My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

The Bible is a struggle of light and dark. Good and Evil. How can I be religious in a time of abundant electricity? I never see the dark anymore. I can’t recognize Evil. City life is lit before dusk destroys us. Religion is for country folks and poor nations still left in the dark.

How about a modern device to capture city slickers interest in the Bible? Maybe we market it as a Sci-Fi novel. Replace the word “heaven” with the word “outer space” throughout the Good Book. Watch what happens…

Matthew 3:16 (New International Version)

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven (outer space) was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him.

Just imagine a space ship that looked less like a flying saucer and more like a flying dove. There was a tractor beam. Jesus was in it.

Matthew 16

The Phariees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tested him by asking him to show them a sign from heaven. (outer space)

Is it so hard to believe people were looking for proof that Jesus was the alien he claimed to be? “I’m the son of God and without sin”. That’s an alien. People still are looking for contact from aliens.

Matthew 4:17 (New International Version)

From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

Perhaps when we read “kingdom of heaven”, we should think instead, “a distant planet”. This distant planet may be like the Death Star of Star Wars fame. That is, it is a flying planet, not subject to gravitational orbits. Heaven can fly over earth someday and beam us all up – if we have believed in Jesus – and been good. The aliens only want good people on their flying planet.

So dear precious readers, please be good! Planet Heaven, a.k.a the Kingdom of God, is entering the Milky Way!

Christ Galactic, Superhero Saviour. In a recent motion picture George Clooney was tapped for the role. “I wanted to play God, but Jesus is a close second,” Clooney confessed.

If it ain’t broke, you can still paint it. That won’t hurt anything.

apples baseballs bananas

“That big ditch on your left is the Grand Canyon, on your right are the shitlands of America. Flat dry and empty. They stretch all the way to Californee…”

* * *

I was the first stranger to get picked up for the ride-share to San Francisco. The battered old Subaru pulled up in front of Echo Park Lake and I hopped in the front seat. My knees bumped the dash. My head was jammed into the ceiling. I put the seat back. Didn’t help.

What an old beater. The knobs to the radio were giant bolts sticking a cock’s length from the cassette deck. But it didn’t work. All for show. Coffee stains, missing floor mat, broken antenna. It looked like it’d been bought off the impound lot.

Jeremy was the driver, he wasn’t talking much, he was reading a map and driving to pick up a girl who had answered his ad. She got in behind me, I pulled my seat forward and really screwed up my knees. My ass was already numb. Jeremy navigated his creaking beater down Hollywood Boulevard, stopped in front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre. An Asian kid jumped in. We were four now. The car scraped metal at every bump. Too much weight.

Those two in the back hit it off right away…well.. she hit it off…

“You’re from China? China’s really big. It’s so big! What are you doing here?”

“Looking at schools”. He knew the words, but they came out funny. “Rookin ahh skuz.”

She was rattling like a tea kettle…“China must be the biggest country in the world! What type of math do they have there? Jeremy, hey Jeremy (she taps Jeremy’s shoulder, since he is an admitted math major) what kind of math do we use? Like gallons? (She turns back to the Chinese kid) Do you use gallons or meters?”

I wanted to kill someone. Why kill myself? It’d be better to leave her alongside the highway like a litter of kittens. She’d probably wander into the road and get smacked down. Save me a prison sentence. Expensive lawyers. Three strikes you’re out.

She can’t keep quiet, she’s so excited to learn about China.

“Do you like reggae?”

“Reggae? Yes, I like reggae.” He says. He talks slow, like each word is too heavy for his tongue to lift. His lips are flexing as he talks, his jowls strain, his neck has wiry sinews jutting out as he heaves the word “Reggae” back to the chirping bird.

“I do too.” She says. She was satisfied with her communist friend. He liked reggae. The world was moving towards peace, thanks to her gentle line of questioning. She could always find the common denominator. She was a regular saint. She worked with children. These types always end up talking like we’re hearing words for the first time.

“Do you like Los Angeles” she asked him, and the way she worked her mouth made me want to stick something in it. You know what. She was going to ask if he wiped his ass with paper or used a stick. “Do you brush your teeth?” She was going to give him a lesson on double knots for his sneakers next. I’d like to pull those laces around her neck…God it made my blood boil to listen to her rambles.

