There I was, in the library again

And there she was, ignoring me

It’s not cool or sexy to be reading books

but I started doing it in 2010.

Searching for a big idea,

is a lot like believing in a big idea.

Time runs out, if you’re not careful

and then you’re left with nothing

like all of that hourglass sand,

sifting through your fingers.

You type with those spindly things

and bleed into the paper,

but if there’s nothing there

when you’re done

all that blood

that kept you alive

is wasted.

It’s a transfusion

from your body

to the paper,

and you pray it doesn’t go all over the floor

like a bleeding heart.

Why does a man like me write from his guts?

Because, it’s the gamble I want to take.

So many of us

climb the careful ladders

to nowhere.

We are shaky in our position.

There isn’t much difference between success and failure,

when you’re up there

because

we don’t have our feet rooted in meaning

on the ground.

We stand on wooden stilts

and wonder why

it feels like

we’re off balance.

The female motivates men

to become.

She already is.

And often, it takes decades

to do anything original

and by then, he has figured-out her mystery

and found deeper riddles

elsewhere.

An act of creativity

is an arrow shot in the dark

at an unknown enemy.

It’s a battle

with hidden foes.

It’s a labor of futility, like sandcastles

smothered by the tides.

It might be

the only thing worth doing.

It doesn’t produce anything.

It’s like a path through the forest

that isn’t a path. An artist follows it

like fireflies in the dark.

It’s the sound of music

that only he can hear.

At first, it leads him nowhere

and then

he just enjoys the sound of music.

It might not be fair, to exercise our judgement

based on first impressions alone,

second glance looks,

three-way conversations,

and four way stops.

We can’t see inside someone else’s soul

though, we are wary of a serial killer with a knife

who claims to be reformed, and has a glint of evil in his eye,

while he cuts the red velvet cake.

We might feel someone is beyond redemption—that they aren’t worth the risks, but

what do we risk, if we accept someone, again?

Maybe, the most power words we can say to ourselves are, “You can’t hurt me.”

We are only as vulnerable as we allow ourselves to be.

The fear of being taken advantage of

disrespected

and misunderstood

is real,

and it happens all the time.

If we close ourselves off, it will happen again.

If we show people who we really are, they will gradually get to know who we really are.

As we get older, we can see the risks, or is it that we become more conservative and closed off?

Why not venture far, beyond our limits?

Because

the risks

aren’t worth it.

A man who has gone to war

appreciates peace.

A peaceful man

avoids war,

and all of the things

that could interfere with his peace.

Writing about what scares me

is honesty.

As a careful person, I enjoy my careful life

but there are moments

when I step into the sublime

with the help of a good friend.

We can be better with the people we trust, if we recognize that friendship blinds us.

It makes us see people through rose-colored glasses.

We see red, and we love who we know.

We see red, and we hate who we don’t know.

I understand when someone says,

“Never again!”

I ask you,

“Why not?”

She wore purple glasses

like a bookish whore.

The man looked at her,

like an alcoholic

afraid to have his first drink.

She laughed at him.

He was a bore.

She thought, she understood him,

but he knew

that wasn’t true.

A classical conservative man

meets a woman

who

loves to walk on the beach

nude.

“I’ve just got to tell you…” she said. “Ed Kemper, is my most favorite serial killer.”

“Mine too. We have stuff in common!”

He checked her out online, and she was wearing the joker face, while drinking a beer.

“We love the things that might kill us,” he was fond of saying.

He noticed, she wasn’t wearing any underwear. She wanted his attention.

He was the piano playing, idea creating, Mr. Rogers.

She was the woman who talked about abuse, recovery, and trauma, stored in her hips.

“You have to fuck a lot of guys, to push out the bad thoughts,” she said. “It’s like a catharsis, or an aborted baby. You don’t want to keep what’s ugly.”

There was something exhilarating in her. She had purple hair.

He was a male fly

drowning in a pitcher plant

of female goo.

