#44 "Attention Span of a Gnat”

Dear Don1001,

Although presently I’m writing my memoirs, there are contemporary things that “bitch slap” you back to the now. For instance, I just saw an Internet TV commercial for a mortgage company that was advertising the advantages of a new low variable rate mortgage over a stodgy old 30 year fixed rate. If you want an allegory or metaphor (I can never remember the difference) for the economic debacle that took place in 2008, the variable rate mortgage (that anyone including children could get) is that poster child. Those “Dream home deals of a lifetime” turned out to be all sizzle and no steak, and in the end for most people, it turned out to be like a long bad weekend in “Vegas” where you get on the plane with a screaming bad hangover with all of your credit cards “maxxed” out and a tooth missing. Since February of "09" American homeowners have suffered a combined net loss of over a trillion dollars. I don’t know about you, but from where I came from that’s money, real money.  The recent monetary “pig-fuck”, my friend, was the result of a combination of avarice, world-class arrogance and stupidity. Now less than three years later some of the financial institutions that the Federal Bank lent money for 0.0% (that’s zero percent) are starting to slowly creep back into the shadow world of variable rate money lending. The sharks on Wall Street have a lot of “cheap” money and they need to find a place for it and what better way get a high rate of return than lending money to people that can’t afford it. Which make me wonder just how long is the attention span of the American people? It can’t be too long, because after the World almost went into an economic Armageddon, one would have thought that in the election of 2010, the people that had lost homes and jobs would elect politicians that would have their best interest in mind, but they didn’t. The American people returned to office at the State and Federal level people (mostly conservative and very rich) with the very same mindset that drove the truck into the ditch in the first place. And what do these Ayn Rand aficionados have to offer as solutions for the pain of the working poor and the middle class? More tax cuts for the Rich. (Personally that’s not the direction I would have taken but nobody asked me.) So I doubt things will change any time soon because the economic elites are still having so much fun that its easy for them to rationalize an America where the majority of people are saddled with a boatload of debt and angst about the present and the future. I know this is a horrible indictment of the truly rich but it certainly does go a long way in substantiating my best worst fears about the future.  A fear that events that have yet to come are going to be as equally fucked up as the last decade, because we, as a people, are still more infatuated with flash than substance.

                                                      Wishing we could rewrite the future, Brother Gregory

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#43 “Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs)”

Dear Don1001,

Writing my memoirs has loosened a torrent of repressed memories. These memories were placed into the deep reserves of the reptile brain because of extreme weirdness. The sort of incidents in one’s life that pose more questions than answers, and if you did find the truth, you might not be able to handle it. When I was transporting “cargo” in and out of the swamps of Louisiana, we would occasionally make runs into the Gulf to meet up with ships too large to make into the Inter-coastal Canal, during one such run I saw some World Class strange. At sea, at night you see all sort of lights that are unidentified moving through the sky and most seaman don’t think anything of them, but this night, the lights weren’t moving through the sky but moving through the Gulf waters. It’s one in the morning and we’re chugging along at close to 12 knots about fifteen miles out Houma, I’m standing on the bow smoking a Cuban cigar and drinking a large cup of very suspect coffee, when I see a 747 size light slowly rising underneath the water about 500 yards off of our right side. Now in the area of the Gulf that we were in the water is about a mile deep, so this was different, so I run up to the wheelhouse, where the Captain has got a “what the fuck is going on look in his eyes” and is starting to steer the ship away from the light that is getting closer. Normally this is the time that you would call the Coast Guard, but if you’re meeting with a ship that slipped out of the port of Santa Marta, Columbia, in an area you’re not suppose to be, in the middle of the night, there will be questions asked you don’t want to answer. By the time that the whole crew is on deck, there has been a joint fired up and for about 3 minutes we watch this massive submerged blob of light, track us. Right as the joint is finished, Captain Jean calls out over the PA that he was headed back to port, no matter how much money we offered him. One of the hard-cores wanted to renegotiate with Captain Jean with a Glock pushed in his ear, that was until suddenly 5 smaller brightly lit orbs emerged from the large blob of light surfaced about 20 feet above the water and hovered there for 5 seconds, then they disappeared into the night breaking the sound barrier with a resounding boom as they disappeared. As we looked to “Mother Sub/Space Ship” it took off at the same speed under water. Things don’t move that fast under water but this thing did and it barely made a wake. It was at that point, that collectively we realized that Captain Jean was a fucking genius and that land was the place to be. Evidently the ship we were to meet saw the same light show and headed back to Columbia, chucking “merchandise” along the way so that they could go faster. We weren’t sure if it was Aliens or a NSA/CIA “Black-Op” thing. Either way, there are certain things that you don’t fuck with, Aliens and the NSA/CIA both come under that heading. After I got back in the wheelhouse I asked Captain Jean what he thought just happened. Captain Jean said he didn’t know and didn’t care; he just wanted to get his boat back to port safely. Two weeks later we met up with another boat and then everything went smoothly. So gradually the incident didn’t matter as much as staying alive or staying out of jail. Twenty-five years later, I wonder what exactly did happen that night, not that it really matters because then as now, Aliens and the NSA/CIA are still things you don’t want to fuck with, trust me.