I never got a good look at her. She sat behind me. Sometimes if they’re pretty enough you can just tune them out and feel good looking at their waist. Their neck. Just take your time and check out each part. By then they may be done talking. They feel better. You feel better too. But like I said, she was behind me. I had nothing to look at but my knees. The were tickling my chin.

But the driver- I could see him! What a set of lips. Jeremy. He was nearly albino, just a chromosome away from a couple of rare medical things…mongoloid-ism for instance. He’d looked at me when I climbed in, I saw straight up the caverns of his nostrils. They were stuffed with plugs of the whitest hair I’d ever seen. I looked away. Sickened.

And the Dutch-boy haircut was too much. Who models themselves after a kid on a paint can? He really had it down. Same straw color hair. Same mixing bowl haircut. Next time tell his mother to leave the bowl out, fill it with water and drown the poor son of a bitch.

The only person in the car I could stand was the chink. He mumbled a few English phrases between front teeth that looked like a short pair of chopsticks, then put his head back and closed his slits. He didn’t want to hear how big China was one more time either.

I felt bad for America. We really were the worst. Our whole population was a bunch of nitwits. The Chinaman, he was on the ball. Smarter than the three of us white folks put together. This wasn’t a stereotype. This was the four of us in a car for seven hours. I know. I was there. I KNOW. It’s OVER for White America.

The little gal was taking writing courses and thinking about studying Chinese herbs. She was thinking about studying a lot of things. Beat generation writers. Raki. Or traveling. There were some music festivals in the woods somewhere she’d heard about. Maybe she’d do that for the summer. Catch a disease, have her heart broken, swallow cum. She’d really explore herself.

She took care of children now. Wiped their noses, their asses. She was a hippy she said. The Chink and I could care less. Who was she talking to? Jeremy. The driver. But he had his head up his ass. He couldn’t talk to a woman. It got his wiring screwy. He breathed weird when she spoke.

The Chinaman, I never heard his name, never asked for it either, he wanted to find a school in America where he could study Engineering. He was interested in making a wrecking ball with Mao’s bones to swing into Alan Greenspan’s brains. Man were we fucked. America was full of losers. The only smart ones were here on a visa.

We finally stop for gas and a piss break. Two women behind the cash register are squabbling in some Oriental jive. Turned out to be Cantonese. Hong Kongers. Our boy knew Mandarin. He put those two chickens straight. They wouldn’t let us in to use the toilet. He said a few things and they stopped clucking. I went in and what a piss I took. Five hours worth. I was fire proof for a while back there. It smelled weird. Maybe the hamburger I ate for lunch?

Why do I call us losers? Now you understand.

The dizzy girl asked what the country was that smoked a lot of pot. She answered her own question.

“Jamaica. I couldn’t think of the name! HAHAHAHA!!!” Smart girl. Dizzy isn’t the beginning. She was tilted. A broken pinball machine. The flappers flapped at air. No balls.

Our white pilot, inbred from ultra northern European stock, a bunch of Viking butt-fuckers and cannibals in his lineage I’m sure. He spoke worse English than the slant eyed kid napping back there. His ugly sausage lips tripped up his vocabulary. They were too stuffed. God stuck hoofs and all in when He cased them. His lips hung off his face. Full of shit. His skin was so white he looked like something living under a rock. His nose holes were huge, as I mentioned. His fat lips may have crawled out from his brain down the nostrils, widening them so grotesquely.

His eyelids were too thin to hold pigment, the splash of veins gave off a red glow that made him look mental. Great bulging eyes. A real goblin. He squeaked out nervous laughs as an ellipses to his unfinished sentences. What a bore. What a pain. Seven hours I signed up for? Chewing on my knees the whole way. Los Angeles to San Francisco. I was the dumbest one of the lot.

They were okay. Just kids. They still had a chance to wise up. They might grow into their eyes. Learn a thing or too. Stop asking questions. Not me. I was an old dog with one trick. Biting.

I had ten years on them at least. Too poor for a train, let alone a plane. I was the real problem with America. Practically hitchhiking to San Francisco to pursue a Master degree in Poetry – at a crummy state school. I might as well be heading to Wisconsin to try shoving my dick in my ass for the folks at the county fair. It was all just as pointless as the other.

