Velociworld

Fishing, and Cutting Bait

I am between gigs, as the pipe-hitting jazzmen say, so what better time to return to my ancestral stomping grounds in Savannah for a few months? My brother has been suffering from unelucidated health issues, too, so I'm doing a bit of dual caretaking: him and my soul.

The key to wringing pleasure out of a coastal town is a boat, of course, so we've been ploughing light chop and glassine high tides, exploring them old haints. Primarily Daufuskie Island. It lies across Calibogue Sound from Hilton Head, and is memorable from the movie Conrack. The island used to be singularly populated by the dusky descendants of slaves, who spoke only the Gullah patois, and would sell you crabs, shrimps, and beer if you behaved your cracker ass. In fact, the Senator used to take us to the beach at Bloody Point as youngsters, there to pic-a-nic with the fambly, the feasts consisting of extremely sandy mayonnaise sandwiches, unsweetened Kool-Aid in Scotch-plaid Thermoses, and canned sardines and Southern Comfort in a Dixie cup for the old man.

As an aside, the Senator had considerable fun toying with me and my brothers over the local denizens, admonishing us: "Stay out of those woods, boys! There's wild ni**ers in there, and they'll gitcha!" Which fact was only half true.

Now the island has a hundred McMansions, yet fortunately it is still only accessible by boat, precluding the horrid rapine that befell Hilton Head, population density: infinity. One may still traffic with back island trash on Daufuskie, and the few remants of Gullahs who haven't been property-taxed off the island are still ebullient of heart, and courageous of soul. Those fuckers from Hilton Head run ferries there every day, however, and they covet. How they covet. Like paedophiles at a scout jamboree.

South of the marina, in the opposite direction of Daufuskie, lies Wassaw Island, best taken from the south end (like a good woman), then work one's way north along the tree-stumped beach to the north end, where the revelers congregate. South of Wassaw is Hell Gate and Petit Gauke Island and the true rat-dom of Bryan County. Lest one is red drum fishing there is no reason to navigate those waters. The fishermen are obstreperous, the crabbers bilious. If one is not of the first degree of genetic relation one is a provocateur.

It shocked me, really, how much I'd missed the salt water, having been domiciled in Deliverance country for so long. One cannot close one's eyes and inherit the wind of the mountains, but low tide, as they say, is forever. I'm three decades into gainful employment, and five away from my retirement monies. If honest work comes my way I'm alla in. If not, my Great Black Father in the District of Columbia has extended my unemployment benefits, which was kind of Him.

I am perhaps a true hobo now, traveling light. My only necessities are my fishing tackle, well-prepared meals, and vagabondage, should the right girl appeal to me.

Of course, even the wrong ones appeal to me.

A Maudlin Aside

Comes now the hot, hard days of summer. Just around the bend. I have been privileged to witness, if privileged is the proper term, great hatred, and vitriol, and animosity amongst us, even during the dry winter season, when passions generally run to the complacent. People of nominal political persuasion castigating their fellow man. Folk who normally only gin up the requisite civic duty on a four year cycle gnashing teeth at their perceived enemy. It is unbespoke, unholy, and highly unusual.

It is also a good thing.

I personally could never be truly beholden to a position, be it political or personal, that did not infuriate someone, somewhere. Pissing off one's fellow man is the essence of liberty and freedom. And if one is not pissing off someone, then one is without true conviction.

Here's a thought: when I was eighteen years old I found myself standing in a train station in Malaga, Spain, there to take a short trip to the Spanish Riviera resort of Torremolinos. I held thirteen dollars in my pocket, and a bottle of the local skullpop, and felt myself the poorest man in the world. Until I felt a squishy aberration underfoot, and looked down to see I was standing upon the rubber waders of a young Spaniard, about my own age, who possessed no legs. The rubber waders he apparently attached to himself for the sole benefit of dragging himself around train depots so as to entangle himself with potential benefactors.

I gave the poor brute a pull of my skullpop and five of my dollars, and hefted him to a nearby bench. Not because I was a good man. I was not. I still presume I am not. I gave it to him to alleviate my momentary guilt, and because it was something my mother would have expected me to do.

My mother was very big on doing nice things for those unfortunate people she found herself surrounded with at times. She'd grown up poor in south Georgia in the Depression, and she liked to do nice things for people later when she had the money and opportunity.

She still considered them niggers, of course, but she never said that outright (very often), and I think her heart was in the right place.

So: what ties polemical acerbity with noblesse oblige to an unknown, legless Spaniard? Or a poor black lady on the back of the bus? I'm not sure, other than my conviction that the institutionalisation of noblesse oblige has made us a coarser, more angry people. It all boils down to expectations.

