Juche

A lump of clay, a nation, a young person. A philosophy, a temperament, an environment. We all have to start out somewhere. The stage is set. Some turn to friends. Others to learning, maybe clubs and activities, becoming leaders and followers. And invariably there are those of us that turn into ourselves.

Juche ideology has been dubbed as North Korea’s middle finger to the world. Melodious chants that decry America notwithstanding, they’re in it for the haul, going it alone in Orwellian bliss. Proles starve if they can avoid the work camps and the Pyongyang privileged justify it for the cause. Outsiders cannot partially-photograph the Great Leader’s graven image as people cry out in worship before him like a tent full of holy rollers. Ahh but we all have to start out somewhere.

The green idealist, naive, intellectual yet insecure and socially unmotivated, with an appetite for apathy, is no stranger to the ol’ bunker hunker in a world that doesn’t get it, with little more to offer than sneers and grinning idiots with their lameass comments.

At church they tried, more or less, to teach us the righteous path, yet, in the end the choices are all our own.

Sometimes even those who love you don’t have the full picture.

Sometimes we bite the hand that feeds us.

Sometimes we throw out the baby with the bathwater.

After all, how would the Wizard of Oz have turned out had Toto never gotten curious about what's behind the green curtain?

Every revolution needs a leader, even an unlikely one standing at 5-foot- something. Purge the dissidents. All associations deemed a threat to her reich were hereby annulled. Funny how surrealism takes a while to sink in.

I had gone into isolation a few years before so why not now? Sure is hard to live in the moment when your head is so well furnished.

Dad took a video during a snowstorm just after Christmas, and as the eyes witness it piling up outside the ears get a conversation with my mom, oh how confused and withdrawn I had become. Later on he evidently asks me to climb atop a two-cord stack of firewood and throw some off for the garage. Ground zero in the year with two eights. It’s all over my face, wincing to aim for the pile eight feet below, within eyeshot of someone’s house that I had betrayed just a month earlier, carelessly opting instead to place my trust in someone who had simply not yet earned it.

I answer Dad's questions bluntly, with few words. Jonestown party of one. If the punch don’t kill ya it has a bitter twinge that lingers in the mouth for years if not decades.

Still, we all have to start out somewhere.

Over time her music becomes my music, her friends become my friends, her worries become my world until the second wind gradually picks up, the cold war thaws a bit, and eventually there’s no choice but to drop my assumed sense of duty and walk away with what I still have left.

Freedom can be a vacuum at times, but then, some things are worse than emptiness, such as never letting go.

fixture

Twas here i came for things various, and sundry. To learn. To labor. To laugh. To live. And if all else fails, to love. All around are furnishings and windows and bodies and ficus. Conversations ebb, tide in the sea of someones, as is written, nothing new under the sun.

The lady, stroked with water colors, in the middle of the room. She's in all the rooms. Dressed to the nines in pastel wool and chiffon, nothing ever moves, save the eyes. They go as i go, about my business, with no more to offer than Mona Lisa herself sneaking a peek from the netherworld camouflage, foundation and blush.

When i finally shake her hand she offers just enough muscle to make the connection, leaving me to work the pump, and toil at her dainty heft.

That gaze. The latest fly in the sap. Janie come lately, etched into the phosphors sans haste, gateway to possibilities, as stars dot the heavens, that never shall be.

So what? Even as years pass, n'er you hardly even spoke, that charge in the air, you felt it, perhaps you both, has a substance, has a life, a name.

A story.

Sophie

Sophie plays with her dolls as her big sister’s boyfriend rings the doorbell. But Sophie doesn’t like him. He has a gruffy face and messy hair and wears white tee shirts and a red bandanna and drives a bad old car and listens to loud music. He comes over when her mom and dad aren’t home and they go in the bedroom until they get tired. Then he sits next so Sophie and gives her a candy cigarette and tells her she’s got pretty curls and makes her smile.

weekend

some gambler
lost his lucky deck
and the drunkard
just ain’t thirsty
your stoner next door
but no jones
this cagey brawler
can’t throw a punch
a backstreet drag king
running cheap gas
skirt-chasing pilot makes approach
on a drooping windsock
just some vagabond
who can’t find the horizon
but if you got
freedom
do it anyway

'40 Year-Old Virgin' blames failures on Tony Danza PSA

FAIRFIELD, CONN (Goiters) - A real-life Forty Year-Old Virgin claims that a late 1980's public service announcement triggered a pattern of "romantic dysfunctionalities" during his teens. The ad, entirely a close shot of actor Tony Danza urging young people to not rush into sex but wear a condom if they do, ran in heavy rotation on MTV and other stations during a crucial time in the life of Maynard Snerdley.

"It has taken years to come to terms with this, and it's not easy to talk about."

Despite that fact, he continues.