I’d put my nose in a book as soon as we hit the highway, let them talk around me. Then night came. Not enough light to read so I stared at the page until it was too dark to fool them. I had to listen, then the questions came. Growling didn’t stop them. When the little gal found out it was Poetry I studied, she asked, “Who’s your favorite poet?”

“Me” I told her. She wants to hear a name she’ll recognize. What do I care? I don’t want a gold star from her. If I play her game she’ll forget what I tell her by the time the next telephone pole whizzes past. We’re doing 75 mph. We might as well talk batting averages or recite lines from our favorite movies. She wants a bell to ring in her brain. Even better, let’s sing about beer bottles! There’s common ground. What a conversationalist! She was a real impresario. It was all names and dates with her, like a 5th grade history lesson. I didn’t like that shit then. Today I’m not feeling any different.

“I like Neruda” she told me. Oh? Hooray! She has a favorite poet! I rattled off my grandfathers’ names, a few French words, just to seem social. She liked them too. She was happy to agree. All great poets. Especially Reconteur…

That Chinese, I can’t get over him. An adventurer, a world traveler, and looking for an education. That’s the difference. That’s where I went wrong. That’s where we’ve lost.

The white kids are out looking for kicks. I was chasing the footsteps of a Massachusetts mill-town drunk, thinking that would change the world. I traveled the world myself at that kid’s age. On The Road. I was watching it all going by, looking at how one country’s girl’s asses stacked up to the next. I was excited to be able to drink in bars without a fake ID. Yeah, I loved to travel. The different plants you could chew, smoke and snort. That was the life. Never read a book that had any facts in them. I loved opinions. That practical stuff wasn’t the way, not for me. Poetry. Travels. Binges.

But this little Mandarin, he was here to get a trade. To learn a skill. Sure, he’d have a little fun, take in some sights, try to put his dick somewhere hot and moist. But when he got to be my age, he’d have something. He wouldn’t be trying to decide if he should start rhyming his stanzas again or not. He’d have a bridge built. Maybe a missile silo pointing at my university. His favorite poet? He probably had an answer to that too.

I undid my pants…I was going to get that dick of mine in my ass if it killed me.

“I can’t sleep in LA. The city is under surveillance. Same with Philadelphia. Cops escort me wherever I go. It’s like the “check engine” light? A mapping system.

This is my last cigarette. I try to control the smoke, so it just goes in one lung, then I switch. But you can’t. You can’t do that. When I get in my car I turn on the A.C. and point those vents…(breathes in deep and tilts head back).

I have three bouncers. Inflatable castles for parties. I have Spiderman, Dora and Spongebob. They’re clean. I don’t charge tax. I don’t care how long you have them, I just want them back in the same condition.

I need another cigarette. Marijauna is addictive. I was addicted to it, but I cured myself with cough syrup. Six or seven bottles. That sent me bi-polar.”

A Koreatown hotel, four stories tall. The entrance is through a parking garage, idling exhaust walks in with you to a lobby tiled in dime sized rectangles of mirror. The color on the tv in the lobby is bleeding out from old tube technology, the Koreans on it look like they are living in a hippy era. Psychedelic.

A young kid is behind the counter, online. Kevin is just outside sitting on the low cement bar at the end of an empty parking spot. He came out with a cigarette behind each ear and smoked each one into the filter. He had been in LA for two weeks. Kevin is 22, married and separated with a six year old child that lives with his parents. This was his story.

Up north an hour east of Reno there’s a real pretty white gal with long legs living alone in her gooseneck trailer. She’s been out of work awhile. She was a chip hustler at the casinos. Not a pretty term, but that’s what she did. Stand close to a guy who’s hitting big and hope he’d call her “Lady Luck†and slide a fat stack of chips over to her. Got to the point where every pit boss in town had banned her from their establishment.

Today she is sitting in a plastic lawn chair you buy at drugstores. It doesn’t fold, it’s a white stacking chair turning grey from weather. She’s dipping her toenail polish brush in a gallon of lemon drop yellow latex paint. A little habachi on the ground next to her is smoking with Hillshire Farms Cheddar-burst sausages.

The sound of an ice cream truck is in the distance:

Do da do do
Doo doo
Do da do do
Doo doo
Do da Doo Doo do do do
Do da doo doo do do

It pulls off the two lane road and parks, kicking up the dust on the dirt shoulder. Rachel holds the book in her hands over her toes to keep the dust off them. The music continues as a young black man comes to the window.

