Ghettoville

Post Script from Ghettoville

2009-11-29T07:13:00.000-08:00

I must say with all due respect that the Phase 3 and The Arrivals - the online remarkable series and programs have been very compelling for me and my friends - This series certainly make the unaccustomed to thinking - think. Through these vague and hard to find online programs and my online curiosity I slowly figured out that the US Federal Reserve which was created in 1913 despite being unconstitutional - a global corporate entity that pinned the US dollar to abstract numbers and debt to the future; while removing the dollar from being based in silver or gold... is our nearly 100 year old slave master. What are the numbers behind the debt that defines the US dollar standing on? What is the US dollar pinned to? The Answer: Human lives - from when ones parents pay the Hospital for the birth of a new soul - for the necessary medicine and vaccines - for the very food to nourish - for education whether state tax payer or private - for health "care" - for work or a "career" as an "occupation" - for mortgages to come home to - to find shelter and family in - To retirement and finally the cashing in on the dying process in a hospital or nursing home to the inevitable death tax: A dying process strung out on medicine to prolong the life span of a living human as a resource to be tapped out. That is what the Allah Almighty US Dollar is pinned to. Souls. ...and now there is no where to run to - no way to live outside of this control grid. No way to unplug like in the film the Matrix. You can wake up and see your chains but you cannot exit Plato's cave of control for the blind. And if you do open your eyes and wake up it is as a prisoner of Palestine - which is held captive to show the world what non-compliance means. And now Palestine can be erected anywhere for anyone. Hell begins on Earth and there is no way to avoid it when you have no soul it is your destiny. I'm glad I know this but the resulting personal depression and feeling of powerlessness is all I am left with. I still would rather know. But I cannot change this Matrix of Control. My very life compels this system - I am guilty of it an accomplice for playing a part in it - however small and pointless. My conclusion is I want off the planet - in a space ship that looks like a coffin. Wake Up but there is no way out. After a lifetime within this control grid one has no soul left. I do not have the time or space even to pray or meditate - even if I believe in some form of Allah Almighty God of good and wisdom and compassion. No one here gets out alive. Wide Awake in the prison of life in today's world. I am waiting on the Angel of Death but fear there is none. I am a slave without a soul or a life. I am the silver and gold behind a worthless international currency. In short I am meaningless. Like oil I am a resource to be used up for someone else. ...Wide awake and free thinking in my mind only from a prison played out on either side of the retail checkout counter - in a life lived out of discarded super paver parkinglots to nowhere. I can't see the razor wire but it is everywhere and inside me. Ghettoville, USA Matt

Sunday November 29th 2009

Midsummer's Summer Garden Before the Color Fades

2009-07-02T16:47:00.000-07:00

Random backyard snaps of wildflower seed results... Flanders Field poppies remind old folks of WWI Vets.

A Cactus blooms in an Ohio garden. The rest of the photos look like a moment from The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and friends fall fast asleep thanks to Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West distracting the Yellow Brick Road travelers with a field of poppies in bloom - distracted by their destination of illusions while in Ghettoville people chase weedy pipe dreams from parking

lots - car parks - not city parks... parks for cars - not parks for people:

But of super paver parking tarmac places to nowhere, of nowhere for nobody...

In a nation who does not know what "place" is or why it is important and why a monument - not a retail marquee are imporant things for the soul set in place in those very places to make space for place.

I can't put up flowers for all of the dead in all the cemeteries I know so this is my garden to those loved ones who have passed on.

When I see this riot of colors I have to remind
myself that November always brings the death of winter frost and freezing cold. The anniversary of tragedy and loss returns again and again - decade after decade.

It just doesn't seem possible right now from a balmy green world where I am barefoot and in jeans and a T-shirt...

Parkinglots are dead places, for the walking dead - never moreso aparant than in this economy of rubble.

Let the markets decide - they did and they packed up, boarded up and moved out and left us behind in Ohio.

Debt is the liquid in the broken up dreams of a failed nation's veins and the parkinglots stand cracked, weeded up, fenced up, forgotten in front of old strip malls of the cheapest buildings possible.... Mocking the reality that Western Societies only present the illusion of Democracy - and that Western Democracy's only present the illusion of freedom. Freedom is not just a free market for the wealth.

Cement block architecture and metal sheds with plate glass windowed fronts... Facades of plywood all boarded over... set back behind colossal monuments of flat tops to nowhere to the trickery of free market Capitalism and the power of the nightmare of the American dream. The fear of the dream being a nightmare is the fear that controls the masses...

There are no corner shops or corner cafes here. There is no here or place - no metropole. Nowhere to walk to. A drive through, yes, for too hot coffee or a drive through for liquor, beer, cigarettes and greasy junk food for

a nation with a huge hole in it to drive through...

A hole where there was once soul - even Route 66 is a phantom memory of stretched out tar in chunks for miles.

Not much need for a flag pole this fourth of July given the legacy of the Bush trauma years...

The ghosts of Reaganism has come home on the horses of the Apocalpse to roost. The Beast of the Apocalypse was Capitalism who seduced us with a shiney new car... As a nation we have lost our dignity and our wallet. As a nation founded on stolen land and stolen lives what did we really expect?

We sit in cars that aren't moving - and if they are moving
then those cars really aren't going anywhere, nor are they, like we, who are not really from somewhere, going anywhere - while the air conditioner is on and the electronic music plays.

Parks for cars, Parks for houses, Parks for golfers but very few parks for citizens... or people. The forgotten city park and it's importance cannot be revived when there is no
place here in Ohio.

No healthcare, no jobs, no unemployment office. No one to call for help with these basics on the hard facts of living. But the creditors will call you but they won't help you - even if you ask.

How many people sit with a hand gun in their lap and a creditor from health care bills on the telephone.

And there is no one to ask for help. It's the Fourth of July, I despise the sound of fireworks - especially this year. Illegal fireworks from a neighborhood brought up on contra-band fire works from the over sized sofa with an over sized pizza and cable TV... for over sized people. Cars that go boom to houses that go boom - for the red white and boom. The reverb is on and everyone has passed out intoxicated and oblivious.

A President of such proportion walking through history calls on us to have Hope - Hope in ourselves - but right now we need a hand up and not a hand out. We need to brush ourselves off and take a much needed vacation - a holiday. We need to sit in cafes and at talk - talk at the corner shop about what we are going to do but those places don't exist like much that we once took for granted. Working poor in debt to time working for corporations while indebt to other corporations.

Carcasses in the abandoned super paver parking lots to Nowhere - Lives played out at the bottom of the retail food chain from both sides of the check out counter - Lost souls on an existentialist ride around and around - year in and year out with no place for destination.

One more trip around the sun - on an axis of four seasons - sure why not - but why? How many more times around in this repetition of ignorance - this annual banging our collective head on the wall to learn what...? What exactly of why we are here and what we are to do with what we have - the stolen, polluted ground beneath our feet or the hijacked and polluted sky above our heads. What kind of sinister place is this that we have made with that mantra of let the markets decide? A grey November gardern not so far away awaits - What do we see in reality mocking us from the parking lots of a nation when the color fades.

Recent Letters Between Belgium and Ohio

2009-06-08T11:40:00.000-07:00

Belgium: Hi again

Ohio: I'll try to answer your e-mail letter questions this way -- the rain has stopped and the heat and humidity have set in I can't write a proper letter to answer your great and kind letters...

Belgium: Matt... there is so much sadness and bitterness in your mail. That is so, so sad.

Ohio: jawell c'est la vie, non?

Belgium: I always like to remember you as the guy that made us crack up when he was talking about the things he experienced in good ole' Brussels.

Ohio: yeh well its still me - i was always depressed - its the source of my art and humor...

Belgium: Never thought you'd miss it!

Ohio: what Belgium, Brussels, Bart anything with a B in it?

I miss people and places... Bart got the house, the neighborhood, all my belongings that were shipped over, even the things from before I met him - stuff from my family - they are still there (i hope - Bart says they are but who really knows), the dogs, my friends - jeezus - all he needed was a power dildo and dishwasher and he wouldn't need me or Gert.

Belgium: Why on earth are you staying in Ohio!!!! I don't get that.

Ohio: well you just answered your own questions... where am i going to buy a house in Belgique for 12,ooo dollars... Aalst? Genk?

Belgium: Of course you have your house there now - but still. If you're not happy, go away. You lived here - and I KNOW how different it is - and even if we're the 'old country' we are SO MUCH more 'modern' (the word is 'vooruitstrevend' but I don't know that in English)

Ohio: Progressive i think is the closest match... but yeh you all are very modern - and sometimes i think trapped in that very modernity.

Belgium: ....(more modern) than the States.God, it IS better to live here! We saw some real poverty last year, quite amazing. Patrick's host mother lives on 2 euro a day for food. That is incredible! I don't think I can make breakfast for that money - at least not a breakfast that is good & healthy.

Ohio: yeh life here is really bad - i have never seen it like this.... Europeans just have no idea... I am glad you have a feel for things tho.

Belgium: About Bart... We see him once in a while. We meet. I've always liked Bart a lot and I still do. Don't be too hard on him. I think he's a rather traditional guy and he needs things he can 'hold on to'. Gert is more like that I think. A lot more traditional. I'm sorry I talk about him - but that'll be all.

Ohio: I love Bart a lot more than my own life - he is my best friend and my only family. He divorced me - whatever... good for him and Gert...

Belgium: You were a VERY different person in the end than when we first met. We didn't really understand things in the end.

Belgium: What with Yemen?

Ohio: (i consider Yemen my home - i live to go back - i belong there - it might seem like a contradiction but its a very good way of life)

Belgium: With the beard?

Ohio: (what is it with post Roman society still being obsessed by a clean shaven face - after Yemen and those places - western men all look effeminate to me now - like you can see their mothers faces in their clean shaven face - I call it the Gillette Conspiracy)...

Belgium: The Muslim thing?

Ohio: 1.6 billion people can't be wrong can they? Or do you just think they are - all - wrong - all one big thing - all with the same views etc... Lahore - my god i never saw so much sex drugs and rock and roll - it beats Amsterdam any day - and none of it commodified... it is not based on money...

Belgium: I mean - those people are very homophobic,

aren't they?

Ohio: again I think you answer your own questions... you have a bright mind - don't fall into the traps of dominate (white) cultures ways of thinking....

Belgium: We don't have anything against Muslims - not at all - but there are some of their ideas I really find appalling.Not like they're all that good with minorities or even majorities - like women!

Ohio: You can deconstruct and analyse that sentence for yourself - it sort of really says it all...

They all find the wests attitude very frightening... our relentless support of Zionism despite the appalling human rights abuses by the Israelis... The US's economy would tank even more than it has already if the US didn't invade other places and create enemies to manufacture war....

The answers to your question that relate to me personally are in all my blogs and on Facebook whether it's about sex, drugs and rock and roll or my own quest for personal spirituality and mysticism - its all there and been self published and charted and posted as it all evolved from the point my mother died until now - past my father death and past the relationship that will remain the love of my life - i will not have another relationship like that nor do i want one... I just hope i don't kill myself hurting from Love Lost - I am trying to evolve beyond that but I actually might not... time for me might just have stopped when I got served those divorce papers.

c'est la vie... ultimately life is really sad. every relationship ends - either in life or death, both are murder for those who survive.

The answers to your questions about Islam and the Muslims are apparent to me in how you have framed those questions - which come across more like accusations... your mind has already been made up about the answers with western media like views based in fear and misunderstanding so lets not waste each others time on that.

Belgium: What's with your sister? A maximum security prison? What on earth happened?

it was a terrible tragedy of banality:

She was raped at 13 which sent her life on a different course than any my parents could comprehend - she ended up with a very bad man - had three kids before she was 21 and all in less than four years and then he abandoned her - she tried to commit suicide after a long history - since the initial rape (the first of three violent ones) of mental illness - (no surprise there) and in the process killed her children but didn't succeed with herself... she received a paupers plea bargain of three life sentences rather than the electric chair. She wanted the electric chair but my parents didn't want to do that to me and my brother. In Europe she would have received mental health care for a few years and been rehabilitated - not locked away for three life sentences which she will never live long enough to serve. It is very hard to live with - grow up with. Very, very hard... Most people i know find it fascinating but they do not ever have the capacity to comprehend the grind of it all over three decades - Margo is the only family I have now - She is my best friend - we talk and talk and talk - we joke about how we carry out the tradition of the family Sunday dinner at Grandmas at the prison once a month... it's our way of laughing at the whole tragedy of our lives. I need to be near her - she is much older than me and going blind. The sadness just doesn't end.

I am learning to embrace sadness - run towards it - die with it. like making peace with my own mortality - my own limitation - the fact that I will die with a broken heart from the summation of all of this....

when I got back from Belgium i was called up for jury duty coincidentally for the Judge who was Margo's prosecuting attorney at the time - he was young then - now ready to retire after a successful career - she made his career - i refused to sit on jury duty for him. Life is Gothic. This is my own American Gothic.

Belgium: Matt, I hope you will find some happiness inside of you. Don't let the bitterness take over. Life has it's turns and one has to accept it. People die, they go away, shit happens all the time. And we all get our share, you can be sure of that! It's a lot about the choices you make. Don't let unhappiness or bitterness choose for you, but look at all the options and go for it. Sometimes life doesn't treat you all that nice - but often that's because of the choices YOU and only YOU made. All things that are happening now, are your choice. If you realise that, you can change things for yourself in the future. Choose with your heart and only choose what makes you happy. You really, really, really need that!

Ohio: Well what you say is very true but it is also very Southern Lowland sort of thinking, typical to Northern Europe - it's just not my way. My friends from the Den Haag write to me in much the same way as you - it's all post Catholic/post Calvinist post religious thinking which doesn't set with well most other cultures.... The US is a very religious place in a grocery store variety selection sort of way. Bart never got that about me -- but it was my upbringing because my parents though mostly secular thought after Margo i needed a moral upbringing and all. Meeting up with Moroccans and Muslims and Islam in Belgium - where Catholicism is like an exquisite corpse was an interesting experience for me. It reminded me of the Christian Nazi upbringing i had. It was fun to reframe all that American Christian gay identity with Muslim same-sexers Moroccan transvestite Belly Dancers and bearded men in galalibiyyas - it was too much for the little Flemish Quartier of Brussel - but who cares... I feel like i contributed to Flemish culture in Brussel - but it was the Marocians in Brussels who spoke Flemish that I love - So that is probably why i bonded so well with Marocians and North Africans in Bruxelles - who though born there - were like me - we shared a commonality that I am very happy to have experienced - we were mutually confined to a life outside of the two Belgian mainstreams - occassionally we would get let in to be a part of things but it's not comfortable for either the indigenous Belgians or the Belgians whose culture is from abroad. There is some overlap but honestly Europeans don't want all that multi-culti stuff that has been forced on them. I just never expected my intellectual Belgian pals - be they Flemish or Francophone or both (lol) - to take my Orientalist bohemian ways as treasonous and cut me off - I thought they could just roll with it and evolve with their New North African origin Brothers and veiled Sisters - boy was I naive - even my Americaness was too much for most Francophones... but all of that was a surprise - so much for progressive northern Europe...

Over here even in Ohio - i have the space and freedom to continue doing Moroccan mens drag instead of transvestite drag... lol there are now many Muslims here - unlike in Belgium here they are the very rich and they missed out - like me - on the economic crisis that has brought so many people down from the tyranny of the Bush II years. Here we have Somalians - Palestinians - all Arabs - Pakistanis and a few Moroccans - I stay in their parts of town... African Americans just hate Somalians and the "sand niggers" as they call em - African Americans display acts of blatant racism to these new Americans that Whites from the nineteen fifties showed blacks... oooh times have changed and turned in on themselves... it is all rather interesting.... but there is space in North America - that Flanders reduced in size as it has been over the unkind centuries doesn't have the hospitality for. The mindset here is more medieval but we have the space to live in our own fantasies of life. But i prefer Brussels to be honest.

Belgium: You 'feel' very, very lonely to me. I'm sorry about that. I hope you will find a new, better way, one that makes you happier anyway! You have so much talent! You have a great sense of humour! Use it!

Ohio: Ever since my sister's demise in 1976 I have been a depressive - it is my struggle - it is a hard thing to grow up with - alongside... burdened by the state - then my love life with Bart was burdened by the state with all those residency issues (all of which were resolved ironically in time for the great divorce) - my life was harder than it should have needed to be... it made me a better person... Once bart achieved a petit bourgious sort of way of life in Brussel - something he would not have had the courage to find without me - he was content to level off - i still have to evolve even now... Right now I am just trying to figure out what is next. I really don't know... I am just trying to get over Bart - but he is with me 24 hours a day - i curse him for that.

I miss Bart

I miss home there

I miss "our" things

I don't like the world Bart wants with Gert anymore than Bart wants my Arabesque Internationalist, post Western, post gay, world - where being gay is considered a from of white colonialist decadence and a byproduct of an aging demographic phenomenon... not that the Arabian world or Pakistan don't have same sexers - they do - they, just - like Marocians in Belgium - do not subscribe to the middle class, middle age, white identity of being gay - it doesn't apply in their world anyways.... All of that - their courage and their adaptations of our culture - really impressed me... Palestinian gay guys, whether Christian or Muslim in culture, are just the sweetest people you will meet and with the saddest family stories - stories that we can relate to each others with.

Like feminism in those places is hard work that goes on unrecognized by the women in the west - here where Feminism is a theory confined to academia and suburban rich women who complain a lot but know nothing of the struggle of women beyond Western media shock headlines... feminism is dead in the West but very much alive and confrontational and working itself out in Arabia and Asia... The West has closed its mind to everything - it just forces it all on the rest of the world but it is a one way exchange - the West doesn't learn from the East but the East is learning from the West and adapting... those civilizations that adapt will succeed - I am afraid the West won't - it certainly isn't working in the states....

Everyone says that i should write a book - i hear this all the time... people don't read. Publishing and journalism and newspapers are in a crisis of modernity and changing technologies... i fell through that huge crack... oh well...

but i do hear this a lot - why don't you write a book (it gets annoying to hear this) i know i already have - i have self published it on the Internet unedited - raw... now you need to read... go read... send me your money while you are at it....

I just wish my writing and illustrating would pay the bills...

I'm not impressed.

but yeh I do miss Brussels very much - i just couldn't do it again... it would break my heart to go back anyway with things as they are...

wasn't it weird though...

that time in the old Flemish quartier of Brussel/Bruxelles/Brussels/Bruselas....

and then it was over

just like this essay of letters I'm posting right now....

lol

Here Where Apache Tears are the Fragments of Black Glass Stones

2009-05-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

I can stop crying now
'cept I'm not crying
because
I'm over medicated
but
if I werent
I would be crying
I can feel that.
and really
I wouldn't
no,
couldn't
cant
stop crying.
I don't get
any of this
but I will say
a lot
of all this
seems better
but harder
harder
at my end
of the pike
than yours
but at least
there is Margo
nearby.
And
the sky
is blue
the weather
warm
the people
embracing
it's just all
not me
not me
anymore
I am
trapped
within
an exile
of an exile
of love
and its a lonely
sort of place
that I can't seem
to get used to.
Waking up
with those dreams
those nightmares
is unbearable.
Nobody
but nobody
knows
or comprehends
and if i tell them
they scold me
about you
so
it just all
reinforces
my social
isolation
and loneliness
I was socially
isolated
and cut off
in Brussels
but not like
I am here
really.
That might
seem hard
to imagine
but my life
is lonelier
and harder
than it was
in that attic
in that apartment
in Sint Joost.
But
I have
to do
what I have
to do
to survive.
It's going well.
True
but me
and my alone
and interior
and subconscious life
are still
though medicated
suffering.
You can't change
any of that.
I'm just glad
my demons
cant hurt you.
no mores...
I'll be glad
when I am
off this planet.
But until then
I intend
to find the desert
again
and the blue sky
and as many
starry nights
from anywhere
on this planets surface
that I can find.
that gives me reason
and hope.
I really miss
those lands
with the calls to prayers
the roof tops there
or the desert rock floor
from the trance
I find
from all those over-lapping calls
from all those Minarets
to prayer.
Not this silence
of life
in the automotive
Midwest...Dreaming
of going there:
Back to Arabia.
That
only that
keeps me
hanging on
with what
I am doing here
if I am
honest
at four
in the morning
I know
I will
never have
such luxury
of travel
again
I will be
lucky
to get out
of this
glue trap
of Ohio
even.
For that
I wish
I would have
never
left
Sint Joost
in Brussel.
But look
at all
I have done
here,
will you
(experience it ever)?
but still
I am not
impressed
with myself
I want
something
else...
I should
have went
to Yemen
instead.
God,
oh no
not
now here
in
no where
Ghettoville
Ohio.
Mustafa_
Matt_
Matthew_
Mathijs_
Mathieu

Voting for Parks and Nature on Cinco de Mayo

2009-05-05T08:19:00.000-07:00

So, here, I, Matthew J. Crouch, being of sound mind and body - (despite being what some call, mentally "ee'ill") - am writing from the Ghettoville-USA blogette desk located in my home between Mecca Park and lil' Moghadishu at
2292 Albert Avenue,
Mecca Park,
Mifflinville,
Mifflinville Township,
The old autonomous area now within Franklin County,
Columbus,
Ohio,
USA

I voted today for the tax levy to help maintain, build and preserve nature while hopefully setting up bicycling paths with the tax levy money...

As you can see from the Park photos taken du jour some of the Area Parks are in decline... and logistical neglect. Me and the K9-unit named Rusty had fun climbing over this fallen tree...

At the voting poling station at the Mifflinville or Mifflin Township Community center behind the Mifflin Police Station I was one of a few
people who had seen the inside of that voting place today so the people working there were quite happy to see me walk in.

While there before voting when asked about the Mecca Park Estates park lawn which is hardly ever mowed - a park with at least two abandoned vehicles from various decades in the brush and overgrowth... I said "A neglected park is better than no Park at all"... Which is true - too much netty maintenance and the natural aspect of a parks conservation becomes out of balance with the nature and ecology of the land and all the life forms it hosts. For certain a forgotten and neglected is better than no Park at all. It beats a McWal-Mart Super Paver Parkinglot anyday.

The post on the limited and unconnected bicycle path had some public made art - graffiti which is the last stand of publically understood Art in these States by the masses - Art that is misunderstood by the powers that be - Someone had scrawled in neat hand writing "Muhammad The King Of Art" - which with its layers of meaning (intended or not) of course appeals to my Islamic sensibilities - for Muhammad the Last Prophet* - who was really the only Messanger who spoke the most of Nature and Art: (Despite the Catholic Churches disregard for that little fine print part of the Bible about no graven images) - So all of central Ohio Muslims should be voting for the parks and recreation tax levy today if they are bothering to vote at all... It seems in this neighborhood nobody is bothering to vote.... Indeed I myself didn't even know there were special elections today until one of my environmentalist activist friends e-mailed me about it.

I asked my African American neighbors if they were voting today - some of whom are inter-racial like our Great New President - Barack Obama - and they were full of out dated excuses from the decades of White Governance and Apartheid politics that ran the USA for its entirety... I guess old habits and ways of thinking - despite the Brotherhood connection - are hard to break even here in G-ville...

For that I am truely sad.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste - here it just isn't the minds that are wasted by cannabis (which should be legalized) and alcohol but lives and generations for people of color have been wasted by economic grid lock based on Aparthied economic isolation American style. This dynamic is Barack Obama's and his Administrations biggest threat - not the Repulligans and their Zionist Military Industrialist Media and McChurch agenda ready to trounce on this great country and resume their greed based economic policies based on lies and no compassion for We the People...

* At this point readers who are Muslim should meditatively reflect on the Peace and Blessings for their Prophet and His Message for the World.

Le Quartiers du Ohio Centrale

2009-05-03T16:30:00.000-07:00

le Quartiers du Ohio Centrale: Ghettoville, Gangstaville, Thuggahville, Nowhereville, Cristelleville, Metheville, Gothville, Cracqueville, Hashville, Redneckville aka Poubelle Blanche-ville - all surrounding the empty car park that is now the ever popular Marche aux Drogues - there really is nothing to do here but go to church and be a religious extremist or be strung out on dope all the time.

In the photo are some families of tribes of wild geese with goslings afoot... It's not apparent from this photo but this is actually a massive parking lot - this is the reserved green space. I remember when this area between the Scioto and Olentangy rivers - where this view is - well - I remember when this once ridge and valleys was farmland, woodland and wetland with the occassional single family home. That's all changed in three decades though - now that whole area is tract housing, strip malls, apartment and motel barracks that look like minimum security facilities. There are Public Storage sites, car dealerships, condos - housing developments... But the Ohio wildlife Geese still remember in their DNA that this was one of their stops in their North American migrations. Needless to say there is the Ohio Wildlife roadkill strewn about the roadside and parking lots....

Ohio Revisited as a Flemish Belgian Imposter Just Directly South of the Most Southern Tip of Canada

2009-04-29T08:30:00.000-07:00

Exhausted after closing at work - laying on the floor in front of a TV in a house with no furniture - propped up with pillows and pilled up watching The Vampires of teendom: Edward and Bella...Rosalie and Emmett ....Alice and Jasper....Esme and Carlisle - Characters from Stephenie Meyers Twilight books brought to life on the big screen by Catherine Hardwicke in remarkable understated ways that corporate Hollywood could never comprehend. Sort of like True Blood from HBO for high schoolers and adults like me who want to remember something better than our own dull and miserable past lives in the time of youth.

I miss Anne Rice and her Southern grandieur, grace and polite society - her literary history and knowlege of art history - at least in print. That Stephenie Meyers does makes Vampire stories much less gratuitous excuses for blood and gore as a metaphor for our planetary ecologically consuming human selves . But the other "supporting cast" characters from Twilight wether in the book or the film intrigue me more than the plot dominating Vampiric forms of Scarlet and Rhett as Bella and Edward.

That movie Twilight I must have seen in the cinema ten times... Like when a boy I must have seen the film The Lost Boys at least 25 times during matinees of loneliness.

Tired of this alone-ness, these Twilight DVDeez go better with klonopin king pins in a solid state lonely life, lived out on an existential road trip to nowhere.

Super paver parking lots - trapped in retaildom - Dreaming of Arab North Africa and on towards Easter-wards...

Having seen Twilight so many times with Ben - hanging out tonight with Rusty the black dog as such - it's like someone - anyone, human or non-human, are curled up here too on the floor - farting like that darned dog.

