You've Heard it Before

I can't. I won't. I should. It might help. It might be letting the world see the wounds. It's too self-indulgent and pathetic.
Stay away. Go away. I will drive every human contact into a safe area. No peeking behind the blinds.
How weak I've become. How strong I once was. Let the years roll by and serve my life sentence of suffering. For what? Nothing. It's a meaningless nightmare of pain. You've heard it before.
Yet the words salve my wounds for a little while. It's a prison vacation in a walking torture chamber. I hate these words, I hate the weakness and the self-exile. But no one else can see. They won't understand, because neither do I.

Bigot Bingo

I am a shameless lover of the NY Post's Police Blotter. The best thing about it is guessing what the race of the accused perpetrator in a crime.
There is a rule in journalism that one is not supposed to identify the race of the arrested unless it is directly connected with the story. This is why newspapers will name a suspect's clothing, their approximate height and weight, and what neighborhood they are from. The papers can roughly identify physical appearance. But the best way of ID-ing is usually their race.
This is why mothers name their baby's names that make it obvious who they are.
In Hispanic neighborhoods, especially Puerto Ricans, half the last names of suspects seem to be Maldonado. If I could get a San Jose phone books probably half of it would be filled with Maldonados.
The babies names are usually Angel, Miguel, Jose, and of course Jesus. If you ever want to see Christ return, try Jesus in New York. He's everywhere.
Then there are the African-Americans. When I was a kid the black students generally had the same first names as white kids. Paul, Larry, Charles etc. Now it's whatever odd name their mothers can imagine. Lots of D's. D'quan, DuTroy, DeCon roach spray.
Also of course the Ls. LeBron, Lontel, LaQuan etc.
It does make NFL more interesting, with guys named Pac-Man and Antoine Randel-El.
With white guys, look at the Italians busted in police stings. When I was covering police in Trenton, I would go through to arrest docket every day.
Most of them were young and arrested on bullshit possession of a controlled dangerous substance. That meant crack.
Every once in a while, you'd get guys from Philly who were middle aged and had a vowel at the end of their names. Can anybody guess what profession they were in?

But I can't wait until kids now come of age, of crime age. They all have these precious special names that their parents most have gotten from soap operas.
Grant, Harrison, Wesley, Spencer, Brant, Dylan a million times; Lord King Richard the VII.
I don't know when newspapers started the policy of not naming a suspect's color. I guess they thought it would fuel bigotry to do so.
That leaves you the reader with name and address/neighborhood of their homes. TV news often broadcasts pictures of the suspect. But by that time you've usually got a mental picture. Its less than Bingo, more like connect the dots.

Simon Says Stop (second edition since I forgot the earlier post)

Part II - a rewrite of Nov. 18 that's much better than this edition. I can't figure out how to jump stories to where I want them.

The real news in a newspaper is not on the front page; that's pack reporting. But take a good look at P. A17, usually the metro or city beat. What you will see is the end of the American empire, the buried tragedy of the inner-city that usually gets little front-page action.
So said David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who created "Homicide: A Year on the Streets of the Killing Fields." Then his cable series "The Wire," which ran for what? Five years? Its dead-on verisimilitude actually rang true
.
There was a time when groups like the Black Panthers provoked genuine fear, a fear of an uprising. In this scenario, the Panthers would gather in East Harlem and march down Park Avenue. Residents would afraid to leave their condos, but were too afraid to leave it to whatever those doormen do to stay up at three am.
Yet people get killed on public transportation, in openly public places, and of course convenience stores.
If we are ever going to get real jobs in WPA programs, as Obama is talking about, they're going to have to include addiction programs.
The news philosophy in local reporting everywhere seems to be, as Simon said at a meeting at Princeton University, "if we don't acknowledge it, it doesn't exist."
Simon, a squat man in his 40s or so, with a shaved head, looks like a character on the series. He told the distinguished professors and others that the ghetto economy is going to take 30 years to fade away. Do not convict anyone on a non-violent drug charge; it's a complete waste of time and does not not make the punishment fit the crime.
Instead of rookie teachers at the worst schools, pay established teachers "combat pay;" - that is, about double what their peers are getting.
Instead, he said, "statistics are the devil."
Teachers are told to get their numbers down (of violent crime, of rape, armed robbery etc., as well as classroom achievement). The teachers, quite naturally, cheat with their kids numbers.

