Morning TV Strip Poker

Laundry day in the early am before the rush of desperate, destitute, and distracted invade the shopping plaza of no return over off Twain avenue, almost noon now and I almost wanted to give some old guy short on a bit of change to do his laundry, but the second I reached into my pocket for the money, a small army of handout artists began circling the laundromat to get a taste of my new found generosity, so forget it, guess the old man will have to do his clothes by hand once again. I left a bunch of throwaway clothes in a trash can and someone has already retrieved them alongwith an assortment of remnants from inside my van, tv show souvenirs mostly that have been taking up space. Attempting to watch Spanish version of Today show, except it is called Hoy. There is a magician performing card tricks under the guise of strip poker with a small group of male and female guests/hosts at his sides. The game has been rigged for the women to win every hand as the guys over the course of several hands are reduced to boxer shorts and the sheer delight of the ladies who emphatically cheer "Take it off, take it off." Don't really get much of this on the actual today show, it is pretty tame on comparison to the cast of seductive hotties on Hoy, live commercials for laundry soap, funny enough and other household goods which might lead to more of a domesticated slant toward the Spanish audience, but watching a strip poker contest on live morning television is one thing I had yet to witness, even throught my travels of watching morning shows in hotel rooms and buses across the globe. The last thought had to do with why the men played the roll of loser in the contest, maybe they by letting them win, it is no wonder they get so many attractive women, from Florida to Argentina, just a thought, time to fold some clothes now.

SlyKat

SlyKat sits at the corner of the bar with a shot of Jamisons backed by a gin and juice in a tall pint beer glass mulling over his future, creativity, and the never ending night. He is dressed in a Raiders jersey, camoflauge pants, and black LA Dodger baseball cap, no one would could ever accuse him of not living up to the current hip fashion culture high jump bar of those who endeavor to never be seen out of character regardless of the place or time. For some reason, people such as SlyKat feel the desire to start up conversations with me, maybe just out of boredom or possibly from some inner invisible kinetic energy that radiates from my prescene in such places as this low end college two for one drinks dive I happen to be drinking in tonight.

Either way, it does not seem very possible that SlyKat will resist the need to drag me into some sort of dialouge that will no doubt transcend the realms of the rationale to the irrationale as well as whatever other plasma like particulates that float around the universe, nothing is off the table, when some people drink excessively for extended periods of time; they begin to merge the visual drama of their personal inner mind with the immediate surroundings of the reality around them. The trick is to merely take part in the illusion in a pedistrian sort of manner as if visiting a wax musuem or planetarium, just let the walls dissapear and people such SlyKat will fill in the rest with their own personal surrealist type of painting.

This guy just wants to bounce his weirdness off of someone, of course, nothing really phases me anymore, so why not just let him babble for a while and see what develops, just another means of how I get material to write. SlyKat begins by hunching over the bar and simultaneously yelling at the bartender for another drink, his last drink of the night, but that was almost two hours ago, the neccesity of constant alcohol as well as a stage to act out his routine prove to be to irrestable to pass upon on a Sunday night as the late night football game plays in the background. The drink arrives as the lesson begins with SlyKat reaching over the bar once more to shake the hand of a cook who has come out to the back bar for anothe shot of tequila. I remember the bartender pouring the man a large four ounce shot about an hour ago as he sat near the entrance to the cooking area, trying to look inconspicous, anonymous, ninja like, grabbing a quick drink then heading into the back once more to continue on with his culinary duties.