What is a man to do, when there are no safe crazy women?

She was audited by the IRS several times,

and now she hides her money in 5 different safes,

that belong to 5 different female friends.

She waits tables, but screams at her customers for eating too slowly.

She brings home a new man each month, and has her way with him.

“My husband tried to dominate me,” she said. “That’s why I divorced him.”

Later, the writer told his friends he thought she was a typical woman from Seattle.

“But she’s from Eastern Washington,” they said.

The skinny male black widow spider fucks the female, even though he knows he’s going to be eaten.

The writer looked at her,

as if she was his muse.

Giving away his mind, would be like giving away his behind

to a prisoner who hadn’t been loved in 20 years.

Oh, the horror

they could share together.

They could bleed together.

They could dance through life, until death,

and murder all the people who got in their way.

The writer might say,

“She stole my talent

my virginity

my sanity

my sense of reality

my bank account

my friends

my life

while everybody

believed her

when she said,”

“He stole from me. I’m the victim. My husband was a narcissist. That’s why I put a contract on him. It was him or me. Someone had to die. I watched a lot of serial killer documentaries, to know how to do it.”

“You did the sensible thing,” our friends would say.

“Now, can you hook me up with a new man?”

“Yeah. What do you want? Conservative or Liberal, Innocent or Fishy?”

“Just extra crispy; I want this guy to taste good. I’ll eat him with some ketchup and tartar sauce.”

The goldfish were swimming in circles, competing for fish food.

A tired writer, not so much tired of physical body, but of spirit, was trying to eek-out a paragraph to feel good about himself on a drizzly day. Classical music played in the background like soundwaves of genius, washing up on a desolate island, where two stranded men were trying to survive.

The toilet flushed in their studio apartment, and Alan exited their bathroom, like a man who spent all afternoon there, conducting business.

Andy looked at his feeder fish.

They had grown to three-times their expected size, with lifespans that tested the limits of mortality suggested by the pet food store. He stared at them through the glass, and they stared back at him.

“Not much of a social life,” his father said.

Andy nodded. “They need to get out more, but they’re trapped behind the glass.” He looked-out the window at the street, where people were walking in and out of shops.

“You could flush them down the toilet. That’s where they belong, and they’d probably feel better, swimming down the pipes,” Alan suggested.

“That would kill them.”

“And… you need to get out more. I wasn’t talking about the goldfish. You need a girl, son.”

“What I need is success. Without success, a man with a woman, has a problem he can’t solve.”

“Then, get a better job.”

“With a job and a woman, a man can’t write. No, I need succeed first.”

Alan limped into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

“Would you like some peckeroni?” He asked.

“Just eggs, over easy—that’s brain food.” Andy could hear the skillet sizzling. If he listened close enough, he could hear birds chirping. He was trying to catch the next idea from his subconscious mind, but it wasn’t echoing out of the caverns of his creativity.

Beaker jumped across his two-foot-thick dictionary, and spread-out on the table. It purrrred. It got close to the writer, who looked up everything, the old-fashioned way. The big ball of hair, reached one of its paws into the fish bowl, frantically. Its claws were like fish hooks.

“Beaker, knock that off!” Andy said.

The cat nearly pushed the bowl onto the floor out of pure spite. Then it sauntered off to its cathouse.

“My therapy appointment is in 30 minutes,” Andy said.

“How many times do I have to tell you? You can tell your problems to me, and I’ll charge you half as much.”

“Telling my problems to family, just isn’t the same as being able to unload to a complete stranger.”

“I don’t understand you, Andy.”

The writer watched his dad reading the National Inquirer. The subject of his father’s interest was near-death experiences. The old man was getting older, Andy thought. Personal interest follows age, like a loyal dog. It accrues like a bad debt.

Andy walked down the broken stairs to the door. It was like that dream where you step-out into nothing. Space grips you, until you hit the floor and wake-up. Andy opened the door. The rain was like a waterfall. He grabbed an umbrella. It was only two blocks to see his psychoanalyst in New York City. The wind was blowing. It was threatening to turn the umbrella inside out.