                                                            Turning on the Night Light, Brother Gregory

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#42 “Literary Agents & Bail Bondsmen”

Dear Don1001,

One of the side effects of doing huge amounts of coffee and Khat is binge writing. But occasionally you need to come up for air and Cannabis, so I’ve decided to take a break from writing to blaze a big fatty and to compose you a note about what I’m writing. I’ve decided after five decades on the Planet to pen my memoirs, or at least I think they are my memories and if they’re not mine, they’re somebody’s and they’re weird enough that they need to be penned. So after decades of hard drug use, cheap hotels, air flights from Hell in Third World countries, suspect food and a large quantity of weirdness, it’s time to record some of these escapades while I can still remember them. And what better way to rationalize a life that can only be characterized as theater of the bizarre combined with moments of sex, violence and illusions of grandeur than a memoir? Although my decades of Bohemian/Political Gangster lifestyle has enabled me to accrue a lot of stories, the huge amounts of alcohol and drugs that came with that territory, has taken a toll on my “hard drive”. I have all of these vague memories of things that I may or may not have participated in to some degree, like of hanging out with some junkie classmates for a couple of weeks in the Summer of “76” as they were in the middle of a phase, they described as “Crash and Burn”. These morons owned a “63” Ford pickup that they would crash into a small town pharmacy, grab all of the drugs they could in five minutes and then haul ass to the next small town and do the same thing until they had a large laundry bag full of drugs. Thirty some years later it’s hard to say exactly to what degree I participated. I know I didn’t go with them during the robberies because even at the ripe old age of 20, I knew these guys were fucking crazy. Although my “home-boys” from the “Hills of Southern Indiana” were junkies, they knew nothing about drugs, that’s where I came in, I could tell them which drugs would get them high and which ones would clear up their acne. Of course I kept the best drugs for my services but they never knew that because they were getting higher than they ever had in the life, so everybody was happy. But because of that incident alone, some would say I was an accessory to several felonies that are too tedious to list; I would say I was an “in-bedded Journalist” a priori. I wasn’t participating in crime; I was observing these antisocial behaviors so that I could write about them at a future date when I could be more objective about the facts and not face serious jail time. For some individuals, journalism is a vainglorious attempt at relevant observations about current events, for me, its vague recollections of three-day weekends in Hell, pen in hand. All serious writers should have a good literary agent and a great bail bondsman. Well the Manatuska Thunderfuck (Alaska’s finest Cannabis, I wonder if Sarah ever tried it?) has taken off the edge enough that maybe I can eat something and get some sleep.

