lots of stuff at ebloggy...
jump start
After being told I was getting up
and crawling from a warm bed around five thirty am
to kiss M off and lock her out the back door
and experiencing a jarring blast of arctic air against my naked skin,
I started the greek coffee
and came into the desk to fire up the demon
(the name of my computer's shell... which I put a picture of in here and dreaming n blue oh so cleverly called it a pin up for geeks, giving me a laugh at least);
sat back down at my soiled and stained
once cool red leather captain's chair
and let my fingers once more play
a little prayer for absolution
and give thanks for my muse,
our fathers, my beatrice,
our mothers, my lovers,
our cats, dogs,
my gods, my m. . .
in their name
i take aim
----------------------------------------------
Liberal Lovers Of Liberty and Libations
We have to stop assuming
we will be
the victims
of another nefarious plot
forced into another war
lose another stolen election
let another species go extinct
and so what if we lose for awhile?
we'll take the required
two steps backwards
forgive
and never
never
never
forget
start walking taut and alert
b ready to act
thinking
like a Lioness
raising cubs
& for dog's sake
DON'T DO ANYTHING
UNLESS YOU TALK
TO PEACE
FIRST
------------------------------------------------
Hey elfshits and other assorted curios,
I am reading and editing the recent flood of words to come in off the lake. They are about ankle deep around my desk.
M. has no idea what I am doing on the blog, can see only the mess that needs cleansing.
The fever dreams raged on unabated through my first few days locked up at Saint Anthony's psych ward; I learned to hold my toungue about the craziest shit.... didn't like the look in people's eyes when I told them I was still trying to wake up and unsure of my name... that there was something more afoot.. something well beyond a boof.
Awake or asleep, the writing and the campaign continued developing in my mind -- in places deeper than the pea of concsiousness that seems like me to me. By this, I mean, I kept having dream visions of how to do protests, orgainze writers for maximum fun and effeciency, paintings, and etc....
Organically the Crusade of Pain became more and more complex, going from writing some comedy, to protesting for the poors like me, to thinking I may have been awakened for some purpose... that I may just be a tiny part of a praxis for peace. Like some of you.
This dreamING ABOUT the projects I am working on was entirely new to me, the stuff of biographies of great men... not the mumbling of boofs. I would get up after four hours of sleep and go out into the empty hall of the psych ward and talk with whoever was doing the nightshit watch for suicides and sex. I talk a lot anyways, but during this period there is so much I suddenly want to say, as the writing attests to... and still they were kind enough to take me seriously, even as I paced up and down the hall in a hospital gown and socks (I literally had no clothes when they transfered me; they got me some real clothes after like four days.... everything I had at home was way too big by this point... when, like I said, I lost ten or more pounds to puking... not to mention I tend to wear them loose as hell to lessen the pressure on my spinal fusion -- lowers that all important pain score a bit).
Though this is as crazy as I have ever gotten without heavy duty chemicals, I was not judged by anyone unless I was an asshole -- which sadly enough I think I needed to be to get them to take me seriously as a chronic pain patient, though of course I am probably wrong... this is fuzzy time in the memory, too.... regardless and all... when I settled down and let them do their best, I was cared for and indeed humbled by the entire staff at the hospital.
I am freaked out that if I quit typing my new found confidence will shrivel up and die.
Now that I am home and smoking a bit again, I am back to barely remembering my dreams. This is a sad side effect, for sure, and I am going to have to figure out how to get those dreams back. I can hypnotize and stuff, other people... not myself, because of all the pain, when I try to get in touch with my body like I used to when I meditated, my mind recoils like a hand in a fire.
I want thousands of folks in the writers meetings putting together great shows, and everyone who gets something on gets credit....
Sitting in the hospital talking to the doctor and thinking I knew him and everyone else on the ward from past lives or something, I strategically decide to start holding my toungue tight. I don't like being locked up no matter how gilded the cage, and this was pretty sweet and helpful... but Pipedreams about bibles and john the baptist and aleins waiting for us to find peace are topics best kept out of therapy sessions with shrinks eager to slap ya somewhere they can make money off you twice a day ( you know what their student loans look like????). Not that I believe them, but I did... oh, dog, I did.
One of the finest human beings I know of kept pysch patients longer than need be, and he did this, simply because it was the way things were done, and it did indeed let him live the life of a prince. He also gave free therapy to folks like me and my ex-wife. I remember his gentle sing song voice telling me. "Your problem is that you are a revolutionary without a revolution..."