Catherine Hardwicke understands the Twilight Vampires like no one else could or will - perhaps even better than their creater Stephenie Meyer.

If you got a man or wo-man in your life named Khaleb or Khalil or Khadeja then my advice would be:
Hold tight to that Khaleb you won't regret it. Vivian Vivance Kalebz or not keep him closer to you than your own hearts beat.

My only pal Benoit is a good buddy bender friend of the discarded animals lives like mine - it is like he has a psychic power to find discarded lives of field mouses, cats, dogs and people like me. People like Ben for all their self abusing bad habits go to heaven for their animal charities.

See you Ben around the bend, like in the blog Baghdad Burning, "where hearts can heal and souls can mend". Ben. Bender. Bendahar from Kumar....

All I look forward to are the visits to the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) to visit my sister Margo (or to see or hear or read you buddy Ben or dear reader if you even exist)....

Rusting and broken down neon signs along the roadside of the old Ohio high ways and free ways all cluttered with wildlife roadkill and garbage - discarded - former life forms that we all were - if we can just admit that everything we want and desire are already in this big Universe now in the past tense. At least in the West.

... Betty Butterfield and the Scientologists or the Buddhists - I've seen it all on Youtube! Seen it a hundred times to keep myself laughing when I have no reason for laughter or a smile. Google it - Youtube it - Betty Butterfield -Forget it - car insurance and the community meetings... super paver, meaningless, cosmic, existential, parkinglots to nowhere...
....read.... ....write... ...recite...

Nowhereville or is it Ghettoville or is it that Bronte Villette or did I loose my heart to Bruxelles mon amour back in Belgique and old, really old and forgotten Flanders - Vlaanderen - from the south of Hollandia and into the north of what is now France. Miscellaneous Flemish dialects of the Old Dutch language mixed up en Francais Belgique Bruxeloises....

Back in Brussels there is a museum with a room full of ornaments in the shape of hearts. My heart is nailed there to the wall also.

Pharmaceutical electronic driven to distraction and subsequent life, now replete with an Ohio emptiness - alone in my aloneness. In this prison nation I care for no one anymore. Even though I don't want to, or forget how to, care.

Even though my pal Benoit - there is nothing he can do or say to help make a difference in me or our collapsed world.

But its the laughter and stories he seems to pull out of a magicians hat that keep me holding on...

Yeh, I guess I've been a psychological, emotional, psychic vampire mess for everyone who knows me, one way or another, including through this here blogette to nowhere.

Some of my getting back in touch with myself has been in those long belabored bloggetry of personal essays to you dear reader.

I suppose if/when I get a boy/girl/(or both-tranny-lol) - friend then I'll stop needing companionship. Elusive and non-existant companionship at present in my empty (literally and figuratively) home life. Life lived off the floor keeps me humble and connected to the mother Earth.

But, whatever, I deal with things stoically now - learning how from my sister self surviving in her personal Palestine in Marysville, Ohio in prison incarceration.

....But that house in Brussels that was once home - all nine feet wide of it with five floors - under terra cotta roof tiles and red brick and all just endless wooden stairsteps - my friends there in the neighborhood, the dogs, my being so easily replaced as it were, the things of mine from before all that which were shipped over from Ohio; things accumulated during those long years in Brussels or things I accumulated abroad - or even say charcoal drawings from college art school days - that all ended up over there - never guessing in a million years I'd be back to Ohio - I guess until all of that is dealt with - as if it could be dealt with - I just feel lost and without family or tribe or clan or place or purpose or language - like you, dear reader, if there is one at all - you are all that is stuck with me - which is better than the alternative of....

...being ignored... negative attention Oscar Wilde once said is better than no attention.

I don't want to apologize for writing too much - I do it to survive mentally and I though we were having a good time. I was at least I thought I was. But, yeh, I am always happy when I see the rare comment post on this here blog. I do though feel sorry for anyone who reads me and gets into my self torturing brain to read...

Americans here are generally so much more so literally and figuratively embracing than Europeans and everyone in Belgium who all to easily accept the inevitable detachments in life with a sturdy sadness. So it makes it hard to be that way with myself - that now foreign, collective and material past, still in Villette, as my old self back in Bru-town. Confined now to memories and non-existance.

Forgotten by Belgians with disregard that is considered polite.
Keep your drama, mama said, to yourself.

I really don't like being American again: Me and my past Euro-Belgian-Moroccan Muslim life are in such vastly different realities and time zones and cultures - Like I have separated into the ultimate Geminoid contradiction where both of us have changed in ways the other doesn't know or that we wouldn't recognize ourself in the ourselves - That it makes holding on impossible. Maybe i should stop trying to understand the Salvadore Dali persistant Pesistance of Memory.

My Flemish pal Wannes just in says "in life these little tragedies happens in between the big tragedies"...

So I just try to understand Wannes' logic about these things...I really have been wanting for two years from someone from over there to arrive here and find out who and what I am (and what I am not) in this post relationship void. A void to avoid in life.

Relationships should not end like this in excommunication or dislocation.

I wish I could just face all that I am not now - and be cool with it - I've adjusted to it. But I am a fraction of what I once was in Belgium as a Belgian-American - here or in Belgium. Maybe I don't want to see all that. I can't say that I blame anyone for not wanting to be remembering me back there - back then as such. I still try to live in the past because things on some level were better than this Ohio Revisited life - a life here as a discarded human being in a literally discarded and disregarded part of the world.

I used to spend a lot of time with my dogs in old town Brussels named Buddy and Sagan both like me from Ohio - it is hard just having to ignore them - to have to forget them back in Belgium in another home and hope they forget me and the many days and ways we spent together over so many years and miles or kilometers and dog walks along the canals of Brussels.

I try to just think in terms of not owning things: Animals or material possessions. Not because I want to but because I have to in Buddhist like ways - detach from all that or go insane trying to hold on to something like mercury - the Geminoid quick silver that cannot be held in your hand that is so poisonous. I try to think of animals as having a home or a place "in a family" - being a part of a family - not owned. Nothing stays the same - So I just hope those dogs have a place as I know and trust they do - even if I can't be with them throughout their lives. The only consolation in going back recently to De Hague, in not going onto Brussels, was that I thought it better that the dogs not see me briefly. I don't want to think about any of this any more - it all yields so much grief of things now out of my hands.

I sometimes show a good neighbor Witch my writing here - she is astonished - floored even by my writing ability. I like the things she sees in what I write that I cannot see. It's not writing I consider I am doing - it is called surviving this brain and body and society and modernity of soul-less-ness and nowhere-ism.

I see my sister Margo tomorrow. Going to the Ohio Reformatory for Women - the old ORW - it is hard for her to comprehend me now or my previous life's decade abroad. Margo can't even endure car rides to the world outside ORW just to the medical clinic at the Ohio State University which she is occassionally taken to like a lab rat. Because she lives in such a small non-automotive world in confines of a locked down convent like community that covers less acres than what people without cars can easily walk - imagine that for three decades - So being in the prison transport van to drive into Columbus makes her terribly car sick - whole years can go by and she won't be in an automotive van, so the effect is something the rest of us can't imagine - extreme car sickness. Imagine what that means for everything else in the world outside ORW since time for her stopped in 1977. Time Suspended like Time was Suspended for Palestine in 1948 - waiting with lives defined by razor wire and concrete control. She can't go on a long walk without getting dizzy because there is no long distance except in circles within all that razor wire control, locked down, over populated, prison community. To think about her or my life now, it induces grief. Just grief that is to the core - to the bone - to the flesh of this souls mortal coil that I am entombed by until death stuck with a brain that won't leave me alone. As if that brain were some Alien implants brain without a mercy for its symbiotic host showing me the world I live in from a foreigners point of view.

Like when I think about Brussels it induces grief. People do not come out to the sticks of Ghettoville, Central, Ohio where I now live - it is hard - people do not walk by - there are not even sidewalks - and the house is set far back from the street. Then what is close - the neighbors to the east and the west - my kitchen window looks into to theirs - in the summer we can talk to each other through open windows for a laugh or over hear each others conversations even if we don't want to. My neighbor to the west where the bedroom window looks into their bathroom and bedroom windows - we keep these windows shut for privacy and mutual respect.

When I look around the strange and empty and foreign house I live in - my clutter piles must provide some comfort - if everything was in order - I'd remember what I don't have here that was left like a refugee in Belgium.
If all that materiality from my past life were here that would be worse - Then I'd really feel trapped here. No going back.

I guess I should just return my Belgian passport and ID for it sadly won't get used anytime soon now.

My life now plays out on a retail dance floor of a stage, like a cheap version of Belgian Art groups like Damaged goods, her holiness of dance mother Anna Theresa deKeersmaaker and that immense woman from the Need Company - The best Belgian Diva since I don't know when Tin Tin's only female character. Then there is also my fellow American Meg Stuart or Stewart... Willem Dafoe from the Wooster Group days performing at the Kaaitheater and it's studios - my life played out like some student work at P.A.R.T.S., stage life like Rosas dancers. Jan de Corte and Siegred and Tooneelhuis. Not to mention Toona and the marionettes. Or Arno and other local Bru-town celebs like that flakey Christophe Coppens the mad hatter of Brussels... my life was suffocatingly fabulous compared to this present spartan monk like solitude - stage performance without an audience. In a land with no Art funding or public concept of Art.

I wish you knew - dear reader - but if you did - I would be ashamed.
The people I do encounter here are the lost souls of post United States American ghetto life - They are not always people you want to speak to for you see the frightening and wild and feral look in their eyes.

And yet I want you to see, to see what you would approve of in my self determination of a life. It is just nothing to write home about.

I just don't have relationships and exchanges so I suffocate anyone who will listen or read me - like old people do. When I look into my minds crystal ball... I see... through the fog of pollution and Ohio haze:

I see hard work loneliness and a road ahead of indeterminate length that ends in death with not much else by way of distraction.

That is why I dream of travelling across Arab North Africa - from Morocco across the Atlas mountains on to Algeria and Tunisia and over and across to Libya and into Egypt - across the Sinai to Medinah and Makkah - south to Sana'a and Taizz and Aden and Mukallah - eastward into Oman and Muscat - over to Dubai and the multi-colored desert sands of the UAE - stopping in Qatar and Bahrain and Kuwait City before checking out old Damascus or bullet riddled Beruit and on into what remains of once grand and humane Palestine. Across Jordans dreamlands and tranversing Iraq and into Iran over land to Afghanistan - to see - really see for myself - what is going on and where. To find the Khyber Pass and make my way back to Multan and without missing stops in Peshawar and Quetta - passing somehow via airplane through Baku in Azerbaijan or wandering around Kazakstan.

Really it's all a trip to go on to never return from.
Dreams like this are how I hold on.

When I dream of travelling like this I want to be captured by Yemeni tribes men - held ransom for government money as a human collateral of a tool of negotiation - except that is a dream of mine - they would never get me to leave their tribal village so I wouldn't be of much use.

Being truely free means being willing and able to die at any moment in time - even if most of the time - there is no reason in doing so - living or dying. But until everything including my pulse can be lost - I can't live.

Ohio is a nightmare trap sort of place. Run by an Oligarchy of merciless self serving Capitalists who care nothing for Ohio or its remarkable history or its once beautiful land and ecology - to say nothing of the weird modern people now stuck here who have no work, no healthcare, no where to walk to, nowhere to drive to and nothing much to do but drink liquor, smoke cannabiss to bliss themselves out with - get caught up in Crystal Meth, Crack or the Heroin hills surrounding central Ohio's flatness....

One begins to wonder if we don't have Al Qaeda and the Taliban all wrong. To places filled with urban ghetto warfare - or anarchy in Moghadishu or post Soviet/American Afghanistani tribes, lost in the vacuum of all that confusion, by Western and Soviet meddling - for all their primitive applications of Islam - those forces, however primitive, might bring stability for people. I'm not so sure we can blame them for the harm the US or old Soviet or present day China induces, ironically, for the free markets of Capitalism. Wether its the Somalian coast guard being branded pirates so that the West can dump toxic waste in their territorial waters or so that China can fish all the fish out of those waters while Somalians on the land have no food and water and not much governance left.

And G-ville, Ohio - or Detroit City - despairing lives and parkinglots to nowhere might eventually need some of that Taliban bearded chic to restore order because the greed of American styled consumerist human commodification of lives lived as human resources for Capitalism isn't going to build inner city towns and gardens for food much less flowers and trees.

I'd move to Afghanistan or the SWAT area of Pakistan in a heartbeat. I'd move to Sharjah if I could get a job there. Dubai - I'd rather be a retail slave laborer there than here in Nowhereville, Ohio...

All that is left for me here is my sister self locked up for good without end in a womens "reformatory" with no chance for release even after three decades and still going - how does someone locked up like a Palestinian for six decades re-emerge into a strange, super fast changing, technologically advancing, mercilessly fast, for a Capitalists world based on shameless, self serving, greed? Explain to me this womens reformatory reform process then, exactly - Ohio. My life is locked up there too with all those women - like all those broken families and people and children in Gaza.

Despite all my built in life contradictions to it - Islam - is the only way out of this prison planet lifestyle in this here decadent and declining and self and annoyingly righteous West. What do you do when you find that the rainbow of the rainbow flag takes your life on a ride full circle? There aren't no red or silver shoes to take you back to Kansas because Kansas is a McWal-Mart-ers super paver Chinese owned parkinglot to a boarded up store front.

So much for the amber waves of grain and endless mind boggling vast prairies under big blue sky with little fluffy Orb like clouds...

From the Jungian Archetypical Landscape of Nightmares and Parkinglots

2009-04-28T01:43:00.000-07:00

...its only 4am:
I awake to a dream in which I am holding or clinging, in some humiliating begging style, to Barts knees while he sits in a chair - sobbing into his lap because he and Gert are going to sell the house and I can't buy it for the price they could get for it on the market over there.

Bart tells me "...you can never,
never come back, etc..."
My heart hurts - it just doesn't stop - this heart - the beats or this pain.
Before also:
Dreamt I was in the Ardennen/Ardennes trying to drive in those hills and valley's during rain and fog and heavy dark low looming clouds.
I commented to Bart that I forgot how not flat Belgium was.
Now: Here in my Ohio waken life.... before sunrise...
....lost in a test market city
stuck in retail with no way out.
Like Bart came and went
Into my life and fifteen years of my life just vanished like they never happened
I just cant bare any of this interior pain...
...during the day or night
I ache - my heart aches
My hair is nearly blond again from the Ohio spring sun, my face brown and older looking
I do not recognize myself or where I am.
I speak the language but do not understand anyone. I wonder does anyone I know or don't know:
Know these depths of senseless, seemingly self inflicted, pain?
....it's probably Demonically true but I forgot one sinister dream sequence where Bart snapped back to my crying:
Speaking in implications the way that Euro-types do in cold hearted and nasty ways,

saying:

"...none of this would have happened if it wasn't for your little fad" - meaning my interest in Islam which I learned of and went on an Odysseus like experiential journey within Moroccan Brussels and then abroad to places Americans never go.

After acquainting myself with what I call the New Tangiers of the North

Meaning present day old city Brussels,

That new part of which Belgians try to ignore and pretend isn't there, yet, all that is crazy and wonderful and enchanting about the culture and people of Morocco in Brussel or Bruxelles and throughout Belgium - was what ended up intriguing me the most about old Flemish Bru-town... They, "the Marocians", like me (American ex-pal Matt) back then, we shared a common denominator - lost and stuck there in le Belgica - after having forgotten why or how we all got there: But life went on, caught up with us there anyway. Playing us out in ways we didn't like.

Now, I dream of going to al Maghreb, Maroc, Arab North Africa and on a transcontinental Saharan road trip headed East to Makkah and beyond - in some fantasy version of Nicholas de Bouvier (the 1950's euro Jack Kerouac - book, le livre en Francais, translated into English) "The Ways of the World" - Trying to be post literary Rimbaud selling guns in the Yemen of the past or building a rainbow window-ed lit house in Ethiopia of another century. In this sense my life is all different - like a wrecked car.

...all dented beyond recognition... ....if it weren't for these dreams or nightmares....
...it really would be like that Bart never came and took me away from here
as in Ohio here
saving me inadvertantly from the tyranny of the Bush II years
only to drop me off back here for the Obama Administration of our collective self empowered counter corporatist Hope and Change...
So we in G-ville could believe in ourselves again.

and I went back to where I never wanted to be
alone
or in
Brussels
or in
Ohio centrale
I forget which now.

This is when I am grateful for the mercy in ritual.

Right now, right here, as I write this: It is al Fajr - predawn prayer time in G-ville, YO'hi-O...

In that Qur'anic Arabic recitation and ritual repetition, in a foreign language I scarely know, there is comfort. Consolation, if not purpose.

I wish I could hear the call to prayer from the nearby but silent Minaret which stands aloof and in eye-sight - just down the street. A street I call Koning Albert2delaan or Avenue de la Roi Albert II - King Albert Avenue of Belgium - my street chez moi maison bleu - that here passes through what I call lil' Mogadishu: Where the minaret stands architecturally punctuating with grace this dusty third world style road I now live off of.

The birds are singing like it is the end of the world but it's just the end of one more night alone at the begining of another day. Alone again. Outside the air is fresh and a morning star or planet looms in the sky too bright and too low that it is unsettling.

Last night at Magreb time (evening prayers around dusk) - at that time just before al Fajr arrives to Makkah that I follow via Satellite - the crescent moon here hung over head in this comforting ways at twilight to be found in the tree tops.

Two raka's figuratively kiss the Earth and give thanks. Obedience yielding and returning dignity.

On a psychadelic magic carpet ride that I pray in prayer that takes me back to somewhere I have been - anywhere but here.

Dream Journal or Uncommon Nightmares

2009-04-27T20:06:00.000-07:00

I've been reading online from links sent by e-mail (or is it e-female lol) pals to stories featured at Common Dreams... Some of which make me think that e-paper should be titled Uncommon Nightmares...

I had an uncommon nightmare of my own last night... I awoke to psychic network of dreams of Zionist Israeli demolishions and incursions into the old remnants and quartiers Arab East Jerusalem. Never been there but from what I gather, what is left of Arab Palestine - be they Christian, Jew or Muslim - the soul of that place and all those people now around also scattered around the world - resides there - not in sentimental notions of a mythical land without a people, for a people without a land... and fantasies of a new state - the I-Word state... Those old and paved over Palestinian towns and villages that spawned Christianity fared better under multi-cultural Palestine and the forgotten 600 year old Ottoman Empire, than some sort of Sci-fi American version of the Israeli-ification of an unwanted past, people and all the cultures and societies that went with that old place - in favor of what exactly? Some bland form of automotive culture and red roofed McInternationalist style and relentless Capitalism that could be anywhere and simultaneously nowhere. Nowhere-ism at it's best or worse....

Why am I though on some psychic frequency dreaming of Old Palestine and Her last stand in the unique parts of Jerusalem? Not to mention Ramallah or Gaza City or what was once under Tel-Aviv. I'd rather not be in bed here in old Ohio waking up to other peoples present day suffering over there that my tax dollars here help fund. I'd rather be in Arab North Africa, from anywhere in (Morocco) al Maghreb to Cairo - or Arabia - or any one of the cool stans... Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan - Iran - Azerbaijan - somewhere with Mosque and Minaret is where I day dream of travelling to.
But East Jerusalem - old al Quds should be saved - preserved and not forgotten as too many people from too far away see it as a spiritual metro pole and a cultural antiquity of sorts. A place like that should not be demolished and repressed to be replaced with an bland Westernized uniformity of modernity.

Aren't we all sons and daughters of Abraham/Ibrahim?

Who here remembers Rachel Corrie and her brave selfless last stand.

What the United States doesn't understand is that if we don't rise up and start pointing our collective conscientious finger at Zionism then all that razor wire and checkpoints will be sprouting up over here in the other big Israel. All those Wal-green/CVS intersections with cameras at the traffic lights will be the future checkpoints - enormous concrete walls can be built anywhere and justified by fear.

Nightmares from the Ohio Wildlife Roadside Roadkill

2009-04-20T05:35:00.000-07:00

So, I am just awake... so this might all be incoherent...

Had this strange long dream that I think my retired teacher pal who was visiting Maysville, Kentucky who posted all these fab old town photos induced... Maysville is on the Ohio River on the Kentucky side.

Those photos combined with where I now work at a deluxe Wal-Mart if ever there were one with an admirable politically correct vision at least - (that sits on an area which I remember as an empty farmland area of two lane roads and wood/wetland areas replete with native Ohio wildlife)....

So, the dream began and I was in an Ohio wetland area with woods flanked by forgotten old abandoned family farms... there were streams, trees, wildlife everything was green and shaded...

In the dream I was with a gaggle of people on a tour... a Wal-mart corporate tour... some executive-type was showing us where there will be a store entrance - right where he was pointing to were these tangle wood trees... I asked, "well, what about these unique trees...?" Everyone was silent - like collectively saying "duh" - CAT - as in Caterpillar would raze them all... then I said, well, at least wouldn't they make a nice natural and unusual alternative entrance to frame the entrance area.... silence...

And meanwhile it is the company Caterpillar who is the machination of bulldozing once grand Palestine.

Then the pasture like prairie in front of all that future Wal-mart-o-rama was teeming with insect life, I asked what would that pasture area be... (again, wrong question)...

...and everyone was silently saying - the super-paver parking lot...

I then said that I suspect that Sam Walton never envisioned all this - this is all just a cult - I then went on in the dream to say to my corporate tour director that my dad - rest in peace - used to dress formally - albeit simply - in brown leather shoes, actual slacks and a sports coat like tweed jacket - kinda dapper until that Wal-mart guy made athletic shoes socially acceptable - pull on synthetic pants with an elastic waistband and a zip up jacket, also synthetic - and that mom (RiP) - wore the same exact same thing - adult versions of children's pull on clothes without any dignity... and they were dead and I blame Sam Walton for their disgraces before the end of their lives, for having lived in such clothes, out of Wal-mart super paver parking lots, eating and dying from fast food and buying up recreational-ly - devoid of purpose - cheap made in china crap - that they thought was American made...Well, I didn't make any friends or sympathies in that strange mute gaggle of people I was with, all nameless and faceless and speechless...

Then, we, as the afore mentioned gaggle, were in an old Americana town somewhere in old and forgotten Ohio - old terracotta brickwork everywhere - streets, sidewalks, structural facades all terracotta brickwork with simple yet elegant arches - grand pillared churches poised on hilltops - Lots of business on the High street - independent opticians, A temple like Public Library, bookstores, barber shops for men and beauty salons for women, cafes, green grocers - butchers and bakeries... Remember, I lived in a small country called Belgium which still, at least in some half and half way, functions this with the independent family owned service businesses with corporate American style supermarket stores as competition.....

In the center of town was a beautiful town hall that still functioned as such - lots of trees, green spaces, shade, the ever present red brick that seemed vaguely Dutch or Flemish in style and hills and no grid of street alignment. Narrow streets too...

And yet all this was the 21st century and somewhere in forgotten Ohio..... and what was once a grand turn of the last century city park behind the town hall - get this - a huge three story deluxe Wal-mart was having its grand opening... and I was having, all of the sudden, visions of the beautiful old Ohio town going out of business and becoming obsolete overnight... then in the dream I was in the town hall standing in the waiting area of a grand lobby - again somehow with Bart the Belgian - like at the town hall in Brussels... (a grand medieval place still used as such).... anyway.... we were in this Maysville styled town hall - waiting on the Mayor... This Mayor - he had replaced his old carved paneled wooden door to his office with a security but plastic Tupperware brand or was it a Rubbermaid brand petro-product plastic flap of a door... From in his office Populist conservative like news was blaring from the radio or TV... and I realized that Mayor got paid off by McWal-Mart of this country's sinister Military Industrial Complex Corporate-o-cracy to build that Wal-mart in a town like that on top of a historic park... with the purpose to erase our collective American, once grand and yet simple brick and elegant history replete with architecture that yielded human dignity from its very proportions by some Jeffersonian intent - But that the media had an agenda to, like I said, just erase our past, which perhaps, was in reality all a modern day and socially acceptable Capitalists cult of all that. The local media which somehow by its incessant yammering, convinced all the groovy independent business people to go along with the Mayors plan to sacrifice the grand old park for a deluxe flagship Wal-mart with a parking lot out back (rather than in front - the effect of which would literally turn the town inside out - back asswards as it were)... because acres and acres of Dominion type vinyl housing was going to be built surrounding the town guaranteeing the independent businesses more business despite the obvious colossal competition... oh, it was just a nightmare...

In the dream I was having literal visions of new Dominion brand type gated community houses, McMansionettes and townhouses, condos and apartments, cheap chain motels, only a couple years old falling into foreclosure and disrepair and standing empty - the independent shops boarded up and empty - out of business signs - the Wal-mart - empty and closed up - denuded of its sign-age - the once beautiful gracious town looking like it was neglected and forgotten for years - and anyone still left there was stuck strung out on crystal meth...

Then I woke up...

Awoke to a rainy day of suicide skies...

And thought I felt like Jimmy Stewart opposite Donna Reed in the Christmas time black and white holiday film - It's A Wonderful Life.... I was remembering that film was referenced in that jerk of an asshole, Mr. (James Howard) Kunstlers book titled The Geography of Nowhere - that book is great but the author is a nasty sort of human which I experienced first hand through e-mail...

Magic Carpet Ride

2009-04-18T10:20:00.001-07:00

Magic Carpet Rides - or doors as Portal to other Kingdoms, other worlds as seen from G-Ville central Ohio.

My Palestinian refugee friend and Brother - A tall and handsome Arab named Muhammad - sent me a delux Saudi made Prayer Rug to encourage my cosmic journey explorations from within.

In Coleman Barks book The Essential Rumi - there is a

Jellaladin Rumi poem about a Prisoner receiving a prayer rug from a friend from the outside - when what he really needed was a key to the locks of his imprisonment. But through the prisoners use of the Prayer Rug in the pattern he noticed a design that was the tumblers and bolts of the locks of his imprison and thus found his way out.

I admit that has been my experience and longing with this Prayer Rug of a Gift from a generous Palestinian living as a refugee in The Kingdom of Humanity.

In one photo here in the backyard the rug points from the North American direction to the Qibla or towards Makkah. The rug is in a private corner of the backyard - Ironically or humorously - the satellite dish from which I stay connected to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - to Makkah and Madinah and the sounds of the call to prayer defines my homes Qibla - literally and figurately...