Andy walked down the street.

There was the door, 209. The writer had read about this guy on the back of the National Inquirer. The first session was free, and Andy’s curiosity had gotten the better of him, like Beaker who pushed antique vases off the piano to see what would happen when they hit the floor.

Inside, it was a dark hallway, leading to a black door, at the far end of a corridor. It was odd, because there were no doors to the left or to the right—just the one. Andy was about to knock, when a voice said, “Come in.”

He entered.

The waiting room was full of clocks. It was important to witness the lost minutes before the mind was worked on, he guessed.

A little man with a big nose was standing in the middle of the room.

“You are the writer who called, am I right?”

“Yes, you’re right. And that’s the problem. I can’t write.”

“Oh—the words that we say to ourselves are very important. Now, step inside my office. I have a new kind of therapy.”

“That sounds dangerous,” Andy said.

“Oh—something new is dangerous to you, is it?”

“No—that’s not what I meant.”

“Perhaps, a Freudian slip?”

“No.”

“Okay. It’s called mirror therapy.”

Andy and the psychoanalyst (who looked a bit like a dwarf, and not the genetic abnormality, but the fantasy variety) stood at the foot of an enormous mirror that stretch to the ceiling, and filled up the entire wall. It was impossible to know how the therapist got the thing inside the building. It was old. No, ancient, Andy thought. It could’ve belonged to a different epoch, or world.

“Where did you get that?”

“It’s not important,” the dwarf said. “What is important is what you see when you look inside it.”

“I see myself, and I see you.”

“Look closer.”

The scene began to change like the sea. It was like those pictures that are hidden inside a picture.

Suddenly, Andy saw a big blue lake. There was a rowboat moving across it, briskly.

“You have always wanted wealth and fame,” the therapist suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Andy said. “I just want to write a great work of literature.”

“Hold out your hand.”

The therapist put a gold coin there, and Andy could see his fingers closing around the precious metal.

“When you get back from your journey, you will never be the same again.”

Andy felt a tremendous push. Then, the sky opened up, and like Icarus, he fell.

He splashed deep down and opened his eyes.

There was seaweed all around and colorful fish laughing.  Then, out of the dark water swam a big goldfish. It wasn’t orange, like the feeder fish Andy owned, but gold. Somehow, he knew that it was treasure to be found.

A tiny hand grabbed him by his thick collar and dragged him into the boat. The arm was strong and small, like a chimpanzee’s, with all that compact muscle.

Andy looked across the rowboat at his therapist, but he was no longer wearing a 3-piece suit. He looked like a dwarf, with leather pants and a red turtleneck.

“How did we get here?” Andy demanded.

“Through the mirror.”

“Well… I want to go.”

“No sense in that. You are always trying to find someplace magical in your head. I just helped you to do it, and all you want to do is go back home. Now, look in your hand.”

Andy looked at his white knuckles. He pried them open and saw the gold coin.

“Now, I promise you, that if you use that as bait, you will catch the golden lake goldfish.”

At that moment, the sun was beginning to set and the lake turned to gold.

“Cast away, before it’s too late. Magic can’t last the day. The darkness steals it.”

Andy’s therapist handed him a fishing pole, where he promptly tied the gold coin to the end of the line. It plopped into the water like an enormous insect, and in only a matter of seconds, it was swallowed by a big goldfish that swam willingly to the side of their boat.

“Now, grab your hands inside his throat and pull.”

Andy obeyed, with half a hope and twice the fear that his hand would get bitten off, like a bad breakfast pulled out of a sick child who has eaten too much candy. The gold coins sparkled in the light like magic.

“You have to catch them with their own vomit,” the dwarf said. “It takes money to make money.”

And in that moment, he pulled a tiny mirror from behind his back and activated it like an iPad.