The 80's kind of sucked. He gave me a xerox of an old picarsque novel to read that he said helped him become a man... Christopher something... He was a Persian psychiatrist who did his damndest to keep this manchild's traiterous hands from wringing his own scrawny neck.
_________________________
JOKESTERS UNITE
this is our right
we are
NO LONGER VICTIMS
to the whims
of jackel$ and fool$
NO, NOT Tonight
racing down from the stars
up there swooping
and ready
screaming and itching
for a fight
that's our eagle
tonight.
Persia, Land Of Poets
The W talks fast into the microphones in an earnest voice practiced to what his handlers swooningly called ,'a nearly perfect reagenish octave.' He glances down at another speech carefully think-tank designed to leap from sound bite to sound bite without revealing anything at all about anything; at first, he was almost surprised when it worked time after time; now he is confident he can always rely on the B.ig C.on to win out in the end with just enough folks to save his elitist ass....
"I can say with certainty that the Quds Force, a part of the Iranian government, has provided these sophisticated I.E.D.'s that have harmed our troops," he said, using shorthand for improvised explosive devices.
"I intend to do something about it," Mr. Bush said, alluding to the armor-piercing weapons. He also said, as he has repeatedly, that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would be a peril to world peace, although he steered wide of any suggestion that the United States might wage war against Iran.
persian blood
or a few more nuclear bombs
in the oil fields
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
you have to
assume
they great they
are all lying
fearful they won't be forgiven
determined to get their way
they great they
distort information
in formation
in
formation
formation
in
peoples
lives
and lands
will burn napalm orange
again
the great twit cries wolf from the oval office?
gonna look that way
no matter what
now
w yr credibility is gone
baby gone
retire into the history books
with your esteemed father
your disgraced brother
your tattered shreds of southern decency
or make your family an anocroynism forever
a curse on the lips of our children's children
smoke a peace pipe
get drunk
and laid
ANYTHING BUT
pour a sea of gasoline
on this fire
don't be stupid this time
we will all burn
this time
The italicised two paragraphs are from today's
NYT. I don't know much, but I do read it every day.
A call to arms and toes
and legs and tounges and tits and the no no place*
and anything else you want to flaunt
baby
baby
my little baby thing
I am now in an active dialog with you, rather than spinning fictional stories.... Get a little worried about how my hair is today, if the animals will behave, if I can keep my temper and tears in check. I am not used to letting you in my rather thick and solid and soiled concrete, steel reinforced walls, let alone just balls out opening the castle gate and waving you in. I feel kind of embarrassed and on and humbled by your sharing these interesting times with I, John The Boofster, your reluctant, though never-the-less exuberant host at this gathering of the minds and other more important organs.
I see myself walking through crowds of lepers and the other written incidents that go along with this welcoming ... The new baptism could well be becoming a footnote in this times unweildy tombs.... to be acknowledged as one who ponders great questions, not one who comes up with great answers.... or so we've dreamed up in this pipdream of peace, this toddlertext teetering to an uncertain future with dark matter all around.
I am ready to start my little blitzkreig. The chains to the mundane are almost all broken.... though there will always be more, and one day I wish to welcome them...
For now, though? I'll Sleep When I Am Dead (cool flick; the one guy kills himself after getting butt boned; he should have learned to take it in the ass and bide his time, wait for the right moment to shove in the shiv and reclaim his pride).
The primal survival, the reason our balls get tight and sweat breaks out on our foreheads and we grind our teeth and steel our gaze and sometimes, just some silly ass times....
LOVE THE WAR ITSELF!!!!
We know better, and it goes away.... Ask Walt Whitman why the nurse with the bloody hands could no longer write poetry that stirred up war in the souls of man? Ask Nathanial Hawthorne why he was sceptical of the idea that america needed a war to masculanize us????? There is always a reason for war.... but come on, there a lot more for peace -- everyone has hundreds. This is not brain surgery, or even Leggos...
. I am going to practice the shit out of a few of the new entries, some comedy, and even some of this latest mania poetry, then, when I am healty enough and doc says I will not end up madder than normal, I will hit the streets to start promoting my shows -- where I hope to sell prints of my art cheap, and my books.... should I ever get around to editing them. I almost never practice. I simply write too much to memorize. I mean, I can, but... why???? I want to read off the page, so what the b;eeep!~!!!