"We all know that adolescence is a confusing time, and there was Tony telling us to hold off on the nookie and gee willakers, when you think about it, who am I to argue? This man has obviously made some mistakes in his life. I mean, just look at where his career went after Taxi."

Snerdley cites a combination of counseling and even more counseling to help turn things around.

"My therapist led me realize that I'd been distancing myself from women after a certain point. When the relationship reached a critical stage I would become less likely to shave, even for several days. Well golly, what gal wants to have steel filings grind against her face and neck? I bet it's just awful. "

This of course refers to Danza sporting short, bristly whiskers in the ad.

"I guess a light went off in the doc's head one day, then he played me the video and I was like holy macaroni, that's it!"

This was confirmed by his psychiatrist, Dr. Gimmie Cash, who added, "Yep. Holy macaroni."

With his wall-building days now behind him, Maynard is pleased to announce his recent engagement to a lady that, if you can believe it, "looks a LOT like Judith Light," who starred opposite Danza in "Who's the Boss?" for eight horrific seasons on ABC.

wist

When I ask a question I don't want an answer. Tell me a story. Make it a long one. After a while you'll get used to it. Then maybe, just maybe, I won't have to ask.

charise

Bowling is for Thursday night. Bowling. Nay the sport of kings yet the boon of restless souls in a home town, to exercise body and mouth alike between ten white pins and and a few brown longnecks. Bowwwww-ling. Booyeah.

Her gaze became fixed, the fruit fly in resin, even though I could swear she'd never looked my way.

As an unspoken code we try to keep this a guys night, about half are married, group therapy, now available without prescription. We have a couple of leaguers but the rest of us can hold our own. My average is creeping up into the high hundreds, although in a twelve-lane venue it's getting harder to concentrate on the game lately.

Slender build, honey sun-bleached drapeage, either natural curls brushed out or maybe last spring's perm and some kind of button-up top, and there's bound to be a couple spares beneath those baggy diamond-hipped jeans the girls wear nowadays. She means business, rolls with a considerate kind of confidence and a prose from beyond her years, doesn't leave many standing. A couple of her decisive strikes have given me pause while lining up my own shots. There are always the same four gals in her group.

One night Harry, our bald-headed grandad, catches me looking and word gets around. After nailing a sweet Brooklyn strike in the third frame he gets an arm around my shoulders.

"Intelligence reports have confirmed she's been sneakin' some peeks too, champ." I just shake my head and sneer.

Next couple of frames are kinda rough so an offering is taken for another round, my turn to represent. Right before I embark someone bumps my arm and for some reason I look up just as she's headed for the restroom.

Brown eyes, that shouldn't be, by some counts at least, or maybe it's the game throwing off my gyro. After we pass I wonder if I can ever believe what I just saw. She had whispered "hi"after I smiled, as if under distress before ducking into the latrine. At the counter, awaiting the tray of fresh troops, I actually wonder if I should warn the other women not to go in there for a while.

Instead, it seems the place is kinda sparse tonight, probably the cider fest drawing most of the folks with rugrats.

On the return trip she emerges and smiles this time, nearly choking on a giggle.

All clear, I thought.

We finish the night with scorecards no better or worse than any other. I get home and things feel different, taking a moment to get my bearings as if the furniture had moved. After a shower and shave Carson seems a bit more chipper than usual. Good for him.

Next week the ladies are a no-show and things feel normal yet, I'll allow, a tad empty. Then a special league event forces a break, but finally it's all in place again, she wears a thin sky-blue cardigan, not that I notice. Lately I'd worked up to an 18 pounder and tonight I hit some kind of stride with the thing, landing on a not-too-shabby 216 once the dust settles. Didn't pay for any food or drink that night, and the resulting hubbub earned us a visit from the ladies league who had started a frame or two ahead of us.

"My name's Charise," she assures me with a dainty handshake, somehow grossly out of phase with all the cannonballs fired from that arm somewhere in the annals of my periphery. Her name is Charise. The world around us is of grins and glances, it knows what I know.

"So you're from around here?" It turns out yes and no, as the story unfolds I get the hint of a greater conspiracy from far beyond our respective teams, our poor tired mothers, the silhouette pros of the sport, double agents extraordinaire, leap from the upper walls and draw their sidearms, taking aim from behind pool tables, hold it right there Mister Bond, how kind of you to pay us a veesit. She talks fast, almost frantically, as if there's an egg timer on the bill of my ball cap. New intelligence is in, the eyes are brown, all sources confirm, dark binary stars to planetary freckles, and the (orange?) blush makes it all hard to parse. I gradually perceive her aroma, a finely-tuned ratio of powder, perspiration and AquaNet.