This is the heart of the ghetto policy: lower what the students have to do for qualifying as to what constitutes major crimes, push the teachers to raise numbers up at the state and national level (like the No Child Left Behind program), anyway they can.

This situation is at the heart of the show; in politics, in police, and in the prisons. The system is rigged: you can't win. Policy and Police commanders, at the point of tears, are interrogated as to why the crime numbers aren't down.
So armed robbery, mugging, and other street crimes are pushed into less serious categories, so major violent offenses are supposedly down.

But simply standing around shaking your head in disbelief at increasingly brazen, open violent crime does no good.

"The question becomes, "Are we one society or are we not?" 'Simon said. "If we're not, let's hire more private security guards and build more gated communities. And let's to terms with the fact that America only works for some of us."

Fordham Road, The Bronx

Fordham Road split the borough in two. North semi-safe, south a hellhole.
I told my friend Keith there were some great Irish bars up there. Instead, there were wizened old-man bars whose sparse occupants told us one main thing: It's all gone to shit.
The hood had turned unequivocally Hispanic. The Irish youth had, believe it or not, decided to stay in the newly emergent Celtic Irish Tiger, and were staying over on their side of the pond.
Before, when I visited the Fordham campus, I was blown away by the hard Bronx landscape giving away instantly to manicured, rolling lawns, tall trees, and mock-Gothic architecture. The bars were cheap, absurdly so, but it was felt that the students were easy marks for mugging.
But I had been to Belmont Ave, Italian-American inspiration to Frankie and The Belmont's doop-wop's of the early 60s. Still a few old birds up those apartments whose existence was to tell you to shut up or leave in the courtyards.
Believe it or not, we did. On to Yankee Stadium, then the Sunnyside area of Queens. An entire world in one place.
After the Irish beat Milan 1-0, the entire bar went outside in the Queens street and jumped around and broke pint glasses.
My partner in crime is not around anymore, at lease not to me; but tell me in NYC, are there no new worlds to conquer?

Fits Right in the Palm of Your Hand

You can now download porn into your cell phone, or another person might send it to you. This may be a little embarrassing, on planes, trains, and buses. Especially when riding next to women, children, the elderly and others who are not sickos like you.
Maybe they'll put in an "adults only" pleasure-yourself train cars or similar areas in the back of planes.
Or you can talk too loudly on your phone, filling in everyone around you to the play-by-play action. "Yeah, she's getting it on with an Aardvark now. This is really hot," you say as you pant along.
And if you think regular cellphones are a menace on the road, think about XXX right on your steering wheel. I wonder what people will tell the cops when they wreck their wheels and maybe themselves at a certain moment; that is, coming and going at the same time.
Its the classic problem of oversexed society: sex and sexual images will become boring. I've already wrote about the news kiosk in Austria where a triple-X magazine, complete with the money shot, was right in the middle of all the other "respectable" rags, and people just walked right on by, paying no attention to it whatsoever.
In the Luke Wilson film Idiocracy, one could go into a mini-Starbucks, get a latte, and get, uh, a happy ending.
Let's get sex at least semi-naughty again, the way it was when you stole Penthouses or paid for Playboys from some kid's dad's collection. It is actually quite easy; you simply make a new domain name, (XXX) for porn.
Otherwise that sound you think is your porno-cell will not be moaning. It will be the yawning from everyone around you.