Those Arabian satellite TV networks from Al Jazeera to Sharjah or Qatar or the Yemen are all serving all of humanity - to those willing to tune into knowlege and Message of the Last Prophet.

I just don't trust any man without a beard regardless of their religion or lack of it.

New Doors

2009-04-18T09:27:00.001-07:00

There is a saccharine Christian saying - or was it from the terrestrial TV days or rather nights - from the repeat broadcasts of the film the Sound of Music? I forget - it doesn't matter anyway - but it went...
"When the Lord closes a door, He opens a window" - Implying for one to crawl through an unexpected window as opportunities to move seem to close like a slammed door...
Then I can't help remember the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe....

Through that wardobe door one left one world and ended up in another... Where one could find Prince Caspian and take a Voyage on the Dawn Treader...

I installed these doors in the photographs here in self determination Thomas Jefferson style on my post World War II Am-vets neighborhood cracker box house - decades beyond its expiration date... This is my own personal Monticello or castle if you will. I've got the red hair too with Jefferson and all the Liberal notions as well. Where you see 15 glass paned doors there were once walls...

The desk was my design my from re-used (Thanks President Jimmy Carter for that) Habitat for Humanity wooden kitchen cabinetry better built than any kitchen cabinetry on the market these days and some cheap counter tops - that's where my antique computer sits from the Ghettoville, USA blogette desk I write to you, dear reader, here from...

The things about Blogs is no body is reading them - not that I care. My broadcasts here are like all the mute and silenced Minarets of North America... They are there if you choose to see them standing like never before - unnoticed and especially unheard. I blog - keep my journal - write down the days and sometimes the nights as they pass through me. I wonder if science fiction like time travelling will bring a purpose to all these blogs on the internet. Uncharted Lives from unknown times across the Universe like a faint radio signal.

I would like to climb through the door of a plane and disembark through that door and find myself under the skies of North Africa, Arabia, Persia, or any of the cool Stans - Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan or the Cholistan desert.

Mostly, I long to return to the roof tops of Old Sana'a - the last place I travelled through that finally felt like my only earth bound temporary home. I would like to see Sharjah and visit Mosques in the Kingdom of Humanity.

I watch the al Fajr prayers (the pre-dawn prayers) on TV from the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia - KSA on Channel One (KSA1) for Makkah with the view of the Ka'aba 0r on Channel Two (KSA2) from Madinah with the voice over in English. When it is pre-dawn prayers there I can pray here simultaneously with those fortunate Brothers and Sisters in the land of the Prophets and beards and clean white clothes.

It's either that or Al Jazeera in English or TV from Sharjah or Qatar...

This might be Ghettoville and the West in decline and from social and cultural poverty but via satellite I can travel to more dignified places and in virtual ways - in real time - participate and learn to be a better person defined by self determination and self respect: From a willingness to know other things, other people, other places, other customs...

There is something about the media Sheikhs in white from distant lands that if you choose to see them and tune in to them with a private satellite dish - like some old terrestrial radio antennae - it is possible to tune into and find a key in the pattern of ones prayer rug to unlock the doors of restraint from here in the "free world" of the West.

I am not the job I work at.
I am not the car I drive.
I am not the neighborhood I live in.

In central Ohio dreaming of desert night skies from places like:

Makkah
Madinah
Marrakesh
Sharjah
Muscat
Sanaa
Jeddah
Kuwait City
Baghdad
Tehran
Cairo
Kabul
Multan

G-ville Backyard Spring Moments

2009-04-18T08:00:00.001-07:00

Here are some photos du jour of G-ville chez moi: My washed clothes hanging out on the line, environmental activist style, clothes drying... I was even using the clothes line in the cold Ohio winter. It's not that I am not too cheap to use the electric clothes dryer - there is just something about the act of putting up clothes on the line and letting them wave like peaceful prayer flags. Plus on a sunny spring day like today out on a line they will
dry faster than in an electric and costly machine to run...
Maybe, I miss the sense of Mother or Grandmother that a clothes line invokes. In fact often times clothes out on the line dry faster than in the dryer anyway - hanging up the clothes is good for stretching the muscles without having to do Yoga. Once the clothes are dry I leave them out waving in the breeze because even my boxer shorts remind me of colorful Tibetan Prayer flags carrying prayers out along the breezes.

I planted a few small Spirea late last autumn that are starting to blossom - My folks had their backyard lined with Spirea, Lilac and Forsythia which they dug up from around the foundation remains of the old farm house that was torn down to build the housing development they moved to in the early nineteen-sixties... My folks, RiP, were recycling, unaware, long before the days of being environmentally or politically correct - they were just cheap! lol - Then again I am generally cheap or trying to practice being so as a virtue...

I still day dream and night dream of making road trips across North Africa from al Maghreb otherwise known as Morocco through Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, across the West of al Mesr (Egypt) and onto the Kingdom of Humanity - Saudia Arabia - before ending up in Dubai in the Emirates detouring to Muscat and back to Sana'a and Taizz and back to the UAE. From there I'd like to make an extension into Persia to pass through Esphahan and then trek across the mysteries of Afghanistan before finding my across the Kyber Pass to check out other places like Peshawar and Mystical Multan.

The thing is mostly I am at work or in my back yard just hanging out - but my heart was bewitched by Arabia - I fell in Love in Arabia with a place as if it were a mysterious and magical woman - My souls earthbound home is in Yemen - I learned that from staying there one summer...

I really don't know why I am in Ohio. How I got here, much less how I ended up back here. I don't know who is coming to take me elsewhere but I associate Ohio with some strange forgotten ancestral Native energy - a swampy morass of wetland and woodland and spirits mingling between the heavy humid sky and damp ground. Now entirely cleansed of Native people as if it were Palestine of today which is still being cleansed in progress due to our Western minded dis-regard. Here the wetlands and woodlands succumbed to farms - then factory farms - then subdivisions and strip malls and the rampant parkinglots to nowhere. Then came Wal-mart - Good Lord I get a headache just thinking about Wal-Mart. Those acres of retail tarmac were once pure Ohio woodlands and wetlands. And yet the wild life returns to where the cars are now parked - The drivers of those shiny metal boxes oblivious to what once was here...

Mostly the wildlife I see is roadkill which is why I identify with myself being Ohio wildlife roadkill. It's just a matter of time until my body is a discarded carcass strewn and forgotten alongside a busy Ohio road.

And yet I dream of North Africa, Morocco, Makkah and Madinah - Dubai - Tehran - Kabul - Quetta - Peshawar - Multan (the ultimate Sufi magickal mystery tour of a city!)... I want to make a road trip like none other - from one realm of Mosques and Minarets cultures and tribes and its modern city life - following the reminder of the broadcast Calls to Prayer from different areas. I really don't want to live anywhere where I can't hear the Minaret reminding me that this Earth bound life is not all there is, because this life is just in no way, especially right now, from Ohio, enough.

Ironically, I chose to live on a central Ohio street with a Minaret - the minaret was designed with architectural sympathy and a nod to the prevailing culture and architecture here from this region - Not a slender Egyptian or foreign minaret - but a sturdy thick barn silo style minaret attached to a Mosque built with architectural dignity and grace - not like an aluminum shed of the drive through church variety so common in this neighborhood. The Minaret I can see from house from down the street is a silent Minaret - And this is the land with freedom of speech and freedom of religion... The ice cream truck though daily broadcasts many times throughout the day hawking ice cream loudly to an impoverished neighborhood.

At least I've got satellite TV and can explore the dignity and grace of people and places who have not forgotten the real meaning of Allahu Akbar - God is Greater. Greater than any of this....

Abrahamaic Monotheism Version 3.0

2009-04-12T13:04:00.000-07:00

In Dutch the word for Tulips are Tulpen...

Pictured here are some evidences of Spring springing up - rising up from the dead of winter - from out in the backyard on my existential trip to nowhere from where I watch the seasons change and feed the birds.

I also had to mow the lawn today with my People Powered Mower - (no electric, no gasoline - just pushing)...

Meanwhile the laundry is hanging out on the line to dry... I hung it up myself on the line outside to dry after I washed in a machine - there is no Misses Crouch. The windows in the house are open letting in fresh air even though it really isn't warm enough for all that... No suicide skies today.

I can't help but remember familied Easter Sundays in years past - when I was a kid - before all this roadkill lifestyle of mine descended up on me. Those were happier if not more ignorant times - less alone times.

Meanwhile, this might be Ghettoville - or G-ville - but I hear a dog off in the near distance barking - not my own. Birds chirruping and some singing. Mostly I hear nothing but the gentle cool breeze which takes imagination to achieve.

Whenever some one asks me directly point blank: "Matt are you a Muslim" I suddenly fall into a K-hole of thinking and think, how in Islam, anything that is created by God is Muslim, including the person who just asked me that annoying question whether they know it or want to believe it or not. Then I get to thinking: "Am I created by God" (insert question mark) - For all I know I am a child of Shaytan in the land some Persian types refer to as the Great Shaytan - which, incidently, I agree with those Revolutionary old men. Well, I believe in God - like in Arabic - Allah Almighty Akbar - Allah is Greater. But God is God and he has 99 names in Islam and quite a few other as well in other monotheistic religions of which there are the Big Three - Abrahamaic Monotheism Versions 1.o, 2.o and 3.o and probably all the sub categories of the .1 and .5's plus myriad in between, but who is counting? Who cares if you pray sitting down, standing up, bent over or all three combined, 0r even, who cares if you don't pray at all...

It ain't, nor should it be, anybody's business if you do... or dont.

Is the point - if after I'm gone, as in dead and gone and some one wakes me up then asks me about what I believe, or believed and whatever I achieved, or didn't achieve - or thought and felt, or tried to do - good or bad - I mean, if that were to happen, as I believe it will, or hope it will, (because this life does not feel like enough!) - Not because I want to Believe but because it was chosen for me, long before there was a "me" or and "I" or a tooth for a tooth... I know what I believe - I know what I am running from and running to and how I seem to, statistically speaking, run back and forth.

I think the bearded Prophets of Old are cool - especially the ones you see on the streets and satellite TV of today. I really do want to visit Makkah under Arabian skies. I want to spend more time in Arab North Africa as well - anywhere within earshot of the call to prayer from the Minaret - before dawn or before sunset and all the times in between - but, no, I am not very good at what I believe or practice or disbelieve in but I try to keep it all to myself. Neither do I see myself travelling anytime soon - But I practice being optimistic about that. I need to travel - back to Arabia - which is like simultaneously time travelling to a dusty past and an inter-galactic New Las Vegas of a future when you land in that DBX - Dubai airport!

The Universe is very big.

I often times find myself remembering Yemen. The rooftops in Sana'a, Yemen are magical - they are divine and meditative places above the cachophony of a crazy modern and ancient Southern Arabian city of the Prophets of old. It really is the mystical Arabia Felix. Back there to this day in old Sana'a women glide along dressed in Ninja black... Those images of dark fabric dignity and mysterious eyes of silence and grace. I keep having this compelling image haunt me - specifically also of me laying on my back on a roof in some city such as old Sana'a with such a woman - a sister-wife in the religious sense - who like me - enjoys kicking back and watching the nighttime stars turn by on their big wheel. Holding hands in silence watching the stars in the sky - not side by side in some separate chairs getting fat together watching the stars on TV - but laying back on the roof, holding hands in silence - content with watching the stars glide by on a warm Arabia night breeze.

That dream is replete with al shay (the tea) with cardamon and sugar setting out in little cups and a metal tea pot.

Jellaladin Rumi translated by Coleman Barks, in the book, the Essential Rumi taught me a lot - that led me to read and re-read a mod translation of the Majestic Qur'an with the calligraphic Arabic and English side by side - I want to visit the Kingdom of Humanity - the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Are there any other questions and does any of this really matter in some Western styled pointed confrontation: Yes my past and present life contradict me but this is the Soul bound by the mortal coil that I am wrapped up in and all I know as me that gets called Matt or sometimes when I am really lucky, Mustafa. I really do want to travel more but essentially I just want off this planet.

On a side note, I sincerely wish Barack Obama and his family and the Administration of the White House at present would have inherited a much better National condition - all of non-white America deserved better - legal or illegal - We the People deserved not the discarded carcass of a gaggle of nasty blue eyed Zionist Corporatist Vampires of Capitalism - All of Us in G-ville have Hope and desperately want a form of Change we can believe in - one that will include all Gods children.

Crucifixations or Death and Taxes

2009-04-10T19:16:00.000-07:00

Oh yeh I have to say I have had third world styled food poisoning - at a moment when the only toilet in the house had been taken out - and I was really in the shit sprays for days - still left with a severe headache from all that. More evidence if we needed any that life here in the US is a third world country - food poisoning.

I got hired today in some under-employmend situation but under-employed is better than un-employed - and despite being sick as a dog at that! Plus I contacted my old job and got them to FAX my W-2's and I have an appointment to get my taxes filed tomorrow... so once that's done i'll rest a little easier...

I keep asking myself if today has any religious effect on me in some lingering memory like way? I will say today I got a lot done despite being sick and felt like someone was looking out for me - maybe that was because I visited my sister yesterday - and seeing Margo is like seeing an old friend and hanging out with the good ol' Crouch family for Sunday Roasts... (back in the early 70's) plus seeing her connects me back to when mom and dad were around and even before Margo ended up incarcerated when Grandma (Crouch) was around - before all this that I now know as life caught up with and depressed me down to near half dead paralysis of a road kill life.

I still have to pinch and remind myself that I am also a Belgian and a "gay divorcee'" of a Belgian at that... But moreso - what seems ever more dream like is the time I spent abroad - Yemen now seems so exotic and dream like - I can't believe I not only went there but thrived there better than in Belgium.

For the short time I was there I still have vivid memories of the UAE. And then Pakistan except for some rough times there (which despite what I remember when I kind of tripped out in Lahore - from stress of all that full on culture shock that caught up with me there - where - I still remember the internet cafe in vivid detail where those e-mail correspondences to Bart and other friends in the west occured from - where I was saying "help, what did I get myself into?" - but then later recovering lol) is equally an exotic memory experience that I am tremendously proud of.

I never stop being amazed at how freaked out Midwesterners (even hip urbane ones) can get when I speak of having been to those places... (and sometimes all the Belgium years included).

...So somehow Margo and where she is connects me to the good past parts of the Crouch family - and my kinda cousin who is Margos only friend in the free world left - well - my visits with him connect me to my moms side of the family - and makes me feel less detached and like a lost soul here - that I feel that way here where I am from (meaning central Ohio) is baffling to me - maybe because this place lacks any real sense of place other than all the wal-mart super paver parking lots - oh the horror of wal-mart as Betty Butterfield says on Youtube.

But it is odd that, that old communal visiting hall, at ORW, which hasn't really changed in 31 years - now is an architectural construct memory in my mind more familiar to me than the home we were all brought up in. I must say it is weird having 31 years of my 40 years revolve around my sisters Margo's incarcerated, prison, check point, razor wired, humiliated, dehumanized life - and that somehow even when she needed mental health care and medicine - when she got nothing but a plea bargain poor persons prison (way to go Ohio) - she managed to succeed within the state imposed limitation on her life. She, not me, is the remarkable person here.

I should really think about all that some more because too many memories are coming back...But Margo has some great stories about Mom and Dad that either Mom and Dad would never have told me - for who knows what reason - propriety or their ideas of parental responsibility or because with their rigid twice monthly for years visits to see Margo - in some ways my living under my parents roof then kept me at a greater personable distance those years - I don't know...

I do like hearing the family stories from Margo and my cousin that I just, stories that I never knew about. But really Margo is heroic - we all have to admit that now in her ability to survive - Including that Kafka-esque Parole Board.

My ex-teacher pal from dads old widowered condo life post mom was telling me about this LD kid an artist kid who burnt his art (in the sink in the high-school art studio - responsibly no less - and ended up being forced on medication - then when he turned into a zombie from meds he got put on more meds - which is ultimately the real control formula that made my condo pal retire from teaching early) - To which I said that really good artists have always burnt the work that they didn't want created - which I think is a virtue and a sign of some genuine rare genius...

The post Bush II Administration system in place that puts this sort of bright lived lives down is just plain wrong. I also told my pal that Americans need to admit that public school in the US is day care so that parents can be unhindered human resources - and that college in the US is really just to get those Americans who do go on to that to be on par with European high school kids. And that Grad Students here are only equal with European undergrads.

Until we can admit this is the education reality in this country we can not evolve and better this place as a nation - until we can admit that this country has huge population mass third world debt traps (houses, schooling, cars, healthcare etc). Even the whole idea of a middle class might be a myth of a pipe dream - an ever elusive pie in the sky American Dream - but life here is in reality an unending ever unfolding multi-faceted nightmare of debt and traffic.

While at the grocery foods car park today I saw by accident some female goose made a nest out of fresh mulch in the parkinglot under a parkinglot landscape area tree between parked cars. I remember when that whole area was a big wooded wetland that ran over the hill between the Scioto and Olentangy Rivers where it wasn't farmed - generations of geese later on still collectively remember that too.

Then while sitting in the car just taking in the suicide sky an old little woman walked up to the geesette offering bread and said in this little voice "you are doing a good job" to the mother goose - like the goose was some little teen mom living out in the parkinglot. Imagine what the goose was thinking - fight or flight... what is this crazy, upright, two legged, scary, white headed, two uncontrolled flaying armed, human doing to me now?

Everywhere I look I see Palestine under the Israeli Occupied Forces seige - even in the nature and parkinglots here. Well that little old woman meant well but can only think in humanizing terms with nature - as if nature were just like a childrens Beatrix Potter story - where all of Old Englands wildlife are characters like people...

This country needs more dissent - more public protest in the streets. Corporate/politician heads should roll in their own blood more often. Well despite all this and the house nearing completion and ready to be flipped (as if that is going to happen any time soon in this market! lol HA!)...

If I can't travel abroad like I used to again then really I don't care if my life ends early because this American Matrix experience is just not working for me in any way with meaning. I know you know what I mean but I had to write this... I've been sick with food poisoning for three days cooped up in the house with the shits - at one point the toilet had been ripped out and I was using a hole in the floor or a bucket for the endless shits - can you imagine...? My Gawd my travels in the third world were never this primitive!

Well I got through it and the toilet got reinstated - and I got a job - and faked it, though sick as a dog, in that corporate nonsense intimidating interview - that thank God I was just too sick to care about and that probably got me through the intimidation part - lol - Well - jobs these days in reality if you can find one are just a stepping stone - no company wants lifers despite what they might say about any of that - I just wish I could bicycle to work - because the commute is insane - Central Ohio should be a bicycle city given how generally flat it is like the whole of bicycling Holland or like Copenhagen.... who knows - maybe it will happen sooner rather than later... I don't know but this house is finally looking like it will get finished... Which is one big psychic relief to have a clean space to live my life in and out of.

The Mexican guys who work here though despite the difficulties of communicating are really great and actually put up with me and fix the things I complain about without loosing their sense of humor - which is actually nice to have around. But my gawdh that crazy Mexican radio they listen to loudly when they work drives me batty if I'm on the phone... I do use Spanish around these guys so maybe they appreciate that - I have learned a lot of Spanish with them just being around and I'm not afraid to try to use it. When I do they laugh at me - not with me - but I don't care - it's the laughter that I appreciate so much. Plus they work fast and cheap without being stressed about it all so who cares if they leave the beer bottles everywhere in the yard like they had a party - it kind of goes with the neighborhood...

On Al Jazeera in English As Seen From Within the US

2009-04-08T20:44:00.001-07:00

I should be asleep... But I've had 3rd world styled food poisoning, the details of which I will spare you. But my physician DR kindly e-mailed me a remedy to care for myself since I don't have healthcare at the moment.
He suggested I go find that Pedialyte (electrolyte replenishing drink for infants) which for six and half dollars (at the corner liquor shop) for a liter I don't know how people can afford to breed...
Also got Gatorade to go with it. I must really have been dehydrated for all that I drank I have hardly had to go as it were. It is tough being sick out here in the sticks of Ghettoville alone - too far from friends. Though there are many nearby within sight churches and mosques - no one is in the habit of checking up on the neighbors...
I'm exhausted from having been so sick but now can't sleep...
I was watching al Jazeera in English via satellite and they had the most amazing examination on two things in the US:
1. Detroit - and how the current economy is affecting that already dead carcass of a once grand and beautiful place (real estate that can't find buyers at 50 dollars to 500 dollars for a house on some land, albeit in need of work but habitable all the same) - This because vast neighborhoods have no police department or fire department or city services like trash and garbage pick up that make up basic urban infrastructure city services - It was nearly sci-fi post apocalyptic Mad Max, Mel Gibson, Road Warrior like - Perhaps the scariest part of that report was on the newer suburban places being stripped down and left vacant or the (30 some storied) high-rises that make up the core of the center of downtown Detroit all being abandoned; (not just a few floors being empty or one or two abandoned hi-rises but all of them) - and then...
2. On the US prison population being 25 percent of the global prison population while our US national population only comprises 5 percent of the global human population... Then how the criminal justice system is preying upon the poor under classes in merciless ways... It was all really great documentary style production - but, my God, this country from an outsiders critical perspective is really exposing how, in places here, everything is in shameful tatters. I mean, we all know this on some level but it takes an outsider view sometimes to present it back to us. To hold up the mirror so we can see ourselve as we are.
If only this stuff were available on mainstream US media outlets. And it's al Jazeera and it's actually very concerned on our behalf in these overtly sympathetic ways that for media is quite sophisticated to present in convincing ways. I really must say Al Jazeera in English is impressive and very much needed. But who here watches it? But hey I'm unemployed can't they at Al Jazeera in English hire me?
There was also a point about the central train station in Detroit being this once grand and now abandoned structure that was in use until like January '88 which lasted longer than Columbus' Central Station or Union Station as I think it was called... it was also a grand structure... demolished - Reaganized... And now though Columbus is the state Capitol there is no passenger train service that stops here.
...And that poor people here end up in prison - where the state pays 60,000 a year on the inmate - and the inmate in their whole life probably never had access to that much money or care that money like that could provide - so it might be prison but it is better than Ghetto-life...
So I am really thinking - my God - those Islamic Republic for all their libertarian drawbacks might be statistically speaking on the whole offering all of their citizens a better way of life than the liberal democracy way of life here in the states that we identify with as being Lady Liberty's light and beakon to the world as an example....
And, Ironically, people in those Islamic Republic generally believe our liberal democracies are in theory a great way or method and that Islamic Republics have a lot to learn from our way of life, which is, actually, in tune with the Islamic sharia in ways we in the west are loathe to admit. So I am really scratching my head over this.
The question is why doesn't the states want to be the liberal democracy it is and why does it work so hard to undermine its own constitutional foundation - when Islamic Republics are defending and helping us undestand that which we ourselves as a nation are ironically undermining. I mean, would someone explain this to me... is it greed and Capitalism and Corporatism and economic despotism and Zionism all combined into this sinister Beast of our Biblical styled Apocalyptic making...? well it's food for thought.

Happier Images Under Suicide Skies

2009-04-04T08:13:00.000-07:00

Yeh so the posts here on the G-Ville blogette have gotten a bit heavy. So here are some images with a lighter message.
"That Car" - some local has made an art car of found art applique' on his own car. I see this car at the most unexpected moments quite a lot. One of the more interesting aspects of life in grey and boring C-bus town...
Then my pal Ben who lives next to a railroad track a few months back photographed some heavy tanks being transported south through town. That corresponded to a day Palestine got hit rather hard in time for Christmas '08. How quickly everything gets forgetten around here. Ironic that for Christmas '08 Israel invades Bethlehem which last I checked was in Palestine...
So yesterday I was at the corner shop run by this groovy Palestinian family and waiting in line to buy some phone credit for my cell phone and the guy in line next to me gets rung up and his total is $19.48 and he says to the woman "1948, Good year, hunh?" and she just sort of smiled back silently. And I am like ready to just yell out - "Dude, do you know your history? Do you know who you are speaking to? If it wasn't for the Balfour Declaration and that year - 1948 - this woman wouldn't even be here on this side of the planet!" - Instead I bit my tongue and keep my mouth shut. The man had no idea - People here just have no idea. I was always taught that ignorance is no excuse.
The donut shop bar stool still life photo is pretty much a feature of my weekend or occassional weekend of my solo life. I don't drink (well normally) but in central Ohio - maybe it's the pollution or just the perpetual overcast suicide skies but you wake up feeling hung over - that's when I go to the local donut shop and get coffee... It's an old Independent Donut Shop that looks like a forgotten relic of Route 66 - except this is no where near the forgotten, replaced and decommissioned freeway that headed West - from Chicago to LA.
You know I am trying to post happier ideas - but I don't really have too many.
I was watching Al Jazeera in English or maybe it was the Saudi 2 station via satellite - and they were saying that over 600,000 jobs in the US were lost in March. Hadn't heard any of that on the comparable US media outlets.
I'm unemployed too but who is counting?
Maybe it's the uncertain times we live in but I have been watching a lot of TV from the Arabian Penninsula. Mostly I don't want to forget how to haggle with Taxi drivers in Arabic in case I have the luxury of travelling back to magical Arabia sometime. But wether I am watching Saudi TV - from either channel 1 or 2 or Sharjah TV which I like a lot... Or Qatar - or even TV from Yemen - I don't know - I have to say that Satellite dish I bought sometime last year which wasn't really expensive - well, I got my money's worth of entertainment out of it. I've learned a lot more about life in Arabian Penninsula than I ever knew from my limited travels over there. What I miss about the Arabian Penninsula is the dignity of the place: People dressed up in Angelic beauty - and gracious people who, really, if you get the chance to speak with, are really the most generous and hospitable of people I have ever hung out with. I like how Arabian Satellite TV presents itself and it's various cultures - it's a different world - and it has the right to make its own rules - but the imagery I am impressed by is that the place doesn't cash in on passing itself off as disrespectable monied trash in way Hollywood is notorious for.
To be honest I've learned a lot from TV from Sharjah in the UAE or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - KSA, or Qatar. Sometimes when I look at the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia I think every citizen there is some sort of extended nearly divine angelic like Royalty - Right now in G-ville nothing feels respectable or pride inducing so watching programming from Saudi or Arabian Television in general has been a great reminder of the potential of human dignity from self determination.
So for that thanks Qatar, Sharjah in the UAE or from the Kingdom of Humanity - Saudi Arabia - from deep in the heart of G-ville.
You know, If you read my blog, I'm always complaining about something that shouldn't be so in this country here - the USA. Like, that we in the US live behind an electronic iron curtain of (mis)/information. Given that the general mainstream media in the US has it's military industrial complex propaganda agenda (that's no secret if you want to see it you can if you don't then you wont) - and that there is another side to that story that one never hears within the US - but then again - the US is still the land of the free in theory. So via the internet - if you are determined - it is possible to read about life outside and beyond the invisible electronic iron curtain of limited world media information that is allowed in - it is still legal to purchase a cheap satellite dish and receive free programming from around the world and watch whatever region that interests you - to find out about life outside. So I should stop complaining - I should try to be more optimistic. Thank God for Al Jazeera in English!
We have a unique President for a pivotal time in History - for this I am glad - really glad and hopeful. And when life within the confines of the US gets to be too much from all the social and economic decay - it is rather a relief to tune into Television from more dignified places like Sharjah, Dubai, Sana'a, from Muscat in Oman or Jeddah, Riyadh and even during religious time from Makkah and Medinah.
It's been a reminder of the potential for human dignity watching basic TV from those places. Plus the "soaps" even when you can't follow along with the spoken Arabic are hysterical and compelling because of the body language and the language of television. So, yeh, things here in the US seem grim - especially from here in depressed socially and culturally - Ohio - And so I'm not travelling uch these days - but while stuck at home inside - i'm usually - thanks to the internet and the satellite - off enjoying other parts of the world and learning something about myself along the way.
And the really nice part about watching TV from the Arabian world is that the sky is always blue and the weather sunny and warm!