“Hold onto the fish.” And like before, Andy felt himself being pulled into the mirror.

Back in the office, he was soaked. The water was raining onto the floor and the fish was gasping for air.

“Let me get you a clear plastic bag full of water to keep him in.” The therapist walked to his sink and pulled an enormous bag from the drawer and filled it with water.

“Now, until next time. My fee is 100 dollars an hour. Don’t try to pay me in gold coins. And don’t get greedy with your fish. It takes him time to cough up the money, so to speak.”

Andy thanked his therapist profusely and walked down the busy street to his apartment. The rain had tapered off, but he was as wet as a cat that had nearly down.

Up the steps he went, until he got into his tiny apartment. He went for the biggest bowl—the one used for spaghetti. He filled it full of lake water and plopped the fish into a sunlit spot near the window.

Now, the tiny feeder fish were watching the big gold fish, and Beaker the cat, was thinking murderous thoughts from across the room.

“How did your session go?” Alan asked.

“I caught something.”

“What? Did you catch a diagnosis? What kind of therapist are you going to? It isn’t a woman, is it?”

“Oh no—nothing like that. I caught a fish.”

“A what? You didn’t go to the pet shop, did you?”

Alan walked into the living room and saw the goldfish, sparkling in the sun.

“We don’t have to worry about the rent, anymore,” Andy said. “The conditions are finally right, for me to make a living as a writer.”

The End,

but this is only the beginning…

I hate it.

My whole life, I have had to fight against it.

My teacher said, “Andy, I can tell you want to do the right thing…”

or, “You’re a good boy, but right now, you’re being bad.”

“Why do some people get away with everything?” My friend asked me at a party.

“It’s because they’ve been accepted as a scoundrel. If they act any other way, people get confused. We, have always tried to be good boys.”

“I hate it,” he said. “I need to change my identity.”

“Sorry man. It’s too late.”

Now, he has changed how he acts. “I’m an extrovert,” he said with superiority.

He wears gold chains, silk shirts, and leather boots.

“What we need to do, is look like that.” My friend was pointing to a guy who was kite surfing. He was muscular and had a good sense of style.

“No doubt,” I said.

We went out in public.

A sales woman told me I was solid. She looked at my friend… “You’re trouble.”

My friend didn’t like that. He wanted to be a good boy and a bad boy at the same time.

“Actually, I’m a post-doctoral researcher,” he said.

“Oh—I was wrong about you. You’re a good boy.”

“No. NO. NO!” My friend complained.

He wants to have it both ways.

If you want a criminal record to impress a certain type of woman, you have to do jail time. That’s a deal breaker for most people. Plus, it can be hard to get a job.

We kept running into these girls that my friend had talked-up, at various times.

The other day, I had told him that I was in danger of experiencing envy, on his behalf. He is doing quite well, with the ladies.

This pleased him, but worried him at the same time.

He has a hot girlfriend, and his new status as a player, is getting in the way of his long-term relationship.

His sister suggested that she could hook me up on a date.

“Oh—maybe, I’ll message her,” my friend said.

“You want all the women for yourself,” I complained.

He smiled.

My friend knows he can’t date them all, but he wants to.

He wants to be disreputable, but he doesn’t want that to affect his reputation.

Lately, I’ve been dreaming. Sometimes, I don’t dream for months at a time, and I prefer that.

Recently, a dream sticks in my mind like bubble gum. Usually, they vanish, but this dream sticks around like superglue. What is a boy to do?

It happened two nights ago.

Satan visited me in my dreams, along with about 12 other demons. They were all shaped and colored differently, but I knew what they were. It reminded me of a scene out of Lord of the Rings where Gandalf and the Dwarves show up at Bilbo’s Hobbit Hole.

Satan kept asking his head demon to get the contract ready to sign, but the head demon kept making edits and notations to the contract. I just lay in bed watching them. It was a show. Some of them were on fire. Satan was in a red suit with horns. After approximately 3 hours of bickering with his head demon/secretary, Satan finally had the contract ready to sign.