“Afternoon Ms. Rachel. Enjoying this weather?”

“I am, I am Anthony. Putting a coat of paint on the toes and doing my So duko’s.”

“Now I’m not familiar with that.”

“Japanese puzzles. I bought a book of ‘em after Jill at the salon gave me some to work on while my permanent set. I’m hooked!”

“Be careful you don’t end up blowing your whole paycheck on them things now…”

“Don’t worry sugar, they’re fun but they don’t have the thrill of the tables…”

“I’m sure they don’t. I’m sure they don’t. I stopped by to see if I could get you anything from the coolers on this hot afternoon.”

“My A.C quit and that tin can heats up fast. You know how I like those chaco taco’s…”

“I saved one for you Rachel, they’re a hot seller, but I saved one for you.”

“I can’t get up right now, though, this coat hain’t done drying yet.”

“Company policy states I’m not to leave the vehicle ‘cept for fueling up…”

“Guess if you can wait five minutes this coat’ll be dry ‘nough for me to make my way down there.”

“Sure, sure, I got five minutes. Say, I heard you picked up a little job down the antique shop.”

“Yeah, it’s two days a week though, not enough to pay rent here. I need a second job. Any ideas?”

“How about taking in foreign exchange students? My sister in law does that, makes $750 a month, just has to feed ‘em, that’s all.”

to be continued…

Celine wrote entire novels using elipses rather than periods…even after exclamations!…It was a unique style..and his thoughts!…a real master of the phrase!..

Here is another excerpt from “Castle to Castle”, not a very great book by him. Look for Journey to the End of the Night, or if not that, Death on the Installment Plan for some real disbelief in mankind’s goodness. Here is the master:

It’s hard to get animals to reproduce in a zoo, but people, even condemned to death, even hunted by Leclerc’s army, with the woods full of Fifis and the whole R.A.F. on top of them thundering day and night, don’t lose their desire to squirt!…Anywhere you go, you’ll find people who manage to enjoy themselves.. if tomorrow the earth turns into ashes and plaster…a cosmos of protons… in some hole in the mountains you’ll still find a batch of haggard lunatics buggering and sucking each other, swilling and piling it in…

Thank you Celine. I have written today’s entry in his style. Enjoy:

And these homeowners…little kings in little kingdoms…refrigerators full of pickles and milk…is that mail-order glue-and-sawdust sandwich-wood your castle?…Or have you screwed over your own mother to buy a place with gold shitters?…doesn’t matter if it’s two cardboard boxes laid open-ends together so you can crawl in and stretch your legs out…you still hate your neighbors…they make too much noise pissing and fucking…Children don’t understand wars…”Why are they fighting?” …give them a tree fort…see how long before they throw a rock down on your head…now they understand!…Property Rights!…Tresspassing!…They’ll smash you for snooping around!..

________________________________________________________________________

A friend is making a documentary film about downtown Los Angeles. “I wish I was a writer, I can’t capture these amazing moments down here, as soon as I take out the camera people change.”

I told her to just talk to me and I would write it down for her. She declined, saying it would take too long.

“Then we’ll make it a poem, they only take a minute!” I said. So here it is. A poem about a journey to the Los Angeles River.

When I was there the light was a De Chirico painting,
The freight train was stalled,
The river just a trickle.

Longshoremen back the cars out of the ship and onto the shore. Roll On Roll Off, or Ro-Ro for short, tail of the ship drops down to form a ramp. Eight levels are revealed, each holding hundreds of brand new vehicles from the import market. No more than 3 miles allowed on a vehicle’s odometer before it is considered used. So longshoremen always drive them in reverse.

Try craining your neck backwards for an eight hour shift when you offload one thousand BMW’s in Jacksonville, Florida one sunny afternoon.

Think about what you want to do for a living.

At 19 I got a job with two guys who did remodeling. What a great job I thought. I got to knock down walls with a big sledge-hammer. My boss drank beer all afternoon, then we quit at four. We threw things off roofs and out windows. I decided that was what I wanted to do.

I wish I had thought things through a little more.