Pills and Paperwork or What Healthcare in the US Really Looks Like

2009-04-03T10:07:00.000-07:00

Pills and Paperwork are pretty much what healthcare or the lack of it in the US really looks like.

I find the commercials on TV for various Prescription drugs akin to gratuitous psychological violence.

Given the endless pills and paperwork from health insurance companies, medical centers and hospitals or clinics for procedures and tests.... It is just like beating an already sick patient who is trying to recover from an illness. I don't know - healthcare isn't supposed to be like this...
...like a for profit industry.

The pills in and of themselves are distressing - but the paperwork - the incoming and incessant bills are the sinister dimension of the Ohio healthcare system that thrives on keeping people sick to keep the profits in the healthcare industry.

It's enough to make you wonder if there is a Judgement Day or a God.

Will all the Capitalists, Pharmaceutical companies and all the medical Doctors and Surgeons - will they ever have to answer to the Almighty - do they care as care-givers?

It is modern and medieval but especially soulless at the same time...

Healthcare in Ohio is dismal given how merciless the state of Ohio representatives have been over so many decades.

It's not being sick that is so much the problem - getting sick - that is a fact of life... Or the medicine that makes you sicker than what's wrong in the first place. It makes you wonder if we are human lab rats for these pharmaceutical giants to test on. But it's the battery of bills and subsequent incomprehensible paperwork that follow sick people around for years - that's what kills your heart and steals your soul. That's the kicker to all this suffering.

That we have created such a merciless system for ourselves when each and everyone of us will fall into this morass at least once at one point in our lives.

How do we explain that to ourselves even? How do we justify this? And to think the hospitals have a religious affiliation is the icing on the cake - that's the abomination to the people.

That the politicians who defend this shocking system generally also consider themselves religious...

All of this makes me ask if our lives in the US are bought and sold and traded via corporations like cartells who own us - are we as people publically traded as human resource commodities? My guess is yes - If so then shame on us.

Suicide Park Columbus Ohio Spring 09

2009-03-28T12:50:00.000-07:00

You drive around central Ohio and you see signs of the times. A forgotten and discarded mobile home park has become a literal Trailer Park Trash site. Salvaged almost beyond recognition these once manufactured home were typical low income housing. Nothing looked like this around here before the two Bush Administrations wrecked havok on the infrastructure of a nation and its peoples lives.

It's not about cleaning up places like this - The time now is to learn about it. How, why, who and where did this happen to?

This is not a low income version of Grey Gardens. Undocumented lives were lived here - played out by all the nastiness of the dark side of the American Dream. These are the chewed up and discarded bones of human existance from the American styled unrestrained Apocalyptic Beast of Capitalism.

What sort of people and Nation do this to themselves? This is enough to make me want to just pack up and move to The Kingdom of Saudia Arabia and find some peace, order, stability and leadership.

I find these images - this modern day ghost town inside the Capital of the States of Ohio - This park tells the truth about the sadness of the state of Ohio.

It gets even creepier because even though the place seemed empty - it was not - there were people there...

Though they did not want to be seen - ghost like glimpses of strangers were behind a few of these dilapitated structures.

This is not America - a song from the film Falcon and the Snowman sung by David Bowie. But indeed this is America - this is the United States. No matter how much you try to look away - this part of America begs to be seen.

When I look at this place I just want answers. In this mortgage and housing and economic crisis my guess is - this is the future (indeed it is the present).... The large sprawling suburban homes of McMansionville beyond the ring of the outerbelt will eventually look like this. Sad scenes under a sad and ambivalent sky.

This place should be named Patriotic Park - so patriotic Americans can go here and meditate on the way things here work out for all too many people.

When I see images like this I just want to run away: To a different society, a different culture - a place with different values - where poverty does not neccessarily exclude dignity or humanity.

Shame on us in the US for our relentless economic greed. There has got to be a better way than rampant consumerism turning people into consumptives who can not then even take care of themselves or the world we live in.
This is a salvage park of homes from discarded human lives from a social and economic system based in cruelty and lacking any decency. Like Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders sang in the song My City Was Gone - with the lyric "way to go Ohio"... My Trailor Park was gone - way to go Ohio...

There has got to be a better way to rebuild a nation than to just turn it over to salvage collectors for scrap metal for the military industrial complex to use in foreign war machines.

Unsettling doesn't even begin to describe this place. More like "unhinged mentally" describes this land and park place - devoid of both park and place. The future is in Nowhere-ism.
An architectural urban lack of planning example of a a social system built on an idea like existential nihilism - where everything is permitted and nothing matters ends in what exactly... when greed takes over? ....Suicide Park.

In Sharjah Dreaming of Ohio

2009-03-22T05:51:00.001-07:00

The Devils or Shaytans can you find you anywhere...

There was some ancient writer from the Arabian world who wrote "in Cairo dreaming of Baghdad" or was it the other way around. It was something I read that now in it's half life is a half memory in its incomplete incorrectness... That's the way my mind works... Thank God for Google... If I weren't so lazy I'd "Google it"....

I'm imagining someone in Sharjah a city in the Arab Emirates dreaming of a strange place called Ohio - north of the Ohio River Valley and South of the most southern tip of Canada. Curious about a strange nowhere place somewhere else far away.

So for that imaginary friend or Brother or Sister in the UAE here are an odd assortment of photos. The photos for you presented as seen from dreaming of a strange place called Central Ohio - Columbus or more appropriately C-bus... "See bus?" because there is no public transportation in the urban sprawl of C-bus... and everyone dependent on public transportation chants "see bus" while standing precariously in the lanes of automotive traffic...

One photo is of a happy Bhuddha at some Chinoiserie hole in the wall type place where you order and pick up non-halal food through a barred up window in Ghettoville... stick to the vegetarian options like tofu because who knows where the meat comes from. That's probably why the Bhuddah is laughing. I rather like the odorless electronic incense sticks on offer. The barred up window hole in the wall eatery is neccessary in this neighborhood because here is more of a war zone than Iraq ever was which is a secret the media here will never tell you unless you watch Al Jazeera in English - Al Jazeera would do a story on that dirty little skeleton of an urban war playing out daily in the US on warmer nights thats confined to the US media in America's suburban closet... except as far as skeletons go its more like a 500 pound Gorilla named Ishmael chewing on a bunch of celery who doesn't even fit in the closet anyway...

The other altar is much more beautiful with its oil flame of Hindustani origin from the great Punjab. America is chock full of religion. I like life and culture from anywhere from along the old Spice and Incense Routes. Those Routes beat Route 66 any day any millenium...

The wetland and woodland photos are from OSU research area that is painfully all too small for the scale of the project - or for the downright dire environmental need. I want to see this research area become at least the size of all the combined central Ohio Wal-Mart parkinglots.... Scroll down to the subsequent entry for a link to the place - it is worth visiting and experiencing. There is a huge fallen tree that stands about three meters off the ground - I was able to walk my dog Rusty up there in search of squirrels and a view. Dogs will go anywhere you go even up a tree.

There is a funny cell phone self portrait of me on the phone with Barack Obama (pictured in the background on the poster in my kitchen). No I'm not on the phone with Barack Obama. I wish I were. But with him as President I don't have to call him: I have HOPE. Hope despite being unemployed and not having healthcare and having an insane (literally and figuratively) pre-existing condition. If I could call Barack Obama there isn't much I could tell him that he doesn't already know. That is probably the difference between the Barack Obama administration and the previous ones. The Obama Administration knows what is going on and they and we who support them are fighting to make the hope of change a reality for all the Ghettoville streets in the US of A.

But if I were on the phone with Barack Obama - I'd tell Barack Obama that 1000 square foot kitchen garden his wife Michelle is building at the White House is a brilliant idea! Sad to think that hasn't happened there since Eleanor, bless her soul, Roosevelt! Organic kitchen gardening at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue now that hits me in a soft spot and makes me want to cry. I'd invite myself over for dinner for vegetarian styled Collard Greens. Well that won't happen because I prefer to eat sitting on the floor and eating off communal plates while eating with my fingers from my right hand for the sensual experience of food. That requires not just clean hands but well washed feet for dinner!

In Central Ohio dreaming of Sharjah... And in Sharjah dreaming of Central Ohio.

I want to go to Sharjah and write, blog and illustrate. In short I want a grant to Experience the UAE. Who knows - stranger things have happened. The UAE really needs a cultural injection right now to build bridges to the rest of the modern world. The world of Islam is full of unexpected opportunities and pleasant surprizes - anything can happen.

In Ohio Dreaming of Sharjah

2009-03-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Dr ___,
You asked that I write you after a few weeks on my new meds for Depression. I really cannot express how much that impressed me that you asked me to write you and assess my condition for you this way. Thank you very much in advance. You are a cool doctor and I admire your work and honest approach with me over the difficult and often times tedious subject of something like Depression and anxiety.
Well let me explain things here this way: Keep in mind I am still reeling from a separation from a 15 year relationship and having lived abroad for ten of those years. I am not adjusting to what is left of my family after my return and my fathers death. But on other levels - except for the momentary unemployment I am doing well. I own my own house (and its paid for) as is the used car I drive. My credit rating is good and I keep busy working on my dilapitated but paid for home.
But to describe where I am at with the meds you prescribed. The Fluoxetine (aka generic Prozac) works - but I am skeptical. Lexapro would probably work better. I am taking some form of Clonazepam for the late night anxiety that is gripping and often times worse than the depression itself. But here is an example - a slice of life of what is going on with me. Despite my sometimes incessant loneliness and aloneness and my struggle with existential nihilism in a society where everything is permitted and nothing matters - I feed the birds and watch the seasons shift in my existentialist roadtrip to nowhere. But tonight... ....watching TV from Sharjah UAE in Arabic (and my understanding of Arabic is limited at best) http://www.sharjahtv.ae/ via satellite (I've been to the UAE and liked it very much) and at one point felt something on my face. Even though I wasn't feeling anything but pharmaceutical numbness, tears were rolling down my cheeks. No lump in my throat. No specific sadness or at least none that I was aware of. But physical signs of depression all the same. Finding that I was tearing like that - crying - surprised me at how out of touch with myself I am - I don't really have words to describe what it means to be surprised that you yourself are crying for no reason almost personally oblivious to doing so - some part of me disconnected to my awareness was crying. ....and all while watching TV but not crying over the TV subject.
I'm sure this detachedness happens to other people but it has never happened to me. I'm not sure what to think about taking meds for depression. This isn't right - it isn't natural - and yet I cannot function in "life" without meds. To be honest - despite what I write I think I probably need more/different medicine not less. At least for the moment. (Sick isn't it?)... I still struggle with incessant thoughts of death that honestly just pester me. I want to live and enjoy things but can only think about piling up medical bills that make no sense and how and where to get a job in my condition.
I do not have an active tendency to inflict pain on myself in any suicidal attempt - thanks God(s) but the existential nihilism is dogging me to no end. Its like this - if I have to die (and I do - we all do - I understand that quite well) I just want to get it over with. Like as a kid during swimming lessons in the spring when the outdoor water was cold - you just had to jump in and start swimming. Well thats how I feel about death. The cold pool awaits. ...(But first)...
I really would like to just travel a bit more - especially since I lived overseas for so long and travelled about the middle east the way Europeans do in ways Americans cannot comprehend. I have the money to travel modestly even but should probably save it. But who knows maybe it is better to travel. Perhaps once my meds stabilize.
Sexually I have noticed a difference. I can make sex if I want to but getting me to want it is not so easy (solo or otherwise) - but then I'm not really a swinger or living the lifestyle of a stud bachelor. In some ways its a relief not to have a compulsion for sex. But it does affect how I feel about myself. I get the most satisfaction walking my dog at the OSU wetlands research area open to the public. http://swamp.osu.edu/ I like the quiet and the birds and water and tanglewood trees there. I like the mixture of science fostering and restoring nature rather than destroying it for capitalism.
The rest of the time i just feel extremely lonely like...
...human roadkill on the side of a busy road of life and capitalism.You are the only person in the medical industry i know who would understand any of this with respect towards me.
Then this morning, Later:
I woke up today to typical Ohio overcast skies - I just feel - ....so.... - I can't articulate - it's like a my soul groans... moans and groans in ways too deep for words from any language. I got up early anyways, today. Drove myself to a far away independent diner because I can't take the McChains... And there are no independent diners anywhere anymore or donut shops to abuse myself with - then while at the bar - I prefer eating solo at the bar - the sun came out and I recovered... somewhat. Or the coffee kicked in...
Last nite was weird. Haunting and alone is all I can say.
...I wonder what Dr ____ will make of that letter. I suspect his RN will send me a one sentance reply and I'll wonder if anyone else but you dear reader understood the words. Well, with writing, it's the process for me that matters. The writing it all out it's how I survive...
Outside, I do wish it were already ten to fifteen degrees warmer - what I don't like about the Ohio climate is that it always has me wanting something... different. It's a hard climate and the suicide sky fucks with my soul and my brain. Waking up alone with those skies today - after last night... I don't know how it is I'm not hurting myself physically - but thank God I'm not. My mind torments me.
As far as roadkill - "...my god..." - as Betty Butterfield from YouTube would say with her dialect - I burst out in tears over roadkill because deep down I know I am Ohio wildlife roadkill - squished to the pavement - run over half alive but stuck to the tarmac - waiting - I can cry over roadkill but can't cry at my folks funerals.
Then last night sitting and watching Sheikhs on Saudi TV via satellite late night alone in bed unbeknownst to me I'm crying at how dignified and Angelic they look - like the Angels Gabriel and Michael - Jibril and Mikael in Arabic.... (think like al Gebra for math). Maybe thats why I was staring at the soporific electronic blue TV images all catatonic and alone like and crying and not even realizing it. Plus I've been to those parts of the world.
Central Ohio feels like a glue trap for human lab rats. I've been with men like those sheikhs - some are dear hearted extremely generous and gentle - others can be mean and nasty - hey - just like anyone else around the world. But those bearded sheikhs in white have a style and dignity like nowhere else in the world. Maybe thats what I am missing. Why I am crying inside. I feel like roadkill - white trash in dirty jeans and a torn T-shirt with holes in my socks and shoes - in need of a wash - suburban misfit - lost - alone - discarded housewife dishrag - wandering along the side of a transcontinental capitalists expressway.
....Sell house - find Rusty a home - get a job in Sharjah, UAE - maybe that's what I should do... move to Arizona... who knows... who cares... nothing matters... But the point seems to be to leave here - Yet to occupy myself I keep working on this house... which is endless....I just want to wake up. Rusty the black dog deserves better. I really don't know. Nothing makes sense without Mom and Dad and Bart or my sister-self locked up behind countless layers of razorwire and guarded checkpoints.
It will end - in that there is consolation - an end to the wanting in this soul body - an end to the needing. But right now it just feels like nothing will end, nothing will change and that difference is utterly elusive. But something has got to change.

A Personal 21st Century La Villette ah Memories of Bruxelles la Morte

2009-02-08T08:22:00.001-08:00

A personal and delicate posting from a 21st Century Bronte novel about a thinly disguised Brussels town being a place where hearts being broken are that city's strange life blood - Villette - or Bruxelles la Morte. This on remember Experiencing Belgium back in the day, once upon a time.
.....I like the sweet things you say about our quasi post- relationship family but mostly what I read makes the bottom of my already delicate and tender heart these days fall out and I cave into a painful form of sadness and despair: I cannot drive here anywhere in central Ohio without this happening to some degree and most people I see here know you and remember you and are curious to want to hear more about you. (to such a degree that I see that they would rather see you than me) - But I have very little information about you to give because I just don't know anything anymore. Then they see how that affects me and say that I must get to the point where you and I never happened and all of that is forgotten - then and only then I will be free to live my life again. But my answer to that is how do you throw 15 years - the best years - of your life away. Neither do I want to - nor do I intend to. Instead this sadness will eventually claim my life and that is really ok and perhaps as it should be. My sadness and disillusion will remain a cornerstone of your life post me - wether you choose to know it is entirely up to you - better you not think about it in the long the run. But it is a truth to our lives now.
My grandmother and grandfather talked about getting back together up until my grandfather died of a heart attack. Then my grandmother lived on in loneliness and despair for years and years after even after her sister and my mom and dad died - long after her second man committed suicide - she lived long so long after that always speaking of the man she loved whom she divorced, until her drawn out end. I will not repeat that history. Neither should you. I am not sure how but I will pack up this house and end this real estate game. I will move - because I cannot co-exist in this place with the ghosts of my family and now you and the dogs; my unique and bohemian chosen family haunting me and ripping my heart out daily and nightly.
I go to bed thinking about you - get up in the middle of the night groaning that you are still there back home tormenting me and wake up in the morning much the same way. I don't want to take on a new partner or lover to replace you and fill that void. I want to evolve into a sort of independence that doesn't need a replacement part in the form of another person whose problems I have to acquire to make my life work. I do not have poetic nostalgic palliatives for my shredded heart. And I have only myself and my depressive confused brain to blame. My heart will not mend - nor do I want it to. I want to live as the corpse I am - as a carcass - as an empty vessel until my time to go arrives. I wish that time were sooner rather than later. Last winter after the hospital I was the most suicidally minded that I have ever known. I do not want to go back to that place again.
It is my goal to leave this house and location before then. I still get bills left and right about that hospital stay that don't make sense to me in their logic or possibility and they eat away at my substantially above average credit rating because I don't know what to do with them or how to contest them. Without you I am a double amputee. Most of my life is spent stumbling around. I have considered marrying for convenience a decent Muslim woman who is modern enough to grasp my life up until now and who is still desiring like me to be not living alone. Umers ex, Kristoff, is doing this with much success - as are many metrosexualist post gay men in other places (with or without religious communities). It requires honesty and consolation and compromise but is a new trend in the rainbow movement going full circle.
Otherwise, one just gets stuck in the party boy who refuses, like peter pan to grow up and thus lives out their numbered days on crystal meth, coccain, weed, heroin and pharmaceutical sleeping pills all with the implications that go with being seropositive. It is a passive form of a cowards suicide.
Of course in the back of my mind I hear you calling me back to some modernist construct of a life and family in some as we used to call it "choose your own bohemian adventure" way. It is a dream like voice of a siren call - for the destruction of the lives of good hearted Sailors - for I see no truth in it. ...and I sincerely doubt it - though it feels very sweet in print to read - I find it is a phantom memory based on wishful thinking and not grounded on any reality at your end. Your emails suggest a glimpse of hope that make my heart leap back to life and make me ready to board a plane - but mostly that feels like a very small carrot at the very end of an incredibly long stick. In reality you are saddled with your new man and his friends in a world now extremely foreign and undefined, without room for me. I mostly try not to think about it or imagine it. What memories I have are a demonic persistance of memory day dream of people and places that once were. I go to bed either on the verge of crying or actually doing so - I wake up the same way - and mostly in the middle of the night the single bed is cold and empy and frightfully full of a gaggle of demons who harrass me about a long an remarkable and unique marriage that should be celebrated not forgotton - not buried in the back of some cemetery for broken marriages.
So I will either marry a woman - or find some way to carry out my life elsewhere without a partner of any sex. What I don't like about this place in my life now is that all I can see is that I am at variable 'Y' location, and 'Z', being death and the end is next - it is just not clear when I look to the distant horizon how far Z is. And how do I sustain myself and provide for myself until then in dignity and hope and accomplishment. Mostly at this point there is only religion to occupy my mind. I have nothing else at present - and ironically I am trying to steer clear of religion and now that I can and want to, there really is no point in doing so or not doing so. Until Z there is just whatever busy work I choose to apply myself to. I feel like an old man sitting on the beach in God's Waiting room in Florida on its Gulf side West coast - watching the sun set once again and once again waiting for my time to come.
The promise of death is what is next. I want to go running towards it and embrace it. I have done all I have come here to do. Rumi has the best esoteric explanations for all this - which is why it is no surprise that organized Islam doesn't approve of him or his writing.
"...I don't know who brought me here to this place and left me nor do I know when they are coming for me..." - To loosely quote Coleman Barks translations of the Sufi philosophical master Rumi from the book no library should be without - The Essential Rumi.
Books quoted in this essay posting.
If you don't know them "you can Google it" to quote the Vampiric character Edward Cullins from Stephenie Meyers "Twilight" and movie books.
"Villette" by Charlotte Bronte
"Bruges La Morte" by Georges Rodenbach
"The Essential Rumi" by Coleman Barks

In Times Of Hope During the Great Depression of 09

2009-02-03T07:54:00.000-08:00

...Freedom and Liberty aren't even good pet dog names anymore...

Meanwhile back in Ghettoville...

Corporations that were born and breed and grew up in the great USA who then went on to become Global-Multi-National-Corporations need to start cultivating an ethical conscience is what I am thinking today - I am demanding that these Corporations - (you know who you are and the investors tied into them) - need to ask what John F Kennedy asked of we the people: Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.

Now that we live with Hope for the first time in ages none of we the people are in a situation to offer our country anything - we have been mercilessly preyed upon by cold hearted Vampiric Corporations and our material lives have been reduced to tatters and carcasses. The we the people out there have been reduced to blood drained corpses of relentlessly greedy capitalist corporate vampires. Oil companies, Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare Industrialists, Food conglomerates, to name a few - and my favorite -Transportation thugs who desecrated public transport in the mid 20th centuries to make everyone here in the US dependent on the automobile...

If we the people are going to have Hope in ourselves and our President and our possibilities to regain our unique and potent American optimism - then the Corporations of Control who have reduced the American Dream to an unending and depressing Nightmare are going to have to start giving back to the Nation.

We must end Corporate Welfare.

We the people cannot help Wall Street us in Ghettoville or the Big Three Automakers anymore. If we do help then we must as a Nation get something in return from our taxes - including National and globally enviable Healthcare. No corporate welfare for the auto-industry unles their rescue package is built on rebuilding National Railways, trams, metro's, buses to bicycle lanes to connect Airports and Urban centers to suburban housing communities.

We the people must say "No bailing out Wall Street" who has advocated merciless Capitalist greed at the expense of a Government and a Nation for we the people unless Wall Street gives back to Ghettoville the Nation the economic blood it drained from our very lives.

And bourgiouse Al Gore can just get off his high horse of privilege and self righteousness. I will never forgive Al Gore for conceeding Bush II the election in '00 without a fight or without balls. For Al Gore to be the environmental consciousness of 21st century public life is sick. Here is a privileged sort who though he is actually telling it like it is - for him all his remedies are luxury problems that people in his economic class can pick and choose what to do with to make themselves look good. Unfortunately Al Gore's ilk will choose and dictate what we the little people of America get inconvenienced with for the sake of our Grandchildrens world.

There really has to be a better way to reign in Americas Corporate offspring and get them to work at building up Obama's Hope because we the people have already been worked to death, without healthcare, without holiday time to work at volunteering to work at the chance for Hope we have at this precarious and precious moment in American History.

We the people need a lot less work and a lot more rest from the merciless and Apocalyptic Beast of Capitalism that this once great Nation gave birth to.

The Hope that we the people have at this moment will be devored by these beasts of Capitalism if we don't build a strong enough government to balance merciless and unethical corporate greed. Knowing that makes Hope very difficult. I am cautiously optimistic and suddenly sentimental about this land and remarkable leader.

These un-co-operative Republicans who have been bought and paid for by the Corporate-0-cracy can just go down the same economic tubes that we the people went down over all the decades since Reaganism.

Put that in your Capitalist contraband black market Pipe and smoke and let it show up in your jobs urinalysis and get you fucking fired!

At 50 Is Cuba Showing Her Age?