Conversations extend into the parking lot to be punctuated by slamming doors. I sit and take a few deep breaths over the steering wheel of my '82 Cutlass, staring into what's left of the sunset over the shopping centers. The car is just starting to produce upholstery dander, having sat outside every day of its life, the dust dances in twilight with the sweet autumn air.

Her name is Charise. It may just as well be dammit.

world where

Shed a sea of blood and the world is better, for every noble cause under the sun, all of which are right. Why dream? Deputy Fife takes aim. With a lone bullet gonna make Mayberry a place where one can break wind without some dooshjob redneck stealing headlines about his lack of wit. We bash each other over the head with a book while healing whispers proximity, old white men in suits selectively adapt a mute button, and that once proud sense of belonging shrivels into a maudlin caricature of itself, ridiculously wanton in its attempt to exhume former glory. Now Barn' done got excited and shot the floor again. Drag 'em in here and turn 'em into one of us. Compunction is a tsunami caused by an epic event no one remembers. We cannot change so they must. Go us. For God's sake we blow up fruit stands to keep the dream alive. Better put Otis back in the cell before he starts making sense. Dreams are for dreaming.

three dragons

Many years ago a person emerged from the autumn fog with some long leashes and said look over there, and when I looked over there I felt the leashes slip into my hand, then there I stood with three dragons. I had no clue what their names were.

But over time it's become clear that the first is Ambition. He wants it all, from being a 007 coder to bringing down the house with a 12-bar blues solo, and everything in between. Basically a would-be badass at whatever looks cool.

And then there's the one I call Aphrodite, except, well, she's not what you might expect. You know that girl from school who trips over her own toes and just can't catch a break? Yeah. After a while the "blond moments" were obviously calculated for effect but she's starting to take hints. I think.

Finally we have Allure. Al's...something else, totally unaware of what the ladies want, especially when he's got a shot. Seriously. Once you've seen an awkward teenage dragon you've seen it all.

Now, put all that together for a traipse through the park. Can't remember the last time they were all on the same page, you know, off in every direction, stopping on a whim, no stone unturned. Not sure if my insurance covers scorching but so far we've been lucky.

Still, though they wear me out and try my patience...at the end of the day they're simply irresistible. Not everyone agrees, of course, some look down their nose, because, dragons should be stuffed into a cage and not roam around causing problems, messing up the landscape and disrupting people's lives with their youthful ardor.

That bothered me at first, till one day I was shoveling some dragon doo and it flew into a disapproving eye. Then, the strangest thing happened.

I smiled.

tutelage

beauty protects the skin
skin protects the woman
yet
sometimes
there's just no place
like
vulnerability

bird legs

as for the girl
the boys talk to
but rarely
about
the one who
comes to mind
at odd moments
and somehow makes
you feel
ashamed
they say she has
bird legs
kinda stringy
not much
to grab onto
until
one evening
you both walk out
to the parking
garage
as she plays
with her
keys those eyes
make the sales pitch
the smile
seals the deal
and despite the
bird legs
her leather sleeves
gently
crackle around you
she says i'm
a compulsive liar
you say i don't
believe you
raucous blazing futility
behind a pillar
about your waist
bird legs
get
what they came for
and as you
drive home
you can't decide
whether you lost
or she won
but either way
she is the
girl
you'll never call
who walks away
on
bird legs

Revolution Day

All the pundits will suddenly be correct
You don't know how long we've waited for this
The suits and the hippies finally agree
Belly buttons and aholes everyone's got one
Pot gut accountants been tellin us for years
Who are we to disagree
Schoolyard bullies got their own undies up their crack

tlc

Being good evangelicals, we swarm to the fairgrounds that May evening, to hear Leighton Ford, in-law and close associate to Billy Graham, as he strives to redeem the word "crusade" for both infidel and faithful alike.

The youth from my church waste no time, finding solitude for its own sake, along a paved trail to a bridge at the foot of the woods. Immediately a lit cigarette and maybe a beer materialize and make their rounds as the only bona-fide couple in the group studies French.

As I stand there agaze at the surreality before me, having been heretofore excluded from such extracurriculars, she reluctantly takes a hit of the coffin nail. Later on she tells me she wasn't sure why she did, "I used to smoke but I quit," just as she'd always revealed herself to me.

So I seek refuge, not really finding it in the grandstand, next to two chicks I know by name, as usual, engulfed with inane chatter about boys and boys. And so goes the entire service, even as I see one of the party crowd mope to the makeshift altar, and the razor-sharp chill in the air keeps on cutting. It's as if everyone there knows somebody else yet I evidently don't even know myself.

Afterward, in the twilight she has a choice. Being the alpha for once, at the ripe age of thirteen, I extend my mom's offer to take her home. Somehow I just know, then she hesitantly shuns the others and comes with me as several pairs of eyes hurl their daggers. We meet her dad at the agreed place and I hug her goodbye, but not before she tells me she's kind of glad she didn't go off into the night doing God knows what.

