Marry Like Water (Destiny’s Daughter’s Wine) February 1, 2009

Marry our daughter. We’re out of food and water, fresh escargot, His cargo full of grilled caribou, fine wine, Malibu tofu in a fine, tangy goo. We wannabe richly constantly passing contented constipation like million dollar bills, gorgeously green, sun-tanning naked in the bright sunlight on top our Lord baby Jesus’ thrift-store dresser.

We know Kimberly S. is a good Christian girl deep down in her heart, but she’s too hot to trot, probably smokes pot in the Quickie Mart parking lot. She needs a STRONG Christian man with STRONG Christian values to beat out the living daylights with the rod of Todd and his thick-as-a-Bible belt. 79 thousand dollars and you can make her holler, straight up legal like the Regal in the US of A. Just turned 14, she’ll smell like Maybelline for Teens as she’s washing your floor down on all fours, loving Britney just like Jesus, maybe even more. Money for holy matrimony will make a nice down payment on Daddy’s speedboat sacrament, maybe buy Mommy Imelda Marcos’ thousand pairs of shoes, half-off at Good Will.

So marry our daughter. Fresh, young, 13, she’s ready for her sacred rite of passage, that first kiss on the altar of love, tied up tight like virginity in the throngs of King Kong. Pubescent perdition is a family tradition, going all the way back to great, great grandma’s first menstrual cramps. Her mom married at 13, like her grandma and her grandma’s grandma, engaged before the legal age to get an abortion without Daddy’s permission in 1 out of 5 states. She may be too young to drink 3 percent beer, would rather date Richard Gere, but she’s legally yours for $56,000.

Lord, please, marry our daughter. She dresses in black, depression-drenched in Kerouac, like nighttime was a bottle of wine and the moon’s just some lousy beatnik. 15, droning poems like some aging gnome squatting on a mushroom barstool, she’s wondering when her old soul will begin again. She’s got the mind of a Bodhavista, the body of Hannah Montana dressed like Marilyn Manson, but for 42 thousand clams, she’ll damn well darn socks, polish floors, bloody indeed breed for the seed of the Lord.

See, bride price is a Biblical tradition, a Moses cure-all prescription for teenage sedition. When good ol’ boy Shechem raped Jacob’s daughter, it took some hefty hauling to get her to his kitchen to make him some bacon. We’re talking circumcision down to size, not just himself but the whole fucking countryside, every male down the line giving a little skin so this mother fucking rapist can get by. Circumcised by circumstance comes up in the Bible only once in a while, usually as some weird-ass pimp fee, a Ticket Bastard charge on a credit card, some slice of super congealed Ronald Reagan lard on your wheat melba toast. Like Holy Matrimonies don’t cost enough money, they’ll slice off a piece of dick to boot too.

Or how about King David schilling out 100 Philistinian foreskins like onion ring tokens of true radiant love? Hell, it’s in the Bible, people raping, foreskin forking, fucking sick ass shit, flaming on a stick, like hell’s bowels owns a website and all the bust-a-religiousnuts subscribe.

To kind of world do we want to subscribe? Selling our daughters for a cup of cold water, a diamond ring, the American dream, legal as a steeple and somehow justified by God? Girls locked and stocked like bunnies on the 4-H auction block, sold like slaves, like livestock, adding acres to the farm and a Jacuzzi with a view. Is Jesus the confessor of Chester the Molester; how can Sunday go so horribly wrong?

When will we realize we are the eyes of God? We are imagination mentioning infinity, our own tree falling in the woods, hearing our thoughts for the very first time. Infinite love is instantly intent when we choose to invent it, ascend into the bend to see who we really are. We are the sons of a Sun, the daughters of a Star, a rippling divinity of Creation’s creativity, an idea born from Universal dust. When we will we marry our destiny, choose true love and become happily ever after?

Everywhere are miracles, like marigolds shining bright in this Milky Way night, as open as a Universal Kiss. Kindness opens minds, as hydrogen doubles oxygen into water’s weddings’ wine.

Mary up in Smoke (Nirvana’s Ocean Blue Skies) February 1, 2009

Mary had a little lamb, a little house, a prairie, starched pure white all buttoned tight, a contrary sanctuary. For everywhere that Mary went, puberty publicly followed, flying high on Junior High, nursing rhymes soaked in sin like a hymen’s hymn.