SlyKat and the cook have a quick conversation, not much more than three or four words, the cook looks as if he has been busted, yet the emotion on his face quickly departs when he realizes what kind of weekend drunk has made contact with him, no different than hanging with his buddies after a long day at work, no threat here, just grab the tequila bottle, then casually make way back the kitchen to finish the rest of the bottle with the boys. Afterwards, SlyKat looks at me and says, "You should say hello to everyone, regardless of who they are." "Doesn't matter if they are a dishwasher....... (voice trails off) ........ "When I am at the club, I say hello to the doorman, bouncer, porter, ........... everyone, (while slamming his hand down on the bar for emphasis)...... " You know why I do that?".......... (as his eyelids fight to stay open)...... I tell him, "Because you never know who might rise up in the game and become a big player."
SlyKat points his finger at me, "That's right" (while swaying back and forth in his chair) He pounds his chest, right at his heart, "You feel me, right here." "I can tell, you get it."...... (drifting from consciousness again) "Everyone remembers me, in every nightclub in town." "It gives me access to everything." SlyKat steadies himself once more.

There are points when a division between being serious or rather insane becomes an impassable rift, by this point in the dialouge I was looking for any way to distract myself with the football game on the television. The talk took on the form a rising tide from a flash flooded river swelling to such a massive proportion that it consumes nearly all of the surrounding state. Words like weights, drowning in high tides of slang, not much left to do but nod, then agree sometimes while slowly tuning ol SlyKat out, luckily for me a friend of his shows up which provided the perfect opportunity to break away from his drunk ramblings. I mean damn, should have just got up and left the bar, yet part of me is busy observing the characteristics of this urban hipster, just another chance to write about the bizarre beings who make Las Vegas their home.

Who knows how long SlyKat stayed; he seemed pretty well connected at this particular bar, no break in the flow of drinks, one right after another as if flowing from some hidden door passing down a conveyor belt directly into his hand. Couldn't drink anymore, could have been watching SlyKat who has been heading down the same path as myself for way too long, another trapped creature attached to the unlimited flow of booze, drugs, and partying, sleeping a lot less than I which almost was too impossible to believe, but with that glazed over, semi conconscious, and almost angelic tragedy upon his face; there could be no doubt that he has no yearning to change his current course of self destruction. He would be at the bar tomorrow for Monday Night Football getting wasted once more carrying on with more hardcore babbling that all the other patrons would fail to understand, thankfully I got it, a silent cry from him to get out from under all the sleepless nights, unachieved goals, and possession by a life that keeps breeding new generations of throwaway children doing the same things SlyKat has spent his entire life doing but with more reckless abandon than ever before; all too willing to take my place in front line of non stop festivities, good, I am done with it, forever.

Walking in the Rain

On the cold nights like this evening, runaway youth walk alone in abandoned parking lots heading toward fastfood restaurants for an affordable meal. Head down staring into the reflective flickering overhead parking lights from the grocery store in the distance with hands stuff in pockets attempting to fend off the cold that wearing a short sleeve t-shirt and black jeans allows to seep through him. The kid can only hope three or four packs of hot sauce might warm his stomach up enough to make it back to the nearby enclosed bus stop before his clothing becomes nothing more than soaked wash rags. A few tacos, no need for the drink it is already too cold, fish out a few dollars in change, then sit down in the semi heated dining area for a few moments, damn shame he arrived so late, the indoor part of the place will be closing in ten minutes. No refuge tonight, no parents that care where he might be, regardless of time, the fact his mother still lets him in the house anymore amazes him day after day. Alternatives for skate rocker dreamers with no ambition is just about the same as if has ever been, pretty close to zero and all the toys everyone else seems to use to create half baked views of reality or fantasy cannot be purchased on the wages of a dishwasher. Most apt to turn towards the life of distribution, do I need to describe what kind of distribution I might mean, certainly not movie or those discount booklets our athletic coaches would try to get me to sell for new jersey before football season, but the kind that can either lead to life in a darker fast lane or 6x6 jail cell, still this requires, drive, social skills, and keen sense of a paranoid schizophrenic, just feels like too much effort why not just walk around all night until his mother has gone to sleep or passed out from all the pills and booze, still she holds down a job, a testament to her genetic makeup, blue collar values, and her mother who did the same thing for 45 years until liver failure and a staph infection turned her into dissolving mass of bile, urine, and shit, but some relatives would argue his grandmother had been that way long before she died.

