0DD TIMES

alex katz

This afternoon it came to me that maybe what makes politics seem so odd now is that it always has been odd, it's just that now politics is front and center daily serial entertainment. Before internet what happened in the background was unknown. Now, the background is the foreground. We see now that what we suspected before, turned out to be so. Only now, whatever we see is too late. It's history. It's engaged. We're living it. It is said that the transition from this form of economy to the next one will only be by revolution if it does not happen by legislation. In this time, the republicans are only allowing laws having to do with the private parts of women. Maybe somebody needs to show these people some porn sites on the internet. I hear Jimi Hendrix in my head saying, "They can't get no relief." If they didn't alienate their wives with unconscious assholeness, their wives might not have so many headaches.

donald roller wilson

I wonder what the Texas legislators did when they were in high school crossing the border with their buddies to find some Mexican whores. I'd guess they laid on the bed beside their fallen women, stiff as a post, and not their wieners, unable to move, paralyzed by the preacher's voice in their heads condemning them to hell for committing fornication. Naughty boys! Bad! I doubt the Mexican whores hate it too much when they get one of those guys who pays and just lays there feeling guilty. These men are post-Sixties people. They grew up in a time of sexual liberation. They didn't have to cross the border. I thought that old hung-up thing about sex went away after the Sixties. Maybe it only happened for people who went through the Sixties. Of course, in that time perhaps a majority of the people did not get their sexuality liberated while the freeing up was going on. Our politicians, like Al Gore, live their lives squeaky clean as they can without exploding. When they explode, it's often a scandal. They end up Ken dolls, no personality, a toy you can project a personality onto, your own, and he becomes your friend. And their wives at big political gatherings seen on tv look like Barbies with tv anchorlady hairdos. I'd guess their hair is so fixed in place it would not move riding on the back of a rice rocket. They offer themselves as puppets to the rich at country clubs, vowing to do as they're told.

max ernst

Can you beat that for a two-dimensional portrait of people I know nothing about? You'd think I was writing a bad novel about a Central American country by somebody living in Detroit who'd never been south of the border. I'm going by public appearances as seen on tv. In other words, illusion within illusion interpreted in illusion, like one of those heat mirages we see on the highway in summer, waves of heat rising from the pavement in the near distance. Sometimes when I confess to liking action movies, some in particular like, Syriana, that concern the CIA, I get lectured that the movie doesn't show the Company anything like what it really is. How could it be otherwise? Written by a script writer who lives in Los Angeles and makes his living writing screenplays for Hollywood. His knowledge comes from reading, movies and tv. It's fiction. Duh. A fictional story told by a director with a film crew, producers wanting the ultimate payback, making it to hold the interest of people with equivalent of fourth grade knowledge, explosions and gunfire like songs in a musical. I never imagined the CIA played to box-office. Jean Claude van Damme was a ballet dancer before he started being a kick-boxing martial arts actor. Martial arts fights in movies are choreographed. They are dances. Like when I watch a Daffy Duck cartoon, it's not because I believe ducks speak English.

alex katz

Something else about the seeming craziness of this time is that we have a corporate government now run by hierarchy, not democracy, and we're being manipulated by propaganda and bullshit round the clock. When we get bullshit presented daily as news, it goes back to the post-Kennedy assassination disinformation campaign that has reached the place half the people in the country have a belief system based in the false. The other half is right behind them. Then there is the rise of the youth. Occupy has been suppressed so they'll never do massive demonstrations in USA again. They'll come up with something else. The suppression of Occupy so quietly, so behind the scenes, gives me evidence of too sophisticated a police state. I can't help but think it seems like a crazy time because it is a crazy time. The time of the Patriot Act. It's crazier than a junebug inside a lampshade. Every day I thank God in one way or another for making me somebody from the very beginning unable to take the path of position and money. I got my education for my personal benefit, ultimately my spiritual benefit, not corporate job training. The people living the fantasy driven by ambition to get ahead learn to thrive in an unreal world, the world we have to learn to go through in order to get ahead. For somebody who doesn't accept that God is, I'll say it's consciousness I'm extending my gratitude to, for the opportunity to live surrounded by trees. The trees are sane.

alex katz

 

 

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GRUMBLINGS IN THE EARTH

        kurt schwitters, 3

In all my time in the mountains, I have had the same bed, a wooden frame with a 3/4 inch plywood surface and an old, like something Social Services would arrest me for sleeping on, cotton mattress, all fluffed up after a day in the sun, it's about 4 inches thick. After being slept on every night and countless days it's about an inch thick, if that, where the imprint of my mortal frame has custom-fitted it for me, personally. Like the way a shoe feels better the longer it's worn. That imprint is my hammock and with the blanket makes my cocoon from which I rise refreshed and ready to face whatever is next. I don't have wings, but my spirit has me upright, the spirit being what the wings symbolize, unless angels really do look like white doves flying.