__________________________________________________________________________

Message For Special Reader’s: Click here to see the Ro-Ro your adventurous author sailed on all the way from J-ville to United Arab Emirates! Yes, I washed dishes on this happy little ship for four months!

http://www.msc.navy.mil/inventory/ships.asp?ship=4&type=ContainerRollonRolloffShip

(Don’t forget to come back here, please)

In recent news the faithless became explained. For these souls the only hope for salvation is pharmaceutical. A preacher’s demon becomes a demon preaching. A demon in the sermon. Heaven’s Devils. A man playing a doctor on television began to notice he was different than the others. Research conducted at prestigious campus’s revealed a lack of specific proteins on the 13th strand of DNA normally associated with holy rolling. It appears God fucked up.
“How can I believe when I can’t believe?†asked the genetically skeptical actor who has since landed a role as a priest into molestation.

Always the dark kid, mad at something…sunshine, other children’s voices. Mad at toys. Mad at the television. He was a kid stabbing walls with a pocket knife and mad that he couldn’t punch the house down, mad he was afraid to burn the fucker. Right down, Mom and all. Mad something inside said, “No”. With that voice he would never conquer anything.

“oh, if they only “prescribed”…they couldn’t do much harm! Hof Richter was out of everything…But those bastards always wanted to operate! anything, any way, hernia, otitis (1), warts, cysts!…they all wanted to slice…they wanted to be surgeons!…it’s an intersting fact, even in normal times, that the screwball bone-setters, chiropracters, faith-healers, fakirs etc. are never satisfied to dish out advice, pills, phials, good-luck charms, or caramels…oh no!… they’ve got to have Grand Opera!….the real thing!….they’ve got to see people bleeding…throbbing…oh, I won’t go as far as Daudet, but it seems pretty obvious…that surgery, even the most legal and official kind…has a good deal of the Roman Circus about it!…human sacrifice a la Tartuffe!…and the victims want more and more! absolutely masochistic! they want everything cut off or out…nose, bosom, ovaries…and the surgeons make hay! precision butchers, watchmakers!…your son’s going into it? …has he got the real assassin’s instinct?…innate?…the old Anthropithecus (2)inside him? is he a born trepanner(3), brain ladler, Cro-Magnon?…good!…good!…excellent! a cave man? splendid! tell him to sign up! He’s got what it takes!…surgery’s his cookie! he’s got the makings of a great surgeon!…the ladies, so pinheaded, so sadistic, will swoon at the mere sight of his hands…”oh, what hands!…what hands!”…they’ll go crazy! they’ll get down on their knees and beg him to take everything! and not wait! their money! their dowry! their uterus! their essential! their tits! disembowel them completely! …turn their peritoneum(4) inside out… clean them like rabbits! their guts…their organs! several pounds, a whole trayful!…oh wonderful darling assassin!

1. Otitis is any of several disorders involving infection and/or inflammation of the internal or external ear.

2. Anthropithecus: African ape

3. trepanner:
one who operates on with a trephine.

so, tre·phine (trÄ­-fÄ«n’)

A cylindrical or crown saw for the removal of a disk of bone, especially from the skull, or removal of other firm tissue such as that of the cornea.

4. peritoneum: membrane that forms the lining of the abdominal cavity, it both supports the abdominal organs and serves as a conduit for their blood and lymph vessels and nerves.

Louis-Ferdidnand Celine (author of the above) is getting me through some writers block. The way out is to form opinions. Unfortunately I don’t have any. I am in a strange mood, where I don’t believe in anything, and can’t make a decision. It’s times like this where a strong opinion needn’t be good or true to be passionately believed. I’m ripe for a cult or a war.

A Pacific Palisades gas station (near Santa Monica beach) has Biodiesel at the pump. Just pull up, pay too much – it is a fancy full serve station and someone will hand wash your windshield – and drive away. I am finally back on the Bio-wagon after leaving the San Francisco Biofuel co-op. The Bearded Lady, as my truck is known, is running happier now. Thanks vegetable kingdom!

The soda machine was advertising the introduction of Diet Coke. The man behind the front desk was protected by an iron grate. He looked like he was from thirty years ago too. I paid him ten dollars to go up to room 506 to visit my friend.

“Visitor Charge. Hotel policy,” he told me.

506 had a window. That was the nicest thing about it. You could sit on the sill and look out and pretend you weren’t inside.

left on the curb

“Maybe a hamburger today. Had one Wednesday though.”