the writing of john scott ridgway and his mental demons -- gilford tuttle, white male christian, and johnny pain -- punk serial killer with a penchant for vegetible molestation.
the crusade of pain limps on
Published on February 17, 2007 By Gilford Tuttle In Writing

military intelligence

the soldiers were told to march silently
through the carnage
concentrate on the fighting
heroes kept their stride
right over the edge of the earth
falling soundlessly down into meat
morphined out and pretty sure they were going to live
after this bullett, too...

there is still time
pull some of them back
from their veteren hospital slums
give them parades again
let them travel


gather their songs before they go silently
into that good night
and you are left with helpless sobs
and expensive caskets



NOW

is the only time






JIHAD'S END


OSAMA BIN LADEN
laughing at A PSYCHEDELIC PEACE BEAR
in his LAP TOP
as he HITs A HOOKA on A WEBCAM
and blows some sweet smoke into MY PARTY!!!!!


WE NEED ALL
EVOLVING beasts
IN THIS ONE SILLY ASS TRIBE

STAY IN YOURS

JOIN OURS

WHATEVER

CHILL


ARTISTS AND WARRIORS YOU HAVE DESTROYED

NOW YOU MUST CRREATE

AND HELP THE CHILDREN

HEROes

CIRCLE THE FORESTS WITH BAYONETS DRAWN


LET the ragged soldier's GREAT FAMILY LEAD
let his gentle smile be their true reward
softening our hearts and opening our minds

WE NEED TO FIND OUT
from bin laden
WHY THIS HATE EXPLODES ACROSS THE GLOBE


DON'T YOU WANT TO TAKE A CLASS WITH THIS DUDE

PICK HIS MIND
HAVE A DOOBIE AND ENJOY HIS GENTLE SMILE SIDE

HE FOUGHT FOR YOU
ONCE
BEFORE YOU LEFT HIM FOR DEAD
LIKE WE DID SO MANY
TO THE UNKNOWN HEART BREAK OF SILENT SPIES
AND POLS
and warriors and mothers and monks and mad men and Pain




LET HIM GO HOME

LET HIM ADD HIS WORDS

TO HISTORY

HE HAS EARNED HIS REsPEcT

HE IS A WARRIOR

LET HIM SING

I LONG TO HEAR HIS SONG




DON'T LET HIM DIe
ALL CRIPPLED AND DRUGGED
AND MYTHIC

another child drowning in our tears





PERSIAN BLOOD


OR


a few more nuclear bombs


in the oil fields


hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm











their prayers are for the manifest of life


not nukes





in the 80's


under the cloack of reagen's lies


the graceful Iranian doctor told me


you are a revolutionary


without a revolution





and what was true then


is true no more














and you know





you have to


assume


they great they


are 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


that smile and your 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


strangle a teddy bear





just DON'T


IGNITE THEM OIL FIELDS











CAN'T be stupid


this time





we will





all burn





this time







Yea, had some crazy ass dreams

for a week or so, while I was awake. This is the truest story I know how to tell.





There were a few days of blurry faces looming around my hospital bed. I was restrained for some reason not yet clear... and I was sure that I knew every human I saw before, somewhere.... and I thought I would remember, be suddenly jolted into knowing past lives, cosmic adventures.... the undreamed. I was at Ressurrection hospital first, in Evanston.



I thought perhaps the staff were paid actors on some reality show and I was getting the big sting; the whole country was in on the joke, except me, because I was the watched one, some terrible angel who you humans were cautiously awakening.... again.





This was going crazy and then coming back... most of the way. Inside my chest and gut, there is something stirring that I wouldn't notice before and I feel like I have changed deep and true and all romantic and wild.



The radio station suddenly didn't like me, or something.... who knows? They say they just want music now. They have no idea how funny peace and I were hitting when we riffed. It will be a damn shame if no one gives us money to film some of our skits.



I more than likely blew the opportunity somehow... maybe when I started going after people before I reached the conclusion that I had to forgive everyone, as they have forgiven me (yeah, right.... got to inspire them to do that). Fearless radio turned out to be spineless radio, maybe.,.. unless I am wrong, which I am a lot, and hope I am. Those are some damn talented folk. Still, They have lost me. Each according to his own. Radio is hardly the major thrust of my career.



A total thanks to those who have already pledged their time to the scrappy beginnings and are prepared to show up at cook county dressed warm with their dogs to try and show our support with the bruised and battered and dying. I'll let you know when it is safe to come out fighting peacably.... like I would know?







I was transferred from resurrection hosp. after waking up and nodding out on waves of white fluid pumped into my iv.... as I was leaving, someone pulled out a brand new green catholic bible with a felt like cover. I kind of sneered it off, thinking at that poiint that i was the pilot of some earth ship who had come from afar, and was now manifesting in human form, again, to make some cosmic sales pitch for humans to get all peaceable so they could join the intergalactic space orgy that is the apocolypse in this game (or is after you earn as much through study and hard work or some such bleeep).