2008-12-31T13:02:00.000-08:00

The headline within my Gmail - email program read "At 50 Cuba is showing its age"...
The thing is how do you agree when your vantage point to that headline is G-ville, Ohio in the last dark days of the Bush II Era. With every governmental institution in these United States in a bankrupt crisis mode, Cuba is looking like a ravishing debutante compared to this two centuries plus aging free market economic government over here.
At least Cuba has a bed in a hospital for anyone in Cuba who needs one - And if Cuba doesn't have the medicine for her patients then we know George Bush's Uncle Sam is to blame because of that idiotic embargo. But try getting a hospital bed if you are sick in the US and you don't have health care - try getting your prescription drugs for that matter. Dentures? Optical care? Financial assistance or just plain guidance. How about housing... Cuba has housing - does it have a homeless problem? Is Cuba rife with vacant boarded up dilapidated house while people in poverty have to make due on the street? In the cold and damp of winter?
Technically I am not a Communist - but that is only because I have zero idea on how to convert. Is there really such thing as the American Communist Party? If so, how do I join? I would proudly be a card carrying member of the American Communist Party! I would go one better I'd put ACP bumper stickers on the back of my car if only I could find their central Ohio head quarters and pick up some artistic Communistic propaganda.
Right now Castro's Communist Experiment 90 miles south of Key West is looking mighty inviting. Will Cuba accept citizens from the United States who on make shift rafts try to sail from Key West in search of a better Island life? Compared to the United States Capitalist Experiment I am ready to convert to Cubanism! God Bless Castro - at least Cuba's government isn't run by a throne that will only hold someone for a few years at a time before ejecting them out Jack-in-the-Box style. At least the Cuban government during decades long economic crisis caused not by Communism but by the United States Government that affected the Cuban masses - well Cuba isn't trying to bail out the economic henchmen who caused the catastrophe in the first place - like we here in the US are.
At least the Cubans aren't - while their people are sick and without health care - homeless without a housing program - stuck in traffic without a viable public transit system - I mean when all of that is going down the tubes in the US - at the least the Cuban government isn't trying to save the Capitalist henchmen who are profiteering off corporate greed. I mean how shameless is it that the media here is obsessed and I mean obsessed by bailing out the Big Three Automakers and Wall Street while Ghettoville, America is dealing with foreclosures, health crisis, food shortages in their home...
In the United States here in Ghettoville, America we are in a Depression - say it - D_E_P_R_E_S_S_I_O_N - say it! Say it again. DEPRESSION! We here in the land of the free are in a DEPRESSION - say it I say. And though Israel is bombing what is left of Palestine to smithereens and back the media in the US is focusing on other "issues"... Not on the Depression - not on the housing crisis, not on the health care crisis, not on the fact that food is fast becoming unaffordable.... The media won't say this is a Depression even though Ghettoville has been in a Depression since before the Clinton Administrations. The US media will not adequately or accurately (especially the New York Times) report on the plight of Palestinians trapped by Israel's shoddy final solution.
God Bless Cuba and may the United States look south for some solutions to our own problems in 2009 without self righteous hypocrisy.
Way to go George Fucking "W" Bush and your Dick Cheney before he dicks you George Bush I administration for turning me and all of Ghettoville, America into Kalashnikov carrying, goose stepping, American Communist Party members - That was really Republican fucking brilliant conservative economic strategic of you all. Now GET GW BUSH II THE FUCK OUT OF DC - We The Communist Peoples of America cannot wait until One Twenty Oh Nine.

Universal Health Care?

2008-12-18T09:51:00.000-08:00

So here is your G-Ville author at his blogette command center. MoveOn dot Org is calling for photo submissions with a placard with your personal Barack Era Issue. I don't have a printer so this is my mode du jour to MoveOn's request. The thing I don't know about Universal Health care - or - Galactic Health care much less Planetary Health care. How about National Health care? ...maybe Capitalism is the disease. Health care for the United States hmmm ...it's long overdue and I'm tired of all the greed based excuses. Health care pinned to employment is just plain wrong as is Health care based on Nationality. Health care doesn't make economic sense period. That said this nations doctors have become complicit with the morality and ethics of this country's greed based Lawyers and Law Firms. Shame on US.

Dreaming Of A Warm January Day in '09 Round about the Twentieth

2008-12-08T08:46:00.000-08:00

From here in G-ville I sit writing with cold hands and feet. I'm remembering a classic nineteen eighties song titled "Life in a Northern Town" by the Dream Academy. One line from the lyrics goes "...In winter 1963, it felt like the world would freeze, with John F. Kennedy and the Beatles..." Back then over there in those Isles off of Europe that was a year with a real harsh and snowy winter. The Kennedy assassination played out that gruesome November and the Beatles began that long and winding road to bore us. But here now in these post - Twentieth Century times in G-ville I'm dreaming of the Bush II family and administration loosing their jobs ahead of schedule and getting evicted because of a faulty mortgage on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. At least that would all be way more relevant to the realities of most voters.

Perhaps on 01/20/09 the White House can appear a bit different - Instead of a radical paint job in some fab color how about that infamous White House being bathed along with Capitol Hill - another White building - or another historically Whites only building... How about on this day which I am dreaming of from here in G-ville - those buildings are bathed in a color of lights. Like those old aluminum Xmas trees that had a color wheel spot light shown on them from across the floor - that color wheel spotlight would change the color of the aluminum silver foil tree to green, then pink, then gold, then blue on a slow glittering rotation. At least for Barack's first day can the White House not be only white? Or probably regrettably it will be some laser light cosmic electronic showdown in every color of the rainbow done way over the top. Maybe I am just nostalgic but a few strings of C-9 light bulbs of various colors would be a treat. OK, whatever, but as long as the White House's white facade becomes at the least a blank canvass for some illuminating electronic color. I guess calling it the Rainbow House is a bit much.... Likewise it probably won't be lit up in pink or rose colored lights for all those little pink houses in the American collective dreams but maybe it should. How about Turqoise Blue and Turqoise Green from those enameled American C-9 light bulbs which is at least how they appear radiant once the electric is switched on...

It's just a thought. A cold dream from a depressing G-ville Monday afternoon. A spot light on an architectural building of and for the people for once seen and depicted in some other color and colors. But do we really have to wait until late January 2009? Can't the Bush II regime be packed up and shooed back to Texas early in advance and in time for an Obama Xmas Special? Can't we just give over the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave early for Barack Obama and the new fab First Lady and First Family to be at home for Christmas in the white house under the lights of many colors.

If we can't fire the redundant Bush II administration - can't we just shoo them on their greedy way and out of our "we the Peoples" way to stop this winter of misery now ahead of schedule. God knows the Bush II administration deserved to be fired and do not deserve to go down in a white washed history. They're not going to be hung on some yellow ribboned Oak tree with some good Kentucky hemp rope for crimes against humanity so can't they just be sent back to some of their many other homes and ejected from our job and home of Democracy ahead of schedule and in some indirect historical shame they deserve?

Cold December 08 Ohio Facts Dreaming of an American Communist Party Summer To Rescue Us

2008-12-06T12:16:00.000-08:00

It's not like I am uniformed of the Socialist and Communist drawbacks - it is just in these present economic dark ages - in this cold and cold hearted winter - with the infrastructure of this dilapitated state of Ohio falling to bits around us - it is just - things got bad enough here that a Communist and/or Socialist solution would at this point in the social malaise and suffering be a step up into better times for many people trapped under the mess of wealthier peoples greed. And to think most wealthier Americans consider themselves Christian but see no need for Christian charity on a personal or state level despite the undeniable need of large portions of the population. Christian self righteousness when comfortable tends to blame those burnt by Capitalisms crushing blows from the consequences of personal greed. God Bless America. Yeah, Right. Way to go Ohio...... So goes Ohio so goes the nation. Well for alot of Ohioans we are at the bottom of a forgotten and frozen over toilet bowl.

A Motorola self portrait of yours truely from a 21st century entry into the forgotten poor little richards almanack....

Matt Matthew Mathieu Mustafa Moustapha Krautsch Crouch

Just call me Comrad or Mustafa please.

Eagarly awaiting the coming Revolution of Everyday Life.

Pictures Of The Day From Here In Ghettovillle Dreaming Of The American Communist Party Rescuing Us From These Cold Hearted Economic Times

2008-12-06T11:57:00.000-08:00

Just another view from what should be a nature preserve called the Linden Air Woods. If the economy bounces back this inadvertent nature preserve will become another paved over parkinglot for cars and ticky tacky American houses...
The Linden Air Meadow that connects up to the ravines and streams that find their way to the Alum Creek waterway.

Farewell Angel - cast off sent to the pound because her owners couldn't afford dog food. The sign of the times are the discarded pets people are shedding themselves of in their personal economic turnmoil. Shame on you and your do nothing Bush II era Administration - at least set up a fun for all these mis-fit toys and people would you BEFORE One Twenty Oh Nine. Angel you are missed - sniff... I don't want to think about her being put down. She is/was a good if not neglected dog. At least in the mean time she is warm which is more than I can say for myself.

Where is the pound for people with no where to go in this climate?

Evicted! The New United Soviet States of America - Rescue Us This Winter PLEASE!

2008-12-06T11:10:00.000-08:00

Right now from where I am writing in Ghettoville, Central Ohio it over cast it is 27 Fahrenheit degrees (or -2.777 Celsius degrees) and snowing - the roads are not suitable for safe driving or walking.

Pictured here is my friend Ben being EVICTED in time for Christmas by Sheriff Kearns office in Columbus, Ohio. Ironically our Merry making Christmas head Elf, Sheriff Kearns, who is endorsed by the Democratic Party of Ohio will be rendering Ben homeless in time for Christmas - way to go Ohio!

Ben and I both voted for the Democratically approved Sheriff Kearns. Ben is renting the first floor of a grandly proportioned forgotten old University District house along side the railroad and fairgrounds just east of the Ohio State University district. It is a house with heavy woodwork that has never in all these years been painted and despite all the seasons of students renting those rooms the house is still as solid as ever.

Ben is not behind on his rent but his landlord who owns over 200 properties is behind on their Mortgage Payments. This is a trans-National problem that isn't getting much press. Ironically Al Jazeera in English ran a story today on satellite TV on another such scenario in Indianapolis, Indiana - one state West of here - that is precisely what Ben is caught up in.

This is the same economic malaise that no one in political power knows what to do with. Rental class people aren't really land owners so they aren't really real Citizens and have very little rights in this present Corporate-O-cracy. Ben's landlord has repeatedly lied to Ben in exchange for rent payments over the situation of the mortgage. Sheriff Kearns office of Christmas Elves though helpful and sympathetic still intend to carry out a harsh penalty on Ben rather than his mortgage defaulting landlord. Merry Christmas from Ohio - way to go.... you got it O_H_I_O
Sing it Chrissy Hynde wherever you are.....
Clearly no-one in the US with power and economic understanding are willing to put themselves in the shoes of US citizens like Ben who are renting from deadbeat ......landlords. Perhaps it is time renters start performing credit checks on their prospective landlords before signing off on a rental contract.

Perhaps the Democrat or Socialist or Communist parties in America will offer up their solutions. Perhaps Christian Conservative will fund raise and speak in tongues over this and pray about it - meanwhile - rental class economic strugglers will continue to get thrown out in the middle of winter under the eye of a merciless God and Society.

God knows the Republicans thrive on this sort of suffering. Shame on you - you know who you are. Once again though already this early on Democrats are proving to be silent complicit partners with the Republicans who created this mess. They are both after all two side of the same useless US currency in these Soviet styled Ruble economic times. But in a two party system what choice do you have? The cold hard facts of the US is that the Republicans and Democrats are in a very well to do bed together - and they are cozy and warm in their self serving relationship.

My vote, next voting time around, will go toward the American Communist Party because someone with a conscience for - "we the working poor and unemployable people" - has a lot of cleaning up to do.

At what point exactly did the United States become such a foreign country for its own real but not well off people? After buying so much junk via McWal-Marters of Made in China American products do we the people live in such a foreign country where a United Soviets States of America might be the best way out of this social misery and injustice.....

Tired of Waiting for One Twenty Oh Nine?

2008-11-24T08:08:00.000-08:00

It is cold and damp and rainy - Ohio has the climate of a forgotten family cemetery. If I am going to be confined to a cemetery I'd rather it be in the dusty cremains of a desert than this putrid place. Gas prices here are below in some places 1.60 US$ a Gallon (still not Metric - yet! coz weez ameerigunz an i-litter-irate)

.....To escape the Ohio pollution, damp, mold and mildew smells that makes me want a road trip until I think about what a dark rather miserable time of year it is for North America in November. I would have gone on a road trip this year late summer or early autumn but Exxon and the Bush II Administration had other plans in other places which is not all what the Grande Olde Par-tay really is all about. At all... and most Republicans today don't even know that which isn't very Republican of them - just ask those two hillbillies out of Wasilla who went on a Neiman Marcus spending spree recently - they wouldn't know either.

....(Speaking of which I was always obsessed by her hands - almost as much as she was - those beauty pageant claws - which she would never expose as all ball jointed and curled up arthritic and veiny - so she always had these odd hand gestures going on quite independent of whatever non-sense was coming out of her tele-prompted mouth. (you know just to keep her hands and fingers looking straight so she'd appear younger - a woman's age as you know is clearly exposed on the back of her hands - Like a mans age is revealed in his beard - which is why vain Westerners are obsessed by being clean shaven. It's the type of thing cheerleader - Drop Dead Gorgeous or the Hairspray pink elbowed beauty contestants worry about in photo ops - is the Vaseline still on my teeth? ...are my hands and fingers straight and not curled up? ...feet together, no static cling - hate that on camera and could someone please refresh my Aqua Net stat! I love making fun of her so much I almost voted for her to be the new national punching bag-hag.

I am devising a scheme to rejuvenate this country in six months - just sue the Bush Administration - Cheney and the Haliburtons and the like - and make Exxon and Marathon provide private health care for all Americans and those even just passing through - the way European North Western Medicine and Health care works on a national government level instead ours will be corporate-o-cratic-automatic. Companies like those record (ree-cord not re-cord) massive profits by the second. They can continue to do so - even - tax free - but they will have to provide First World Health care, Housing and Education to anyone who needs it out of Patriotic obligation to the Nation that bred such a corporate-entity at such great national social expense. Plus they will have to begin a public works project nationally to restore pedestrian infrastructure to all US cities where it was removed to benefit the Auto Industries greedy desire to make us all dependent on cars and auto ways. Waistlines will return and chronic illnesses will subside and the Prozac generations will be no more. And they must provide real education - not this quasi religious crapolla that has swept the school hallways since Reagan - And I mean Education - no more phenomenal student loans to get through the University to curse you into poverty when you start a job until retirement if you stay healthy - but the school entrance (and exit) exams are murder of course - so no more faux educated Bush II types can get an education that they can't really absorb - less waste. Perhaps just the threat of obligation to The Vampiric Corporations like Exxon et al's human responsibility will be enough for them to stop stonewalling Democratic measures to make these basic first world standards available to all Americans for the first time in their wealthy assed history.

My biggest gripe about this whole two party national self abuse system is that these Fake Republicans cause so much damage in a very short time - that when the Democrats get their turn - they can only push the mop around all that bloody decay and never have the chance - in 40 some years of actually building any of the great notions that are inherently interesting about the Democratic ideologies (notions which invariable self corrupt because greed runs through human veins not blood). We haven't seen in my life time what the Democrats can do that is good. but then neither have we seen what the Republican can do that is good. Anyone here remember WWII era Republicans who didn't want to get caught up in European linguistic and racial quagmires who would have scoffed at present day Middle Eastern sentimental ones? So we need a revolution to chuck out this system. Bring in a Castro type - Singapore is a successful Dictatorship - the Republican/Corporate-o-cracy is an unsuccessful economic Dictatorship - and they never really step aside when they aren't in office - see the Ken Starr Clinton Character Assassination years if you don't believe me. Ask a dead Kennedy man in a seance. So this is why I am anti-American - this model - this experiment - doesn't work - it is a self loathing sort of game of unhappiness with no results except for warmongering. Would some please stand up and say so.

Random images

2008-11-20T09:47:00.000-08:00

Someone fearlessly unafraid of color. The Purple facade along the alley behind Summit and Hudson.

A nine eleven refuge camp tapestry tribute - once a controversial e-bay item - now worthy of rethinking and reconsidering.
Some US state department Mosques of America calendar for 2009 -- highly collectible -- extremely hard to get a copy of. Not available for the taxpaying masses - I sure do want one but gave up on trying.

Benoit, Bender, Ben, BJ, Bendahar - many names - many guises but from the same great men of Walt Whitmans civil war era soul reincarnated for these post 20th century times - lost like the rest of us in the retail snake pits of America and their unnatural geography of parkinglots to nowhere. Some say Ben fell off the cover of a 1950 or 60's male physique pictoral from the days of sidewalk newsstands - back when most towns and villages had a pedestrian infrastructure. I say souls like Benoit were the stuff that inspired Leaves of Grass to not just be written but published in more free-thinking times than today.

Ben is hard working - destitute - working poor - devoted animal lover for discarded house pets much like himself - a local hero for homeless cats and dogs around OSU. Guys like Ben deserve a tax exempt status until this country can resolve its working poor control matrix/3rd world inducing shock doctrin-ette economic dilemma. Bens landlord defaulted on his buildings mortgage and you think Ben has money for a new rental deposit - utility changeovers and a rental moving vehicle - and in this wintery temperature.

Ben is just another all too human non-Joe variety example - like the rest of us - of the idea of United States American - too bad this country is over-run with economic and political Vampires who are ruthlessly feeding on lives such as Bens - draining guys like Ben to exhaustion - for nothing more than greed. Shame on you America - Shame on you and your Big first world Exxon economy creating third world domestic nightmares for most Americans (South, Central and Northern).

We still demand all the money you Exxon political types stole from our impoverished lives in the last 24 months with gasoline inflation prices. Let the economic Vampires drain humanity to death and extinction so they can then just feed on themselves.

I wanted to read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine after seeing the book product placed with the character Tara in True Blood; couldn't find a word about how all that Naomi Klein writes of all applies to the example of the Shock Doctrine idea playing out in Gaza and the West Bank fragments of a once beautiful and multicultural Palestine.

It has been said that the Palestinians will not be freed from the Vampire clutch Israel has on them until the Americans are freed from the Vampire clutch that the international Zionist economic cartell has on us here in the US: Well, that won't be happening in time for that miserable concrete wall around Bethlehem to be torn down by Christmas this year.

Don't Let Healthcare In This Country Make You Sick

2008-11-10T06:53:00.000-08:00

The following essay is about my recent experience with a central Ohio Doctor who astonished me with her extraordinary determination to listen and help me rather than inflict her profession on me - as most doctors do in the shortest amount of time possible for the greatest amount of money possible.

Dr Elarossi is actually located quite far from where I now reside yet I prefer the drive because she is quite possibly the best doctor I have known in North America. After living overseas in a country with actual healthcare I became used to affordable doctors who spent as much time as possible with me the patient neccessary to see me get well.

The US healthcare system is designed to keep people coming back which is an inherent flaw of the for profit US healthcare model. People in the US deserve better and Dr Elarossi knows this. It is my opinion Dr Elarossi is doing her part with what she can within our current healthcare crisis of greed to continue the art of practicing medicine ethically for those who seek her out for help.

I found my way to Dr Elarossi quite by chance and now refer everyone I know in need of an alternative to the current healthcare crisis of disregard and neglect to her. We here in central Ohio are extremely fortunate to have her here working on our behalf. Dr Elarossi has a patient and impeccible bedside manner steeped in modesty; her communication is based solely on a pragmatic devotion to science and the art of medicine not business. She spent a great deal more time in counsel and consideration with me during my appointment which is unheard of in the states now for sadly way too many decades. To her credit Dr Elarossi doesn't treat my condition as a single issue but treats my body as a whole state of being with a body, mind, soul and spirit ethic. For all this Dr Elarossi deserves in my opinion an award and recognition for her unique approach to medicine despite being locked into a medical economic structure that unfortunately creates a control structure of chronic treatment for dis-ease.

There was once a time in the United States where individuals with the caliber of character that Dr Elarossi has were sought after - maybe not in the recent last century but certainly in the one previous to that - Citizens who stood up against the grain of a seemingly insurmountable sinister force because of their own personal convictions and determination to do what was right for other people without a voice - these were the people public monuments by local artists were erected on behalf of a community to tell their story of achievements. If this were a more gracious time then there would be some sort of monuments being considered for good people like Dr Elarossi.

These days, however, the only monuments being erected are by corporations for themselves or their accomplices who work on a corporations behalf and not for the voiceles humane level of life. One need only listen to National Public Radio to listen to the long litany of shameless self promoting "generous" corporations and individuals who wish to slightly benefit society only after they have greatly benefited themselves.

God Bless Dr Elarossi - if only there were more doctors this forthright in their persuit of the Art of Medicine then this country would be that much more a healthier, ethically, and morally compassionate place for all Americans and our guests.

If you think this is all too good to be true then check out Dr Elarossi for yourself. There are lots of good and excellent Dr's out there but few who are capable or willing to stave off the beast of capitalism from devouring good doctors patients from our current merciless healthcare system that rewards the rich and healthy and punishes the poor and sickly.

Yesterdays Hope Tomorrows Salvation

2008-11-03T00:54:00.000-08:00

This image was from yesterday November 2...

Hope and Salvation oddly playing out on the State House steps and lawn in Columbus, Ohio. Last time I was there I got stoned with some state attorney type. But that was years ago.

Today, in another "bury my heart at wounded knee Indian summers day" gathering trapped in the cold air of the shadow of those sinister Reagan era mirrored facades; on a lawn that once looked unobstructed with boundless optimism to the wide open West. A lawn once designed to be a staging ground for Ohio democracy in the open air to play itself out in - now out of all proportion and reason with that claustraphobic inducing real estate shiny walls looming overhead...

The nice thing about bad architecture (and bad governance) is how easily it can be demolished. However, this country is more famous for tearing down the good. From a backdrop of a sturdy domeless rotunda that belongs that way as a unique, suitable and timeless architectural reference summing up the lame state of Ohio - the original unlimited outdoor space of early 19th century urban planners would have held in its arms todays Democracy happening.

How it seems impossible that we have all waited for forty-five years for a promise of the dream of Democracy to be fullfilled - can it possibly have taken so long? Are we so over due? It's not very often the words of a politician raise the hairs on my forearm and yield a scatchy and difficult lump in the throat that is hard to swallow or speak with. I really didn't want the public humiliation of tears streaming down my face when it was over not that it would matter in such an annonymous and annoying crowd - but I remained a man with no falling tears - but it sure wasn't easy. Thanks, God, for Barack's sophisticated and polite sense of dignified humor mixed with rugged optimism for the difficult times ahead. I only wish I could have been closer but then, who there, then, didn't wish that no matter where they stood.

Bicycled there without food or water - stood for too long - but would do it all again! If only for another chance at a possible hand shake or at least eye contact with a man walking through history unfolding around him fueled by hope.

Independent local cafe's, diners, shops and newstands would have jumped on the opportunity to turn a buck with todays crowd - the chain stores just remained oblivious rendering themselves redundant in their pervasiveness in a downtown defined by parkinglots and bankers business hours.

Politicians inevitably will certainly always disappoint in the obligations of compromise that society and governance require - they are only human supposeably - (well - occassionally - sadly too few that is - of those inhuman politicians which Plato warned us about from his Republic) - caught up in the nasty human equation of politics - but some are better than others.

Even from those pop music performance outdoor ampitheater distances something palpable was present despite all the "inconito" agents strewn about.

Bought a 15 dollar T-shirt!!!! Yikes what was I thinking - of a Matrix the movie poster twist - "That One" with Barack as "the Neo - the oNe" that one...

Sometimes the unreality of lifes persistant or perhaps incessant illusion is brighter than the rest.

In Morteville Queen Carlotta still Reigns every Halloween

2008-10-31T17:10:00.000-07:00

A bury my heart at wounded knee "Indian" summers day in Mifflinville.

I've been on the phone getting disappointed by cheesy Whirlpool reps of a used car lot lizard character of a civil servant disfunctionaire bleedy Mary over the two faulty appliances I bought... me going way beyond the call of duty on Whirlpools behalf to try to get them to take responsibility for their business, products and services - which they then like a beast of Belgian bureaucracy throw back on the sales company I bought the kitchen AIDS of a Whirlpool brand from (the very retailer who incidently tell me the problem is Whirlpools - and neither end of this shameful equation know I have expert experience with this sort of bureacratic misery bullshit from my time in a belgian purgatory of bureacracy! talk about a rock and hard place - my ass!)

so both the retailer and Whirlpool then blame me directly for being a naive consumer. Capitalism here for me post Belgium is shocking in how brazenly unsympathetic it has become - at least during the Clinton years business tried to put on a fake "customer is king" (or Klant is Koning as they say in Flanders) sort of pretense and if you were insistant would actually get you what you wanted to pay for - which in my case is a moot point since I comitted the naivity of paying for what should be a recalled item - assuming someone would do their job. Whirlpool and Appliance Smart are saying if you were stupid enough to buy their product then it's your own fault. Amazing actually - Me going about all this sort of detached and amused by this. I did naively buy Whirlpool products (scratch and dent) From that Satanic retailer (no not Lowes or Home De POT) but some do nothing sort of cheap virtueless sort of retailer called here Applaince Smart "Factory" Outlet - Appliance Stupid if you ask me a consumerist citizens report alert! avoid Whirlpool products from retailers like Appliance Smart! Be yea weary fellow consumer like avoid it like the plague of Europa's dark years...

...Because dear old RIP Veteran dad once was an electrical engineer who designed Whirlpool controls in his part of the post WWII domesticated military industrial complex via a local company that moved to the sticks called Ranco - where he worked his life away - which used to be located just south of Batelle Memorial Institute - where mom RIP once worked... once upon a time - this all seems like lame fiction now - except these were their lives - and had they not met at that fateful intersection of Avenues King and Neil perhpas I would not be. Which is where I seemingly fatefully met a stray Flemish sort of Belgian -- and if nothing else had a good round of love and compassion for too many years; along with the privilege to live abroad. The consequence of all that is now I am better equipped to understand this miserable land to my advantage. Not that I care.

But I miss the King Avenue Coffeehouse.

...can i just continue to abuse you dear reader unaware and write out some withdrawing from Effexor those pills from Satan herself frustrations on you...

plus i just want to suddenly - celebrate autumn and finally cry about things I haven't been able to on mood stabilizers... (for years now) ie Moms death, My Great C.S. Lewis Divorce and Dads death... etc.

I remember the day of the dead or dias de los muertos and, and, and
I got the balls to finally quit my job - did I tell you!? I couldn't take my L-word bossettes no mores who despite all my slacker and self absorbed appearances I never-the-less-always-the-more have extreme respect and gratitude for but my life and personal mythology show must go on in some other uncharted healthcareless direction with a fatal pre-existing condition. So now I shall InshAllah finish the house until Xmas and who knows... I gotta go baby sit my needy cat Tonka.

...before I go what do you know about Chrissy Hynds restaurant in Akron called something Subterreanean or Mediteranean or Terrarium oh yeh Vegeteranium - me thinks - tho I'm no sure about that. That place of Chrissy's should have been more appropriately called Hyndes is you ask me given the size of American behinds - well anyway it is supposed to open a loaction in C-town and NYC? Ms Hyndes Pretenders back to Ohio lyrics are sublime but disconcerting when you hear them in a song at say Home Depot. Her lyrics have wether I liked them or not been all to telling of my home and origin and like her I had the privilege to live elsewhere but still this place like some miserable rats glue trap pulls one back I say. Glad to see it's had the same effect of such a anti-celeb-type-celeb...