It said, that I would sign my soul over to Satan for 1 billion years to become a New York Times Best Selling Author. Apparently, Manhattan is where Satan holds up for most of the year, doing business with the publishing industry, but it’s cold right now, so he prefers to vacation in Florida.

I told Satan that I couldn’t do that because I write with my soul. Without one, I didn’t trust that I could get the job done.

“Nonsense,” Satan said. “I’ll give you an artificial transplant. In fact, I’ll let you borrow Bukowski’s soul during your interim on earth. If you get tired of his soul, the demons and I will do another transplant in your sleep.”

“You can have the soul of John Steinbeck—he was a communist, or you can have the soul of Hemingway—he was a philanderer.”

I could see Satan, with his black fingernails, and surgical mask, leading his nurses in open soul surgery.

It wasn’t a pretty sight. My soul came out with his 3-pronged trident, kinda like a fish, flapping on the end of a spear. He put it on ice. I didn’t know there were freezers in hell, but Satan had to preserve the souls somehow.

When the surgery was done and they had practically grabbed my arm and forced me to sign the contract, I lay back in bed, paralyzed.

Then, they jumped up and down and danced around, chanting: “Play with Yourself…Play with Yourself…Play with Yourself.”

“No, I don’t want to. No, I don’t want to,” I shouted. I was being terrorized.

I woke up, feeling constipated. I went to the toilet and crapped. My face felt cold. I looked at myself in the mirror. I was pale with black eyes.

I prayed that I wouldn’t die in my sleep, and I went back to bed. When I woke up, I felt normal. I search for surgical scars, but couldn’t find any. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Now, I just have to see if I can be a New York Times Best Selling Author, or not, I thought.

I’ll put forth the effort. If Bukowski can’t get it done, I might need a transplant. Maybe, Hemingway will do the job. Hopefully, it’s free, but knowing Satan, there will probably be a cost. He has my soul. What else could he want?

A Disclaimer for my most gullible blog followers: This was only a dream, I hope, but if I get published as a New York Times Best Selling Author, we will know I sold my soul to Satan in my sleep.

The Asylum for the Criminally Insane was designed for the kleptomaniac who stole pocket change. It was created for the man who got drunk, and in his nihilism, cut the heads off parking meters, instead of little girls. It was for the harmless and hopeless who annoyed society so much, that the citizenry couldn’t afford to let them roam free. It was for the drug addict who went to the salvation army for a bowl of soup with the stipulation that he listen to a sermon, and in so doing, he gained a faith in God. Then, he walked out into the street and took his clothes off, to get naked in Christ. It caused quite a show, and would’ve been welcome, if it had only happened once or twice, but every day, was another story. He made the business men late to their meetings, and they couldn’t have that. It’s more of a sin to be late, than to take you clothes off, when the deal is for a million dollars. There are exceptions, of course, like if Pamela Anderson did it, but when it’s an overweight middle-aged man blocking traffic, people get offended. So, the disciple was locked-up for good, in a place that fed him oatmeal, three times a day with psychotropic medication.

There was a game room, but nobody could agree on the rules. It’s horrible to play with someone who won’t let you win. It makes the crazies, even crazier.

Lewis was playing checkers by himself. Then he had sex by himself. Then he watched Oprah. Then he played chess by himself. Then he went to his room and read a book on Santa Clause. It was almost Christmas and the orderlies had set up a tree. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t flammable. It was safe in every way, but it was fake. That’s what Lewis realized about mental hospitals. They protected people from the realities. It was cold outside, and he didn’t mind in the winter months.

Many things bothered him, but as he read about Santa Clause, gradually, only one thing bothered him. Why didn’t Santa Clause visit the criminally insane? There were no chimneys at the asylum, but Santa always found a way in. Lewis had been there, year after year. No Santa Clause. No Presents. No cookies. No stockings. He thought about escape. No, that was impossible. He had to convince the orderlies that he was normal, but when you wear a straightjacket to breakfast every day, it’s difficult to convince a psychiatrist that you belong in the office.

