Don’t Take That!

From September 11, 2009

A wake to a new day with a baby brass knuckle punch in the lower lumbar that reminds me that I’m still a fat bastard. I was dreaming about finding a place to live in Mount Shasta with the two most powerful Scorpios in my life, my deceased father and my loving wife. I twist the subconscious fuzz out of its Freudian knot to plug in some coordinates of understanding.

I paste in that Sky’s (Saxon of The Seeds) passing is still on my mind and that when I first met him he has been hanging out in the Mount Shasta area. The sideways equivalent in my mind about elegant dead weirdoes always leads me back to my Father, who what he lacked in elegance made up in weirdness but was just as much of an outsider as Sky was, except he didn’t have a few obscure hit songs.

For my wife, she has been omnipresent on my mind since the day she captured my heart. Although as of late we have taken to sleeping separately due to excessive busted chainsaw snoring and thunder clap farting on my part. I suspect we are adjusting to our returning roles here in China and long for the peace and tranquility that a place like the idea of Mount Shasta could be. Which is all fine and dandy but when I astutely half lucid dream that it gets colder than a well diggers ass in the winter time we are all transported out of my dream back to this so called reality. (Well, at least my wife and I. Dad and Sky remain in the confines of my mind and running free in that eternal ether that it seems to be piped into.)

I pop a couple of blue pills in fatal acceptance that I am getting older, but follow them with some much needed vitamins to stay young. The irony is not lost on me as I decide to rage on long into the day. If that doesn’t help I put on the kettle boiler just in case as my other drug of choice, Devil Caffeine awaits me in the freezer locked away in some of Idi Amin’s own Ugandan coffee beans. The morning ritual is made all the sweeter by pushing the black go juice in a repossessed French Press, which we purposely kept from one of the many foreign shit birds we tried to help over the last few years.

My wife finishes her yoga. Bless her for keeping that torch burning. I sneak little lustful peaks at the woman I love and know that she is mine all mine!

I bang about the world’s smallest kitchen like the Good Year Blimp in a parking garage. Physical comedy ensues as I perform cooking fetes of contortionist proportions that only a half waked grumpy fat man can do early in the morning which really is about as graceful and quiet as a hungry bear with a cow bell finding the pick-a-nick basket in the back of a opened motor home at yellow stone.

Ah shit! The power just flumped. Twice since we have returned to the flat this week has the power kicked off on the auxiliary plug ins. This just brought the whole morning party crashing, as Madonna and her Abba sample was axed quicker midbeat than if Simon Cowell was at the helm. A pause for the cause as I sort this out and get things back up to speed in the name of Scotty from Star Trek, and I don’t mean the Simon Pegg version (although he did a kick ass job in Generations).

Well it thusly appears the power wasn’t the only thing that needed a little repair. The wiring in my brain needed a little over haul as I returned to become pretty frustrated at all the friggin piles of nonsensical scraps of paper, receipts, business cards, and other various two dimensional pieces of flotsam and jetsam that has become the on running joke between my wife and I of, “Don’t take that!”. Thank the Great Electron that my darling little wifey picked up on my gripey vibes and gave me a thorough mental cobweb dusting with a massage and a little Charlie Rich’s “When We Get Behind Closed Doors” to the machine gun guitar sounds of the sublime Screaming Blue Messiahs. No man should be so damn lucky, but I am!

Let me let you in on the “Don’t take that!” joke. We were in Vegas a few years back. As we walked down the Strip a small army of pint size Central American illegals in dirty ass baby shit yellow polyester polo shirts handed out stacks of prostitution propaganda which amounted to glossy nude photos like hooker baseball cards. We chuckled what the fuckly at the shear volume of this exploitive bull shit that was drifting in and out of their tiny little brown fists into giddy unsuspecting tourists looking for the fable .99 cent steak and lobster coupons to the forgotten cast aside stacks which clogged the gutters.

We looked up to see Ma and Pa Midwest crossing the street as poor old grand dad reached over at the fistful of porn that was pushed at him, needless to say we peed a little in laughter when Grandma pulled him over like a rag doll and yelled at him, “Don’t take that!” and the legend of the short hand that is the way my wife joke around with each other was born.

Backing up just a little bit, I couldn’t help but run through my mind all that was involved in this little American immorality tale of prostitutes, escorts, pimps, pushers, photographers, printers, people smugglers, and the poor loveless fuckers that keep the whole vile rat wheel turning. It has a resounding ring of all too American to it that keeps me kicking at the pricks who hypocritically punish sex workers and not the political police machine that obviously profits from such physical misery of poor people just trying to get by, staying high or show me where on the doll did daddy touch you? Nothing worse than seeing such beauty, innocence, and weakness cajoled, corralled, controlled, and corporately sanction by the powers that be looking up at you with dead eyes from a photo that would make Larry Flint blush handed to you by the same expressionless fucked at birth Have Not* (poor people with no chance of advancement, ergo the Haves and the Have Nots) who has know clue the whole game is rigged.

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson was so right when he found the long agonizing death of the American Dream in Las Vegas. I simply say, “Don’t take that!”