Once a hapless citizen is denied the kindness of a stranger because he possesses the expectation that the Government Integral will dispense it in lieu of the stranger, along with a salt tablet and a quarter of cheese, the social compact has been broken. Kindness is no longer required, nor is thanks.

It's all of a thing. Today I would likely direct that Spaniard to a help booth. There's an app for that, you poor legless fuck. Get on board. Just don't look to me for help. I gave at the 15th of April festivities. Nothing here for you now.

It's a sad thing, but it was inevitable. There ain't nothing we can do as individuals that the government can't do more poorly, more insensitively, and more inefficiently.

It's the American Way.

The Chasm

Ever go to one of those state or national parks with a gorge, or canyon? There's always a ledge you can walk out on, and scrunch your tippy toes over the edge, and look down at the vastness, and the depth, and think Fuck. I'm an inch away from Death.

Then the vertigo kicks in, because we don't even have the primordial recklessness of the damn monkey, and you get a bit dizzy, and your eyes roll back in your head for a moment. Only a moment. And you step away. To safety. To the net.

My toes have been hanging over the precipice for a couple of months now. And, yes. My eyes be rolling back in my head like a fucking porn star. But I just can't do the natural thing, and step back from the chasm. That would be pure boredom. An intolerable state of affairs.

Here's the rub: even a psychotic like me could use a little companionship now and then, even if only to berate them for their fore-ordained ignorance. (That would be my one joke I'm offering here).

Fact is, I wouldn't have anyone who would have me. On a Venn Diagram them circles would not touch. Problematic.

I don't have much to offer in the way of empathy, or compassion. That's for the fellows in the insurance commercials who want to leave a Family Well Provided For. I want someone who inherits a bag of shit of bills. Who has to cremate me for price considerations, and then has to field threatening calls from my bookie while her car is being repossessed, even as she's thinking I was just slapping my titties in his face yesterday, the poor guy. And that demographic is pretty fucking skinny.

No, the girl I often think I want would force me to church, and attempt to cure me of sloth. That would be frightful. On the other hand, she would not have tattooes, the millenial indication of a brain damaged by groupthink and poseurism. How do you get a fucking tattoo, anywhats? As soon as one gets the bastard, one thinks of something better. I prefer scribbling with a Sharpie on my nutsack. Things like Tao! And Get Some Bread Today! Because I am invariably somewhere around my nutsack at some point during a typical day. Form and function. See?

At any rate, prospects are bleak, unless I find a slightly addle-pated woman with the breasts of Jayne Mansfield, Tourette Syndrome, a penny lodged in the cognitive portion of her brain, and the vagina of a circus midget.

There has to four or five of them out there.

Changing My Luck

There are several ways a fellow can change his luck, and I am in need of a change about now. Fortuna has spun her wheel several times, and all against the grain of my good fortune.

The classic way, at least in these parts, would be to finalize a financial transaction with one of the dusky maidens for hire that stroll down my sidewalk on occasion. As the Senator was wont to tell me when I was a mere stripling, "You aren't a southern gentleman until you cut the chocolate cake, boy."

Mos def.

Well, now, the improprieties both social and legal of commercial sex aside, I don't believe I'm quite there yet. I am, however, considering that other great exercise in reversal of fortune: the capture of an albino. As Erskine Caldwell so delicately informed us in God's Little Acre, albinos can find treasure long buried or hidden from we normals. Doubloons, pieces of eight, even pocket change and the occasional penknife. It must be metal, I believe. To my understanding the albino cannot ascertain buried paper tender. But that's just scrip anyway, foisted upon us by a bankrupt government, eh?

They're like fucking leprechauns, these albinos. Plus one does not have to deal with the Irish in the process, the codswaddlers. Albeit, like leprechauns, the albino must be captive. Why, he's not just going to walk up and give you the booty. He acts upon duress, unfortunately, and you must be prepared to use coercion, stringent coercion if necessary, to force him to bely his gifts.

I love it when a plan comes together. Of course, all I have now is duct tape, a Taser, and a divining rod. I'm not sure if them albinos can't dowse for treasure. Better to be prepared. You know, between us girls, I haven't actually seen any albinos in this cracker-assed county, but that's because they hide out. I just haven't gone deep enough into the woods. That's about to change. Wish me luck.

The game? Afoot.

Reflections on a Snippet of Boccherini

-Or-

As the illiterate Joe Plaice said, "The Lord taketh, and he giveth away."

-Or-

As the not-so-illiterate Guy de Maupassant said, "The simplest of women are wonderful liars who can extricate themselves from the most difficult dilemmas with a skill bordering on genius."