Lewis began to act polite, overly so. “It’s a nice day we’re having, isn’t it?” He asked an orderly.

“It’s 10 degrees outside and I’m stuck in here with you.”

He wasn’t friendly, and grumpy. Maybe, that’s what it means to be normal, Lewis thought.

He went to the head caretaker. “Listen man, this oatmeal, mixed with my medication tastes like shit.”

“Do you want the hose, Lewis?”

“No sir!”

“Then I suggest you get back to eating your breakfast.”

There was no convincing him, or anyone, that he was sane. Lewis had to escape.

All he had to do was steal the key card from the most absent-minded guard. He would chat him up over a smoke break, and then have his hand in his pocket faster than a prostitute on a city bus.

It worked. Harry wasn’t too smart. In fact, Lewis thought the guard was stealing drugs. Lewis walked out of there and nobody noticed. Once he got onto the street, he really blended in. There were so many people who looked crazy.

His mission was to find Santa Clause and kill him. It’s funny how Santa and Satan both begin with a letter S, and they wear a red suit, Lewis thought. They might be one in the same.

It was getting late in the afternoon, and there was the shopping mall Santa hugging kids and making their dreams come true.

Lewis couldn’t stand the sight of it. He grabbed an extension cord and snuck up behind the Christmas tree. When the last little kid left Santa’s lap, the garrote went around his neck.

“Ho Ho Ho, you son of a bitch!” Lewis shouted. “Why didn’t you bring me presents this year?”

As if by a miracle, Santa got some air. “There is no Santa Clause. I drive a bus most of the year.”

“You lie!” But Lewis wasn’t totally convinced.

Santa Clause was turning blue and he slipped into unconsciousness.

Four hand guns were pointed at him before he realized it.

“Let him go, man,” a security guard said.

Lewis ran. He had to find the real Santa Clause.

“Taxi, take me to Bellevue Square.”

The turban talked to him like a psychiatrist. “You don’t look good, sir. Something is wrong with you.”

“Don’t I know it. What do I owe you.”

“14.95.”

“I’m going to give you your life, instead.”

When Lewis walked into the mall, he struggled to find Santa Clause. The place was closing. He tried to read one of those mall maps, which made him feel more lost.

He found a gun store, and asked the red neck behind the counter if he could buy a firearm.

“Sure! If I sell you this piece, it will bring you peace on earth and goodwill to men.”

Lewis noticed the alcohol eggnog the red neck was drinking.

“Will you take a credit card?”

“Sure.”

Meanwhile…

Harris was closing out his Santa job with a stiff drink. He couldn’t remember how many children had sat on his lap. Many of them smelled like they had poopy diapers. He needed whiskey, fast. Two tours in the jungles of Vietnam, and working in a shopping mall was far worse. Back in the suck, he could kill people, he didn’t like. Back in the real world, he had to pretend like he was scratching his head with his middle finger.

Then, there was the Showdown at Midnight…

“Hey! Santa Clause, why don’t you bring me presents anymore?” Lewis demanded.

“Hey, it’s been a long night, man, and I just want to go home to Betty,” Harris said.

“Is she Mrs. Clause?” Lewis asked.

“No. She’s a pole dancer, but tonight is her day off, and I’m a lucky guy.”

Lewis pulled his handgun, and if almost by instinct, Harris reached under his robes for his Mack-10.

He filled Lewis full of lead and smelled the gun smoke.

“Ho Ho Ho, and a Happy New Year!” Harris said.

The mall security cameras caught it all on tape. Harris was exonerated and was given the key to the beautiful city of Bellevue.

Once a soldier, always a soldier.

The End

Now, when I have a conversation with a woman about this, she takes offense.

Often, she says, “You’re still single, right?” or “No woman will ever marry you. You think you’re better than women, don’t you?”

