Sunday, July 10, 2005

BigTimeBigSelf

is about the bigtimebigself of childhood and all the adult big shots who forgot it ain’t about money and power

is five characters in one person in search of five dads who are one

the one you never had & put inside you
and shot him full of holes

the one who sends you on a mission
to save the universe
to repair his childhood

the one who makes you mad enough
to break all the rules

the one who becomes a child
leaving you with no one but yourself
to be angry at

the one who was the great warrior who died
under the wheels of the garbage truck
that hauled all your history away

leaving you with nothing but now

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

THE INSIDE STORIES

RAT

What the fuck, Bo, they got us down here in this stinkin fuckin prison, tell us what to eat, what to wear when to go to the bathroom,listen to us over the speakers, GOOD MORNIN WARDEN, DIDN’T THINK I KNEW DID YOU?....They call me RAT, cause I’m filthy, messy, can’t take care of myself. And they call me RAT cause they need somebody to look down on, somebody they can thro their shit on. Go ahead throw your shit on me you fucks, it won’t do you no good cause it’s still YOURS, and you’re the ones who NEED IT.

I had a DREAM last nite, Bo, yeah...yeah, I know you don’t give a rat’s ass about my goddamed fucked up dreams. And I know somethin else too. I kno you gotta just let go of that shit with your dad. He ain’t nothin but a goddam dead on his ass junkie and he ain’t never gonna be nothin else I don’t care what you do or how you hurt about it. You gettin all pissed off at nobody and nothing....that YOU stuck inside YOU. Nobody, nobody, nobody. Hahahaha. Have yourself a nice temper tantrum cause there ain’t nothin happening except the wind blowing and the grass growing.

I had a DREAM last nite, Bo, I dreamed I was watchin the road go out across dead plowed fields, dried up busted fountains, houses all moved away after a big war that nobody won, junk lying around, houses all moved away, never find a nut that fit a bolt or a man that fit a woman. Nobody there, just a million years. Coyotes howled, then even that stopped. Then I was lying in a grave. My ex wife & her new lesbian lover came walkin by kissin an huggin on each other’s faces and the dirt was fallin in on me and I was trying to scream and I couldn’t move my mouth.

Yeah , I know you don’t give a fuck, yeah I know you hat eme but god damn you what else do we have down here cept dreams? Ah she’s always so righteous on me even when she fucked around on me, ESPECIALLY when she fucked around on me. Damn your dad. I had a dad, you had a dad. You can have my dad. He was a preacher. He locked me in the closet for playing with myself. He beat me to make me pure, tried to beat the devil outa me....but the devil stayed.

Yeah, I was the preacher’s son an I married the deacon’s daughter and I lost job after job and I told my dad, "Nothin works for me." "Well, you just gotta make it work, try harder, stick to it. God helps those who help themselves."

It was a little town, and nothin happened over and over.

Ever so often the train come thru. Big event of the day. "Well the train come thru. Musta been about 9:15" "O Harold, you know that watch is wrong. My watch says 9:45."

Losin the jobs was one thing, but losing her respect for me was another. I just hit the wall. I got a gun and I robbed a liquor store, and the manager tried to shoot me, and I shot him first. I didn’t stand a chance. I went on the run. I ran and I ran. I lived in the swamp awhile and then I rode the blinds, and I got dirty and my skin turned black and hard and my mind started echoing. Anybody say something to me like "Nice weather. Weatherman says it might rain tomorrow." And it would set me off on a tear. I’d scream and run off.

And I woulda been in a Christian college studying nursing or missionary work if I’d stayed behind. I looked like the devil he called me. You want a dad, here’s a dad. He’s sitting in his easy chair watching TV and cackling in the wrong places.

I had a dream last nite Bo. I was on a bluff above Galveston Bay except it was all different. But I was flying my great big beautiful kite. Only place I ever felt half right when I’s a kid. Down there at Galveston Bay. Sea winds blowing all d ay. The kite would ride up there forever, only this time a big wind was coming up and the storm clouds were gathering, lighting flashed, and my kite was tugging and tugging at my hand, and I screamed at the storm cause I was afraid I’d lose it, and the kite’s tugging and tugging...and.....(GUNSHOT)

Arrggehhhhhhhhhhh.....o Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, why’d you have to go an do that, poor little fucked up kid, had to go and shoot yer fool self.

.....train’s coming, yeah here comes that train again.....get down in the bushes the bulls’ll see you....here comes that train again, must be 9:15.....no Hiram your watch is wrong, it’s 9:45.....now Harold you know that watch o yours ain’t worth a damn..........hahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!