Hand Over the Ambassador, Jeeves

It definitely wasn't terrorism code red at the British Embassy a few years back. A Christmas party was going on somewhere in the sprawling compound. My neighbor and I were invited and, anyway, we ended up with a semi-automatic rifle pointed at us. Cheerio!
The mini-pub where the party was happening was almost impossible to find unless you know the layout. We definitely didn't.
Anyhow, we ended up knocking on the door of the British Ambassador. Some pointed-faced Jeeves type came to the door. We asked if the party was there. "Most certainly not." he said.
As we were leaving, we looked in the dining room window and there was a candle-lit get together, all of whom were senior types, all of whom had looks of absolute disbelief on their faces as they looked back at us.
Walking back to the new part of the compound, a man dressed in black and with an M-16 commanded us to stop. We did (surpise). We were asked to identify ourselves ("well, I'm a Pisces); I said I was as US citizen and Simon said he was British. He asked for ID, then said we were within a few feet of being blasted unto Kingdom Come.
We were escorted to this rec-room/pub way in the back and enjoyed a good time, and laughed about how simple bone-headedness could now get you killed.
Here's the kicker. My roommate used to go to the embassy mini-pub, which showed British soccer teams. Only he wasn't allowed in. Nobody was allowed in the pub.
When my roommate asked why, someone said "oh, some American Wankers came inside and scared the crap out of the Ambassador."
Mike, my roommate, said nothing. A few weeks later the Brits let the sports fans back in, probably with extra-security

Rebel, Rebel (past tense)

It was in the cult section of the last video store, a "specialty" one, here in Princeton. I found "Suburbia," about a loose gang of vaguely punk kids who had tried to find a home in an abandoned real estate development in the LA outlands.
Here's how you know you are middle-aged. I was concerned about real estate values the entire time. There are, apparently, these semi-abandoned developments in what Angelenos call The Antelope Valley or the Inland Empire.
These areas sprung up to serve the military bases around it, and now serve as the last frontier of affordable housing for people who work "down below;" over the mountains in the LA Basin.
The movie starts out in a very cliche way: punk kids misunderstood, homeowners fascist repressive nazi jackasses.
I won't spoil the end by telling you that the movie ends with the youngest member of the clan (maybe 8 years old)being killed by the suburbo-rednecks. Wait, I just did. That's OK you won't see it anyway.
I saw the movie in Georgetown with Walsh McGuire, about the most punk kid that existed at Georgetown Prep. Afterward, we broke a window or something to show what badasses we were. We hid in the cemetery on Wisconsin below M Street, as though the police actually gave a damn.
Hard to believe that kids actually saw that movie and identified with it. Then again, "Qaudrophenia" made me want to drink, smoke, run from cops and get into fights. The operative word here is impressionable.

Porn vs. the Nazis

The first thing you notice is the color. No comfortable black and white that you can assure yourself was long ago and far away. Instead, a pile of still white and pinkish bodies, a mountain of them.
All of it colored footage of the death camps, all of which makes the horror so pedestrian. It is like a bonfire at a Big Ten college. Kindling wood.
I switch to an, ahem, item of adult entertainment. It's an orgy scene, and the similarity of the pile-em up on each other is more than disturbing after watching the scenes of the holocaust.
One is pleasure, the other pain, or so it seems. As I've always said, the problem with orgies is that you can never tell where one person ends and the other begins. What's that William Dafoe pic where he confesses that he might have stroked another heterosexual because it was really hard to figure it out who was who?
I guess the only way to know is to everyone wear one of those Army dog tags.
It's like that old joke. "Why don't WASP's like Orgies? "Too many thank you notes."

Spoiled Milk

I've seen the trailers for and reviews for "Milk," about the flamboyantly gay city supervisor who was killed in office. Let me make myself clear in my profound disgust and protest.

Like we can identify with such a limp-wristed, fruity fairy. The moment I saw him on the screen I wanted to get the old baseball bat out of the garage and bash him with it. Unfortunately, it was only an actor up there on screen there, Sean Penn.
Penn, being from fag-friendly Hollywood, probably didn't realize what a terrible role-model he was making.

Now, bus-loads of children will be forced to watch this disgusting piece of homo-propaganda. The school board wherever they are will probably think that they are helping the kids into being more accepting, and to treat such sissies just like they would with normal people.

I've had it with such trashy filth like the one that Heath Ledger was in. We can all see how totally pissed off God was when the divine one, in his fierce judgment, took that actor away.