And so the lines were drawn. Some of them blew me off for weeks to come, but she rode a horse to my house and I escorted her back on my bike one summer's day, and so it was, till just over a year later. We got the call as I lie on the couch after school, ironically, having just seen her there not two hours earlier. At least she lived through my birthday as I felt sicker and sicker, until the next day, then she was gone.

(for a friend I'll always miss)

our year

Mostly children in January and quasi-adults by December. One time this kid actually asked me why I cut in the lunch line, because I'm a senior, all I had to say. Despite asserting my maturity I manage to land a paper wad into the same girl's lap, twice, from across Mr. Runneal's study hall.

You only need to know three words to get by around here: Attitude, attitude, and attitude. Of course the trick is knowing which one of those to use in a given moment.

The Berlin Wall had fallen on our watch and suddenly we have Russian hair band called Gorky Park in league with the regulars. One day a freshman gal comes up to me to bum change for a snack and belts out BAAANNNG BANNNNG.

In the courtyard we'd bum around on the grass and I half-listened to dudes brag about what they do with their girlfriends and contemplate give or receive if ever faced with a prison situation.

We were doing graphics on those shoe box Macs in computer science class and someone is told to erase a cat's tail because it appears too phallic.

As we descend stairs to the gym for commencement someone points out how this is the last time we'll all be in the same place at once. As I say goodbyes afterward I can't help notice all the hair pins on the floor, amazed at how many it takes to attach a girl to a mortarboard.

When the events that summer took a turn no that one could have imagined, people I talk to never cease to remind me how numb-brained stories always fill in the void before the truth is revealed.

I say some things I should have kept to myself but usually pass up a chance to say something I should have. Didn't take the independent living class but could tell the discussions are priceless.

You are your car. You are your GPA. You are your personal and team stats. You are what you create. You are the college you start in the fall. You are your charm. You are your group of friends. You are your reputation. You are your look. You are your image. You are your future.

Every time I see MTV it's that chick singing about her succotash wish.

Bush Sr. builds a shield on foreign sands, and inevitably someone tells me I hear they're gonna start draftin'. That same evening, as I cross a snow-dusted parking lot from Taco Bell back to the store where I work, I could swear for a brief second I was riding on the back of some transport truck in full fatigues. Some of us were already on their way.

While chasing a deal on car wax I come across one of our gals and was surprised at how much she told me in maybe fifteen minutes, and how much she reminded me of my girlfriend from another school. Funny how we're all made of the same ingredients yet each with a unique recipe. Really should have gotten her phone number.

When it comes down to it, you are your heart.

Duke Fabulous Reporting

WELL this is certainly one for all the ages and a few in between. It was last Saturday or maybe one a them other days, and I found myself ex-akkitakillay where I was, in a rental boat on the edge of the lake with not much more than a net an' a bucket. Lately my fryin' pan got to hankerin' real bad for some frog legs an' so there's only one thing left to-do. I say. So here I am a tryin' my best to troll along tha shore line and catch a few so long as they don't hop quicker than a body can swing a net. Well at first the pickin's are right slim but finally there's this great big daddy rascal facin' tha other way, and just as I'm right on 'im there's a knock-knock on the side of the boat. Now, seems to me a feller might expect a knock-knock at a door ever' here an' again but when he's crouched precarious on a craft it can bear, as we say, un-expected results. This bein' the case, imagine my very own surprise to see that bullfrog hop right along cassidy and all the while beneath the Duke's very own shadow. Right after the big splash is when I hears a giggly kind a laughter back tha other way. So I clears off my peepers best I can to find THE orneriest grin behind a snorkel mask that might - an' jest might - have had somethin' to do with my personal state of hydration. So as we make our ways back to the dock 'bout half an hour later ol' Harley who runs the bait shop just stares and shakes his head. As we get out he starts in, dad-GUMMIT Duke! How many a them there frogs you have to kiss 'fore one of 'em turns into a prin-cess? Well by then I pretty much had ta answer tha man so I let a wink and say, I say why, jest the one with the prettiest legs can'cha tell? Anyway hear what the Duke says. Them ol' English yarn-spinners were sure onto somethin' when it comes to a lady and a lake. Duke out.

(with hopes that a certain frog-catchin' uncle a mine gets back out there real, real soon...)

nevertheless

Someone joked the other day about me winning the lottery, which I don't play, but all said, it would amount to a decent motor home and an mp3 player stuffed with every Springsteen track they have. Sooner or later I'll show up in your town to empty the sewage tank and see if you wanna come along for a ways, fare is one six-pack unless you pass a visual inspection. Not only do we get to see and smell the country but throw in a few state fairs and even a ball game in every park in America, and just to one-up the players I'll visit some kids in the hospital, just imagine the looks on their faces as they think, "who the hell are you?"