I knew an old Regular Baptist elder who died of old age 20 years ago; he told me of a time an angel came to him in the living room and he recognized it for a winged angel. Another man told me of a time an angel came to him. These were old mountain people, the origin of American pragmatism. You're not going to fool one of them with an hallucination or a dream. Maybe you could fool one, but it wouldn't be Millard Pruitt getting fooled. Millard's credibility was a hundred percent with me when he told me he saw an angel. Accuse him of lying about it and he'd be up out of his chair before you could say scat. Though that wasn't the reason I believed him. I believed him because I knew him.


Back to the wooden bed. It has no springs, no cushioning. I prefer to sleep on the board itself, which I have done, but the mattress is the same thing as on the board, having no cushion value. The mattress is a mold for my frame that holds me in place comfortably like an old shoe. Some years ago reading a book about Shirdi Sai Baba, I saw that he slept on a plank of wood. It took years, a lot of years before I felt I was ready. From that moment on, it subconsciously became my goal to be able to sleep on a board. Chiropractors recommend a hard bed. I found I like it even better than on a mattress. My mortal frame feels best when I sleep on my bed that is the same as a board, as the mattress I lie on is about as thick as a thin blanket. I like it. It is the only bed I can be comfortable in. I've never liked a big mattress bed. They're more like wrestling rings without ropes than a place for repose. All the sheets and fitted sheets, box springs and all that goes with it, I'd rather use an open sleeping bag for a blanket. Wear bed clothes and it doesn't get dirty so fast. I'm not looking for a spread in Southern Living. The only way SL would look at my home would be an example of a Feng Shui disaster.


This is taking the long way around of getting to being able to feel grindings of tectonic plates way down deep. Most often, and consistently until the last few years, I felt the same kind of grindings. It was so subtle vibrating I'd question if the vibrating might be coming from inside me. I wondered what it was for a very long time, until I felt a fairly strong vibration, by comparison, from an earthquake maybe 300 miles away. Of course, I thought, a shock wave travels through rock way down deep underground perhaps at least as fast as sound travels through air. Maybe it's simultaneous. That one was notably a hair stronger than was the norm. Enough to make me notice it. It's amusing to be lying in bed and suddenly it feels like the Fifties motel room bed that vibrated a few minutes for a quarter, long enough to make you wish it would stop long before it does. It's like when the tree frogs are trilling and I can't tell if it's in my head or outside. That's the feeling. Am I trembling or is it the ground? By now I'm used to it. It was never enough to wake me, only felt it while awake.


Over the last year I've felt odd scrapings like I'd never felt before. They started getting my attention again after noticing the grumblings were becoming unsubtle enough to wake me from a light sleep. Then one came in rapid succession, like a slow Uzi, but more like slamming a fist from one hand into the heel of the hand of the other at a fairly rapid pace, though not all out rapid. It woke me and did that quck-punch grinding long enough that I grew tired of focusing on it and went back to sleep. Another time was a long, powerful grinding that felt so unnatural it flashed: fracking. Oh no. Halliburton, naturally. Dick Cheney, naturally. Enemies of the American people. It is seriously poisoning the water all over the country, doing it fast and doing it bad. By bad, I don't even mean where ethics is concerned, only the nature of their product: seriously poison water on a very large scale, like all the underground water, the source of our water. Soon we'll be like Bermuda, an island without fresh water. They keep the roofs painted white with lime and catch the water in barrels when it rains. If fracking goes on much further, at all further, our nation will be devoid of the next resource to go to war over, water. All the more reason for perpetual war for perpetual peace.


Allowing Halliburton and the others the right to destroy our ground water all over the country is beyond absurd. Yet, the gas corporation lobby insures full scholarships to the right schools for Congressional kids, the privilege of membership in the right country clubs, a nice car with a driver, expensive lunches and dinners for free, for corruption, for rising in society, for being sucked up to as a big dog. I look at the kinds of people who become politicians and they make phys ed majors look brilliant. We trust our very existence to them. How ignorant is that? They call the Indians that lived on the continent savages. They at least honored wisdom and after how many thousand years left the continent as pristine as before the first human set foot on it. They flowed with Grandmother Earth. In canoes they could see the bottom of the river and the fish, which were plentiful all those millenia of ignernt spear chuckers running about half naked and beating on a hollow log with sticks.