Because just like Jesus’ best friends, Mary exists, or does do did, since was is shall will ever be and we are altogether now. A living nursery rhyme, a day in the life of time, a shooting star jumping over the moon, spooning the cow as the fiddler jams “Stairway to Heaven” on a roof-topped 80s’ luxury van.

Legend takes whatever it can get. Apparently in 1830, a prairie girl named Mary fell head over summer’s salt in love with a motherless lamb, sweating schoolgirl desire like Ritchie Havens’ divinity in a Woodstock sun. Living up to being a legend long after her time, Mary took the lamb to school one day, stashing lamb chops under her coat like some dime bag of schwag, sticks and stems and seeds as white as snow.

‘Cause the smell of lamb follows you for days, Mary got busted and dazed in a lamb-loving haze as all the children laughed. The teacher discovered when Mary’s lamb lived up to a poem, following Mary around like some religious nut bugging Jesus for His autograph. A preacher’s kid wrote it all down and gave the poem to Mary, making nursery rhyme history, immorality’s reality against a sea of forgotten graves. For off the God boy went to Harvard with this literary gift, where he upped and dropped dead of tuberculosis, never even getting close to writing his thesis.

True story. With a moral. Give it while you’ve got it ‘cause you’re gonna be dead. Tell that story to the next four-year-old in bed, and maybe, just maybe, he’ll take his own life serious enough to live, actually give blood sweating blues like a rift, like Dr. Teeth is his Jesus, gliding high in a double-decker Muppet Magic bus doling dayglow to the masses.

Yes, Mary and her lamb lived real flesh and blood, riddled in acne, 12-year-old blues, out of key puberty in prescription elevator shoes. Like Jesus Abraham Lincoln Abercombie & Fitch, Mary had problems, bad days, down and out dues, hoping to God this world’s blues pay something in the end. Thank God it does, as whoremongering hormones score golden orgasms of sin, like smiley faces in the Special Olympics of life, dark deep thoughts growing hair on their hands as everyone goes blind. Buttoned down in mutton down, Mary couldn’t see a thing.

Maybe Mary masturbates an afterlife of glowing red fire to Buddha’s dark blue hue, but what I want to know is, why’d they have to burn her house down, Mr. Death?

Six six-packs of Schlitz may have had something to do with it. Last summer, two rednecks from Clinton torched the house Mary grew up in. In a flash of fire and brimstone nursery rhyme arson, Mary’s innocence burned down to the ground, like some distant memory of a 3-parred, 9-holed ancient Indian burial mound.

But innocence dies as soon as we’re born. From that first brilliant moment of God’s holy orgasm of prepubescent blues, we’re all born gods and demons, wrestling the wheel of this ethereal areoplane, nose diving or shooting high into Buddha’s blue Zen. Get your kicks while you can, but believe in oxygen. Everyone soars into the same blue Nirvana wind, whether sky blue oceans or ocean blue skies, all ending as one, buy and by.

Sun Stroke Broke Rock Stars (Ride Billboard Verbs to Paradise) September 12, 2008

Gushing gas tickles my foot sole, red needle soaring seventy-five miles per whore. Driving through the soul flying depths of a 4-hour daydreamed highway mind, we tumble into Cleveland, pavement ticking time bomb winding down sound. Cleveland steams reeking concrete, coagulating Jacob’s Field’s bowl like the pain of a drain, some swollen bad dream melting sunny runny pavement down a concrete grate. A red light stops us outside Gate D where, stretched like a pirate wretch across the home of the Cleveland Indians, a banner spells car insurance hell: Progressive Field, sludged sewage against the bowl, Cleveland’s very soul sold tooth and nail for a couple of cheap insurance quotes, pieces of shitty junk mail.

Yet sailing somewhere in some back room air, conditioned to chill, Widespread Panic tickles butterflies for breakfast, nervous nerves readying to soar into verbs. Southern blueberry jam headlines a drunk turtle passed out on the Cuyahoga bank tank. For like the formerly known Jacob’s Field, Nautica is too sloshed to know its own name: The Plain Dealer Pavilion sold out like a paper cut, bleeding green gold money of journalist deceit. Slurping dreamless burps, a turtle lurched in Cleveland-drenched tequila hurt, while on the other side of the void, we writhe with the skyscrapers, wondering where in the hell we are.