AT St. anthony's, since i got all mad dog in the end with the cops, they slapped my vomiting ass in the cracker jack box. ... Yea, for some reason when M called an ambulance, I decided I wasn't going with them, or something... so a small herd of cops took me down hard. Who can blame them? A couple of my ribs.







Laying in a barren room puking and puking and the pain a wolverine gnawing on my spine, I started thinking I was already dead, or about to die. I had already lost like ten pounds. They took a couple days figuring out what to do with me, as I yelled and ranted to get relief from the pain trains* slamming into my fusion -- the huge block of bones disentegrating from plain old boring gravity. The psych ward workers were more used to coke heads and really, really crazzy people who were more or less like infants, and suicide cases and cutterS and pukers AND homeless people who found the place their best alternative in a cold chicao winter... I was sure that I was all of them and none. . . I remembered the radio had branded me Pain and it made sense to be there admidst the tragedies of mental break down.





After being an asshole, and being a man of my word, I had to give them something cool for helping me out. I don't think these people make nearly enough money, so it came to me to give them a painting, cabrini green, which used to hang in cook county and never quite made the transition to stroger. Something right about my work hanging in a psych ward. I wrote up a contract so the employees own all rights to prints and stuff, not the church or the hospital...



Other than the hospitals and homes, my paintings are all at MERCY home. Love them gals and guys and they can always use another hand -- it's abused kids and stuff man.





I got some stories All tragic and true and funny, and met a couple damn fine poets and a whole hell of a lot of buds... I was almost the only white guy there and that made it all kind of jovial and cool... I learned while driving cab that blacks get along better most of the time than whites... I would get sick of white people and work the black neighborhoods, personally, because they were chatty and knowledgeable most of the time. When I was eighteen, I sobered up for my first time in a dallas white ghetto filled with people of color who treated me with respect and love. Period. The economy was good there in 1980 and I never heard about no crime.



I especially liked this woman, J., a psychologist or something who told me I needed more soul, and ain't that the truth. Indeed, I let her put some braids in my hair, for the hell of it. M. thinks I am too old for such fashion splashes and wants them out.. they fall out in two days norm.



J. is the one who told me they were not black ghettos, but white ghettos filled with people of color (who can be white now, too, because there is no real white or black anyways... as she also explained with her fire and grace). Never would have thought of that without her musing.







Ah, my svelte, boyount, nubian princess ... what happens when you again meet the crusader on the road? Will this still be war... or finally the time to fuck it all silly?




While I no longer think i am the john the baptist that i discovered in the mormon bible, which i impulsively asked for in the catholic hospital, i do feel like i have been in the desert, and that i am coming back to preach all wild eyed and rightous.


During the mania, I becamed convinced that i was trying to remember my name, and I was pacing so much my feet were bleeding and the back was brutal.... I thought someone else knew my name and could tell it to me... my first few hours on the psych ward, I tentatiuvely tried to say my name was nephi, then mistook a guy for cedric the entertainer, then began to think myself john the baptist. Such dreams were dreamt.


I was trying to find a book with which to interpret reality... or a movie. At one point, I thought of that movie Jacob's Ladder, where all the vet's were already dead and learning to accept their fate, with Tim Robbins... I think this is why I eventually became compelled to cling to the, of all things, mormon bible, which gave me a definition of my mania besides dead. I feel bin laden is caught in this movie just wanting to go home.. . he can still be saved by our Grace.

Pacing out on the concrete dock at loyola beach, preaching to the sunny day and the miraculously blue waves and the ducks too long here now that the warming has them confused.... I was convinced the cia was listening to everything, as I spun out this fully formulated plan out of nowhere, I was pacing back and forth and waving my hands and performing as I never have before... telling a tale that became true in the telling, about how I had traveled here on light, crawled up through your human genes in a practice as old as life in the cosmos, so I could use one of your bodies to talk with you, humanity. . . about what I have to sell. See, I' m just a salesman. Order taker, hand shaker. The shock of being a human and lost in information overload used to stop me from realizing my true self.


At some dark point that there are not enough apologies for, M. was some spy who worked for them. That is when I started yelling at her, thinking all the years we had together were a spy game to her, an assignment, and she had kept her true self from me all this time.... I kept asking her what her real name was.


Weird and tragic and awe inspiring little games the brain can play when you get sucker punched by savage grace.




The mormon's think everyone should be an activist. They offered me some reprieve from the beast I had been, a way to morph into this new thing I sensed then and feel now. Their tales suddenly became a fascination with me after I impulsively asked for a mormon bible at a catholic hospital, half because of that south park episode, an half because about a third of the ridgway's went mormon, according to the goodly professor's book... in the thirties I think, probably around or during the depression?

I kept the mormon's book with me at all times inside the locked ward. I closed the book and wrote on the three sides of thick white pages. On one side LOVE, another PEACE, and on the last PARTY.

I think at that moment in coming back from NEVER NEVER (or not) LAND ... LIFE SEEMED that simple for a moment. Not now.