                       Plagiarizing myself, Brother Gregory

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#41 “Missing Doc”

Dear Don1001,

I’ve been reading the some of the latest newspapers that I scammed on my run to the outside and it has posed a question, are there any political writers that aren’t in some sort of time warp? It’s like Bizarro World stuck in neutral with these people, because the only people they are truly writing for are other political writers, especially those that are of a different political persuasion. They continually spare without substance and yet no one calls out these hack writers for ignoring the things that are really fucking up your life and the lives of the rest of the planet. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times are the worst of a long line of editorial writers that have for too long taken themselves way too seriously. That’s why God do I miss Hunter S. Thompson. Doc has not been gone from the stage that long but he has left a large vacuum. One never knows why, a person sticks a large caliber weapon into their mouth and pulls the trigger but there must have been a lot of physical and emotional pain. So although HST is gone the weirdness that remains still needs to written about and dissected by those that aren’t "political groupies". I wonder what Doc would have thought about the emergence of Gretchen Carlson, Ed Schultz, Donald Trump and Sarah Palin (now that she’s a journalist) as champions of “TV Truth”. They are painful examples of  something Doc said “TV is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench running through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason, then there's the negative side.” Dr. Thompson knew that the TV News business is uglier than most people can ever imagine. And Sarah Palin is  a perfect example not because of her politics but because of her lack of interest in the World. HST knew that you had to poke and probe everywhere and everyone if you wanted to find the truth. Doc understood that “absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.” Which is why the pursuit of this precious commodity should left out of the hands of former Rodeo Clowns, Sports Casters, Beauty Queens or former political hacks like Carl Rove and Chris Matthews. These people are damaged goods and we don’t need their sanctimonious navel gazing. We need big picture journalism and we need it now. That’s why if we’re lucky somewhere is this great country of ours there’s a gifted juvenile delinquent that is starting to write a little and read a lot.

                           Wishing I had some Ether, Brother Gregory

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#40 "In The Red Zone" REDUX

Dear Don1001, 

After hacking into the satellite that has all of the NFL games, I’m nine hours into a full-fledged professional football-watching binge. I’ve never experienced total access to all of the games, in real time. It is fucking awesome and I’m not that into football or maybe it’s the friggin Khat but the ability to go every game when anything interesting is about to happen, is like channel surfing on steroids. At one point they had six games where there were teams in the “Red Zone”, I’m not sure what that really means but it was fucking cool. I can’t really describe it, going from one game to another as shit is about to happen with no down time in between plays, its like playing multiple games of John Madden NFL at the same time. About three hours into to this sensory overload the video had become the retina of my mind’s eye and there ceased to be an awareness of my physicality as I’ve become one with the flat screen. As I watched I was totally unaware of my brain telling my hand to change feeds, or to keep ingesting the substances that enabled me to maintain the perfect chemical equilibrium needed to stay in the “Zone” for hours. Athletes talk about the ability to slow down time and see things before they happen; I now know what they mean. I’m not sure when it happened but by intuition I began to know what game to switch to as a big play was about to happen. From bone jarring tackle to big runs, full tilt testosterone, mano a mano, no estrogen need apply.  It was 100% pure American choreographed violence with no cute female sideline reporters or cheerleaders. If you want to see eye-candy cute female reporters and cheerleaders, rent a porno, it does not enhance the football viewing experience. Men watch football to see whose balls are bigger. I knocked you down so I’m the dominant male. It may seem frivolous to females but men need to know their place in the pack not by intellect but by physical ability. If you’re trying to take down a 500-pound wild boar with spears, you have to know what the next man’s got and that you can depend on him. Football is our modern equivalent of an ancient hunt for big game. These men bond by learning each other’s strengths and that if they slip a little that someone has their back. Because of this, they will literally risk being crippled for life in order to be there for their football brothers. It is why a Marine will sprint across fifty yards of open field under fire to pickup a wounded fellow Marine and die in the process. It is not rational but it is why, as a species, we still exist. So maybe my football orgy is encoded in my DNA and that I have little or no say with my fascination with watching steroid crazed individuals crashing against each other, I don't know, but half-time of the last game of the day is ending, so you'll have to excuse me, I'm going to drink in the last remaining bits of violence and eat large amounts of meat.