Driving into industrial skyscraping rapiers, we grow greatly gestated with nuclear confusion, ionically ironic like a comic’s tonic dreaming dry martinis, eyes squinting winking olives in the sizzling sun. Street name serial letters sleep surreally, like David Lynch drooling midnight snot down the oblivion of the obvious. Slipping into knowwhere, we come out the other-side and make port, stepping out onto the flat ground of the Flats like we were walking on the moon.

Wondering where in the hell we are anymore. A parking lot full of tour kids, and not one drippy armpits-sweating-hippie veggie burrito for sale. Lot rats keep what’s theirs hidden under hats as golf-carted Narcs patrol-troll for unlicensed capitalists doling cheap insurance to the masses, what-the-fuck-only-a-buck grilled cheeses sizzling in the running sun.

Inside the drunk turtle, a burger with a belly button for a pickle costs $8. Corona, no lime for the spine, costs another $7. Water to bathe is $5 a bottle. One drinking fountain is broken, the other personally escorted by the Secret Service, America’s Dixie Cups staked down and shackled in the name of Homeland Security.

Arteries numb from all the nickels and dimes rolled up our sleeves for this shot down the mainline, “Good evening ladies and gents” bounces off a bass line, electricity ionizing blood veins like a cicada-sick dance orgy, an extra-terrestrial insectival carnival, souls sprouting bug wings flying into the sun. Dancing on toes off the edge of our nose, we look around, wondering where in the hell we are anymore.

A crowd receding like John Bell’s hairline, brushed against the wind, that border between hair and bare, bald forehead, alone in a breeze of long slacker locks flying in the evening. There’s hardly anybody here. Half the size of Widespread’s usual venue, the place isn’t even packed. I’ve seen bigger crowds at Christian Bible boot camps, those jam-packed gymnasiums of nameless trolls doling out the Gospel to Noah’s gnolls, truth’s science cascading down an Oreo Cookie Grand Canyon of the Damned.

Damn close enough to count their nose hair, John Bell becomes our Southern Jesus, our cesspool of Gospel spelled out in a crawling, drawling Southern-fried tide. Dave Schools pools of fish, bending bassy rubbery rivers of imagination, percussion mentioning dreams of prophetic phonetics, blood dream streaming runny entropy all over the sun.

But man, I hope they eat okay. Playing crowds thin as hairlines, it seems like Widespread could use a tip jar to siphon a few gallons of gas, a free pack of smokes for that long ride home. Junior high school drama shows sell out the nose, while this concert looks like we’re all waiting for a bus, straggling like third graders kicking stones with our toes. No wonder- gas, tickets, water richer than cigarettes cost a priceless price for any American to express. My wallet is $100 in the hole. What a rot. A good concert anymore costs a discount whore in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Because like a salt lick on a tequila flesh wound, the All Mighty Dollar burns in hell. Money makes us billboard asses as Progressive Fields the Plain Dealer in a back ally deal, and Verizon’s Wireless Quickens Loans with briefcases full of money and mountains of cocaine. That’s how bebop got bought, modified, new and improved, synthesized in a lab for that brand-new spanking taste of Reebok Mountain Dew.

Maybe broke as a bar of soap, a Bearded Self will still nod a nod on nothing but a beard for a chin and a nod for a god, metro-gnoming his sins away. But like the propulsion of dynamic thermals sweating in this heat, if that stoned-out leer skips a beat for a flip of a sec, the entire band will vaporize just like Jesus, flying smoke into the sun, nothing but a bootleg sunburn to look back on.

Marsh Mellow July 3, 2008

Like a Dagoba hangover sludged in a bulge of mental diarrhea, homo sapien-sapped thespians wake up with their wings in the shit. Librarians, lawyers, Tom Sawyer’s hair stylist, Jack the Ripper’s cadaver makeover miracle maker all get their wits in a twit.