It's all there. In the Boccherini.

Gone Brita

Going off the grid for a while, as the youngsters and presumers now say. They used to say gone walkabout. They are both stupid expressions.

I don't envision any internet for a while, other than work, and I've never blogged on another man's dime.

Not a halfway house, or rehab, if that's what you're thinking. I'm clean.

I'm just not purified.

To Soothe the Savage Breast

One of the great burdens of middle age is the spontaneous revisitation of the past when one is accosted by a trigger of an earlier fad, or genre, in music. We boomers, of course, deserve all the filthy brainworms we get, because it is always eventually leavened by a choice cut from the great '63-'82 era of rock and roll, all the surrounding white noise notwithstanding. I can tolerate Billy Don't be a Hero if my next brainworm is Dear Prudence.

What I find harder to tolerate is the genre music. We all know ad nauseum the perverse attraction of disco to so many of our former broheims. That was one hell of a way to lose a buddy. One day you're skipping college class with a friend, dipping your feet in the salt water off a floating dock, building a bong out of bamboo to try out that kilster hashish you just scored, and the next day he's found a polyester suit and a goddam dance partner. It was the stoner version of seeing the guy from Schenectady next to you in the foxhole taking a slug right between the eyes. Either way, that bastard was deader than hell.

It can get worse, however. If you were from the East Coast, or more precisely from the Southeast Coast, or more precisely from the Lowcountry, you had to put up with not one, but two waves of that crudescent filth known as Beach Music. The songs are all originally from the Sixties, of course, however there was a great resurgence, a revival retro if you will, in the mid-eighties, accompanied by that most vulgar form of touch dancing, the shag.

One first heard the songs as a child, while one was broiling upon the beach because Mom hadn't thought to put any Coppertone on one's delicate honkywhite or chocolatini skin. In my case, my poor mother had grown up in the Depression in south Georgia, so to her pale skin was not a mark of the doyennes of Versailles, it was the mark of the fishbelly white redneck. My mother was convinced lethal doses of ultraviolet rays prevented acne, pellagra, and the rickets. And if you did not believe her she would literally dose you with several grams of pure yellow sulphur, just to cure you of the smart-ass. Having seen the effects of the sulphur treatment upon my older siblings I, personally, was a believer.

So: there was the beach, and the amplification amplitude modulation radio, and rock and roll, R&B, and occasionally one of those fucking beach music songs. Ye know the songs; do not hide ye knowledge from me, lest I smite thee: Under the Boardwalk, Sixty Minute Man, 39-21-46, Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy.... Christ, I almost had to put my eyes out just typing them.

Well, you could ignore those songs as a kid, because something cool like Satisfaction would come on next. No, the problem was the revival. When you were in your twenties or thirties. Jumping Jesus, Savannah and Charleston and Myrtle Beach and even, Lord help us, Key West! were inundated with that vomitous shite. And the shagging! Roger me royally. It was the old early sixties touch dancing come back born again, like a zombie Arthur Murray, only with a couple of disco twists thrown in. I was too old by then to do drugs, so I turned to the bottle to soften the blow.

Blow... on second thought, I believe that was also the high water mark of cocainum, so there was that, too. You couldn't go to sleep so all you could do was sit at the bar and drink and drink and listen to beach music and wish you were a 28-day, 12-step Shaolin monk.

Thank God for parenthood. Parenthood is the R. Lee Ermey drill sergeant that slaps your ass out of bed and makes you man up, not least because you know old R. Lee has a grisly, hard penis he'll get you out of bed with if you don't straighten up. So parenthood gets you out of the bars, so you don't have to watch people shag to terrible songs. And dry-hump each other. (You know, the only downside to the seersucker suit on a Southern gentleman is the stain he may acquire in the crotch after gratuitous frottage. Very blacklighty, too. I don't seem to have that problem much, anymore).

Blacks make some of the most awesome music ever. Beach music ain't it. I'll leave you with two songs. One beach, one Eubie Blake. If you can't tell the difference, or prefer song A, please send me your address. I understand R. Lee is available now, and one damned horny Marine.

All Politicians are Bought

The good ones stay bought.

Although I agree with the majority opinion in the Citizens United Spupreme Court case, I find the reasoning risible. The construct that people may have free speech, that people may also associate freely, and therefore corporations represent free associations that must necessarily also enjoy free speech, is bullshit of the first order.

Corporations are not free associations of people. Now or ever. They are merely for-profit entities, with various peoples associating at will for very limited and specific goals, with vast hierarchical differences. Certainly they are free associations insofar as one may choose to work for a corporation or not, however there is no level playing field inside the shell. The average cubicle dweller or dildo machine punch operator has virtually no say so as to how a publicly-traded corporation disperses its political donations, and to pretend otherwise is a case of reductio ad absurdum.