So I was telling you that I heard that Back To Ohio song like i did the other day at Home Depot and in that godawful mall place called Easton that I call Tel-Aviv. Easton like Tel-Aviv being a carnage to set upon an unwilling land by greedy manipulative types with no care for anything but their own profits.... meanwhile I've been chanting the song by peter bjorn and john (the new abba?) called - young folks - an "old" pop songs which I heard for the first time at Lowes Home de Pot which nearly had me on the floor crying... The lyrics - not the unexpected transcendental moment of feeling over their lyrics... the feeling of feelings coming back in menopausal surge like ways in humiliating cold hearted public retail aisles was something "real" and thus felt good and true and meaningful in meaningless soulless ohio parkinglot culture ways... But I remember when Easton was a vast rolling woods that should have been preserved as such - Ohio doesn't need another shopping experience.

I am NOT ashamed and am proud to be so out of touch with pop culture - that I somehow missed the rise and fall of Peter, Paul and Mary I mean Peter, Bjorn and John - the newest Abba since Erasure for sure. The lyrics are ideal for whistling thru effoxor withdraw and are thus an unintentional divine Allah Almighty God send. I wish these surges of feelings were real but it does make observing autumn from Morteville/Mifflinville/Ghettoville/Gangsterville feel like a LSD trippy fun ride like the rotor from Cedar Point back in the day....

...I wish you were here - i wish i were here... Where Queen Carlotta still is on her fat assed throne presiding over Morteville/Mifflinville for ever more...

...didn't watch the Obama show but stood in line for nearly three hours at Vets with a crowd of Obama voters - if there were McCainiacs then they were keeping shut about it. If Obama doesn't win then Diebolt Inc should be executed along with the Bush Familia and administrations I and II and Bill Crystal for being a smug bastard out of privilege totally shamelessly out of touch with how the conservations he defends for a living conserve nothing and possibly spread Socialism and Communism in the US more than any post war (II) red scare ever could. I mean the ideas he claims to defend will drive any one trapped in the retail class masses or below to realize standing in line for food and groceries and health care is certainly way more compassion than these miserable Corporate-o-cracy times we have sold our collective human American souls for.

When white Americans wake up to all of this misery that they have been denying - for denial is more than a river in Egypt - they will find to their horror an African American as President to clean up another White mans mess.

...but yeah my pal Ben is pure excstacy pornstar from the nineteen fifties newstand physique magz - if only he had confidence in himself for what he really is. It's more privilege than I deserve when he asks me to punch him harder - harder - like Tyler and Jack from Fight Club. God bless him for giving me back some masculine man2man sense of sexuality and dishonor to be proud of. I wish I could truely give him something meaningful besides a bruise and a need for stitches - but that sort of thing is underrated and way more neccessary than we know or feel comfortable in admitting to ourselves if we can think that far. Ben is the best porn star and more than Ohio deserves. And yes I truely LoVe him and have since I first met him when I first left for Belgium.

and I mean it to the blood in our veins - but wouldn't want to corrupt any pure feeling like that with a relationship. Ben is real and he is sex on wheels and hell on wheels without a car. Ben is something that deserves more than any of us can give him. Ohio should pay him taxes just to keep him here to keep Ohio from becoming all to Midwestern Decadent dull. I am just happy that I met Ben in those years via the North Market which my mom knew well from when she worked at white cross hospital on Goodale Park which became Hell on Earth Riverside Hospital - where I was born - where dad died - and where mom got chemod to death for no good reason when she deserved Morpheine and compassion instead - and someone to just listen to the pain - not use her as a lab rat for suffering for data for pharmaceutical industrialists who no longer even try to fake the art of medicine as a community role. Anyway we the masses like Justice are blind.

I can go on like this into an eternity of myriad intersections and connections of actual non-fiction looking for meaning where there is only this monotony of souls devoid of purpose or reason for existance... lost souls trapped in a dimension where nothing is real, nothing matters (to quote enigmatic leo strauss the icon of the neo-cons - those very neo-cons who missed the Straussian point - distorted it and manipulated it into todays wasteland of rutted out car parks) --- lost souls kept busy by an automotive inane matrix of work and consumption where consumerism is the only thing to occupy oneself in a retail snake pit of a so called life which is nothing more than working poor shoppers without a cause or purpose. Lab rats in a maze - experimented upon and used up and thrown away and forgotten. Suffering mammals of a human variety.anyway... are you reading this billy crystal meth - no I didn't think so - you just wouldn't believe it could be possible from your class privilege useless vantage point.

I'd stop by as your stud/angel but am not inclined to shave my beard anytime soon - especially not in autumn! But those were happy memories - Which probably are specific to places and intersections in time and space - which probably can't be resurrected on any intellectual way of thinking or considering it all but in my experience with Ben any thing and everything can be ressurected and only gets better with age like good wine and bad misunderstandings.

Ben the happy hustler you desire - he just doesn't have the courage to let go - which first requires a cocktail and a coupla pills neither of which he can seem to get squared away without getting it from his "clients" prior to showing up at their door like a needy but drop dead gorgeous stray dog - then you would be intrigued as I am by what he becomes. But without his pills he isn't your fantasy. Pills; a word he says with a minimum of two syllables and always very plural. It's all consentual anyway and in my experience genuine. life is fucked up that way...

Essentially American Spirit Capitalism unlike what's on the menu down at Whirlpool...Ben likes vicodin before sportsex - i like it after. To each his own and it's nobodies business or rather should not be but someone is capitalising on it for no good. but we are all pathetic and vulnerable in our own way and also unimaginable heros while we are alive - if only someone would tell us.

Halloween always makes me cry - beyond belief but I wouldn't change that and it is still despite its annual occurance with my own personal histories with this season - I much to my surprise still look forward to and love autumn. Autumn is the season of death and beauty and rememberence and curses - very real and harsh curses for those willing to see their own annual death. Pathetic for those unwilling or unable to read their own mortality on the walls around them.

all souls and all saints and all just bonfires of the dead...

come, come, come nuclear bomb to quote Morrissey.

happy Halloween - this is a testament of love and infatuation for you Guy Fawkes we need you in Washington, D.C. now more than ever. Come Obama come, paint that white house pink and all the other colors of this Democratic rainbow trapped by the consequences of unrestrained Beasts of Incorporated corporal Capitalisms from cranky pink elbow'd types.

It takes time for a citizenry to fullfill their responsibilities for a Democracy to play out and the Capitalists from Exxon and Mobil and the Rockefellers and those who worse aspire to be all that. It takes time. Long summers free from excessive work, long holidays with time to spare to devote to the free thinking that Democracy requires. None of which the Americans have ever had so our Democracy is a sham - a lie and a facade - and the Democrats are just slightly left of the Republicans - America - having only two far right winged government options to choose - will it be McDonalds or Burger King? Pepsi or Coke? Regular or Unleaded? one zero one - binary figures of death and the number of the Beast.

and to think if you believe in a higher power you are going to have to answer to him/her for the blood of negligence on your hands. Thank you Osama for the Geminoid reminder you got blamed and seemingly already forgotten for.

I've been using in leaf form Valerian, Sint Jans Worteltjes, Damiana, menthe du poivre (for flavoring), Kava Kava (used cold not hot or warm best with canned Coconut milk and fennel) - and I forget what else - I swear this stuff works!!! Kava Kava rocks! Better than can-o-bliss if you ask me. The PayGunz at the co-op took quite an interest in my purchasing such leafy cocochtions given our proximity to Halloween I suppose. Or were they wykyd Wiccanz i can never remember or care. I told them I was in withdrawal from disreputable pharmaceutical companies - that rather shut them up in their curiosities i must say. What were they thinking - Xanax, Valium, mainlining Dilotten with a few IV drips in a Matrix style catheter plug in my forearm? while hypocritically salivating at the thought? anyway.
Herbed up on my medicaments at my friend Davids house, flopped on a big sofa with Rusty the black Churchillian dog of mine and with thegas ceramic log fire switched on - in front of the biggest newest flat screen Ive ever seen i-we watched all six episodes of Neil Gaimans Neverworld - which i kept wanting to rename Neveryworld for no apparant reason. I made us all the Kava Kava Konkocksion (which is not an intentional Aryan sublimation) and they all swore by it - the herbal effexor effects as an antidote - and asked for more. Neverworld is a - what did you kall it skunkpunk (techo mixed with antiquities) film about London and the post Thatcher-Reagan-Bush vagrancy question/consequence of politics based on greed and cold heartedness - the consequences of which can be seen throughout the so called secular imperialist West - giving meaning to the structures of Islam being the Last book in the story of the Prophets for humanity (a real mercy if you bother read) nothing more than the closing book on this planets human story which we not Islam is engineering by our very selves by living out of balance and in disregard to every indigenious peoples ominious warning finally ringing true.

But I digress - Neverworld being a sort of urban folk tale remedy to help people assimilate i guess to the human beings trapped in vagrant lifestyles and the psychic effect vagrant consequences have on those who aren't. Its a great story I must say. Perfect for herbal halloween remedies. It's the kind of TV mini-series that makes you want to give out a dollar to every persons person flopped out on cold damp pavements for home comforts. Which given all my encounters in the upper world stepping over the under world that I've learned to curse Reagan - Thatcher - Bush I & II for and not the human condition of wrecked lives underfoot who are in the way as it were.

Of course the British Brainwashing Corporations aka BBC is not to be trusted with news of the world or day much less it's construct of history of lies and propagation as such - either at the begining or at the end of the day as they say but this is the sort of low budget gem that flies on the fact that the story is flawless and very neccessary - it should be required for all High School (and Community College) students and their edjewcators.

I must say i dont ever recall a Halloween in central Ohio with leaves on the tree - much less half of which are still green! i remember Halloween being the first realization of denuded trees and leaves underfoot in colossal quantity for the first time of the season. Last night after movie time back at home i was in the backyard dealing with Rusty and Tonkas perPETual dog and cat fighting and noticed the best light pollution free sky in ages - and happened to see a meteor shoot across the sky as if coming directly from Orions belt (groin). So I took it as a good Omen.

...of course I am still insane at the moment (as if it will pass - ha!) but surrounded by friends (24-7 David and Ronald) who put up with these demonic withdrawls and who keep proving their friendship with every satanic channelling experience i dish out at odd moments in evil soap opera moments. And from my luck of having a good little witch next door for a now sadly faraway neighbor.

There is this strange song titled young heros by Peter Bjorn and John (whatch the graphic novel music clip on youtubies) - its a song from a few years ago but the bluegrass version with a fiddle replacing the whistling parts (think Mayberry, Andy) and switching gender roles in the lyrics... Peter, Bjorn and John - (?) perhaps the newest manifestion of Abba? Yes I am repeating myself - this is the effects of Effexor who deserve a class action lawsuit.

anyway the whistling jingle part is actually quite annoying but that little bit of manic music has been in my head for this whole effexor trip home and at the worst moments it was something to cling to - whistling - like how people in doomed flights tend to whistle while they wait or so i have heard from reports from those mythical black boxes.... or maybe it was just the wind whipping thru the cabin and fuselage of human tobacco waiting in those eternally long seconds before igniting in their seats. On the doomed flight one such good witch next door was on at LAX on the runway there were people fried with their hands clasping their seatbelts - presumably to jump out of their seats but the fire spread that fast. The odd thing was she died from smoke inhalation and no visible bodily harm - found going as always against the grain - of human passenger exodus in efforts to help people off the plane. The football athlete who survived said he only did so by pushing the heads of people down and crawling over them. Happy Halloween.

...if you get trick or treaters answer them when they ask "trick or treat?" - with another question "Palin or Obama?" - then dish out rocks or candy appropriate to their parents pre-programmed Stepfordville answers.... you could i suppose substitute rock candy for rocks and tell them its crack and to go ask their parents about that. I miss the real Halloween trix-N-treatz which were way before my time and way more sinister and white pillow topped than todays children fare which is basically parental nostalgia enforced on children with too much sugar to begin with coursing through their Jello brand gelatin fresh veins....

...do like i do when I don't understand the costume and say that is this years best Jean Genet Ramses costume i have seen so far tonight! and watch with restrained glee as their parents shoo their children away in shock and horror from the misunderstood best witch next door anyone could have!

I miss you but remember tonight is the 32 year anniversary of the begining of a personal familial unfolding drama. I was the last person to see those kids having been the child babysitter at the time who took them hand in hand - trick or treating somewhere deep in wooded sub urban Worthington before putting them and myself to bed.

When I phoned ORW in Marysville to complain that I can't get a call to get a visit in before new years because of the waiting list and the prison bureacracy rife with excuses - i said "listen - i'm not new at this - my sister has been out there incarcerated longer than you now for thirty some years" - then i get answers - mind you not solutions - or reservations in for an actual visit but clues to "Call late - in the middle of the night..." is what i hear with a gentlized voice dripping with shame. She should have been paroled 27 years ago (from a secure mental care clinic at that) and those people out there know it because they know she is a cash cow for state money to keep them employed.

Nevermore, Nevermore... Mathieu

All the Sons of Abraham Under One Crescent Moon

2008-09-11T16:45:00.000-07:00

There are Christians calling me Muslim in not so polite ways - which ain't very Christian if you ask me, except no one is.
There are Muslims calling me Christian with an intention not to be polite which isn't exactly Islamic from what I have read.
I've got Jews calling me Nazi which I call flattery - and I'm equally flattered by all the Arab-Americans calling me Jew.
I just want to know who the fuck are you for needing all these labels for your lapel pin way of thinking.
At least the faggots are consistant in their accusations - according to them all I was and alway will be a ho'mo'seks'y'all.
My favorite are the Americans who say I ain't American because of how I think yet with all the freedom of thought I employ I'd say I was more American than most will bother to get.
I know rural folks who consider me city.
And there are Metrosexuals who consider me Appalachian.
I don't subscribe to being Liberal or Conservative because I see a vast colorful spectrum between binary numbers like Zero and One. Love, Hate.
Judge not lest ye be judged.
I do subscribe to the National Geographic for their photos and their maps but not to their way thinking and writing.
I consider myself a proud Mulatto - American - African American - white albeit pink elbowed Appalachian former WASP
but I don't care to be white right now.
If you don't like how I think then why are you here. At least you have a choice. I have to live with and co-exist peacefully with these thoughts inside my head.
I chronical them - my criminal out law thoughts - I don't advocate these dark clouds of thoughts passing through my ears. I chart them like a stream of James Joyce interior consciousness... And I've learned to give myself permission to think in forbidden ways. I can think anything, say anything, write and self publish anything.
I know the Golden Rule - do unto others as you would have them Jew unto Yew. ahem I mean do unto you...
You can do anything, think anything - pretend like Donald Trump to be anything - so long as it doesn't hurt the person or property of another.
And don't forget Bessie Smiths The Empress of the Blues Golden Rule first bluesy ammendment...
"it ain't nobodies business if you do"
So I am a free man. Bearded too. Coppery saffron colored whiskers extending down beyond my chin in Talibanned chic. Now that the Wests masculinity in crisis has a gentle Osama Bin Hidin as as a long over due handsome role model....
Man that I am.
Seven years on and I learned to thank Bin Hidin.
Way back in the nineteen nineties I remember an Architecture Professor at the OSU school for that giving a lecture on Urban landscapes and how ideal the NYC skyline was if it weren't for those out of all balance and proportion and style Rockefeller Brothers phallic Twin Towers downtown. Well I agreed then as much as I agree now. The idea back then in class was that the Manhattan skyline without those Geminoid towers was an architectural equivalent to a man made mountain in nature - with the Empire State Building and its tower top as the Urban Everest. It sure is nice seeing things at this time this way. Better than getting battered in a Battery Park construct. Who sits alone in a park named Battery after dark I wonder.
Well those towers sure did come down rather precisely for an "attack". But we aren't allowed to discuss that. Blowback. Inside Job. Read up on other countries "intelligence" was for this day seven years ago...
Record Oil company profits coinciding with record high gas prices today. Every media news item about a Hurricane is more worried about off shore oil wells... moreso than the life onshore. I like watching all those storms getting hurled from Africa to the catchers mitt of the Gulf of Mexico to get spun around and around and shot up to the Ohio River valley as they peeter out of power absorbed once again by Appalachia in erosion to end up back down in the Mississippi Delta at the Gulf of Mexico just west of the Redneck Riviera. I don't want to be on some poor mans vacation at the seaside having to look at the rich mans oil wells pumping up we the peoples for them...
Arab Christians and Coptic Christians call God in Arabic Allah Almighty.
How much longer until one twenty o-nine? Do you know the meaning to this rhyme?
What color would Obama paint the white house? White is as tired as the pink elbowed men who represent the AIPAC - oh hot and sexy Mossad agent come kill me annonymously for thinking and writing - it's not like you care but the Ottoman empire took care of Palestine better than Israel ever could or would even for the Jews and the Christians and much more profitably too - and with much more pleasing results socially, architecturally and linguistically.
Zionism is the problem and until that militaristic idea begins to wane and tear itself down and reconstruct itself inline with the real world of modernity and not to a sentimental early twentieth century notion then we really can't admit World War II ever really finished.
Who the fuck are you? Muslim Christian Jew ?secular or devout? We're all sons of Abraham tredging through an abandoned parking lot wandering to the next retail store. Leave the Christians in peace in the old towns and villages in Palestine where Christ came from - leave the Muslims in peace in Palestine where they come from. Israel is probably the inter-galactic name that the planet we call Earth is called. I can time travel in my mind fueled along by the creative drives of my psychic network. Can you?

Ramadan 1, 1429 From down the road by lil' Mogadishu

2008-09-01T03:26:00.000-07:00

Just a few snaps from around moi maison bleu taken from down the road to lil'Mogadishu. Trying to put in a fence (even though I don't believe in fences) and attend the ISNA Conference - the Suq there has been a really bizare Bazaar of sorts. Really enjoyed making friends and reading all the books on offer. Bought a groovy Tshirt from the way cool Hijabguy. Met the fellows who runs Shukr who travelled all the way from Amman Jordan - and who had the best looking professional booth displays - Fellow red beard conspirators. In short a pretty good "Labor" day weekend with beautiful blue skies. An unusual start to Ramadan 1, 1429 - strange modernity these times are... none-the-less I'm bloggin' away trying to make sense of it all. Figure out what to do with all the scattered fragments of my life to reassemble like some cosmic puzzle. Work, house, rennovations, belongings abroad, life alone with a dog and a sometimes cat, a kick ass garden of opportunity in my own backyard - literally and figuratively. Picked up a Satellite system to avoid monthly cable fees and now have television from around the world which beats to shame anything on offer by Time/Warner. The Tonka Cat follows me around like a puppy. The dog goes bizerk - the birds, crickets, locust or catiedids(SP?) make a nightly cacophony that I enjoy the peace of from my bedroom window. In short life can be when caught unaware a real delight in simple things - like observing the blooms within a bloom on the wildflowers growing in the garden. The clear sky seems to suggest all the clouds went to the Gustav convention down along the Gulf of Mexico... It sure does seem like Allah Almighty God is finally showing His disapproval on the Republicans - upstaging those cold hearted Grand Old Party thieves - how do they rationalize their blatant quasi-religiosity slash Corporate-o-cracy sympathies for Big Oil and even bigger spending for corporate welfare - contradicting the aims of their own party and their own religion - How do you take a stand publically on such a platform of greed and dare to bring God or Morality into it - it seems like nothing much has changed since Plato wrote the Cave analogy from his ancient tome - the Republic book 7 which no-one in politics in the two American right-winged parties has bothered to read much less study and understand. I'm voting for Obama but can't figure out why Hilary wasn't the chosen V(I)P - not that I am a fan tho. My Ghettoville neighbors so far seem disinclined to bother voting claiming fatigue from being over worked... I said, well, November is quite a few weeks away so how could you already decide that you won't be going to polls for either candidate? To my neighbors here Obama might as well "the Man", another white man. Either way US elections are always about choosing the lesser of two evils... - although how can a nation of 50 states only have two choices... Zero and 1 like a basic binary system - I wonder who the AIPAC and Exxon types will allow the keys to the White House to go to this time around - I will vote - but I am not naive even for one minute to believe votes get counted and that if they do that they aren't manipulated legally (electorial colleges) or illegally (as in Floridian paper and electronic ballotry)... Call me cynical but I intend InshAllah to go pull levers or press buttons in a one arm bandit - Las Vegas styled election process - will it be three lemons for McCain and MsAbel or three cherries for Obama and Biden. 1/20/09 is a date regardless that I am looking forward to but I'm not optimistic. I still think the Bush II Regime should be put on Trial in the states or in Den Haag/The Hague for crimes against humanity and not allowed to go down in any white washed lie of a corporate-o-cracy history. If Americans only cared to know what they choose not to see - but that takes us back to the Caveman analogy of a Platonic nature... Not to be confused with the caves of Bora Bora...

I'm begining to believe that life under the Taliban - excruciating as it may be - is at least in a totally f*cked up way, way more honest than this corporate-o-cracy Exxon McWal-Mess we call governance and "free" market retail slavery.

I painted the little wooden bungalow I call home at the moment Turqois blue - actually French Riviera Blue from Lowes in some Olympic paint brand I think. I wonder what color Obama will paint the "whites" House if and when someone like him moves in. My dream President would paint the facade - wash it in some vivid hue - and wash away the AIPAC and the Corporate Military Industrial Complex Wal-Marted parking lot burnt out inner city grip on this nation. Stop giving welfare to a wealthy little nuclear missile weilding nation on a rant while abusing humans - Stop paying out corporate dole to corporations devoted more to their CEO's and global markets than the nation that spawned them. I'm tired of seeing working poor without proper healthcare, transportation, housing, or rest and relaxation - tired of the incessant media lies and electronic iron curtain of information that surrounds this once great nation. How can the Democrats much less the Republicans not stand for anything but greed? No wonder Ghettoville doesn't bother to vote even for an Oz like we are off to see the Wizard dream like Obama. If I were African American I'd vote come hell or high water just to piss off all the white elbow types who kept my people under a thumb of ignorance and poverty for 300 years.

When it comes to Truth being Told Obama is a deviation from the idealistic goal of throwing off the AIPAC colonization of the corporate and political structure of this nation from the top down. Not until this is undone will Palestine find liberation also. The fact that most Americans don't even know much less understand this (or care) is why this Vampiric dynamic shows how long we have to go. Obama will ensure this Zion-Matrix doesn't change its clenched fist white knuckled grip on this nation. But never-the-less-always-the-more Obama is a neccessary trip we all need to take and make happen for the next eight years because 300 years of North American history suggest this is long, long, long overdue and at least should have been done already 40 years ago for chrissakes: Palestine will have to wait I am sad to say - really sad to say. Maybe Palestine will liberate the Americans one day - who knows - stranger things could happen. Despite the dark passages ahead I find alot of optimism and color waiting on the fall of the New World Order. If it weren't for the AIPAC the Clintons and Obamas would have been Messiahs for the working poor People and We the People might still have had a middle class and not become another two teered have minority/have-not majority third world nation that we now are.

Come back Michael Cleveland

2008-08-27T04:07:00.000-07:00

Passed by this spot on Monday August 25th close to sunset bringing fresh plucked marigolds (orange) and a dog named Rusty. I just had to see the place where Michael passed too quickly beyond this consciousness. I feel like I still need you and still have a lot to learn from you Michael. I miss your smile and energy.

Arabesque in Ghettoville

2008-08-16T15:50:00.000-07:00

http://arabesque911.blogspot.com/

Arabeque is asking fellow Bloggers like me to start up and write their own nine/eleven anniversary blogs. My blogettes have always had nine/eleven as a running theme, sometimes in the background and sometimes in the foreground - conciously or unconsciously. I declare - I believe 9/11 was an inside job (from before it became socially acceptable to say so from outside closed doors) and that the Bush/Cheney Junta should be impeached before or after 1/20/09. I have been fired for much less petty things so why shouldn't they be immune? Dennis Kucinich seems like a real American US version of a North West European or Scandinavian politician for the people who is just doing his job. The Corporate/Media world is afraid of him so he is just ignored and We the People thus continue suffering for the Corporate-o-cracy we live under. In addition we live behind an electronic iron curtain of mis-information that surrounds the United States and it's invisible and very few people behind it even realize it's there but the rest of the world knows about it. So for all intents and purposes my blogettes are just another pulse or emergency flare being sent up as a cry for help to the powers that be (that obviously really don't care) - sadly the Clintons are included and we can assume ditto for Obama - I refuse to even mention that idiotic McCain and Able... But for the record I want none of the blood of this current terrible history that is unfolding around us on this planet at this time because the United States is the global Terrorist network that frightens the planet - I say - I want none of this blood on my hands (from enabling the suffering of Palestinians by a cruel and merciless Israel thanks to the AIPAC thug like grip on the US political and media matrix - or for the senseless US military industrial complex maneauvering in Afghanistan, Iraq or possibly for Iran) - I don't want the blood of this economic greed driven invasions for "Democracy" (read oil) just because I have no choice but to be a tax payer to fund all this Romanesque Empire suffering. We all have to answer to our higher power - how do I answer for being a silent taxpayer - I blogged you see - seeing whats going on between the lines of a Zionist leaning lying media and politicians - unable to do anything to stop this carnage of modernity. This is not Democracy. This is not America. Nine Eleven was an inside job - The people at the top of the food chain irregardless of their nationality - call them the Bilderburg Group if you want - Oligarchs - or Vampires who pray upon the life of the People - Nazi's or Zionists - these control mongers from the Bush Dynasty to Clintons to Obamas to Rockefellers to Cheneys probably though hopefully not Bill and Melinda Gates and their Foundations - to whoever - they know who they are - Just because they don't believe in anything doesn't mean we approve of their blood and oil thirst. Neither do we approve of our economic serfdom with our tiny lives and being complicit to their crimes for our having to be a drone of a tax payer to fund all this suffering when We the People could be funding education, healthcare, housing, transportation, urban planning without automotives and most importantly jobs for We the People.

Move On's Tupperware TV Party is an insult to the memory of MLK

2008-08-07T15:48:00.000-07:00

The following is in response to Move On dot Org's e-mail suggesting I like other Americans host a TV party for Obama's drama speech on the Martin Luther King drive by shooting anniversary. Oh my talk about Liberal bourgiousie being out of touch with the streets of Ghettoville.... (Not surprising my reply to Adam Ruven from MoveOn dot Org who sent me the invite annonymously - bounced back - Oh you know the Democratic Party copper heads really are such a bore - voting is always about choosing the lesser of the two Evils that the Chosen have chosen for us - this year is an easy one - I agree with Paris Sheraton I mean Hilton that McCain is old - I don't trust pink elbowed types with translucent skin conditions)...