“No. No. You have me all wrong,” I say. “I don’t think I’m better than women. I know I’m not. For instance, I’m a lousy cook, but that has nothing to do with what I’m talking about here.”

“Then, what are you talking about?” She says with her hands on her hips and her teeth bared.

“Just that, in every competitive arena, men dominate.”

“No, that’s not true. Women are just as good as men. We are equal to men.”

“No, you’re not. You are brainwashed. Men are better at Basketball, Boxing, Soccer, Swimming, etc.”

“Okay, men have more upper body strength, but that’s it.”

“No. Men are intellectually superior. The grand masters of chess are all men. The geniuses of mathematics and physics are all men. The greatest painters, sculptors, and inventors are all men. Think Leonardo Davinci, Michael Angelo, Picasso, Einstein, Edison, Tesla. This is a universal truth.”

She pouts. “Women have intrinsic value. Why can’t you see that?”

“I know women have intrinsic value, I just can’t stand when they say they are equal to men, and they can compete with men. All the evidence says otherwise.”

“Women will get the wrong impression of you. They will think you are better than them.”

“I don’t think I’m better than them. All people have value.”

“That’s what God thinks.”

“I know, and it’s written in the Bible that the woman is the weaker vessel, and that the woman wishes to take the man’s place. It says that in Genesis, as part of the curse on humanity. Don’t you see that as being true in society? Women want to become like men. Men want to become like women. People are confused because they are believing the lies of the devil. Men have turned away from God and they are following after their own lusts. Women can’t respect men because men don’t follow God. Women are leading men into madness. Adam listened to Eve, and that was the downfall of mankind. If man had listened to God, we would not be in this sorry state.”

“How can you blame the fall of humanity on a woman?”

I’m not. Adam listened to his wife. He should’ve listened to God.”

“I’m worried about you.”

A disclaimer: If you’re an oversensitive feminist and object to 2 out of my 3 writers being white men, I empathize with you, but I can’t help you. In fact, nobody can. I encourage you to keep bashing geniuses. It just shows how stupid you are. The next generation will be dumber because they listened to you. It narrows-down the competition. Hopefully, that’ll help me to get published, but I doubt it.

Charles Bukowski

1. Bukowski recognizes that much of male behavior is governed by what other men do, and what other men do, is governed by women. Society survives because of the relationship between men and women, and it crumbles when they can’t get along. I love Bukowski’s poetry. My favorite collections are: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire and The Last Night of Earth Poems. Bukowski is most famous for his Novel Ham on Rye. However, it’s not my favorite. Post Office chronicles the absurdities of working as a government employee. I work in the public school system, and it’s frightening to see the similarities between how we educate our children and how the Government manages the mail.

Ernest Hemingway

2. Liking Hemingway is a bit cliché, and I must confess, I didn’t read him until much later in life. I don’t like his greatest works: The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls. They were too formal for me. I don’t like the language. There’s no humor in it. Hemingway was too serious. He got up at the crack of dawn and began bleeding at his typewriter. Anybody who stands at attention for 6 hours and types is not allowing the word to work its magic. With that said, I enjoyed The Old Man and the Sea. It’s a simple tale about life and death, written when Hemingway had dementia and was nearly insane. In fact, Hemingway was writing about death his whole life, and it was the love of a beautiful woman who gave him the stamina to write one last great work before he blew his brains out with a shotgun. Hemingway’s death was poetic, just like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Sylvia Plath

3. Sylvia is one of the few female literary geniuses. With that said, most women have more ability at reading and writing when compared to men. This is statistically evident through English Language scores on a Global Scale. I know, because I did a research project on it during my Doctorate Degree in Education. In Seattle, the elites believe that men and women are socialized differently, which explains their differing aptitudes. They don’t believe that there are any differences among men and women in cognition, only in socialization. I don’t believe this. I believe statistics, which shows that men are more likely to have learning disabilities, while also being more likely to be geniuses. On the normal curve, women cluster around the average, and there are more men found at the extremes (This could be due to the XX versus XY chromosomes. Women have a backup X chromosome. However, I’m not a scientist, so it’s only my theory). I like Sylvia’s poetry collections: Winter Trees and Ariel. The Bell Jar is a great novel. There is such a range of emotion in her poetry. My favorite poem of hers is Daddy. In this poem, she discusses her feelings of losing her father. She sounds like an upset little girl. I like her poetry because it’s honest and feminine. Sadly, Sylvia battled with depression and was in and out of insane asylums her whole life. She killed herself with gas.