Here's an example: I worked for almost two decades for a huge old school Southern corporation, formerly headquartered in Richmond, still headquartered in the South. To this day they love to gather customers and senators at their swank West Virginia resort and spa so that they may be served mint juleps by nigras attired in white livery, and have darkies fetch their errant golf shots. That doesn't mean the old PAC monies didn't flow to both sides of the fence. A good 40% of those PAC donations went to leftist ideologues who detested the corporation.

It was fucking insurance, pure and simple. Actually, it was attempted vote-buying, pure and simple. But they just couldn't not give to the cocksuckers on the Commerce, Energy, Transportation, and Appropriations committees who controlled their destiny. My conscientous-objector status to enrollment and participation in the PAC hurt me, too, but I could not give a dime out of my pocket to some of the screwheads they were bribing. What they did with other employees' money and their own profits was beyond my control.

Free association? Sure, if one considers the pimp and whore equal business partners.

I still believe Citizens United was decided correctly, however. I figure if Obama could turn off the verification codes on his donations and reap such sizeable piles of untraceable foreign cash he could afford to forego public money, then everyone else should be able to bankroll a politician, too.

I thought I might essay this concept on a smaller, more personal scale. Say, strike up a conversation with a county commissioner in a bar. Give him some cash, "for the cause." Then send a stripper around a few days later. I'm fairly certain I'd have the gibbering idiot in my pocket in no time. Get five of nine commissioners in your pocket? You're sitting pretty good.

It's not that there's "too much money" in politics, as these asses are wont to say. It's that it's not being focused properly. Or, more importantly, it's not being focused by me. Most politicians can be bought a hell of a lot more cheaply than people think. But not by anonymous internet donors. A bundler, however, can pull together some cash from several sources, none of it his own, by the by, and have that politician all over the snotty end of his fuck stick, if you know what I mean, and unfortunately I think that you do.

Politics is money. Always has been, always will be. And every time the do-gooders try to exorcise it from the body politic, it just gets even seedier. These do-gooders simply fail to remember two critical points:

1. Money makes the world go round

2. There's nothing new under the sun

The Boring Class

In William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying the matriarch of a sod dirt Mississippi family succumbs to illness, and the father presumes to take the body, and family, to her hometown of Jefferson for burial. The journey is a tragedy of poor decisions and hubris, and the story takes on sysiphean dimensions, a parable of inexorability and inertia.

The style is multiple narratives, a tale told in turn mostly by the offspring: the rock-ribbed Cash, the impestuous Jewel, the extrasensory Darl, the impregnated Dewey Dell, and the uncomprehending little Vardaman. Of all the viewpoints, including the bemused acquaintances' and bystanders', I find Vardaman's the most compelling.

Unable to fully grasp the concept of death, he at first equates her passing to the death of a fish he has caught. At a later point he becomes concerned that his mother, encased in coffin, cannot breathe, and he finds an auger and bores into the coffin lid (and face) of his mother. Bore, bore, bore. The buzzards then hold council upon the coffin, attracted by the steadily decaying corpse.

I often think of As I Lay Dying in any number of circumstances. It is my wont. Lately I have been thinking of the inertial tendency of the president's votaries to refuse to see the obvious distaste for the administration's direction, and likewise the folly of inexorably plowing through with a doomed mission.

Like the pathetic Bundren clan, there is no turning back, and certainly no possibility of considering error. And so the court sycophants and jesters continue drilling the same futile holes. Bore, bore, bore. Insanely hoping to provide life-affirming oxygen to that which is dead. The journey is never in question, only the obstacles: swollen river, washed-out bridge, distrusting and cynical rubes and yokels, bystanders offering sane but unwanted advice.

The tribe will not heed. It is not the tribe's duty to heed: it is the tribe's duty to hump that coffin of increasingly rotted horror across the streams of context, the washed-out bridges of perspective, and the arid valleys of humility. Onward to the hallowed burial ground of hagiography, and legend. For many, in fact, it will be the toil of a lifetime, this furrowed insistence on glorifying the eminently failed, and the historically macabre.

To many it will simply be bore, bore, bore.

A Reconsideration

I have always deplored the BCS system for its arbitrary and arcane anointing of national champions in college football. However, since Obama has deigned to weigh into the fray, and "fix" the college championships, I now find myself decrying the loss of Tradition we have enjoyed in the past under the glorious BCS system.

My hypocrisy is tempered only by the prejudicial treatment the current scalawags have always given the SEC, so it's really a net-net for me insofar as my soul is concerned.