I will combine this campaign with political protest. Why not?? I always dreamed of organizing labor, making a difference. I ended up being that preacher con man momma predicted, the one she bought all those books for and tried not to brag about. You all know what I am talking about... I hope.... If not, get some therapy and better friends.., whatever it takes to remember THE MOTHER'S LOVE.
Some splendorific moments I sit here feeling connected to the hundreds of thousands that come in and check out my words, like you are feeding my unconscious thin tendrils of some misty grey vibe that bypasses my pea of a conscious and wafts straight into the chakra in my forhead AND emerges with my soul to create something new each and every precious moment.
(I am using the word 'soul' for lack of a better word to communicate these ideas... I think it might be universal enough to bypass the confusion of the Tower Of Babel, so we can start building that altar into the sky.... Thank You again Matt and Trey for the dog gone blessing of you work... you make the Hunter Proud, I imagine... don't you wish he were here, at his blog, fighting for hearts and minds and any treasure he can find?).
there has to be a less loaded word -- spirit thingy???? Or something a lot cooler than that... uh, which, uhmm... I will have to secret at this point, like so much, for my stupid little security concerns... can't out nobody as a chipmunk Bleeper until I know for sure they want their kinks advertised, like Warren, who at the moment is in some sort of VD related coma -- the first of it's kind).
Other days, I wonder why I ended up such a loser... Bad Monkey gets mad at me when I go on about my self-hatred, but it is there. Like all the other sides of me, it is a matter of balancing the effect of said quaility of my personality. I have done stuff I hate... like Adler says, behavior is different than intrinsice worth. I don't think I understood this until I decided to balls out just forgive everyone their trespasses.
Yea, the guy with barely any clothes, no possessions to speak of... no car, no goldfish, no nice boots or fancy glasses or hearing aides or any number of things I would like... the lacking taunts me tooo. the emptiness speaks of irresponsibility and not giving a f.... about objects. . . I trash everything. Get paint all over helll.... have dirt under my nails often enough that M. starts any intimate sessions of any sort with a stern rebuke about hygien.... (this is trueish).
I am glad that my voice is only becoming firm now that I am ready to go," Bllleeep, yea, I'll be a role model." I want to give the kids some reefer sanity, the unions more room to grow, the hunted a chance to lay down their arms and go HOME...
So, the thrust of the Crusade of Pain becomes focused on bleep other than cook county, thank dog. Now for helping turn hearts and minds into a collective creature that can mature into the government of our most shared dreaaaams. Again, I am a boof.... but I would like to see Obama and Hillary in bed together in someway (I am sure bill will agree with me on this, what with his reknown for 'pussy talk' -- which seems to me like a way for two guys to turn each other on without having to actually get dick poked).
I am kind of flippped out by how many of those fragmented poems that I wrote during my mania were able to grow up into what are 'real poems,' for me. I haven't written too many of those lately. I came home from the hospital and practically just sat down at the computer and started trying to get my blog in order. 28 hours later I had a whole herd of new poetry.
Now, at first, I thought I was just going to erase all of them, mind y ou. I had no idea what I had wrote. I mean, I lost days and days totally, then others to living in ficitional dreams that were more real to me than the hospital's granite floors or the shrinks soothing words... possessed by something that was probably a drug reaction (wish I could chalk it up to something I know and am comfortable with, like an od, but it may have been the opposite because I kept puking up the pills. . . and then there is always the mad-making touch of the holy ghost -- which seemed a lot more ridiculous three weeks ago than it does right now in this foxhole). Lucky for me, the mania gave me a confidence that sustained itself for what seemed like forever. I was in some serious pain yet still able to write because of... well, whatever????
So, that is kind of heads up that if you want to compare first drafts to the finished, go to the church of the bleeding toe, where the fragments that grew into a few poems are still raw.
HOW CULTS START
He searches his inner self and detects only slight coffee/weed nerves, though he suspects there is more to the dancing hamsters than meets the eye, that he is being controlled somehow by the wagging little tail.
by scott ridgway
if you have little stories or whatever that you would like to expose to a larger audience by having me put them in here and link to you...
email to johnsridgway@yahoo.com
I'll edit and then compile them into a book at lulu dot com that will be named Elf Shits. First come first serve... sort of.
Thank you again to all the people who have been emailing me pledges of assisance or whatever.
Every single hamster pelt adds to our stock!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Especially the tie dyed ones!
* The No No place: this is one of the names that seth green and his writing partner considered before going with Robot Chicken (which was actually a dish on the menu at the restaurant where they were meeting; see those minds being inspired by everyone and everything).