Joe Potatoes:

So what’m I doin? I’m workin my way into Bellvue.....into the mental ward.....thru this air conditioning duct....that’s what I’m doin. Because I’m HOT. I’m gonna bust this case wide open. I know things. I know plenty. I know about the Banality Gang....how they turn everything into nothin....with Moebius Bombs. They destroyed my writing....I had books and books. I made tapes. They taped over them with soap operas. This actually happened.

And I know why. You ever hear a really great song and felt like it was yours and somebody stole it from you? That’s how they feel, the Banality Gang, they feel JEALOUS. They wanna SMASH anybody who’s makin a breakthru....like crabs crawling out of a bucket...the other crabs pull them back. They just wanna lie back and be intentionally unconscious, life's EASIER that way.

Or so they say, so they'd like to think; but I know things...

things I was born knowing other people ain’t gonna know till they’re DEAD.

I know what they did with Bo. I know what they did with ALL the Crash Dummy Kids. I’m going up there and find Bo, and see if he can still talk with half his brains blown out....see how those painful memories play with holes in them. Why? I don’t know....maybe I can help him live.....or die.....same damn dumb thing....

just like the Banality Gang wanted....I bet they’re laughing now...o they’re just like the Catholic church, got it all wrapped up, simple banality, complicated banality, sophisticated banality, any excuse you want not to really be here

damn it Oh. Excuse me. The name's Joe....Joe Potatoes Paulson, private eye....very private.....you can’t buy the kind of work I do. I have to support myself with my day jobs at Burger King and Motel 6. Why? Because the Crash Dummy Kids, they get me right here in the gut. They come up like morning glories, so fulla HOPE and....PROMISE! And by mid day they’re wilted or dead....like nothing ever happened....well something was SUPPOSED to happen, and something always gets them and I gotta find that something those somebodies who turn living beings into zombies that watch the flickering blue light of theTV in the Emergency Room all night, or at home. Gotta get to the bottom of this. Any minute here.....my wife left me....got tired of my preoccupations....it’s just me now, all alone.

OK, I’m goin in. I’m puttin on this hospital gown. Cover my ass. I’m goin in. So nobody’ll recognize me, so I’ll look like one of them. I’m puttin on this gown. Cover me. Tying this rope around me. Pull me out if you hear me scream. If you hear anything, anything, pull on the rope, pull me the hell outa there. You hear me scream, whatta you do? Pull on the rope and don’t stop until something comes out. Here let me push this filter out of the way....Goin in.

So here I am in the main hall. Nurse’s goin around the corner. Coast is clear. Shadows of the city, shadows from carlights across the wall, ah the sleeping city, gorged on oil and power...y’all want FRIES with that!? Let’s see now Room 109, that must be this way. Ah ha. Crash Dummy Kid alert. Foot of the bed. Let’s have a look at the stats. Thoughts stuck in the sappiness receptors, and, more importantly....see all these little people inside the cerebral reflex....they’re Banality Gang radio transmitter computer chips....I’d know them anywhere....you see em in boxes of Sugar Frosted Flakey Flakes, you see em casually left in luggage...anywhere....somehow they get embedded, like journalists...somehow the mind can no longer tell its own story after that....and then the anger....like Alzheimer’s....like a PRISONER in your own body!

Oh hi, nurse....I’m Dr. Flavin’s assistant.....NO! NO! WAIT! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.....I’M HERE TO HELP HIM!!!! NO! NO! NO! NOT THE DRUGS! NO! NO! AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

JC

Come on Joe, cut it out, wake up. I can’t slap you silly any more, you’re already silly. It’s impossible to wake Joe up. Some detective. Doesn’t even know I’m inside him. Mr. Pure....detective on the side of law an order, fightin the bad guys. That makes him the good guy doesn’t it? Jerkwad.

Joe’s gone, man.

Whaddaya say darlin, should we dump him? Naah stick him up here, prop him up so he looks like he’s listening to me. At least SOMEBODY oughta...god knows you never do, honey, sweetheart, sugarbooger. Where the hell are ya tonight anyway? This is your main squeeze talkin, your Jazzy Corleone your Jesus Christ your JC, where are you tonight, out at some god forsaken loading dock, fixing to call me up and ask me to meet you at the carwash at dawn.....JAAAAzzzzzEEEE don’t be a party poopah, don’t be a poopah Jaazzzeeee we’re just having a good time! At three o’clock in the morning you’re just STARTING to have a good time, and I got pick you up and we go to Sam’s Club and buy 200 lightbulbs and a hundred boxes of bubble gum and cigars, and open em up in front of the motel TV and just look at em....and you’re all warm and wet, and that’s what I like about you.....WHAT was it I liked about you, I forget....you’re here, you’re there , you don’t know where you are....

it’s like life sometimes ain’t nothing but a cosmic pinball machine, where this ain’t this anymore, it’s two THATs, and the two THATs ain’t thats, they’re cop hats comin straight at us in the black an white and my friend Izzy,Izzy Malone, on the seat beside me, he’s screamin his fuckin head off: JAAAzzzzzeeee you gotta TURN here! Jazzzyyyy you GOTTA turn HERE! Jazzy you GOTTA TURN HERE! HAHAHAHA.