Why aren't there other movies that show the apostles living together, but without so much as a "love that robe" between them? I'll tell you. God was watching them at all times, and struck down everything down to your everyday erection in his fierce righteousness. As quoted in Mark II, part 3, "if a sheep doest wander before the holy men, neither man nor beast should find themselves in unholy congress."

In other words, fruitcakes, watch out, because the greatest fag-basher of all time is coming. And by your limp wrist he shall identify you, and send you down below, which I can assure you is tacky as hell and will play no thumping bass music, ever.

Long Island Trampling and The Office

The Office's Dwight Schrute's cornering of the unicorn princess market in Scranton may shed some light on that bizarre and disturbing trampling to death of the man who opened a Long Island Wal-Mart's doors on Black Friday morning.
If you saw the show December 11, you know that Dwight bought every one of these ridiculous dolls in the area, then sold them to desperate parents at a huge profit. The parents' children all wanted them so badly for Christmas that the adults didn't want to disappoint their little darlings and would pay practically anything.
This might explain the crazed rush in the pre-dawn hours on Long Island. I can imagine the conversation at Christmas. Parent: "Does my little princess like her present?" Child: "It's just what I wanted!" Parent: "Good, because I had to trample a guy to death to get it, just for you."

NYPD Black, Blue, and Trigger-Happy

Is the NYPD hiring only sado-masochistic repressed homosexuals? Some Tatoo artist (allegedly) got partially reamed by a nightstick in a Brooklyn subway station recently, and of course there was the Abner Louima case when, late 90s?
Also, New York must be the biggest market for Louisville Sluggers in the country. Some guy supposedly tried to take a whack at a female cop this week and was shot by her. Bats seem to be involved in an unusually disproportionate amount of group/gang attacks at least since the 80s.
This seems to be a long-loved tradition, as my brother is reading a book on Victorian New York and the thugs used "clubs" pretty often to keep things in line.
I normally blame police very little, because they are usually simply following the said or unsaid tacit orders of society's establishment.
In Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which borders Detroit on two sides and is home to the city's Old Money, cops cars are continuously run up and down the border with the city. Hence they are labeled racist.
But no cop can afford to live in Grosse Point, at least on salary only. That salary is paid by the people who once went to the point of trying to establish a "drainage canal" (ie a moat) on the Detroit border.
But the NYPD is getting carried away, it seems. They shot and killed a man in Coney Island for swinging a chair at them. Recently they shot an obviously disturbed man on a second story outside precipice, I can't remember if the cops said they felt menaced by him.
In any case, the police clearly need better training when it comes to the mentally unbalanced. And I wonder how bat sales are doing lately (maybe they come with rent controlled units).

Hate Poetry

there are some things that can only be hinted at in poetry. Here's my shot

The morning sun starts to creep around the ray-blocking shades on the window.
keeping it off me like a toxic ocean in which I don't want to swim
Who hates the sun?
Wake up! Another day of pain, another of pretending.
That I am a real human being, just like you.

But it is different, a silent scream in which
If I let it go
could rattle the windows and pull up the shades
travel to the far regions of the world
combine it with the wail of Africa, the suffering continent

A compromised existence in which
I have to play pretend
If I let it go
would it put me in the hospital for good
would lose the friends who stood beside me

Even though they could not understand

A cripple for all my life?
The days, months, years and decades pile up
All feeling the same
With each therapist a brief hope
Maybe it will go away

Maybe it will go away

But for now I'm afraid
I cannot let out the fear
the sorrow
the pain

pain beyond explanation
beyond comprehension
my companion for 17 years
I give it full attention

Physician, heal thyself
Poet, hate yourself
A scared scarecrow
A screaming skull

There must be some kind of explanation
Why a just God would send to me
the worst kind of isolation

Too afraid to let out the real anguish
Don't want to send the reader
Flying to the light
I'm gone and best forgotten

Gone and best forgot

isolation chamber

No one can tell me what's wrong
As I fall between the cracks
trying desperately to crack whats in my back
The day is long and the night is black