Don't laugh yet. We got nothing on them. I repeat. We got nothing on them. You and I are not the ones destroying our planet. We get the blame. We are doing our part for the destruction by allowing the corporate world to have its way. Now is too late to take control away from them, even if we made a commendable effort. But what can we do? The system does not include us. United States of America is out of business when the government does not protect the American people from predatory corporate targeting. Why would it? Our government has been usurped in the Shakespearean way, democracy outlawed while We the People watched it happen on tv every evening and never noticed. One thing we do know. The oil corporations are going to do what they want to do and we're not even the bother of a swarm of gnats to them. Not even the bother of a cell phone dead zone.

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THE DARK BEFORE DAWN

        john baldesari

Now that next year's election is the news, I wonder every day about whether or not to vote. I've known since year 2000 for certain that my vote is meaningless. The Supremes overruled democracy, slapped us in the face and said, Get over it. News is out now the FEMA detention camps that have been constructed since the 1980s at unused military bases, denied until now when it's released to the news they've been activated. They're all over the country. Three of them are to hold a million apiece, meaning the way we do prison in America is 3 or 4 times that many, so let's say 3 million apiece. This is not plans. This is actuality. The corporate takeover of our government means business.



In Europe they're calling us the United States of Goldman Sachs, which happens to be Obama's #1 campaign contributor. Maybe that's why. I've wondered for some time why government bailed out the Banks that were bleeding the American people unto death and said to the middle-class people who lost depressing amounts of money, Tough shit. I wonder no more. It was probably planned as long ago as the FEMA camps were planned. Ever wonder why vampire (blood sucking) themes are popular now on tv, and zombies (the living dead)? Look at movies and television as collective dreams. Then look at the movies in dream interpretation terms. It gets interesting.



In the beginning I wanted to be for Obama, the new Vernon Jordan, an intelligent man for a CHANGE, and now I see the corporate man put in, like everything else corporate, to fool us into believing the reverse of actuality. It was so politically correct to be for Obama in the time of his campaign that I became suspicious of somehing I couldn't put my finger on. By now the fog is lifting and I see more of same, just like I thought I'd been seeing. He has what the country people call a silver tongue. He rose from the bottom so fast that in hind sight it looks suspicious. Affirmative Action. The purpose for putting him in office could have only been to further divide the American people for control---divide and conquer, the natural law strategy. It works. This government we have that is not OF nor BY the American people is bombing Iran and we're getting no news of it. Our government has left, since way back in Nixon and Johnson times, the interest of the American people. We're not in the corporate hierarchy. We don't figure. We are to be manipulated by propaganda to forget about democracy and stay at home, believe what we're told on tv.



We can bring troops home now that we have something for them to do here, like be guards at concentration camps. They're looking at creating a very great deal of dissent, telling me our constitutional government is completely over, government of/by/for "the people" does not mean now what it used to mean. The Supremes declared corporations persons, so now the corporations are "the people." All these detention camps that will hold multiple millions are anticipating something that hasn't happened yet, but evidently is in the sequence of events yet to be. The corporate coup in 1963 is by now turning military. The time we're in right now might be the transition moment from Huxley's vision, Brave New World, to Orwell's vision, 1984. It's looking like they're aiming to push us to the point of revolution and arrest "terrorists," aka protesters, book readers, blog writers, activists of every sort that they will be consciously creating. It's like setting the water to boiling so the people minded toward resistance rise to the surface, get scooped up and "detained."



The enemy this time will be the white middle class. It's from the middle class that revolutions are generated. It's the middle class that is being activated for arrest. Out of this will come a revolution. I believe Thomas Jefferson had something to say about this phenomenon. Karl Marx too. According to Marx, we have not had communism yet. Communism comes after the excesses of capitalism. It said government does not go according to the will of the people, the people will revolt. That's a natural law. He wasn't "advocating" anything. He was merely articulating what he saw as a natural law. But, shit, we have to have a revolution first. This really feels strange to be feeling like people in the French Underground durning Nazi occupation, like living under Ceausescu in Romania, or the Soviets in Poland. It's our turn, evidently. There's nothing I can do about it. I'm negligable, as always. Just another voter/consumer/taxpayer. As a voter, I'm with the opposition. As a consumer, I get by on the minimum. As a taxpayer I get by on the minumum. Negligable. Easily disposed of, won't be missed.



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