All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Run for cover!

Holy smithereens, batman. Or are you superman? Either way, keep an x-ray eye open for falling debris. Actually, that’s only if you’re superman. If you’re batman, perhaps you have some kind of protective or repellant device in you utility belt. If so, deploy at once. Use ’em if you got ’em. (That’s what I need… a utility belt! Mitch!)

Hola, you blog browsers out there. Welcome to the land of unintended consequences. Yes, that’s right, my friends… Big Green has made another slight miscalculation. It seems we weren’t real careful about what we were asking for, and Jesus Christmas, we got it. (Or is that Mother of Pearl?) As you may recall (if, like me, you haven’t got anything better to do than surfing the net and catching up on one bogus thread or another), we had resorted to a last ditch effort at getting a-hold of Gung Ho, our militant neighbor, and asking him to use his mercenary war machine to… well… blast our way back into our beloved squat house, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, in a manner of speaking. Now, specifically what I had had in mind was a show of force to intimidate the developers who pulled the mill out from under us. You know what I mean – a couple of ultra-low flyovers aimed at their local headquarters. Maybe dropping a couple of duds on the roof. Leafleting, perhaps. That sort of thing.

Well, we tried to reach Gung-Ho at his remote deployment (destination: classified) via a number of different methods of communication – smoke signal, orgone generator, e-mail, etc. I’m not sure which one(s) actually got through to the old man, but whichever it may have been, the message must have gotten significantly garbled somehow. (My vote is on Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device, which should never be confused with a telegraph.) Gung-Ho apparently got the impression that he should mount a full-scale, sustained bombing campaign against the real estate firm in question. Or maybe he just thought that would be a more fun way to do the job — he’s never been real big on the subtle approach, quite frankly. Either way, he and his A-Team came screaming into town in their surplus F-15’s, shooting up everything within seven square blocks of the real estate office. To make matters worse, he chose the very moment when we were making another appeal for leniency to the local magistrate… on the basis of our good will towards the community.

Awwwk-ward. 

Okay, so how did this affect our plea? Never mind that now. Suffice to say we failed to engender a sufficient degree of sympathy from the judge — or so it seemed when he was fleeing the courtroom along just ahead of a collapsing cinderblock wall. (Yes, the courtroom is downtown, a stone’s throw from the developer’s office.) It’s a little hard to describe the phantasmagoric scene that confronted us as we scurried into the street. The word pandemonium comes to mind, but I’m sure there are others more appropriate to the occasion. Catastrophe, perhaps. Suffice to say that Gung-Ho’s principal target — the headquarters of the Madagascarian firm that had arranged for our eviction — had sustained more than superficial damage. The basement looked as though it might still be useable, once rubble from the five floors above it could be steam shoveled out. Ouch. 

We tried to reach Gung-Ho on the phone, but no luck. He must have just swooped in for the air strikes and then flown back to whatever area of the world he’s destroying-for-hire this week. Seems like the only thing to do is to make our way back to the outskirts of town and see if, by any small chance, a stray round or two might have homed in on… the… hammer… mill……       

Political Rants

Red meat.

Looks like Admiral Rove is settling into his new post (job description: save Republican Congress at all costs). You can see the big juicy cultural issues being tossed out in time for November, as fat boy scrutinizes each race, each district, each county for that crucial wedge. Bush’s loopy plan to station National Guard troops at the Mexican border — in conjunction with fences, barriers, high-tech sensors, and unmanned drone aircraft — is a clear gambit to mobilize the “minuteman” vote in these crucial border districts. Congressional races are all about getting the base (and I do mean base) constituencies in action — that’s why we’ll see various draconian proposals aimed at immigration, gays, abortion, and other brain-stem targeted issues. Even with Bush’s ratings in the low to mid 30s, they can still carry the day if they capture the top-of-mind issues in enough districts and get the American Taliban to march zombie-like to the polling stations. Overall turnout in mid-term elections is usually way below even the poor numbers we see during presidential races, so the X-treme voters are far more influential. 