But I’m gonna chicken em out, cause I don’t give a fuck what happens to me or nobody, and finally they swerve outa the way and I ditch em and Izzy slumps on the seat beside me, blood runnin out his mouth, just another small time hood who finally made the big time. But he was my friend, and I don’t get to have too many friends in this business.

Dirty business so you say, your business is cleaner than mine, so you say; well, anything you say except what do you REALLY know about that? Maybe you don't wanna know how much crime owns your government and how much your government IS a crime? Easy for me to say, huh? And that lets YOU off the HOOK, HUH?

Hey, Sweetheart, honeybaby, c’mere, break this C note for me an keep 20 for yerself! Oh, I’m sorry, did I have my hand in the wrong place? It’s just I LIKE you JUST wanna show my appreciation for a beautiful woman brightenin up my night....fuzzy around you, darlin......sorry darlin, sorry boss. I’ll try to be more of a genulman. Hey, gimmee a drink, I wanna buy a lady a drink. Fines drink ina house. If you’re a lady you’ll accept.

There was a young fella named James Wright, there was a young fella named Douglas MacArthur, an I was in Europe....the only thing wrong with America today is it’s asleep, it’s asleep but it’ll wake up! It’ll wake up! What’m I drinkin? PEPPERMINT SCHNAPPS AN BEER?! Take this faggot drink back, don’t tell me what I ordered. I know what I ordered. Sandy Colfax is gonna knock em dead tomorrow. Yeah when ol Sandy starts pitchin them Yanks’ll think it’s General Pershing himself ona move.

Izzy Malone was my friend. Good ol Izzy.....I HAD a friend used to read books and dream about heroes, and drove a god damned PT boat that sunk and he saved my miserable ass when I was about to drown, cause he dreamed about heroes and wanted to be a big shot, and he got his BRAINS blown out, got em SPLATTERED all over the nice new upholstery of a brand new Lincoln Limo in Dallas in 63, and his head lay on the lap of a young lady who used to read books, history books, and thought they were written by bitter old men because they were too cold, too hard. Ha! And he says, "Nobody lives with a bullet in his brain." Excellent analysis. You can tell he went to college. And I wonder what she thinks now, still too cold, too hard?

And I had a friend at the time, JACK RUBY, come up to me and he says, JAZZYYY, you an me Jazzy baby, whaddaya say, we gonna hit the big time, we gonna be big shots, money, dames anything we want. What the fuck you talking about Jack? Jazzyyy I just got the word from the cappo that Oswald has to go and anybody who gets him, they’ll take care of him real good real fine. Whaddaya say Jazzy you an me. Jack, I said, Jack, just a minute baby. You wanna be a big shot? Go ahead. But leave me out. Because I don’t wanna be no big shot. This is a shitty business and I can leave in a body bag or I can leave with my memories and a shred of honor. What were you talking about Jack, because I forgot what you was talking about. I don’t remember nothing about anything you said, except there was something in it about being a big shot am I right?

Aw Jazzy you a funny man, but if you’d stop jivin and jokin me around we could go someplace. No Jack it’s you jerkin Jack around every time you suck up to big tuna or gotti or any other small time punk walking the street with some private little hard on that he thinks is a BIG DEAL! ...but ....what the hell were we talking about anyway, I forget....I’m old and my memory....my memory hell, nothing I got is what it used to be.

So Jack goes an shoots Oswald, big fuckin deal, an Conally shoots Jack, an Conally dies and what the fuck does it mean anyway? It means it’s a pinball machine and here you come down the tube sweetheart with your escapes and escapades and I’m buying you flowers and taking you here and there , screwin around like a chicken with my head off. Like thinking things could be different someday, you could forget your father fucked you, I could forget this business I’m in like it was a highway with no exits. Like, like, like, but it is what it is.

