daily shriek

and the air is warm and pregnant with rain. it’s supposed to be winter.

Sometimes inspiration comes as easily as josh’s mom.

(link to make your own)

okay, so i am pretty inured to the smell of urine in the human plumbing connecting the various trains, subways, trolleys etc. under philadelphia, but this morning was my first experience of seeing what happens when someone who needs to take a crap and can’t find an open bathroom despite the large number of hotels in the vicinity.

walking up the stairs out of patco this fine but somewhat muggy a.m., i had to walk past a pile of what i can only assume was some sort of booze-induced pile of crap on the landing just outside of where the gates lock up the station at night. i assume it was the booze, because it looked like one of my whiskey shits, or the infamous shit-puke — a story for another day.

it reminded me of the time when my cousin ned came to visit me one saturday morning in the shitty basement apartment i called home for a year during college and had to walk around a big ol’ turd on the walkway that led to my door around back of the building.

so of course we went out and bought a roll of black and white film and took pictures of it. we snapped my cat at the time sniffing it; we put a brick next to it (’shit a brick, heh) , as well as can (shit can that idea, heh) and a couple action figures i had found in the backyard. oh, and we posed with it too of course.

those were the halcyon days that my cousin ned and i used to call “lost weekends” where he’d come and pick me up and drag me around to go see shows that no one his age wanted to see, like X, The Blasters, etc. and drink like madmen from friday happy-hour all the way through to sunday afternoon. oh, and i’m not exaggerating — we’d start drinking at breakfast and keep it up all day. i woke up one morning my niece’s tree house. good times, good times.

he’s about 10 years older than me and my whole life, he’s always just sort of swooped in, snatched me up and dragged me on adventures, to amusement parks when i was a kid, and to bars as i got older. my friends have always been surprised at how hard i can drink when i put my mind to it, but it’s a family thing, a german catholic family thing.

he was always quick to remind me how full of shit i was, made fun of me writing poetry, made fun of my long hair, but only because it was a good laugh. and that one day when we took pictures of shit was what came back to mind as i climbed past the human waste in the city’s people-plumbing, and reminded me how my cousin kinda prepared me for real life by vacationing from reality with me.

sleepless nights don’t agree much with me these days and i had one last night and my brain is focused in a laser like way that is rare for me, but my brain’s feeling as fuzzy as it would were i have imbibed a pint of liquor. maybe i should have.

brains don’t make a freakin sense

i once told a co-worker that she needed to watch office space over the weekend, hoping it would enlighten her just one tiny iota to the fact that she had become indistinguishable from the machines.

it turned out to be a fool’s errand — she came in on monday, and without the slight hint of irony told me the she had a case of the mondays.

i have encountered lots of clueless people in my journey through this world, but it is rare to see such cluelessness in such raw form.

it was kind of breathtaking.

true story

back in the day when i was driving cabs, i took my future wife on a driving tour of the spring grove cemetery in cincinnati, a cemetery noted for its beautiful and vast grounds, famous er, inhabitants, and impressively artistic headstones and mausoleums (including one small gothic cathederal). it’s as much a sculpture garden as a necropolis.

further back in the day, i lived around the corner from the place and used to take near-daily walks there, strolling the grounds and found my favorite quote “there is a sound from the tomb that is sweeter than song” inscribed on the mantle of a large marker that was held 10 ft in the air by two large columns.

i used to take naps there to see if i would have any weird dreams. sadly i had none, but the respectful quiet of the place made for blissful slumber.

anyway, while we were driving along through the winding roads admiring the markers, we came to one near the road that apparently marked the final resting place of a couple — i wish i could remember their names — for atop a 4 foot tall pillar were mounted two bronze busts of whom i can only imagine were the two interred below.

they were both very austere looking people a la american gothic, and as i recall they passed in the late 19th century. i joked to my future wife that “they look like they must have been the life of the party.” a wisecrack that she chuckled at, more to humor me than anything.

but then the weirdest thing happened, the volume on the radio in my cab (the am/fm, not the dispatch) started going up on its own. i shit you not. it freaked me straight the fuck out. and if it wasn’t spooky enough that the the volume started to rise, the volume nob would not turn the radio down — it was one of those knobs that you pushed to turn off so the knob turned freely.

i am not shitting you, it wasn’t till we drove away from the grave that i was able to take back control over the stereo.

needless to say, my better half and i beat a hasty retreat for the exit — not an easy task in the byzantine labyrinth of roads that wend without signs through this small city of the dead.

i’ve never been back, it’s been 8 or so years since that day. i will get back one day, and i will have changed, grown and raised a family, and they will still be there, stoic and frozen in time. and i will be more respectful.

i just love it when art is simple, clean and to the point.

now quit fucking around get back to work.

i went to the bathroom to take a dump, had my sudoku at the ready, but my bowels decided not to cooperate — a rare event for me and my high-fiber ways — and i thought how crazy that i am having to work so hard.

then it hit me “that’s insane, got no brain” started up in my head as i squeezed as squeezed.

apologies and no disrespect to b-real et al, but dude sounds constipated, and my little experience to day called them to mind — oh, and how much fun i had back in the day when c-hill was new, and how i kept blowing out my speakers wondering how he could just kill man.

we have defeated our foes and stand upon the world stage uncontested, we shall rot from within and be pecked apart from without just like rome.

a guys is holding a gun, backing away from the camera, he’s afraid of the camera and the media to which it’s connected and the people those media control and his mind is snapping,

he wants to end the pain, the gun in his hand represents the ability to focus his scattered rage, his family has yet to be discovered in the den

there’s no turning back now