This kid is done with television; he spends tonight watching the rain fall from the sky at a bus stop where a few other adults proceed to make their way home from whatever tortures they had to endure throughout the day. It gives him time to think, to reflect, and imagine stories, lives of others, and the isolation everyone must feel ocassionally. Most of all it keeps him from thinking about the reality of his own existence, a parent who treats him like a burden, a parasite, and inept dim witted moron who will never amount to anything more than a debt ridden, child breeding, and continously unsuccessful half ass. No wonder he stays out all night, sleeps in class, and if possible lives on the couches of the few friends compassionate enough to attempt to understand him. But on this evening, everything is calm, only the truly stranded roam the avenues pushing wheelchairs while covered in black plastic trash bags or rub their hands visciously at traffic intersections to combat the rain seeping through their torn apart canvas tennis shoes, even the prostitues battle the elements in white leather thigh high boots, marooned, set adrift, allowed only to return when the money is right, not much automobile traffic, except for me, driving past all these people, sober, scared, and not too sure what the future holds for all us.

Casino Sex Doll

See her during the daytime shift when there does not appear for any other means of money to be acquired. She runs from elevator to elevator with cellphone in hand heading toward the next sexual encounter. What am I doing here, white man's welfare passing the next ten hours in a corporate bunker discussing the latest strageies on how to minimize the human condition. Experts who are in deep research carving people into the small mechanical structures. The working class shall obey or become one of the many unemployed littering the nation of the United States. There are software programs to streamline the hiring process, detail after detail to figure out of the cyber candidate from Nigeria or Micronesia is more suited for the task. I want to laugh listening to all these speakers turn the workplace into a windows format existence; we are in trouble with such obiendant cocksuckers that have no problem selling this country down the well for their own personal gain. Isn't this what has created such problem in the US in the first place, besides the general lazy nature of Americans. Still, hookers parade the Venetian hotel today because the rodeo is town. Times are tough, so pussy goes for whatever a savvy buyer can bargain for at the moment, only hardening the shell of the sex worker, but clothes must be purchased, drugs to deaden the morality, and money for the luxury sedan. Software program by software program, we all fall behind, watching our own demise like a television drama. Just make believe? Keep watching to find out.

Tek No Lege

Will digitize your life, then not save it, erase everything you believe in, then change the meaning. We have become slaves to the deletion of our existence, nothing more than internet radio stations, software to doctor your Mexico vacation pictures, and applications that can put all of us in the proper direction to spend cash. Bug me some more to the point of exhuastion, where being rationale no longer matters, having mind splitting headaches can be laughed off by the rest of the population. Do not fool yourself day after day, the beers, the sports, the television comedies, and recreational drugs will never mask the fact that we are only a very small portion of a leaning tower on the verge of collapse, which will wipe out all music, art, dance, and theater. Industry can never die, as long as someone can make billions marketing coupons on the internet; the desire to fleece the general public shall never end, they deserve it. Gathering like animals before the slaughter, get the axes, the sharpened knifes, and the meat grinders, no one will notice or care. Line everyone up, day after day, week after week, aren't we missing something, a connective tissue that once gave all of us a reason to stand together. Where did that fabric go? Have we abandoned the American Dream, to settle on survival, a chore that is becoming more and more of an intense struggle day after day, with each new generation to send the oldest into the holding pens for execution, can you take much more of it, probably so, most people do, not me, why stand for this, rather just lay it out there, already lost 3 pages of a story tonight to technology, going to have to go back to pen and pad or more narcotics to make any sense.