Artists, writers, Jim Henson’s right-hand man may make colossal religions out of creative block, but every man, woman, little green guy drains brain’s desperation down the drain on a universal basis. Desperation blues bruises our skin like little blue elephants trampling Yoda’s scrotum when the Tums won’t hum the whiskey into submission.

But as desperate as the thick may take, as dense as sense makes cents, imagination’s pain bends with perspective. Leave your brain a long time ago, go lax far away, step out of the ooze, and the hangover booze of the marsh screws loose.

Do or do not; do not try- size matters not when you bend with the slime, make-believe the marsh’s a marshmallow, the sludge of edible rubber, the bulge of extraterrestrial chewing gum from Chewbacca’s sack full of candy.

Imagine your sin’s marshmallow. Every mark you’ve ever missed, every wrong in a g-thong is just the gooey mass of humans being human. Forgive your empty bliss. Time doesn’t have to be right all the time.

Give it up to the fire. Melt molten marshmallow down the Hershey’s of a missed-masturbation Graham Cracker. Let the thick drip slowly, swollen bubbly until the ooze drips down the stick. Burst into flames if you have to, sacredly sacrifice the Stay Puft for Ray Parker, Jr.’s soul.

Bill Murray never minds, whether its ghosts the size of marshmallows or gophers on LSD. When movie sets collide, you know he and Yoda will be toking it up on a leather couch, wondering what it’s all about. Are Ray Parker, Jr. and Lando Calrissian twins, ying and yang in past lives, or stunt double alternates for Days of our Lives?

Take your mind off the gophers, lull the marsh mellow, raise your X-wing right out of the shit. Go with it.

What would Yoda do? Jedi Kung-fu makes an ultimate guru.

Bag Lady Freedom: Free Food for the Bums June 4, 2008

Dread locked down his mane, Eric Montanez panhandles mass feeding orgies in broad daylight, free soup to hazy lazy crazies, those sap happy lushes of taxpayer expense. The mommy humping commie degrades McDonald’s- undercutting like a bris bargain basement sale, half off to mazal tov, selling out to God for the skin of the homeless. Oh, the humanity. Giving it away for free. Sodomizing Capitalism with a broomstick, going Gomorrah on John Locke’s wet dream.

Thank the Lord in Orlando, Florida, the official real estate of the National Mickey Mouse Socialite Party, you can get arrested for feeding the homeless. It makes sense. Give it up to the squirrels, and the whole world will wallow in squirrel crappy rap stars, gibbering and screwing and smoking dope in the park.

God gave us George Bush, making more homeless on earth than squirrels in the world. Feed bums for free, and they’ll rampage Disney, chase all the minivans to Milwaukee.

The official wording of an Orlando City Ordinance makes it illegal for a single person to feed more than 25 people for free. This means that Orlando food lines must have plenty of hands to handle the ladles. Every 25th down the gravy train makes a new shift and cigarette lift for the soup-kitchen lunch lady. Change hands, change brands, and a new person takes over to feed the hungry people for free.

But Montanez can’t play by the rules of a free market society; he’ll do just what the fuck, no thought to the economy or Disney’s national security, giving it up freely, like words, like turds, like bowl after bowl of pinko Commie gluttony.

So defending Capitalism in the name of Florida, donut dunking, toe-tapping gum shoes staked out his soup kitchen. Round the clock surveillance witnessed Montanez serve over 30 bowls of soup before Special Agents moved in, slapping his wrists slaphappy silly in a cuff-slapping happy spree. Bag lady narcs nabbed test tubes of soup for the boys at the crime lab, bagged and tagged like Dragnet in drag.

The Special Forces involved could fill a short bus on a trip to the zoo. At least a dozen cops took part in the soup kitchen field trip, small fries compared to the city’s spiraling crime problem. Faced with a whooping 49 murders last year, Orlando officials have asked for more than 75 additional police officers in the coming year. Let’s dress them like the homeless and put them on the frontline; serve to protect America one breadline at a time.

Sonny Crockett in thrift-store pajamas, Jesus Christ in latter-day flannel, Nick Nolte on a bad bender with an atomic blender, the homeless vice don johnson at night ‘cause the future’s so bright. Can’t afford a Super Value Happy Happy Meal? Up against the wall, unless you’d prefer to kneel.