You call me up at three AM and say, Jazzyyy I just got in from San Diego, and the ocean was so beautiful, and my aunt was suppose to come pick me up at the air port and she got sick, can you come Jazzyyy, please Jazzy. O for god fuckin sake Myrna, it’s three o’clock in the god damn morning! O don’t be a party poopah Jazzeee, come on.....so I come on and I get to the airport and you haven’t even been anywhere, just sittin there all night tellin stories....to idiots....

and we come out, it’s just rained and there’s mud puddles lying around everywhere. Big puddles with reflections of you and me, like we was just ghosts or images on a screen or shadows, just shadows....and all kinds of knowledge is possible and almost nothin is real like tonight sitting up here in this all night café bar watching a carwreck on the highway and the snow falling so peaceful on the bodies turning blue, lying there in the snow like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, just to take a little break and get outa your car and sit propped up against it in the snow....

and I’m sitting here tonight and I’m thinkin about the snow and the clouds and above the clouds no snow, just stars, and I wonder sometimes what do the stars think, about the bullshit we’re goin thru, another day another fucked up dollar....and Izzy’s on the seat beside me screaming,

YOU GOTTA TURN HERE!


Mauve Jallibean, world’s greatest interior decorator.

You cannot fill those holes with anger Jazzy, because they are already full...of NOTHING. A NOTHING so vast and impenetrable, that only the world’s GREATest interior decorator, MOI!, could fill it. With coLEURS. All the coLEURS there are to glitTER in the dark. I go down and down into the darkness. And Joe is here. And Bo. And Rat. And JC you too tho you don’t know it yet. And a native american called Walks In Circles, whom we shall get to know better. He is in a homeless camp, screaming to his father, the names of the great war chiefs, but they are all defeated by firewater and an abstract design stuck on nature like contact wallpaper, an abstract design called money. And my father is here also, weighing heavy on my back with too much security and simplicity, he is my beeg dark heavy teddeeee bear, and he is talking to me again just like when I was a teenager, searching desperately for a self, and looking at him, and finding nothing, and he said,

Look at this silly thing, trying to stare me down, saying "Don’t avoid the issue!" Go to
bed! And he slapped me silly.

And from that moment I began my career as the world’s GREATEST interEUR decoratEUR. I decorated the walls of the hall to my room with stars and shadows, and I decorated the wall of my room with a mass of blood and guts roiling down it and in the morning, the sun arose and erased ALLLL my handiwork.

But a star was born, born to follow you Dad through all the dusty little Texas towns, matador, olton, plainview, seagraves, seminole, sleeepy dusty little towns full of the emptiness of a thousand nights and the daily horror of daily lives, but still none of these was empty enough for you the true pilgrim, and I the follower, there had to be an even greater emptiness, the essence of emptiness and so I followed you even beyond these, to a hole in the ground, and we went down and down and down, past all the dusty old wisdoms, obligations to abstractions, the horror of debt and guilt and I color the justice red for the blood of innocents executed, and I color the truth blue for the color of things we don't know that hurt us, the more so the more we pretend to know, and I color the religion grey for the obsessive compulsive disorder called ritual and the comfort of the ordinary and certain and all that comes between us and the moments and facts of our lives....and so ....finally

I RIP you off my back, all the huge Teddy Bear of you and I saw your head off with a knife and inside you is a tiny little white Teddy Bear with a soft innocent expression on its face. This is NOT the huge wild angry bear that darkened the door to my room at night, and darkened my days with all that I owed, my very life that I owed, you are all white and innocent and a child yourself. How could you LEAVE me like THIS, with no one to blame but myself?

And there in the dark where justice hangs her scales and hides her eyes from the horror that the necessary arbitrariness of law creates daily, there in that dark, I test the true values of colors, I learn all the colors there are to glitter in the dark, I teach myself all the sounds there are to echo through old houses where people lived and died alone for all the friends and family around them...

oh I learned so much when I fell on my own candle and died, and turned and went up toward the light owning nothing, knowing nothing, except color and form and the moment of touching our common poverty in the broken world.....

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Joe Potatoes Notebook:

list these under CAPACITANCE:

cries of sleeping birds
rituals of forgotten tribes
screams in black holes
crimes with no survivors
secrets carried to the grave
airplanes left on deserted islands
birds without wings or voices
childhood abuse, sex, power, loneliness, murder
broken radios
pain of lab animals
broken trestles, dismantled bridges
Gardens destroyed for meetings
prayers to automobiles
exploding mailboxes
chief of stuff
caged chimps
boys inside fish heads
ford power stroke
bonus points
war as art (good or bad?)
people sitting and staring in mental hospitals
weeds taking over the old garden
plants growing thru wrecked cars
discords for percussion
babies with steering wheels
unmarked days
dancing with shadows