Oh for gods sake why don't we just have Tupperware parties for Obama. Listen this country hasn't had a black leader in the white house since Lincoln and he was shot like a Kennedy too. A black president was needed years ago during the Race riots but the old white guard wouldn't face the times then. Now that the African American community might be eclipsed shortly by the Hispanic Community it's suddenly time for a black president now or never. But this idea of a chez moi soiree avec de television sur la Ghettovillette is more than pastiche its ludicrous - why don't you all come to GhettovilleUSA in Columbus, Ohio (better yet invest your lives and your money here) and see what really matters. Everyone has had a TV for generations now - we don't even get together to watch college football for fear someone not related might fart in the same room - those days of TV gatherings out on the porch for your neighbors went with black and white TV and Whites only restrooms and the whole notion of "back of the bus" - back when there was dependable public transportation. But here in 21st Century Ghettoville for all you clueless posh types White academic liberal types - people in Ghettoville despite their various melting pot racial makeup are struggling with obesity and no health insurance; car driving without auto-insurance; single glazed rotten windows in ticky tacky post world war II housing built for a housing shortage - trapped in houses that were past their sell by dates decades ago. Multiple family members strewn about in various complex Gaza City styled "reformatories" - This is Ohio - stinking hot summers and cold as a Republicans heart winters. Try heating one of these tumble down rape-cods as we call them - or running the airco so you don't kill someone in your house when it is 92 Fahrenheit degrees. If you don't get in touch with GhettovilleUSA then Ghettoville won't bother to spend the gas money necessary to go vote come election day. Which will be as if GhettovilleUSA gave their votes to McCain and Able. Honestly you all at MoveOn are trapped in your bourgeois excesses and clearly out of touch with the cold hard facts of life on these pot holed Bush II administration era streets. Now if you want to bring back dime bags for a dime for Obama then this neighborhood will be singing hallelujah and speaking in tongues for Obama - not defaulting into church life because there isn't anything else around here that's gonna save anyone that doesn't cost as much as the over priced Hollywood fare. We are struggling with gas for the uninsured broken down car or food on the table in the uninisured house for uninsured kids with little or no education - talk about a mind being a terrible thing to waste - GhettovilleUSA has been like this for generations and Mr Obama might know about it intellectually but he'd rather make sure he says the right thing for the AIPAC because that's who run things now. This is not America no mores. Just come here at least long enough to put some tent stakes down if not roots and get a clue about those of us at the bottom of the retail food chain before you suggest another brilliant Tupperware Party scheme for Obama. No wonder Bush II got reelected after he stole the vote from Mr Gore who didn't have the balls to fight him. Take a stand - Take a risk - accept the consequences. And no Avon Parties or Lingerie Parties for Obama either. Its not like we don't already know Obama is a Shoo in after Bush II but at least try to make it look like something Democratic is actually transpiring.
Have a party to Impeach the Bush - Cheney Junta and suggest capital punishment for career politicians. MoveOn dot org needs balls or at least a good set of ovaries.

Matthew Crouch
Mifflinville
next to lil'Moghadishu
Columbus
Ohio
aka Ghettoville north by north east of Linden aka Gangsterville

Diary of an Atom Bomb

2008-08-07T03:35:00.000-07:00

It's the day after - the day after the anniversary of the US bombing of Hiroshima. Nagasaki is coming soon. For some reason I can never forget these Atomic Starburst dates in history - and to think that there was a ceramic dish set for 1950's US households with a pattern called the Atomic Starburst in fab fifties colors - Made in American and California at that - not China - called Franciscan. I remember hearing Gore Vidal saying that Japan had been trying to surrender for months but the US military industrial complex wanted to try Einstein's and Oppenheimers new toys in real time on a real place on real people. If you ask me we have been lied to by the US government over and over to justify their war games. Now we are doing much the same thing again in Iraq and Afghanistan - which we were lied to about - and we are going to try to do the same thing in Iran. The lie with Iran is it's nuclear ambitions or rather nuclear intentions - and we are asked to forget that Israel has upset the nuclear balance of the middle east for years now with its gruesome nuclear arsenal disproportionately large for the region - and we are expected to forget Israels wonton disregard towards their human rights record with Palestine and the Palestinians or towards any Internationally agreed Geneva Conventions.

I find it hard to live in this country knowing these things. Knowing I can do nothing about the course of this history as it unfolds around me in my life time. I don't like that the US is known the world around as a liar. Wether it is lying for entertainment purposes from the US ministry of misinformation and propaganda otherwise known generally as "Hollywood" - or for R. Murdoch's version of the "news" - or the US "local" news - which is the idiot news. Or wether it's the invisible Electronic Iron Curtain of Information that surrounds the United States that is only pierced from within by those people with the time and drive to find alternative non-domestic news sources via the Internet - thank God for that tool.

What sort of times are these we live in? A dark age - caught in the analogy of Plato's Cave from his ancient tome the Republic book Seven? A book Republicans in the US know nothing about.

How does one reconcile that we live in Gog and Magog from Saint John the Apostles vision from the Isle of Patmos as recorded in the book of the Apocalpse - The Revelations - from the Christians Holy Book - the Holy Bible. Gog and Magog - Israel and United States.

How does one accept that as Leo Strauss pointed out in the 1950's that the Americans drive for individualism and consumerism contained the very seeds of our own destruction - (not foreign terrorists as we have been told) - a wise warning if ever there was one - a warning which the Neo-Cons in Washington DC missed the basic point of while trying to capitalise on for their own greed and ambition.

I find it hard to live here and know what's going on between the lines of misinformation. I find it hard to pay taxes to a system that is manipulated by the AIPAC for non-American aims. Where is McCarthy's UnAmerican ideals now? With companies like Exxon and Wal-mart (to name a few) exploiting the hardest working, lowest paid workers. When there are no labor unions or governmental bodies to protect the interests of the lowest wage earners from blood thirsty corporate Vampires who are feeding on the lives of we the People. When people close to the bottom of the food chain have to juggle how much gas to put in their car or food on their table. When there is no health insurance or car insurance or public transportation.

What does America fight for when it drops Atom bombs? When we fight a phantom idea of "terrorism" and only hurt ourselve by losing our unique civil liberties. When we decimate or have decimated places like Cambodia or Palestine - do we really have anything better to offer to replace things with? Clearly not anymore. Drive through Ghettoville and see the rotten American pie dream that is many peoples reality. There is nothing to believe in, nothing to live for - it is a nihilist nightmare thanks not to failed liberal democratic policies but to lies and mis-information brought on by the losers without a cause the Neo-Conz - con-artists if you ask me.

We as a nation aren't spreading democracy at home or abroad - we are spreading the lie of Consumerism. Consumption of military aims and products, then useless and meaningless goods engineered with planned obsolence - all at the expense of our environment and our communities and families.

The only remedy to this disease is to Kill Your TV - but no one is going to do that for it is the new opiate of the Masses.

The nightmare that began on a flight called the "Enola Gay" in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is still like a rising and spreading toxic mushroom cloud expanding and trapping us all in its poisonous and demonic trance. Like Dresden Deutschland those cities succumbed to an Anglophone Allied lie - a lie which years later is still trapping and encircling and enslaving us all.

Blue Savanah

2008-08-03T17:24:00.001-07:00

The Blue project... and the backyard flower tribute to Charles Burchfield. It's been a hard working blue painting weekend. Blue Savanah like the old Erasure video....

La Maison Bleu

2008-07-29T19:04:00.000-07:00

One of the benefits of living in Ghettoville or G-ville for short is not having to contend with pesky zoning codes and their enforcements. In this sense G-ville is way more Republican in spirit (as in the old old party of Lincoln) than those annoying "planned communities" like Plasticville, USA which is way too much like a new version of the DDR and "planned economics". Speaking of the DDR these days going to the Pharmacy is like a public nusaince with Soviet era styled lines of sick people waiting on their drugs. I mean this is totally shocking culturally speaking - the lines at the corporate pharmacy are a veritable pulse of the Nation and everyone looks chronically ill and/or over weight. How the current Bush II/Cheney Junta Fake Republican politico's were able to reintroduce Soviet era styled line of broke "consumers" at retail check points is beyond me. Capitalism invented the soup and bread lines not the good old Soviets. I'd call them good old corrupt Soviets except compared to todays Neo-Cons they seem nostalgic and quaint compared to the Bush II regime which should be run out of Washington if not the Nation as a hole. Haliburton relocated to the UAE - so can these theives of the people. America just won't or can't wake up to the AIPAC thugs who scammed these guys in office to carry out their Zionist aims at our expense. But no one wants to know because there is nothing anyone can do and nobody here wants a guilty conscience. At least it is still legal to discuss all of this in the Iran of today which is looking more and more capable on the political leadership level of confronting the realities of today's complex world - something the Neo-Cons and the Dems are unable or unwilling to do at least publically. Well I'm still voting for Obama despite wanting to vote Independent. G-ville needs Obama but does Obama need or will he remember G-ville? I doubt it.

But this blogette was about not having code enforcement and zoning laws to deal with - all of which just seems way too much like Israeli styled flexible borders of control and punishment.

So given that I am not residing in McMansionette-ville and am in the more Libertarian G-ville I'm able to paint my house any color scheme I choose... I chose Turqoise with black trim for a 1950's home style on acid. My neighbors all expressed pleasure in the shock of color that sprouted up on this street. Pretty soon I expect this small drive into and out of lil' Moghadishu will be painted up like a row of Fiesta ware post war homes. Which is as it should be.

Little Pink Houses for you and me... as that song went...

la fleurs du Ghettovillette

2008-07-13T10:01:00.001-07:00

Backyard in Ghettoville. These days it is hot, humid, rainy and all around sub-tropical damp. I'm covered in sweat and am impressed by the green and flowers. This garden is my at home backyard memorial to my folks as their cemetery is too far away to visit regularly to maintain with these gas prices. They would approve of my thrify solution for theirsake. Mostly I am trying to adjust to the permanency of their departure and trying to stave off feelings of loneliness and despair - with these flowers that is easy but winter will be more challenging.

Rat Trap

2008-06-24T10:25:00.001-07:00

Don't laugh my rat trap home is paid for...

...which is alot more than most of those sub prime sub urban ticky tacky McMansions dwellers can claim.

Since my property would be worth more without the old wooden house of clutter I call home I don't even have to pay for home owners insurance which I can't afford without a credit history anyways.

This old mess cost me less than a years rent for a one bedroom apartment. Even in the worst case scenario I won't loose money except by over rennovating the place.

Why dontcha move to G-ville and get smart about low life living?

Eat Sleep Work

2008-06-24T04:32:00.000-07:00

Here is a visual diary of my living in filth and working poor lifestyle.

SOS - I need a personal assistant, social worker, therapist, and cleaning person with good organization skills.

Adopted By Alley Cats

2008-06-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend two cats - a thin mommie cat and her kitten - showed up in my driveway and stayed the night. I opened the garage and offered food and water and they stayed as if they always belonged here. I'm not sure if someone
dropped them off or if they just past by and liked
the vibe at my place and thus stayed. Honestly I
can't take on another mouth to feed but now
I find myself an unexpected member of the
Alley Cat Alliance. Given that Ghettoville has
mice, rats and other nighttime rodents these cats
are a welcome addition.

I was recently asked where exactly is Ghettoville - or
G-ville for short. I had to think and realized that
it is certainly more than this odd quartier of central Ohio.
In reality it is that basin that runs from New York City and
Miami all the way out West to East LA and San
Francisco. We once called a part of LA "the Valley".
Now it seems more transcontinental these days.
Middle America at or below the working poor
poverty line somewhere South of Canada and
North of Mexico and Rio Grande an inland sea of
parking lot tarmac and retail shed architecture
caught between two Oceans. Nowhere-ville would
be more accurate.

Another Day Another Flower Blooms Unnoticed in Mifflinville

2008-06-19T16:48:00.000-07:00

Wild swamp Irises grow in the front yard and two of seven cactus blooms can be seen today. I'm still practicing thankfulness to stave off despairing. The Iris is the city flower from Bruxelles mon Amour - a place I miss dearly. I try to keep in mind I couldn't afford this kind of green over there without a few extra zero's to my name, bank account and paycheck. Strange that all I am missing in life are those neccessary zero's after the numbers to my name. It seems California legalized gender blind marriage benefits on my birthday and yet meanwhile my divorce goes down anyday now. Well I was never good at the monogamy thing and not lying to others entails first being honest with myself. All of that cost me the dream life I knew in Villette on those old and exquisite streets from an ancient city Tussen Hemel en Aarde (between heaven and earth - are the dream like gothic spires and domes - and tower blocks of old and new Bru-town - Brussels, Belgium - my other home). And yet saying all that my heart is saved for Yemen and it's extraordinary capitol - Sana'a. If I have a homeland on Earth it is the enchanting and mystical Republic of Yemen with some of the kindest people this earth at present knows. And yet in reality I dwell in Ghettoville, USA. It's hard to believe from here that I know the mysticisms of Multan - enjoyed some of the happiest times in my life Karachi, Pakistan and found new meaning to life and my identity in the old city of Sana'a, Yemen. I've spent a night in the UAE and long to go back. I dream of Mekkah and Medinah and long for a roadtrip from Dubai to Muscat. I want to spend a series of twilights in the old, old city of Damascus, Syria. For the moment I am trapped in a small wooden bungalow between utility bill payments that are over due and utterly confusing to me. Trapped between and eight of a tank of gas and empty. Trapped between basic home repairs that need made and the ability to fix themself or pay someone competant enough to do so.
It could be worse I could have debts and health problems...
Yet all I can consider is that our spoiled rich kid out of touch President our times very own let them eat cake Marie Antoinette and his puppet masters just want their greedy corporate hands to destroy our coastlines and Alaskan wilderness for their own profit - not so we can fill up our gas tanks to commute around our motorcities - those lying unethical henchmen will drive up global oil prices to get what they want because they have never had to choose between food and quarter of a tank of gas. Those men should be as Kucinich has called for with 35 or 60 articles of Impeachment - thrown out of office - put on trial and forced to tell the truth of what they have done to the country they swore to serve. Those men should not be allowed to go down in a white washed history of lies and deception for the people of this nation and the planet deserve better and at least the truth.
The book of Revelations from the Christian holy book the Bible spoke of Gog and Magog (Big Israel and Little Israel) and the Apocalypse those Corporate states caused - Tel Aviv and DC two invented Cities thrust upon lands that didn't want them. I can't afford to pay taxes - wether it's sales tax or property tax or taxes from my paycheck and I certainly don't want my money for taxes going to support a nation that disregards basic Geneva Conventions like Israel is doing to support the cliche notion of a Pure Jewish State - at the expense of Indigenous Christian Arabs or Muslim Arabs. All those Neon Jesus McChurches across America to the gilded Pope in Rome should be sounding the bells and sirens that Israel is driving out indigenous Christians from the towns and villages that spawned their religion devoted to the memory of Christ and his beattitude. And that is the great deception - Protestant and Catholics know nothing of the fates of their Brothers and Sister from their Faith in the Holy Land of Palestine - and how Christian is it to wontonly ignore the fates of Muslim Arabs who live alongside Christian Arabs - One would have thought that ethnic cleansing and the intention for pure statehood would have gone the way of Hitler and his followers. My tax dollars should not help fund a state built on such extravagant lies and fake prophecies to the tune of 22 million dollars a day to punish Palestinian non-Jews for the crimes of Nazi Germany toward the Europeans of a Jewish Faith from the first half of the last century. Israel cannot make up its mind from one day to the next where its borders lie and the host of Palestinian Arab Christians and Muslims and secular Atheists are tied up and kept in a prison state based in a conspiracy of international lies and deceipts from an all too willing accomplice of the global media cartell - UPI REUTERS et all. It is just too obvious when listening to NPR or reading the NYTimes that there exists a glaring bold face daily deception progagation on what is happening behind an inhumane wall and statewide prison system of present day Israel. A system that if not stopped in its tracks soon will be exported and capitalized upon around the globe in no time at all. Perhaps this is the Apocalypse Saint John on the Isle of Patmos depicted in the book of Revelations from his visions. Or we are just finding ourselve around the planet falling into a global serfdom of a prison planet.

We must not forget that Jews, Muslims and Christians have lived in peace and prosperity for centuries longer than the current crimes against an unarmed and defenseless people have been perpetrated by a nuked to the gills state of falsehood called Israel. It is time to start listening to Iran not neccessarily because they have the answers but because they know something about a region the West knows little about. It is time the US stopped enabling Israel and it is time we stopped this Gog and Magog approach to foreign policy. Nothing has made me doubt the notion more than present days Israels treatment of its non-Jewish self.

Through the media haze people are waking up - the truth is there if you choose to look it in the eye. Reality isn't quite what we were told it is.

Backyard Garden Flowers Before Midsummers Eve

2008-06-17T17:07:00.000-07:00

Not everyday in my strange life here is all
that bad - Yesterday found me happy and enjoying life despite the political and economic climate we find ourselves in. So to celebrate a moment in time here are some springtime flowers from Ghettoville.

I think I never learned the habit of being happy so when it occurs being happy feels surreal - like an unfamiliar house guest - like there is something wrong in the Matrix program I am stuck in. That makes it harder to practice being thankful as well. This is my attempt.

But it was short lived as local NPR (otherwise known as Radio Judaica) was jammering on about how heating bills will be 300 dollars a month this winter - So I am doomed to be even more working poor. No summer roadtrip, not holiday away from work and the urban grind. No bank account to look forward to and certainly more utility bills backing up on my desk unpayable. Would somebody stand up and Impeach Bush II/Cheney Junta and put those DC types on trial for crimes against Ghettoville.

Can't the Bilderburg Group do something
humanitarian for once that isn't self serving for that stupid myth of a new world order.
Now I have to get creative and figure out how to run a 1950's wood frame house without insulation and single pane windows off the power grid if I am going to survive financially. I mean how to do that on a no budget lifestyle throughout an Ohio winter. It's not like I have money to buy a pot-bellied Ben Franklin cast iron stove. Certainly no money for solar water heating... But I do think I will have to be saying goodbye to AEP and Columbia Gas pretty soon... usher in an old Appalachian lifestyle but that would require being out of work. Maybe I can rig up my computer to an excersize bicycle generator to stay wired so I can keep on bloggin'...

I am Republican at heart as in the party of Lincoln but I will never vote Republican again as I have said many times. The thing is if Obama weren't African American I wouldn't even bother voting - I just want to see a Black man in the White (man's) House for once. But I doubt he will change the economic reality of Ghettoville or Gansterville, Ohio or elsewhere. I mean I hope so and I dearly want someone to believe in for once to actually do something from the Oval Office that provides basic relief for the People not the Corporations we slave for.

How about getting out of Iraq - how about putting this present dark administration on trial. How about we rally behind Kucinich for spelling out all those articles of Impeachment. Guess none of this serves the needs of the AIPAC or radio Judaica (NPR and the NYT) would be yammering on about this relentlessly like a moaning and complaining Barbaras Streissand and Waters all rolled into one media Siren song. Meanwhile 22 million dollars a day goes to Israel by us US taxpayers when our own country is in a vapid decline - we sure could use a slice of that around here these days - too bad Yom Kippur guiltiness only occurs once a year.

lil Moghadishu is Burning and a Cactus Blooms in Ghettoville

2008-06-16T18:34:00.001-07:00

lil' Moghadishu is Burning

That was the chant on Albert Avenue or Alberet Avenue depending on which street sign you read.

Although it is not quite aparant from the photo the smoke and fire are from the Capitol South Apartments burning last night on Fathers Day. That spectacle was in the front of the little bungalow I call home here in my exile of love from Belgique c'est chic. The cactus blooms in the adjacent photo are from the backyard garden. Who would have known at this latitutde cactus could not just survive winter and thrive to bloom but that at this longitude many Somalians have made their home and become a vibrant part of life over on this side of town. Regretably the media's take on the fire last night was to blame the Somalians who called 911 for a communication problem thus delaying emergency help to a poorly built high density neighborhood built on the borderline of Columbus and Mifflinville. The local media (the idiot news from the networks) repeatedly fails to report that crime in this corner which ran so high that police still admit they never came down this street at night for fear of getting shot. Now with a large Somalian community making their homes here crime has dropped, liquor use is down and the new Mosque has revitalized a sagging community area. This is the story the media ignores but they wasted no time in blaming this whole collosal sized fire on the victims not on our decaying emergency broadcast/911 systems. Of course I heard the FBI was there too but I doubt they were there to help anyone. It was an impressive display of heavy rescue equipment and burley firemen and cops and mischievous media types and their technicians who nobody can trust.

Life over here in Mifflin-town or Ghettoville as I affectionately call this unique quartier of a generic midwestern town with the lame name of Columbus - such a name for a landlocked city no less! But this quartier has become strangely beautiful and colorful which is not to say it isn't culturally challenging but a unique urban vibrancy is happening here all the same - I'm looking forward to the opening a new Somalian Suq anyday now this summer despite the Bush II economic woes we are all stricken with. Like Kucinich has pointed out it still isn't too late to IMPEACH THE BUSH II/CHENEY JUNTA...

Mifflinville from the Alley

2008-06-11T14:56:00.000-07:00

Here is some photo documentation of the little alley behind my residence in Mifflinville aka Ghettoville just down the street from Columbus' Lil'Moghadishu. I got this place for 12,000 dollars and it was worth every penny. I don't really expect the property to appreciate that much unless Obama gets elected President. I'm still mad at Obama for his Prostitutional Speech at the AIPAC Convention (really a high school pep rally done up like a Las Vegas show). What can Obama say now to Palestinians Americans and their families trapped in Palestine after promising Jerusalem to the Occupiers? Voting for Presidents is always about choosing the lesser of the evils on offer. Which until that AIPAC speech I thought this election would really be different. I really did. At least when McCain (and Abel) spoke at the AIPAC pep rally he sounded hypocritical, all tongue in cheek like if he were smart enough for that, leering back at the AIPAC Network of political control due to it's shameless media connections that can make or break political leaders in the US. The fact that McCain and Abel did all that while putting on Ronny Reagan (Ray-guns) geriatric voice was pure kitsch. It was cute that after that miserable AIPAC night Hilary comes out about not running - as if she were waiting for the AIPAC-ers to tell her wether to drop out of the election or not.

Meanwhile I listen to infowars dot com and wonder if its all a Bilderberg Conspiracy - Wether it's Al Gore ranting on about an inconvenient truth or infowars going on about prison camps for the middle classes it all depresses me to the point of driving me to call the suicide hotline - or at least to check out the online alternatives to suicide - plant a garden - walk the dog - which I did. I feel suicidal because I can't pay my utility bills and the suicide hotline can't help there either...
Al Gore is a farce because he let us down in the 2000 election - he should have fought Bush II for the White House - he didn't so why should I watch his movie on DVD - as if I didn't know all that already. See the clothes line behind my house - I don't use my used electric clothes dryer because I can't afford the utility bills on my house anyway. I am about ready to retire my old Hyundai Elantra with that fab Saab styling for a bicycle because gas is 4 dollars a gallon except then I'll need a horse and buggy in the winter to get to work because thar ain't public transportation grids anymore thanks to the auto-lobby-corporatists.

I plan to vote InshAllah for Obama - the thing is as much as I want him to be President I really will regret having to run him through my Blogette Presidential Critial Analysis Mill or rather medieval torture device. Obama is the best thing this country has had since the Kennedy's were alive (and the hallowed Kennedy's were all rather good old American playboys but the best we had). We all might miss the Clinton years but we can't turn back the clocks either. After all these miserable Bush II Monarchial years of taxation without representation having the Clintons back in office is just too much like a petty family feud playing itself out at the expense of a nation in an astonishing and unacknowleged (by the media) economic Depression. Miss Hilary as they call here in this quartier is just too posh SUV Suburban out of touch for these alleys and roads of Mifflinville. Maybe She will have a chance in 2016 if we all survive the end of the Mayan Calendar election year after this years round. It is still not too late to Impeach Bush II and rethink the control freaks from the AIPAC.

Salon du Arabe Chez Moi Avenue de la Roi la Albert, Mifflinville, Ohio

2008-05-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

I've never really been a fan of the Monarchial system but having Experienced Belgium as I have over the years and though I now reside under Ohio skies what I find is that I rather miss the Monarchs of Belgium - their palaces and understated celebrity. HRH Paola and Albert as seen from this here corner of my new world from Albert Avenue, Mifflinville, Ohio, USA are a nostalgic memory for me. Indeed from these parts of Ghettoville where there is a loss of human dignity and civilization I begin to wonder if Monarchial role models such as the understated Belgian model aren't lacking in these parts. I miss seeing HRH The Queen Mother Fabiola (with that fab name and once upon a time and timeless chic-coif) being driven about old Bru-town - over-taking me as I rode a rickety Amstel Ludo bicycle past the town house palace. The accessibility of that Royal Family is what I miss. Hollywood or the English Royals just can't come down to that level - especially the QE II who must be stiffly re-upholstered every time she ventures out into her realm - set afloat across her subjects for the media to devour like a launching of some fantastic ocean liner. But the Belgian Royals are just people like you and me and not neccessarily such Vampires as their across the channel mis-behaving cousins or far away Hollywood cardboards princes and princess. I still maintain keeping Monarchs is akin to having the First Family on Welfare there to take the biggest Welfare cheques first. It is just from this vantage point from a distant point on the globe in the social and human squallor of the civilized decay of Ghettoville and the lives trapped here it is very much aparant that there might be perhaps a very neccessary function of a Royal head of state. If only these Libertine Royals like their ancestors were still opening Hospitals and Schools and Refuge centers from poverty in addition to providing a human sense of identity. Well certainly the Cheney/Bush II Junta and their kin are not rolemodels given their apparant greed and lack of ethics and their taste for overtly lying. From here on Koning Albertlaan - Avenue de la Roi Albert from my modest herenhuisje or maison du maitre (really an old wooden bungalow) I find I miss Belgium in ways I could never have imagined. I miss the pedestrian and urban fabric of old Bru-town - I miss watching that old place re-transform into a bicycle and walking city. But from my rooms and my Arabesque and mod Muslim stlyed way of life next to little Moghadishu I rather like all the greenery and the big blue sky and I relish in the certainty of summer. The certainty of summer which is not a guarantee in the southern low lands of northern europe other wise known as my other home Belgium. God I miss you - Belgium and that fantastic complicated and contradictory Brussels. I miss your Moroccan Community and all the vivacious and enthusiastic North African Belgians mixing up race and places and culture and histories and languages in one big Maroc Rai mix/melange of a social symphony - from a strange old city with a 1000 year history of blurred boundaries and cultures from old Brusselse to Bruxelioses now with an Arabian/North African flare - Ancient Catholic relics and New Islamic Centerpieces replete with Flemish dialected Dutch speakers and French and English and Arabic speaking new Brusselaars/Bruxelois - long live the Brussels Ket of new and old and don't forget your fantastic micro-melting pot beats anything American.