But not even Tubbs reflecting Gucci in the slick midnight, nor ninjas slicing leotards in bright moonlight, could retard Montanez from his soup kitchen bitchin’. No FBI file could stop him; no prison sentence could make him get a job. Montanez feeds people freely like Anarchy is a free country. The pages of his Anarchist Cookbook are splattered with the blood of spaghetti sauce, recipes sticky with resins of benevolent substances.

In fact, just before his court appointed Judgment Day, the soup slut served lunch in the nearby park to children and puppies, moms and dads, your grandmother and her bull-dyke girlfriend, multitudes eating and laughing like being  arrested for feeding people was the funniest thing they ever heard.

Not even the judge could keep a straight face. The judge acquitted Montanez, but told him to obey the law. Adults love to say stuff like that- whether you’ve just kissed a flagpole in zero-degree weather, second-amended Red Rider bb guns or fed hundreds of homeless people because you just can’t put your arms down.

But we know better. We know damn well if the law is ridiculous, break it like the wind, freely and loudly. Make the world break open a window for a breath of fresh air that doesn’t smell like underwear.

Conscientious objects. MLK, Gandhi, Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day danced like halos of moonlight in a diamond-studded night. They gave it up freely, nonviolently ultravioletly, shining bright against obnoxious, apathetic darkness, filling our dreams with light. It will be a great day when the people have all the food they need, and at least once a year, Disney lets all the bag ladies in for free.

Porno BVDs: A Living History (The Lakota Secede from the Union) April 2, 2008

Flapping thin wind, disco-yellow bikini briefs fly the Rand McNally flagpole one sunny Sunday just as church let’s out in the morning. Leopard-spotted in the crotch, seventies silk sings in the sunlight, so brightly loud they could only belong to a porno beef-cake hooked to the gills on purple-shagged cargo vans, racked in the back with waterbeds rolling in their wake.

With a little imagination, that’s what the map of the new Republic of the Lakota looks like- obnoxious sex undies flying across the horizon of the United States of America. The Lakota have seceded from the Union free and legal, thanks to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a free independent nation. Its map looks as if the spirit of Mo-nah-se-tah slipped out from under Custer’s drunk, passed-out body, and strung his bikini G-string up the flagpole. The slick stains of the Yellow Haired rapist flap across the map for the whole world to see.

Treaties promised sovereignty as long as the river flows and the eagle flies, but the water was damned, every bird shot dead by the white man, murdered in the river to drench the gold in a bloody-red American sunset. The generals slaughtered the buffalo to “destroy the Indians commissary,” and when the Lakota starved, they told them to eat the grass, eat shit.

When the Lakota defended themselves, they called it a massacre. When the Lakota were massacred, they called it Indian Affairs. Sitting Bull may have scalped Custer’s Yellow Hair, but the grandsons of Yellow Hairs banished him to a freak act carnival ride as Buffalo Bill rewrote the history of time.

But still Wild Bill remembers: “Every Indian outbreak I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government.”

Surrender surrounds serenity; serenity bleeds from broken promises. When the Lakota Ghost Dancers surrendered, serenity flowed like a river all over Wounded Knee. Men, women, children murdered in the snow like Buffalo, like Eagles, like beautiful elemental animals, rising into fog, whispering their names in our dreams.

Four days after the Massacre of Wounded Knee, the Wizard of Oz spelled history: “…our only safety depends on the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

The yellow brick road is paved with gold and washed in blood, meandering through the heart of the American Indian. The white man tried to wipe Indians from the face of their own minds, boarding schools obliterating languages, dances, grandmothers. Babies sold as vegetables. Reservation starvation in a country made of millionaires.

Lakota men die at 44, the lowest life expectancy on earth. Lakota infants die at 200 times the national average. Extermination through litigation, water rights sapped, property stolen right off the map. Untamable refugees shot in the back, stuffed in the trunk of the white man’s Cadillac.

The same white man who owned blues musicians like cattle, whipped them and raped them and fed them to sharks. Sold their families. Stole their names.

Yet blues music bleeds identity, gushing like veins. Listen as Jazz Blues Bebop believes I am me, Black is beautiful, what a wonderful (sad) world.