A bullet lodged in the flyboy’s brain

while his grey matter was shooting out of him, like a bathtub

with the septic tank overflowing.

The Red Baron was cunning. He didn’t open-up his machine guns.

He took careful aim in the sky. “I bet he wanted to be a doctor,” the Red Baron said to himself in German. He enjoyed speaking the language of the Superman.

The boy’s flesh was falling on the field below like leaves, but it wasn’t beautiful.

There were wheat fields under them, with the wind moving through the harvest like a mysterious language, choosing souls, by the breath of God.

Then a Fokker went down in flames, erupting, like a volcano, bringing one solitary sinner straight to hell, screaming. He was trapped, like a fly in a jar, and nobody could hear him begging God for his life, while his skin melted off his face, and his lungs burned up like tissue paper.

The Red Baron laughed. He did a loop-d-loop, just to stretch-out his wooden wings for the next kill.

Lieutenant Johnson stared at the scene in the sky through his aviator goggles.

“Get me up there,” he said.

A dumb-looking auto-mechanic with long hair and scrubby clothes walked over to his propeller blade and pulled on it. It moved and shuddered, like an alcoholic woken up after a 3-day drunk. Pete pulled on it again. The engine groaned. Then it sputtered. Then it threw-up.

“See, I got it going!” Pete said. His hands flew up into the victory pose and got chopped off.

There was no time to help him collect himself. Johnson pushed the throttle forward and cruised down the runway, gaining speed, with one thought in his head, to kill the Red Baron.

Manfred Von Richthofen was an ace, meaning, he had killed too many pilots to count, but that didn’t stop him from scratching their dead bodies on his red bird like Indian Scalps. He lived to kill. Any man with a bayonet can do it on the ground, but it takes skill to shoot somebody out of the sky.

Johnson’s plane lifted-off into the red sun, like a needle, preparing to draw blood.

A Fokker was puking oil and spewing smoke up ahead, like a nicotine addict. Johnson flew next to him.

The pilot was already out of his cockpit, choking on the smoke. He ran across his wooden wing and jumped. He landed on Johnson’s aircraft and tied himself to the top.

There was no time to drop the pilot off. Johnson had to go after the Red Baron.

Richthofen shot some mother’s son in the back, and laughed. He loved the Fatherland and hated his mother.

Down below, Dora was airing out her bed sheets. When the pilots finished killing each other, the survivors went to the whore house or to the church.

Those with faith enjoyed the uncomfortable pews, while they prayed that God would help them kill their fellow man.

Those who had given up on an unresponsive God, enjoyed the responsive female, and the booze helped to numb their pain from seeing their buddy’s brains falling through the sky like bird droppings.

Lieutenant Johnson closed on the Red Barron, but Richthofen banked. He was trying to get behind him.

Johnson took his Fokker down between two farm houses, and the Baron followed.

Lieutenant Johnson flew through a red barn. Then he went vertical. Machine gun fire tore through his wooden wings and the pilot he had saved. Blood was dripping into his hair and face.

Johnson looked like a savage. He was crazy to kill the man who was going to kill him. He pushed the stick forward, and plummeted to the earth. The Red Baron followed with machine gun fire. There was a train tunnel up ahead.

Lieutenant Johnson flew inside and landed softly. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. When he walked through it, he was in heaven. There was no war. There was no church. Only the whore house.

The End