I can tell you, in my hometown Congressional district (the 24th in upstate New York), we are going to witness the most monumental political clash in living memory. Our 12-term Congressman is retiring this year — he’s a “moderate” Republican, though with an increasingly reactionary voting record as his party has swerved drunkenly to the right. The Democrats have an opportunity to pick up this seat for the first time in decades (the last time Utica, NY, was represented in Congress by a Democrat was 1948), and the GOP is desperate to hang onto it… so both parties will be spending like sailors this fall, bringing in the heavyweight political consultants. It’s going to get ugly, my friends, very ugly, and I can already smell the pungent aroma of the porcine Mr. Rove wafting up from the sewers. For a few brief moments, this backwater district will seem like the most important place on the planet… then, after the November vote, it will recede back into total obscurity, all promises forgotten once the hacks have packed up their tents and beat it. 

How do we stay important? Move the whole bloody district down to the Mexican border. There just aren’t enough economically desperate people of color streaming across the Canadian border for the national focus to remain fixed upon us. Not that all that attention is a positive thing — I for one would not want to live near what is increasingly becoming a militarized zone; a kind of Maginot line against immigration (it’s likely to be every bit as effective as the original, too). And another thing (ahem), how are they going to deal with ordering the National Guard to the southwest when so many of them have served multiple tours in Iraq? How are these guards people going to react to the situation at the border after having been shot at for months on end? Is there anything else we can ask of these citizen-soldiers? I mean, for chrissake, we’re giving them yet another mission? Meanwhile, Bush and company are awarding their rich constituents massive tax cuts — that’s their sacrifice. Some give up their lives, while others give up their tax burdens. They also serve who line their pockets. 

Next: the National Guard will be deployed as hood ornaments for the rich. Expect an address to the nation sometime soon.  

Usual Rubbish

What the… ? (Fill in the blank.)

Fill in the blank. (My preference is “fuck”, but don’t let that influence you.) Always the “f” word in this group, eh? Not so unusual. A million and one uses for that storied old English term, and most of them apply to the music business. Nouns and modifiers… sometimes proper names. (Sometimes improper names.)

Anyway, greetings from the streets of Colombo, Sri Lanka — Big Green‘s new “virtual squat house”, now that we’ve been tossed out of the Cheney Hammer Mill. As always, morning finds us scrambling for shelter amongst the curbside artifacts and trash bins. Expect to see us huddled together? Not a chance – it’s every slug for himself in this band. At least that’s the way I felt about it while there was still a relatively congenial spot available to me beneath the flapjack vendor’s stand. Alas, I have been expelled from that sanctuary, as well. Bloody merchants! Now I’m trying to worm my way into my colleagues’ temporary digs. So that thing I said earlier about every man for himself? Not so. Not so.

Now, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that there has been no movement on our efforts towards reparations. As I mentioned last week, our (former) neighbor Gung-Ho may prove to be our ace in the hole, so to speak. So far we’ve had no luck trying to reach him at whatever remote location he’s been hired to invade, but we’ve got our best minds working on it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has graciously allowed his solar batteries and internal cosmium oscillator to be linked into a makeshift transmitter. (Matt’s on the key now, tapping out “C-Q, C-Q”, just like pops used to. Sometimes Marvin throws in “S.O.S.” for good measure.) Trevor James Constable is using his patented orgone generating device to send distress signals out into the ethers, even though the chances of their attracting Gung-Ho’s attention are next to nil (especially if he has his helmet on). John? I don’t know… I think he and anti-Lincoln are resorting to smoke signals. Either that, or they’re burning an awful lot of Zenite snuff.

It may seem ignoble of us to be calling in for close air support. Why, you may ask, don’t we use the legal process? Why the early resort to violent methods? Well, I’m going to tell you. We Big Green ers are simple folk. We don’t go in for all that fancy legal-schmeegal mumbo-jumbo. Most of us, at least, prefer a more direct message… like blow a big hole in their land office headquarters. (My brother is a bit more attached to the intimidation method – have some goon lean on them, know what I mean? Only goon we’ve got is Big Zamboola, and his intimidating days are definitely over.) Not that we can count on Gung-Ho to do anything particularly rash, but hey… we can ask, right? Doesn’t hurt to ask.

There’s a time limit on this street lifestyle – I’m sure some of you know what I’m talking about. As my photos indicate, I’m getting a little scruffier every day. (You should see the man-sized tuber. Couple of days out in the rain and he starts taking root… and even the pillbox-dwellers can’t take the sight of him.) Come on, Gung Ho!