What Lies Behind the Stripclub

Saturated red and blue lights greet the mangled body of some unknown stripper. Yellow caution tape, photographer's flashes, and calm silohuettes surround the crime scene on an otherwise quiet Tuesday morning in Las Vegas. Small pools of vibrant colored blood following the force of gravity toward the nearest cesspool bacteria infected gutter as an homage to the slain victim, a sort of return to the home country, down the sewer channels with the rats, the homeless, and hybrids who have all become sickened with modern society while seeking the most effiecent way to survive as parasites on the puss filled open soar known as the Las Vegas Strip. Bike cops from the stripclub talk amongst each other wondering how such a criminal act could slip right through their collective fingers. Nothing left now but a mess for the Hazmat team to remove, body parts, dissectated flesh and a few missing fingers are nothing more now than tallys in a criminologist's statistical catagories chart. Someone's daughter has died tonight, the street surface quickly absorbs the blood, then digests it as sustanence, a gang hit, a low fi tribal sacrifice, and a movie of the week's plasma soaked graphic religious possession. Dogs bark in the distance, a disturbing force is present, demanding souls, expliotating the weak, while pulling the veil of darkened control over the minds of every pleasure seeking plantation drone with enough clout to sneak off the farm for the night to take part in the historical roots of mystical magic hypnotic transcendental behavior. Searching for clues, to answer well known, but denied from conscious belief, a crown of thorns, self flagallation, and multiple personality disorder. Day will come to call soon enough as seen by the lights growing brighter in the eastern sky, not all shall make it home safe tonight, so run from this field, from this town, this pleasure island marooned in the middle of the universe, where no sancutary exists, the nation, the world, and the mind have exiled everyone in this palace of the insane. Doors welded shut, permanent incarceration where a life sentence would feel like probation, no amount of self destruction, suicide, or drug abuse can lift the shackled weights from the bone, fusing as one while metallic stretchers haul off human remains inside a bright yellow zip up body bag.

Internet Killed the Video Store

Drove by the local Hollywood Video today and like its former counterpart Blockbuster Video; it seems Hollywood has met the same fate, closure. Not the kind of closure that heals the wounds of victims haunted by some unforeseen tragedy, but the kind that puts teenagers and single parents out of work. Does this mean my outstanding overdue charges, long ago sent to those bothersome, pesky, and persistant collection agency phone services, shall be absolved in a gelatinous mass bankrupcy bile. What a boon for the working class, service sector human being who did nothing but leave old videotapes in their automobiles during the summer to melt or accidently misplace a well used pornography DVD in place of History of the World Part 1. Am I the only one with a checkered past when it comes to the retail video rental business? Who doesn't remember those days before bootlegs, torrents, and leaked promo copies which could all be downloaded from a computer from the comfort of home, or the office, or on the college T1 line in the computer science building? Ahh, those days when, I couldn't wait for Tues, maybe it was Wed, or Mon at midnight, when retarded geeks like myself would huddle around a counter to plea for the first copy of Tombstone, The Mummy, Titanic, and classics like Moulin Rouge, clammering around a few clerks of the late night shift who were only interested in getting home, going to bed, and dealing with another day in a high school environment that no longer offered them anything of genuine substance. The low paying service sector gig is like going into hibernation, slow down the heart rate with just enough resources to get by, close the eyelids, pray that the mind takes over with a library of dreams to manipulate the rest of the body into remaining in that cocoon like state, day after day, year after year, until you wake up married with two kids wondering if taking something like LSD at your 10 year high school reunion will be strong enough to deal with a vague memory of the past.

Not sure, worked for me, but I seek adventure, to twist the minds, confusion, and generate dialouge, a false idol with a reputation not even the gods of rock would want to undertake. Anyway, this Hollywood Video store is now nothing more than a gravesite for a generation that now takes its orders from a laptop or cellphone. The darkness pouring out from the building like flooded river symbolizing the closing of another American past time, another break in the chain from what use to unite this country to now what is dividing this country, fragmenting us into subgroups, subcultures, and subnormals. We now talk at comfortable distances all over the world, city, and street, sometimes no more than five feet from one another, when I will text a friend something completely juvenile and disposable, this is train station our society has arrived at for the moment and everyone is in a crunch of mass corpse stomping hysteria to be part of the phenonemon.