Because the greatest blow to oppression is to be. Exist. Existential becomes elemental when the Small Pox Holocaust says you should be dead. Simply being alive honors grandfathers’ great grandfathers. Alive to remember the headless buffalo, the frozen bodies at Wounded Knee, the ancient burial grounds flattened by Wal-Marts and golf T’s.

Against all odds- Calvary bullets, smallpox for tots, brainwashing school farms, FBI hit goons, major league cartoons- the Republic of the Lakota lives. The Lakota exist, and so does the wind. North and South Dakota harvest the finest winds on continental America, enough to power every city in America. The Lakota will plant fields of windmills, like corn, and sell wind to the world like barrels of oil. May all the tribes gather in a circle and renounce their US citizenship, grow wind and become elemental again.

And flapping in that wind across the new map of the US shine Custer’s jungle spotted porno panties, American history with stains in the crotch. America may ignore it, pretend its undies mean nothing in the breeze, but the whole world can see. Let all the world salute the sad, tattered BVDs of American history, loud like booty music, glistening shit in the sun.

Chocolate Saves January 25, 2008

Spinning thin air, Earth’s Cocoon-warmed green blends well with Tree-Bark Brown as Africa shines like a Rusty, Crabby Apple, a warm reddish brown, a shade darker than Borscht, brown with just a hint of Mauved Beet.

Sun shines Ceremonial Gold, a golden hue hazed with a touch of Red Cent, a warm penny color as mountains mold Majestic Purple, a very near indigo blue, very regal, a bright, happy blue Aquarium with a splash of Dusty Wood Violet.

All the colors of Sherwin Williams shining the galaxy like a well-marketed Marble—commercialization at its finest covering the earth.

Step closer. Breathe in.

People smile like car salesmen skipping too and fro, dressed to the T in Old Navy happy and bright, sparkling as an underwear ad, the Fruit of the Loom of the Sports Section, splurging at the Mall on Jesus Christ’s Master Card, no payments or interest for the next six months.

Happy habits. Humvees idol like America, blowing fresh carbon with just a hint of Dynamo, a modern Fuchsia Feverishly Pink, super-bright fluorescence to be used in moderation for narrow trim, for example. Moderation heaps on our plate like a pile of Plum Brown smelling deep purplish, the color of a freshly plucked ripened plum fragrancing to High Heaven.

Greed’s what we need, tapioca caviar, diamonds and lace, beautiful black gold from the loins of the Earth, guaranteed by birth for the worth of a serf. Lord, let us surf.

Lean in. Smell the addiction. Not head on, glared in the glare of an alcoholic’s prediction, but real, in the periphery, where you can really smell the shit.

Curious disease. Alert-calm hoodlum eyes when the spoon’s got money to burn, blood-shot starvation when the stars vex Men. Will ya tell Bill Burroughs to shoot an apple off the head of a Mexican grave, shiver in a closet when the junk’s cleaned out?

Black gunk’s finite; dinosaurs are running out. We’re on the edge of Armageddon, like Mel Gibson ripped in ‘80’s leather, beating Tina Turner in the streets.

Like Mad Max men pretending to be Hell’s Angels, Andy Pag and John Grimshaw burned motorbikes across the Sierra at the turn of the last century. But then they smelled the oil burning in the periphery. It stank Plum Brown of regret.

So looking in the mirror last Christmas, Pag and Grimshaw drove an SUV to Timbuktu high on rabbit chocolate. From England across the Sierra, the pair drove a Bio Truck fueled by 3 tons of discarded chocolate bunny rabbits converted into 396 gallons of biodiesel, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Bio fuel made from Easter candy. Who knew?

Does Jesus? Has it dawned on the Son of God that even chocolate can be an alternative energy, while all the wile we burn holes in the ozone, painting the earth like some oily watercolor for our own cosmic fridge?

What will Jesus do when He opens humanity’s Master Card bill one cold Christmas Eve? Take His own name in vain? Curse God and the day we were born? Or will He kick back with Godiva, a good glass of scotch, put His feet on His desk, smell His smelly socks? 80 percent cocoa beans just might have the means to keep Jesus from blowing His top.

Robots in the Sky: Your Hallucinations Are Real January 16, 2008

“See that kite hanging from the power line? Could be GW spying us on his web cam.”

