, "dazed and confused" as an KISS and Aerosmith fan part of the late 1970s) ... in college, as a member of a flag football team for an ad hoc group of students built from an apartment-dorm complex of athletes, a team called the Dark Shadow Bears we only lost the championship game to an ROTC team who (we were all convinced) had glued his flags on and ran up and down the field, impervious to us. The cheaters! It was like some bad out-take from "Animal House," that game.

~

At the bottom of the staircase, the game is on. And I'm terribly late for my date, all dressed up in my uniform, and the two-minute warning is on ... and it still looks like there are all kinds of barriers to the underground field. From the concourse view of the dream, the whole stadium seemed to be underground.

~

I think, in fact, I'm pretty sure, special drugs were needed for me to become a loser in sports ... But for all that in college stuff, I need to add this. Far as I can recall, I got two "A" grades as a student at the University of Arizona. One was for my first poetry writing course. The second, for a late flag football class that I took as a senior because I forgot all about that P.E. requirement before graduating. I broke my left arm in that damned class, which never did heal right. Just before that, on that day in Tucson, across the common ground from Wildcat stadium, I had demonstrated a special skill: The ability to, as a blitzing defensive back, rush the quarterback and intercept the ball just as he was releasing the pass. I had been practicing that one in the back yard for many, many years successfully, but never in "official" play. But on that day, I did it and scored! About fifteen minutes later, I went high in the air again, feeling the juice, and crashed down on my arms, feeling stunned, queasy and sick from the shock. Broke my arm. I never went back to that class, too busy as a young man with two stories to write every day for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, or a period where I was an intern at the Tucson Citizen paper, to go back, with the classload of a senior, to tell the P.E. teacher what had happened. But when I found out I wasn't going to be able to graduate without being able to reconcile that issue, I went back to the flag football coach, reminded him of my great interception play ... Great Accomplishment in Sports Life No. 3 ... and he said, remembering: "Obviously, you get an 'A'."

So ended my organized football career. Enter, the age of the pencil and pen. And for thirty years as a journalist, in the places I worked, I couldn't sneak up on anybody if I was walking down the wall behind them since the surgery I had for my knee as a senior included a metal staple that over the years began to click with each step ... The left wrist injury I incurred my senior season of P.E. at the University of Arizona didn't heal right, and worse, happened when I was doing a stint as an intern at the Tucson Citizen during which I typed for a couple of months with a cast on my left arm. And so, to this day, I have a unique way of typing with one full right hand, and one finger on the left hand ... I try to remember all of the concussions I've had, but I have trouble with the count ... the best thing I do is write poetry, if only because I'm able to empty my head and pour it all out ... stream of consciousness type stuff ... about such things as, say, the horrors of trying to take in, from 2,500 miles away, as broadcast over the airwaves, the toxic commercialism of an event for a major sport ...

~

Now I'm watching the 48th Super Bowl on television, Denver Broncos versus the Seattle Seahawks, and I'm watching commercials and fast cuts to this and surreal that, the maudlin, militaristic pre-game ceremony and there's one of forty or so faces for the game's eventual winner, Seattle's star defensive back Richard Sherman. He's all pumped up for "The National Anthem," swaying this way and that, and to the "rocket's read glare"," sung by some Wagnerian opera singer, and all I can think about is that "rough beast" from the W.B. Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming." The last I'd seen his face, he was screaming at the world with post-game madness about how so-and-so had dissed him on the last play of the NFC Championship game. In a moment of pure emotion, he was so animal wild the FOX sports interviewer lady holding the microphone seemed to be forced backwards by the bad breath of this supposedly happy man. No, he wasn't going to Disneyland, or, thanking the good lord and his teammates and of course the fans of his team, known as the 12th Man for being so loud at around 107 decibels during each home game, with the single-eyed hawk on the helmet. He was still caught up in the ecstasy of his violent craft. Right then, I knew, he would become a national icon for these fearful times on social media.

For that moment, he was the image of the NFL, which had stamped its fascistic logo on the face of the world for the Super Bowl now.

During th pre-game hype section of the game, a four-hour stretch, FOX News leading pulpit bully, known as Poppa Bear, Bill O'Reilly, had been give the rare opportunity to interview U.S. President Barack Obama. O'Reilly launched into him, pestering him about Obamacare, the assassination of the U.S. Ambassador in Libya in 2013. It wasn't an interview as much as an attempted mugging of the so-called leader of the free world, and it seemed to be a super-weird thing to put on the air for pre-game hoopla of a football game. But Obama was cool, collected, obviously well-prepared to act like and adult before this angry old man trying to play gotcha, when did you know this, when did you know that type stuff, like some pre-programmed angry bot rehearsed by FOX News main man Roger Ailes, who had just had an unauthorized book written about him titled "The Loudest Man in the Room." All the president had to do was find the right moment, matching this invective of rude, talk-over the answer questioning, typical for FOXNews broadcasts for Poppa Bear, to outclass the media star goon squad dude for the limitations of its right-wing propaganda pipeline, led by a man, Ailes, who was at one point in his lifetime, was inspired by the Nazi film director for Adolph Hitler, Leni Reifenstahl.

And then, after that half-hour or so of televised disconnect, of all-out cognitive dissonance, we are brought back to the big game to come ... there's commercial for a new "Captain America" movie ... salutes to the troops wired together to solemn interviews with players, mom, apple pie, the usual ... the usual Orwellian display for nation that has obviously lost its collective mind.

Though this has been one of the worst winters the country has ever experienced, the ice storm of the century has been called off for the day, with the temperature in the 50s at game time, leading one FOXsports announcer to say, "The NFL has given a stiff arm to mother nature."

~

A new Radioshack is on the Blitzkrieg of the teevee now, and the over-the-counter culture is propagandized as cognitive dissonance of the times ... And now we are back ... amused to death ... my eyes are bleeding and then there's a pass ... and then Denver seems zombified at the lower altitudes, as 1984 is beamed into our homes and the ghosts of the Super Bowls past crawl out of the turf and we are all underground now, dead as drunk daisies ... It's 15-0, Seattle with 12 minutes left in the second quarter ... and what's supposed to be the greatest game ever played, as they all are, is a wash: Twenty-two skiddoo by the time Denver quarterback Peyton Manning is intercepted for a teedee ... More from Jeep Cherokee and then later, Bob Dylan has his own commercial too, for Chrysler, selling out, it seems (or is he giving us a message for the rebellion to come), singing from deep inside the matrix to the backing track for his song, "I Used to Care, But Things Have Changed" ... the money-bound creative directive covering the Earth remains ... the extra point is, is ... good!

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