I can remember walking through that video store on more than one occasion looking for something new, hip, and cinematically edgy. Why go to the movie theater, sit amongst others, in front of an enormous screen with extremely powerful sound; when I could lay in bed, drink a beer, quietly, and if the movie sucked, turn over and go to sleep. Now, there is a Netflix app on my phone, so while someone is paying me to act productive, I can log on, browse the movie selections, and bide my time watching the latest releases, as the local strip malls begin to resemble Wild West ghost towns, store by store becoming more like abandoned movie sets where shadows, apparitions, and spirits still walk along the aisles scanning over movie titles like books in a library, where kids run around stuffing boxes of movie style candy into their pockets and where movie dorks like myself use to cull through all the previously viewed movies to find that rare gem of cinematic history which still resides somewhere in a moving box in my home. So say goodnight to the bad guy, cause your never gonna see one like me again.

Year Two

Already been a year since the concept of writing ideas, musing, and witnessed events on a digital platform became somewhat of a comfortable indulgence. In this time, life has continued in its abundance of pyschedelic rollercoaster like activity from the submergence of the darkest fringe nerve frying second by second sanity grasping lows to the most blissful transcendental humanistic conscious expanding humbling highs while turning 40. All this makes me want to smile and laugh at irony in the process of acquiring wisdom. People from all walks of life across the globe have taught me by their actions, thoughts, modesty, and blatent sense of excessiveness while the ever expanding tree of humanity that now thanks to social media and internet technology has crossed pollenated so many unforeseen socio-cultural-politicial themes, that the hybrid variations created in the experiment are like new undiscovered species found in the deepest depths of some previously untraveled tropical forest, however doubtful it may be nowaday that there are few if any uncharted terrians left in this world. Either by the videocamera or resource explioation; those indigineous natives of lands across the planet are relucantly becoming familiar with foriegners like myself poking around dirt shanty towns or cobblestone mountainside pueblos. Unsure of my intentions, part researcher, part refugee, seeking some larger intangible ideology blown apart millions of years ago like an exploding asteriod in the upper atomosphere, spread across the earth wandering guided by an unknown beacon that continously changes location. On my travels throughout the decades I would like to think I have found some of the asteroid fragments bury in the ground, laid spread upon a shore or up along a mountains peak of a semi impassable range, even on the streets of my own hometown that provides no end of literary mining gold which is hopefully conveyed with some form of clarity and if nothing else a sense of awe and emotional amazement in experiencing life without judgement, without filtration, and without fear of what I don't understand admist forces potentially seeking to change me, lie to me, and even kill me.

Mobile Posts 2

Portable technology has been exponentially taking control of the slower moments of the past couple of days. Combined this with my constant grazing at the junk food snack table trying to stay off the booze can be quite a task. I am substituting one vice for another, candy crack addict left to sit in a corner and write about how big of a pain in the ass it can be to fight the urge to drive over to the local bar down the street for a couple of brews, just to take the edge off the day, release some boredom or if for nothing else maybe out of habit. Will there every be an end point to what others have no problem maintaining in their daily lives, the masses live chemically imbalanced, chemically induced, flesh based robots with no goals, cares, or desires to anything more than survive. I am getting too old to just exist, an insect, consumed, squashed, or occasionally flying into the bright burning light of some far off beacon. Some might find the latter dramatic, superhuman, or martyr like, but it all remains the same, zero sum adventure with a fresh spot under the sun in the dirt on a cloudy day. Resisted the need to waste the day under the influence no matter what kind of weirdness comes my way. A slight reward and victory in year of losing battles, still breathing and partially sane fighting the urge to annihilate the few remaining brain dead resistant strain of cells searching for permance in a world nanosecond change.