This news was dropped into the middle of the party like a little green bag, slapped on the picnic table as the night morphed into purple, hazy velvet, that certain satin Certs aftertaste sensing things are melting into strange.

“Yeah, it just might be a spy plane stealing energy from the electric wires to recharge its batteries.”

This dude wore no saucers for eyes. He didn’t see flying saucers on LSD. He didn’t live in a van. He dressed like his parents, and he didn’t play bass guitar in a New Age cover band.

“The United States Air Force is developing remote controlled spy planes to do extended surveillance missions,” the dude said. “They’ve got a wingspan of about a meter. They’ve only got so much juice, so the government is designing them to attach to electric wires and recharge. Then they change shape to look like pieces of trash.”

Fact is, the dude wore the button-down striped blue hue of a golfer, a martini slowly swaying on the deck of his tan Dockers, slick mirror wing tips shining brilliantly like the moon. Brushed eyebrows held up the crown of his wild bald spot. The dude could have sold insurance to schoolchildren, CEO’d executives up the ass. He could even be that nonchalant Dr. Man chanting, “Turn your head and cough.”

I coughed spasms of disbelief like that guy who took so much acid he thought he was a glass of orange juice. Couldn’t go to sleep or I’d spill all over myself.

“It’s real. Slashdot.org. Check it out.”

The story checked out. Slashdot.org led to a New ScientistTech news item that could fit on a blotter stamped with the Virgin Mother Mary smiling incandescently.

Science fiction is now the stuff of newspapers, because really the imagination of the Transformers generation is taking over the world. Government conspiracy believes in the brains that reigned in the golden age of Magnum pistol-transforming robots, choreographed psychopaths primed with an optical mind. Technology has made imagination impossibly possible, and I’ve seen the best minds of my generation deceived into working for the chain gang of the evil Decepticons.

Never look a piece of trash in the eye. Wave peace signs at the shoes hanging from the telephone lines; moon every electrocuted balloon with your own heart shaped loony tune. Our hallucinations have become real, hijacked by the CIA as science fiction becomes the new government conspiracy plot of USA Today.

Where Lives My Mind: The Pixies Gross Vampire Feed December 13, 2007

The Pixies are 40-foot tall Dr. Martins hypo-Zippo lighters never could melt.

The Pixies are beat-up boots tattooed lizard acid Blacklite green, a mystical reptilian, some weird dream you had walking across the middle of the 90’s in ribbed webbed feet, mind smashed tight against divorcedeconomicrecess in the War on Drugs they D.A.R.E.’d to keep your mind stranded in the third grade, wondering if the aliens were looking for you?

The Pixies were there, man. They were wondering too.

The Pixies grew grunge before anybody knew it was illegal. Before anybody knew that anybody but farmers wore flannel. Before it was against the law to play on the playground with a flannel-wearing camel.

Kurt Cobain admitted he ripped them off, but he looked cooler in ripped blue jeans, MTV eyeballs dripping angst.

Because Black Francis stutters into the mic. Black Francis is nervous crazy mind pealing, scabs screaming sweat blisters, a mystery of misery in the chlorinated halls of a white coat wardrobe.

Kim Deal is bass bone, female femur murdering feminine Nazis. Her voice still muscles rippling rivulets filled with gold, a feminist vision, the soul of a woman who is what she is when commercials mean nothing but fucked up show biz.

And Joey Santiago sings Saints in agony, electrical calling the Damned Land, crying for the Christians’ crucifixion of a golden god named Pan.

While David Lovering is the Remington gold plated pistol echo in the nightmare drive-by of my own mind.

The Pixies broke up when only 5 people even knew who they were, one of whom happened to be Kurt Cobain. Grunge grew great flannel tentacles overtaking MTV, screaming alienation pain in an ancient orgy of frustrated gods. But the Pixies did it all better, and they did it all before the world even noticed. But those five fans told their friends, who told their cousin’s friends, who turned this shit on to the guy down the hall, and everyone poured Pixie dust down their Eye Pods, weeping.

A decade after they broke their own sound barrier, the Pixies were broke, sleeping on clown’s couches, feeling background documentaries for 52 cents a cop. Then kids became born rebound, so fingers itched to play. They got back together. Crowds exploded, souls sold out, and once again the Pixies bleed all over the stage as Vampires feed….