Living in Filth

2008-05-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

NPR was yammering on today about how the oil companies are seeing record profits despite high crude oil costs. Then they had the oil companies saying they want access to North American wildnerness areas so they can - what? - make even more profit - yep. Basically corporations like Shell (a shameless and self righteous Dutch company no less with a terrible history in Africa) is a proponent of accessing North American oil reserves beneath virgin ecosystems. Are Exxon/Valdez and all the rest any different? So basically we the people -consummerist or citizen - have no choice but to let the oil companies pummel North America for their own greedy self interests. But what does Canada or Mexico have to say about that? So we let these sinister Vampiric corporations who control most every aspect of our tiny lives have access to regions and reserves with no nod towards conservativism? Should we allow these greedy oil companies access without any hassles just so we can hope (and only hope) for lower gas prices. Yeh, right like that would happen - gas prices go down - ha ha ha. The thing is I don't even like driving and despise the fact that North American "cities" have been unmade the last few (6 ir 7) decades to make everyone dependent on the auto industry and oil corporations. There is no pedestrian urban fabric anywhere affordable for the poor and the waistlines across America prove it.

Meanwhile I live in filth and working poor poverty.

Last night I watched V For Vendetta - did anyone see this movie? I was shocked and astonished and delighted and am even more depressed at our reality after learning a thing or two from this film. I still can't help but think Osama bin Hidin' will somehow go down in history a liberator and rather American like in Paul Revere ways. Or at least I hope so - perhaps we need a bearded and elusive super hero. Ironic that a conservative Wahabi Saudi type shall probably become the liberator of the West from the clenched fist grips of Capitalism Unbound. But the truth is Bin Hidin' is quite a hero for alot of us men who have no hope of making a difference (for good or bad) in this global Matrix of control we are trapped in.

Everytime gas prices go up because of oil company greed - food prices and everything else in turn go up - and since my pay check doesn't it is as if my wages keep going down. My electric bill is 180 dollars (but how is that possible? - I don't even have an air-condition), I just paid up about 400 dollars in late heating bills, my internet bill is 60 dollars (how that is so I don't know). I owe 600 dollars in property tax for this Ghetto dump. My house is a wreck - post rat, cockroach and termite infestation (the carcasses strewn about prove this). I hoped to get the place winterized before next winter but won't have the money for that this year or next. My furnace looks like something discarded from Auschwitz and my hot water tank is an electrical plumbing accident waiting to happen. I have no home owners insurance because I have no credit history. I have a wood frame home with no insulation and single glazed windows all with rotting wood frames. Two windows have lost their window frames entirely and one is temporarily fixed in plastic the other in wire screen. I survived the winter of '08 as such with the help of discarded cardboad. There are more holes in the perimeter of this house than I care to admit that I can see out of all around the place - holes that are officially not intended to be windows... Plus I am just plain tired, very, very, tired. Exhausted and I am just waiting on people wealthier than me to get a clue. No trickle down theory reached Ghettoville, USA the capital of Nowhere, Ohio. There is no summer road trip to look forward to. I'm not going to bother with the ingrates who run the airlines and airports and checkpoints.

Meanwhile once again the guys from Homeland Security want to dispose of me for blogging and my privileged decade abroad.

I could be easily shot dead in a fake drive by shooting if my blogging is so dangerous. I could be picked off easily and no one would know much less care - because ultimately I don't matter. But when your prison system is privatized then people need pinched and thrown into jail to get money from the state. Though I have done nothing wrong except think and write and self publish (and I am delighted by paperless self publishing - woo hoo - my only thrill in life - yipee) I am once again in 1984 ways going to be interviewed by some friendly form of fascism for my BLOG here on BLOGGER and for my Blogger Profile. Wether it's Experiencing Belgium or GhettovilleUSA I am suspect. For what? Stay tuned and please send me donations for my ACLU lawyer I am going to need any day. Or I just might beat the system and hang myself in my nifty garage - or who knows maybe some branch of Homeland Security will in secret do it for me and save me the trouble. We live in times even prophetic Benjamin Franklin had no idea that it would be this bad. Meanwhile everyone is asleep in front of their TV being told what to think.

My personal epigrams of the day:

Give me money or give me death.

Brain drained Ohio should pay people like me taxes to keep me living here.

Freedom and Liberty in the US run only as far as ones wallet is deep.

Freedom is not defined by ones ability to get a loan.

There is no "war" going on in Iraq it is a shameless carnage brought about by ruthless Romanizing Marionette crusading Americans to further the notion that all Arabs are one and the same and all bad and that Israel the puppet master (purse) string puller is good and benevolent.

Time Travelling with the Chosen

2008-05-15T22:01:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chosen_(Chaim_Potok)
Late night in Ghettoville - it's pouring rain. Watched the film version of the Chaim Potok novel The Chosen - Back in my not knowing any better pro-Israel days I was mesmerized by this film. Found a first edition hardcover and began a life long romance with books as a result. Back then I was astonished by the Hasidim in the film being portrayed as not being "for" the state of Israel. I think this more than anything taught me to question what I was told in the "news". I know this is the sixtieth anniversary of the Naqba but somehow this personal bit of time travelling with the Chosen via DVD seemed appropriate given all my ranting in this here Blog. Again I feel compelled to say the problem isn't Judaism, Christianity or Islam - the problem for Palestine is Zionism.
Shortly before I left Brussels I met a man in the train station - a very tall and handsome Hasidic fellow - I greeted him with Shalom and asked to shake his hand. I liked this man alot - his quiet calm and intense eyes. He was travelling with a fellow from Cleveland, Ohio.
Now I speak a bit of Arabic - but religious men with beards and akward anachronistic clothes need to be reconsidered - wether Jewish, Orthodox Christian or Muslim.

High-biscus in Ghettoville

2008-05-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

Just a hibiscus plant from a lawn and garden center from one of those big corporate chain stores that is essentially an aluminum and cement block shed of a store. The kind of corporate store that gets corporate welfare while putting local municipal tax paying independents out of business. This hibiscus is hot! As in stolen which is as it should be since those corporate mart (K or W it doesn't matter) have been stealing from our communities with out even getting their greedy hands slapped by our local and regional "governance".

How US architecture evolved from a utilitarian militaresque Quonson hut to block like aluminum and cement shed like buildings set back behind acres of tarmac without human dignity is beyond me. Seeing churches being built in this same manner is just plain disgraceful to the communities that get to host them. Architectually this is a cheap debtor nation with no taste and no sense of national self respect beyond knee jerking media soundbyte pro-war patriotism/nationalism. If only people would learn to look they would see what truths are being told in how we build the world we inhabit.

Or maybe we should re-read Plato's Republic and concentrate on part 7 of that piece of literature of old.

To Myanmar In Your Hours of Distress: Don't Allow the US to be your unwanted Trojan Horse

2008-05-07T16:54:00.000-07:00

...Isn't it a bit rich and fundamentally hypocritical of the Marionette puppet Bush II and his Puppet Master Cheney to spout off to the Government of Myanmar to let the US step in and help solve the Myanmar Act of God disaster? This is the administration that wontonly ignored New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf coast and let FEMA out to pasture in a mandate of ignoring domestic destruction and suffering. My advice to the people and Government of Myanmar is don't be deceived by the Bush II seemingly generous offering of help. For certain is it some unwanted Trojan horse. There are more capable, dignified and more honest wealthy nations around the world to make up for the current loss of the US being able to help at this time. The Bush II administration owes New Orleans and the whole of the Gulf Coast Katrina Hurricane carnage an apology in the form of definate reconstruction and financial reimbursement due to their hypocritical cruel policy of neglect and denial.

Impeach the AIPAC Network so We The People can Impeach Cheney and Bush

2008-05-07T16:42:00.000-07:00

Woke up wanting to see the Cheney Bush II administration go down in history with their miserable foreign and domestic policy records as much a part of their names as their crimes against humanity and this very country to say nothing of Iraq. I just don't want to see Cheney and Bush II enter into a post-Presidential history without having gotten the truth out about what they did with their time in office. Then I realized that wouldn't happen until the AIPAC released its clenched fist grip on the US political structure. So now I am calling for the AIPAC lobby network and media matrix to be disolved, dismantled, destructured, banned and impeached for it's unAmerican grip of control on US political representation. Once the AIPAC is Impeached then Cheney and Bush et al will most certainly be IMPEACHED and shooed out of office before 1-20-09. If only America would wake up and not let these hench-men go down in a fake and white washed history. Those horse men of the Apocalpse didn't earn themselves a dignified place in history nor should we the people allow them that.

G-ville Maison de Maitre Interior Views

2008-05-05T03:48:00.000-07:00

Just some random interior photos chez moi to post for this here Cinco di Mayo from Ghettoville.

Various G-ville photos for Cinco di Mayo

2008-05-04T20:30:00.000-07:00

Just a Random assortment of images from chez moi de la Avenue Albert de la Roi Belgique on the day before Cinco di Mayo Mexico's Independence Day.

Composting in Ghettoville Ru$ty Churchill's literal Black Dog (a metaphor for Depression). Rusty/Rustique has a very long string of names Dauber Rusty Paws Pooky Poockx Churchill Crouch

A real REEL mower from People Power Machines dot com - it might look and feel like a Fisher-Price toy but it is a mad grass cutter for sure! Also visible Rusty's proud black tail.
A wooden screen door just added to the maison.

A ten dollar Craigs List bicycle to fight gas-o-flation prices and food-o-flation prices... Does any wonder like I do that maybe we are in an Economic DEPRESSION for which there is no Prozac except a Presidential and VP impeachment.

Rusty Paws

That Car! spotted on the old 3C highway on my way to work!!!! Almost as cool as Pakistani buses from Karachi!

An outdoor cacti that grows on an Ohio latitude that survives winter somehow....

So I've been contacted by Homeland (in)/Security for my Blogger Profile and my Blogger "Blogette" and for my travels to Arabia and other Islamic lands. Did any one see the Matrix Brothers movie V is For Vendetta? I liked its subtitle that basically said the people shouldn't be afraid of their governments but the governments should be afraid of The People. As in We the People.

Regarding getting a friendly Fascism form of a coffeehouse meeting "interrogation" or Inquisition all I can say is to quote some forgotten President by the name of Madison - "If tyranny and oppression come to this country it will happen in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy" - Rather Prophetic I'd say.

For the record - Although I eat meat I don't much like hurting another life form to do so and I'd rather be not just vegetarian but vegan. Given my need to answer to homeland security for my blogette and especially my Blogger profile I will say - like Bart Simpson writing on the chaulk board in school on the Simpsons intro... (for the record)

I AM NOT A TERRORIST
I AM NOT A TERRORIST
I AM NOT A TERRORIST
I AM NOT A TERRORIST
I AM NOT A TERRORIST

I AM NOT A TERRORIST
I AM NOT A TERRORIST
I AM NOT A TERRORIST

I AM NOT A TERRORIST

I AM NOT A TERRORIST
I AM NOT A TERRORIST
I AM NOT A TERRORIST
I AM NOT A TERRORIST

I AM NOT A TERRORIST

So Goes Ghettoville Ohio So Goes The Nation

2008-04-28T16:59:00.000-07:00

My Mother used to say that C-town (Columbus - meaning Ohio the capital of Nowhere USA) was a sort of test market city for new products and for the mental pulse of the Nation. I suppose that would explain all the fast food merchants and fast food drive thru style aluminum shed building churches of the Heinz 57 varieties of Christendom. If mother was right then look at these photos. What does this say about the future - are we all soon to be Oakies struggling with our own tiny lives and similar Grapes of Wrath difficulties? Angry Oakies who gather hungry in the many Wal-Mart parkinglots in search of food with no money in our pockets, no food in our stomachs and no gas in our cars fuel tanks. Where will we go? To Wal-Mart I suppose because there are no town centers now, no town halls, no seats of Governance that are actually inhabited.

Actually this house is beautiful - the undulating foundation and facades a living example that is a current living example to the way the late and forgotten Ohio painter Charles Burchfield viewed Ohio and the idea of the North around him - an idea which he painted onto his canvass like some time capsule message to viewers in subsequent generations.

This photo looks like places I saw alongside the carcass of the old Mother Road in the springtime in Oklahoma - Route 66 - whom Ronald Reagan ironically killed off like the last of the great American dinosaurs - much like himself. Oklahoma is sublimely beautiful in the spring wildflower season. I travelled a good portion of that historical American highway after it was decommissioned (as if you can put a road and history like that out to pasture like a discarded former President and his wife). I think I got my kicks on Route 66 in 2003. So goes Route sixty-six so goes the Nation. So goes Columbus so goes the future....

At which point when everything you shop for, work for and ultimately live for materially speaking are made in a foreign country - just one other foreign country - namely China - do you yourself wake up and think - Do I live in a foreign country?

Speaking of foreign countries and foreigners - the good, the bad and the ugly - When the German Pope paid us here in North America a visit - and this so feels like an entry in a twenty-first century Poor Richard Almanack Benjamin Franklin of a blog to comment on this - but honestly... How can the German Pope travel around the world and talk of Christendom while Israel has systematically and effectively driven out almost all indigenous Christians from the land of Palestine - namely from good old Palestinian towns the likes of which Jesus Christ himself hailed from - Bethlehem or places like Hebron and all that - I mean what kind of German leader in such a high held and gilded throne dare travel around on behalf of Christendom and ignore even discussing the fact that Christians indigenous to Palestinian Christian heritage sites have been culturally and ethnically cleansed? I'm talking about the very descendents of this worlds first Christians and first Churches. What kind of Zion is that? The seat of the Holy Roman Empire in the form of the Catholic church has always throughout it's history sided with those in power. At one time the Vatican sided with the Germans and the Zionists of the latter half of the twentieth century will not let us forget that. And now a German Pope is siding with the international Zionist Oligarchs and their multi-national corporate will and saying nothing - NOTHING - about the cultural and ethnic cleansing of indigenous Christians trapped from within or driven out of Palestine (To say nothing of all those pesky Muslims who just wont go away as easily). This is as unforgivable as the Zionist war machinations that ruthlessly proclaimed and chanted in May of 1948 about a land without a people for a people without a land. Except there were Christians and Muslims and Jews living side by side in peace more often than not in that land supposeably without a people for a people supposeably without a land. What do you do when recorded history was recorded as a blantant and bold face lie? You go shop at Wal-mart with someone elses money and forget being told as fast possible - that is until finding out that a typically American made invention that your grandfather once had is now proudly made in China. Help me Lord to accept the things that I cannot change.

Today I met and I really have to write this - I had to meet with some officer or agent of sorts regarding my Blogger profile. I was pleased to do so. I wrote that Blogger profile as an excersize in free speech and stand behind every word of it. The fact that I am being tracked down - as if I were in hiding to give an account in person regarding all that is interesting. I felt like I was simultaneously in both the Matrix and the Fight Club. The interviewing officer was charming and very skilled - beautiful and built like an angel or some super human. If only I myself were. At the end of our interview of sorts I said I had hoped I was being contacted for a job - one that would get me out of the endless cycle of financial disillusionment of being trapped on the very short leash of working poor Cheney/Bush II il capitalismo. I should have just offered to trade sexual favors for cash instead. Still I feel like Allen Ginsberg would be proud of me following his example - that he who dies with the fattest FBI file wins - well that's my paraphrase anyway. The interviewing officer suggested I write a book - well I have - I wanted to tell him that the publishing industry IS the Zionist ministry of Propaganda and that I had no chance in getting published for money given what I know about the other history of Palestine that has been erased, erradicated and driven out. I wanted to tell this fine young man of this great nation - the US of A - that the US is only involved in Iraq to contain and redistribute Blowback the US has earned to another part of the world - to a land the Zionists of the Middle East see as the grass being greener than in their own stolen back yards. Or in this case the Oil being blacker and the dollar being bigger greener and fatter in their bank accounts.

Meanwhile the US still pays Is-royale (Zions Israel) 22 million dollars a day and meanwhile Ghettoville, USA gets poorer, sicker, stupider, fatter, angrier, rustier and more dissatisfied with the dirty and discarded empty pie pan they were left with. When will the New Romans turn in disgust and just walk away from New Judea? Obama-nation - Clinton-nation - POW Repuglican McCain and Able nation no matter what little vote you do or don't cast nothing will change the matrix of lies we are fed intravenously.

When I met with those agents I almost expected them to offer me a Red or Blue pill - with me wondering if it was available as a suppository. Either that or I half expected my mouth to disappear and while I was literally bugged via my navel like Neo. Except life is never that interesting even though the truth is always stranger than fiction. The truth doesn't sell and isn't convincing anyway. And who is to say that Osama bin Hidin' won't actually go down in history at some point as some sort of new Paul Revere? Meanwhile I'll be writing the coffeetable book/illustrated Biography of Bin Laden for Children. Now if I could just find a publisher for that one....

DISCLAIMER (as if I really needed to write this) Jews aren't the problem neither is Israel - Christians aren't the problem, Muslims and Arabs aren't the problem - neither is secularism or Atheism - The problem is ZIONISM and only Zionism. History has shown Jews, Christians and Muslims have lived in centuries of peace of prosperity rather than in hatred and suffering. The Islamic nations never drove the Israelites into the sea - But the AIPAC political Matrix of control needs to be turned down if not altogether stopped for enabling Zionisms atrocities to continue.

Mecca Park

2008-04-09T18:45:00.000-07:00

Mecca Park in Mifflinville or as I call it Ghettoville, Ohio USA. This is a forgotten Park nestled off the Ghettoville infamous corner of Agler and Perue in a old and equally forgotten AmVets neighborhood from the 1950's. This isn't Columbus, Ohio the state capital this is an autonomous township with a long and separate history within the modern day metroplex and urban sprawl of the Capital of Nowhere - Columbus - Ohio.

Mecca Park used to be serviced off of the old 3C highway - by three little roads - Albert, Mecca and Eddystone (better known these days as stoned Eddie). But at some point Columbus did a venomously French thing - akin to building nuclear reactor power plants on their borders to minimumize French national damage in the even of a Chernobyl. Not very neighborly - just ask the Belgians about all that. So Columbus dumped a cheaply built housing project atop Mecca and Eddystone roads while adding to the population density of Mecca Park dramatically. Now all of that traffic in and out of Mecca Park to the 3C (or Westerville road at this part as it is called) gets bottle necked on Albert at the projects.

I'm not at all against public housing or those who utilitize it. But this project was not built to be something to look at, neither was it built to be considerate of its neighbors neighborhood. C'est la vie I suppose. Typical Columbus. Like Dallas is all money and no taste Columbus is neither. Fortunately the housing complex in question is now home to a large and unique Somalian community with a grand Mosque just built to facilitate their prayers. There is even now on the old Albert Avenue a delightful Minaret built to reference the grain silos of barns from this regions architectural history. Although no body seems to ketch this bit of subtle architectural language. In an area of town sadly lacking any landmarks or city parks this inadvert minaret seems to anchor on an axial line just at the bend in the street and connecting it all up over the horizon. If only the minaret were larger and more visible from the lost end of Albert at Perdue.

Observing all of this has me thinking how much more unique this neighborhood could be. Restore Mecca Road to Mecca Park connect the Mosque on Albert with access to Mecca road - and viola a lovely middle class Muslim community with affordable housing options occurs and all within walking to a Mosque for those early morning and late night prayers. Property value would go up and traffic would be less congested in an area where the children play.

I do like observing all this happen. For some this is a bad neighborhood. For others this neighborhood went into a rapid decline in value and self worth with the advent of the Mosque being built. For me I have a more optimistic view: In a community that has suffered socially in the last couple decades from a lack of moral and ethical awareness this neighborhood could use all the religion it can get and a few less liquor establishments. A Mosque brings men and women out onto the streets to gather and interact the way a city park once used to as a vital free space in a community. Given their nighttime prayers the neighborhood is kept that much safer throught the day and night with or without all the extra city lighting.

Seeing the women in all their color from African fabrics billowing about like sails caught on the wind - gliding by in elegant and foreign ways is a tremendous gift from Somalia for this bored neighborhood. Seeing the men in their beards and kufi hats and long ankle lenght shirts - with prayer beads dangling from their finger tips and all with very clean clothes - is all a welcome relief to a neighborhood built out of an unaware 1950's consumerist domestic commercial nihilism - I don't know but Ghettoville now has a new dimension of soul added into it's melting pot of flavors.

This new dimension is a very much welcome relief to the lines at the corner and night shops selling liquor and lotto tickets to a rather desperate and nervous driven, over caffeinated and nicotined customer. Perhaps all the prayers coming from the Mosque and neighboring homes five times a day is spilling over into the surrounding homes and lives and woodland - ushering in a some much needed hope for change for this old quartier of Ghettoville.

Farewell Linden Air Drive-In

2008-04-07T18:16:00.000-07:00

Farewell Linden Air Drive-In movies and way cool sign. Actually the Linden Air Drive-in has been closed for many years. After that the place was a flea market, however, the sign stood until sometime in March '08 when it was dismantled. Until last month that sign was in my opinion a landmark and a neccessary one at that. Without this sign I can't find where my street is off of the old 3C highway. Neither can I find the entrance for Habitat for Humanity the thrift store for DIY home owners (or slum lords). For some reason I was mesmerized by the sign and it's cinematic history. America has no sense of the Sacred - whether pummeling Native lands and culture to build concrete and aluminum shed buildings for shopping on once woodlands and wetlands just to be surrounded by acres of tarmac for parking - or for the US's own history from back in the day in the nineteen fifties to build drive in "theaters".

The old Linden Air Drive-In Screen still stands and I can see it from my back yard though no movies play on it. One less thing to do in Ghettoville in this decade. The rows of hill like humps for parking to see the screen still remain like a strange forgotten burial mound for a culture with no history and no intention for a history. Those mounds now holding the trees that grew up there over time. I suspect the cinematic graveyard will be raised for future Ghettoville housing to play out in after the plastic freshness wears off. For the moment in the economic times of this day and age in this region the woodland areas prevail and the ravines going to Alum Creek "river" flow and flood with Springs arrival.

To compliment my interest in doing my part to protect the ecological sphere or membrane around the planet that all known life in our solar system depend on, I've hung up a cotton rope clothes line - actually I just can't afford my electric bill. The pulley's that I bought are plastic and will survive all life forms on this planet except maybe Ghettovilles die hard cockroaches I suppose. In the mean time my clothes dry rather fast and cheaply on this line. Despite Columbus' air pollution when I bring in the clothes they smell better than synthetic fabric softener fragrances. In the photo below the clothes line is some reproduction made in China enamelled metal glider built like the Ohio trademark Lustron home. That new glider is considerably smaller than the one grandma used to have. I guess I should string up a hammock for napping in while waiting on the laundry to dry.

I'm behind in my utility bills - juggling which one will get paid this month. I still don't have the money for a refrigerator. I need to put up a fence to keep the dog in some part of the yard without a leash and to keep neighborhood bad boys from crossing into the yard because there haven't been any new city parks built in Ghettoville for a long time - so there is no place to hang out and keep out of trouble in.

The photo for FOOD sort of says it all. Closed up former Garage Station advertising food as a basic staple I guess - not really appetizing - no wonder obesity and colon cancer run rampant. The US invades an oil rich nation for a lie - gas prices go up and the economy bottoms out. You can just observe all of this anywhere if you care to look from your car windows. It all looks like a Depression when you take your eyes off of the TV screen or from the wind shield and look around - especially when I look at my bills verses my income. To say nothing of absolute unhappiness with the meaning of this lie called l_i_f_e.

I just want to at least pay my bills. Steer clear of debt and save some money. But all of this is nothing more than peace pipe dreams from the book Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. No wonder every day and night there is a heavy haze just under the layer of automotive brown exhaust, a heavy haze of a disreputable libertine bluish green haze of can-o-bliss hanging over Ghettoville blowing north east outta Gangsterville.

Our Little Georgie Porgie the Marionette Humpity Dumpity President

2008-03-27T04:20:00.000-07:00

Our little Apie
With those monkey ears
Let out of a fake Texan ranchers zoo
Goodbye lil' George
You weren't even, after all
Curious, George
Brain dead
Enough said
Your wife looks like a cheap discarded and unconvincing extra
From the Tim Burton film a few years back
Planet of the Apes
and your naughty children, George
Are such Neanderthals
That they even
Make the Dutch
Look good

Snow Beards Black Dog and House

2008-03-27T04:13:00.001-07:00

A few views from the March '08 Snow storm general craziness that landed upon us mortal souls in Ghettoville and Gansterville over by the intersection of Purdue and Agler near Little Mogadishu.

March 08 Snow Storm

2008-03-21T03:35:00.000-07:00

Chez moi de la Ghettoville during the 20 inch snowfall. The car got stuck then stolen but the teen hoodlums who broke into the car and peeled the steering wheel were not the brightest lights in the chandelier of life. Chinese old wise man parable say don't go an steal an abandoned car stuck in the snow. Another parable says never spit into the wind. The Mifflinville police officer who filed the report on the car was an Ohio version of the way cool police officer character from Fargo. Despite Ghettoville's bad reputation the police services so far seem rather cool and interesting - not at all like the brainless civil servants one has come to expect. When interacting with the police my mantra is - who will police the police? To which the answer is - the Citizens (not the Consumers in case that needed clarification).

Experiencing Ghettoville, USA from Nowhere, Ohio

2008-03-06T04:26:00.000-08:00

Back in the USSA coming to you live from Ghettoville, USA from Belgium to Plasticvillette to Ghettoville. Learning that lifes moments and places are stepping stones without a destination in this planetary Matrix called Earth - just one of many stops on the intergalactic public Metro system. These Blogettes are just entries from my personal travel journals throughout this mysterious cosmos longing for the Divine - the One - the singular Ultimate and unknowable Infinite from our finite minds and lives - seeking a final destination called home. Trying not to forget that Earth is just a public transit platform for us Souls confined at the moment to a shared material plane bound by this mortal coil of our bodies trying to get to the other side. In the mean time there is determination to make the Hajj and find something genuinely sacred and a mercy for this planet.