An inscription inside offers the book from one 'brother paul,' which happens to be the name of the oldest in my family, who died when he was sixteen. The room that I was given was 1 44. I am 44, which the mormons say is the number one age of people who take care of the elderly, and the 1 would come from this being one of my greatest ambitions.

The major muses in the book are abreviated as b and m

anyone knows my work, knows these two women are my muses from way back.

mother!!!!!
Things just got weird!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think we can all see the gamer potential here.... someone oughta go start writing some scripture. maybe u kid?


I decided in a part of my mind without conscious thought to put my life where my words are and follow in the footsteps of my ancestors and stand here all red eyed and hurting and fight. I can't run no more even if I want to.
The decision fits so well I am convinced that I made it eons ago.


While locked up I put together what is called the crusade of pain.


That will be the next entry.

For now, let me say, they put me on dylantin, and that will keep me all mellow and anit-seizure. Weird things they are, seizures.... like being struck down silly and southern baptist with the holy ghost.

Indeed, I came out of this strongly believing that the religious men of yore were leading rich, interesting lives, and I could make mine one too, by allowing the becoming of the political animal I have always been and harnassing my words
for pax romano.


This is the truest story I know how to tell. Freshly released from the hospital and writing frantically to fix and edit the new stuff on the blog, after having taken a week or more going manic, then 30 hours off for a coma, and then another week to begin to figure out why the shit got too crazy for me, and why I came to believe in the old cliche that I was some christ like thing, or angel, or leader or a teacher or some such pipedreams.


My visions of my powers have settled down now to merely inspired by the great men of old and now, so I have been released to tell the tale....

They don't let you out of that ward when you talk to angels. I am looking forward to a little reunion when the shows start on Common Ground. All these folks get in free and a coffe on me (if I have enough money that day).




Here is the newest, what I wrote in the hospital will go up when I get the blog fixed up.

My body was reacting against a drug I had been taking for ten years, suddenly throwing me into a series of literally maddening seizures.



This dream came while I was awake, or apparantly so to those around who expect some excentricities, but clearly noted that the hatter was mad...... . I was in wonderland kansas and barton fink and johnny got his gun and this thing went on forever.


THIS IS TRUE MEMOIR WRITING,


Swear it on my sweet amazon mother's smile, and this is going to be told WITHOUT ANY EMBELLISHMENT.... WARNING, A BIT OF MY SOUL IS ON DISPLAY AND THAT AIN'T ALWAYS CLOSE TO PRETTY.


Perhaps I should gonzo a bit of humor up between the bouts of the pathetic, who knows? Not me, I'm just a boof. And all I got is honesty, like gene wilder modestly once said.

I was vomiting for almost three weeks, some kind of flu, standing at the sink eating crackers and trying to keep the pain pills down long enough to douse the fire burning under those THick, red, angry scars.


Despite deep and steady back Pain that would have normally stopped me from writing, the words seemed to just flow through me unbidden. All I had to do was make myself sit here. When the typing became praying is beyond th is boof.


i felt like i was catching hold of electric currents, in places deep in my unconscious.... and organically growing into a being i am just now imagining.

A leader of some kind of crusade, however sickening the word sounds.... a man struck by some holy, awful, gorgeous experience that I will be spinning out now that I am back at the helm... a week or so mostly off writing has my fingers damn itchy.....



WIth the health, right now I am eating vegetarian, off cigarreettes, taking a bare minumum of pills and exercising... but when my brain went awry, I was just puking up everything and going half crazy from withrdrawel after ten years on the stuff, and having seizures....



I became possessed by dream after dream. It could not have happened at a worse time. A series of seizures...
I became convinced I was a conglomeration of different fictional characters like in Dune, or Stranger in a strange land... in other words, a christ like figure....

Well, that and other things. I think my jesus was a salesman who was telling earth that he could show them how to make the planet a space ship and join in som e intergalactive orgy....

I felt I was Paul Atreides being tested, that one false move and I would be considered too dangerous to emerge.

I started listing the names of a bunch of comic books at one point, which seemed to alarm everyone. I really need to either polish my first drafts more or keep them secret.

Here's the HEADS UP...

The bit with the comic books was me thinking I could raise some money for charity, and the bit with the peace bears was a joke based on national lampoon's cover about a dog being shot if you didn't buy a copy. I thought it was funny to threaten to kill a peace bear unless people quit killing each other or something. M. missed the point and now all the little peace bears are hidden in the closet. They are still peeking out, I guess... but you know little peace bears, they are wary as all hell.

So, here is the boring health story:


I was in a coma state for 30 hours, during which my mortality was in question. I guess in the end I got violent, like some pain ravaged dog... M. called the ambulance and I got it in my head not to go with them, so they called in like five beefy cops who took me down hard. I was already half in the coma, lucky for them or me or all of us.

.....
you live deeply embedded in fiction
we are flowers in our night


still nazi?
still white?

STILL ALL ABOUT FIGHT OR FLIGHT?

NO ONE looks much different
under the cover of darkness
we will be one on this night



b
just a few
torches

b
just a little
light





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