Give a Penny, Take a Penny… Gone! December 13, 2007

Stomping dangling raindrops soaking sneakers, I stumble into the Family Dollar, my third eye shivering an eyelash in my forehead, feet numb with economic repressive depression soaking my holy-toed tube socks. I am on a mission.

Mental Kleenex been plucked bone clean, so I need a new notebook to catch the proverbial snot-nosed ideas dripping down my beard, staining my shirt whenever I sneeze a Think. My inner 10-year-old thinks it should be snowing big white Charlie Brown Christmas flakes like he remembers in the 1980s, but the Earth sweats swollen hot colds in the middle of December, which only makes the snot-think drippier, my sleeve tired and stiff with my own sticky ideas.

Mind Kleenex is on sale, 3 for a dollar, so I grab the notebooks and deposit them on the cash register. I’ve got one grubby buck left to my name, a dollar that’s known a billion fingerprints, a billion dreams, billions of pipe schemes. A woman old enough to be my grandmother rings up an extra 7 cents for the current administration.

$1.07 hits the bottom of my pocket and falls through a hole….

Ah, but there’s the salvation of the Give a Penny Tray Foundation, saving one pocket at a time so billions of Americans short 3 cents can satisfy their government. But in the tray’s place smiles an M&M with fangs, bloody-red greed melting in its mouth.

“Hey,” I ask the grand lady. “Where’s the cents?” I assume the tray fell off the counter, maybe 11-year-olds stole it to supply their gum habit. Imagination can’t be gone.

Because the Give a Penny tray is truly an American institution invented by Shirley working the night shift at the Quick and Go one twilighted night chewing Doublemint-smoking menthols in 1983. Staring down decimals on her register and thinking about Superman 3, it dawned on Shirley that the teachings of Richard Pryor needed to be put into practice.

In an innocent super villain scheme, Pryor proposed a Superman plotline to collect all those decimals at the end of a paycheck and put them to use.

Well, a penny was still decimal even in 1983, so a Super-Man-naturally-inspired supernatural vision socked Shirley smack in the forehead. In a halo of bright-blue Superman light, Shirley placed a tray by her register, catching all the pennies that dribbled all over her counter, rolling into knowwhere where nothing but decimal remains.

People fixed, gave a penny, and it felt great. People broke, took a penny, and it felt even better.

Overnight, Shirley’s Give a Penny tray spread faster than mothers on crack birthing bleached-white robots looking like Michael Jackson. People shared their pennies and danced in rainbows; Sesame Street simplicity smiled down in every city, in every 7-11 shining like heaven.

But presently back in the Family Dollar, here is where the senses are:

“Oh, we don’t have that tray anymore,” the grand lady says, shrugging fears of arsenic in the aspirin. “Our manager decided that when people take something they didn’t earn, it’s stealing.”

The grand lady steals 7 gulps of oxygen without paying, but I pretend not to notice.

Short 7 cents, I scan the counter for ideas, inspiration, anything for a light. Next to fisticuff frog pens, a newspaper stares me down: “Food Bank Gone Broke: Nobody Gives a Shit, Happy Rich People Still Making Money.”

But then a vision of me making money in my own Superman Underoos lights me up: I remember how back in first grade I banked a business popping pop machines for loose change.

So babbling like a subway prophet, I dance into the rain and poke a Coke machine. It burps a dime, tinkling in the deposit tray like sidewalk raindrops. I slap the Roosevelt on the register, and the grand lady slaps me back 3 cents.

Mind Kleenex is mine.

I know I should be a good Capitalist and tell the next first grader that comes along to go to hell, these are my 3 cents, pay your own damn gum habit.

But I think about that next little snot grubbing the coin slot for a Pixie Stix fix; I think about how Shirley is dying a slow Kryptonite death as Lex Luthor and the WTO dominate her cash register, taking over the world.

Richard Pryor shall not have died in vain. I will never become the bad Superman. Pennies should be free, free as a turd for anyone to take. Giving back to future generations of Garbage Pail Kids, I put those 3 cents back in the Coke change slot machine, mind fiercely flowing pure mental snot.