                                   Going deep, Brother Gregory

Now for something entirely different:

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#39 “Tomorrow is Black Friday”

Dear Don1001,

I started the day reading the Thanksgiving edition of the New York Times from 2008, 2009? So why not treat the day like Thanksgiving? So now I’m tweaked out of my skull. It started with a big cup of coffee (from Kenyan beans that had been hoarded) and a joint of Jack Herer/Blueberry the size of a small Louisville Slugger, and trying to do a crossword puzzle from the Times. After about a third of the way through the crossword puzzle, I started chewing a big wad of Khat, which kicked in the African Coffee, so my BP went to about 200 over 140, so then I ate a thumbnail size chunk of refined opium and fired up another spliff, just to take the edge off a bit. So I was occasionally nodding off, gritting my teeth, while trying to finish the fucking cross word puzzle, when I saw the article about how tomorrow was Black Friday and it was high anxiety time for merchants. I’m not sure they could be as tense as I was at that moment, but as I read, I realized the correlation between the drug world and mass consumerism was uncomfortably close. Nothing is as near to pure capitalism as drug dealing. You have a one on one viewpoint of what something is worth and how much customer satisfaction it gives. There’s also something else to drug dealing, good dealers know how much product their customers can buy before they’re dead customers. The question is do the merchants of America know how much their customers can buy before they overdose on too much needless shit and too much debt? On those rare occasions when drugs are plentiful, dealers sit on their stash, until demand returns or they lower prices to undercut their competitors. It’s that simple. So are the guys sitting in the boardroom as smart as the guys working the corners, slinging out “eightballs” and "dime bundles"? I don’t think so. Ever hear of many drug dealers that lose money? Oh it happens, but not for long, if you’re being fronted and you lose money, either you’re beat down or killed. Just imagine if the head of GM was told that if he lost money, that "Ray-Ray" and “Little Joey" would beat him to death and bury him in a cornfield. I have a gut feeling that homeboy would be a little more diligent about the running of his company and most of all customer satisfaction, because if people don’t buy his products, Mr. CEO will be fertilizing Orville Redenbacher’s next Popcorn crop. Which gets us back to Black Friday, (actually Friday, Saturday and Sunday) where some stores do as much as 20% of their years’ entire business. Which is like a yuppie binge drug user coming in and buying your whole supply, which disrupts everything, because when your "regulars" come in, you're out of merchandise. Dealers like steady, everything is about flow, and their favorite customers are the people that have worked their drug habit within their financial framework and like clockwork are there after every payday. Occasionally if you are a “regular” you may get something fronted, as long as you pay soon. The problem is that Big Business of America has stopped “working the corner” and lost track of how much they could front the people and small businesses. And now after pumping too much “product” onto the streets, Big Business is starting to realize that the credit overdoses won’t stop until they stop fronting to people that can’t pay. But Big Business started dipping into it’s own stash a few years back and now has a King-Hell sized addiction to credit. So it will be interesting to see, which can get their addiction to “free money” under control sooner, Big Business or the American people.

                                Trying not to pop an artery, Brother Gregory

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#38 “Made in America”

Dear Don1001,

I’m not sure how much longer I can go before I need to go on another run for supplies and some newspapers. I continually read the same old issues of the New York Times, time and time again. Why is it so hard to find a Wall Street Journal or an Economist? Anyway I’m reading the Times and I remember this little morsel; D.C. Sniper Who Killed 10 in 2002 is Executed (Nov. 10-09), John Allen Muhammed known for killing 10 people in the nation's capital in 2002, is executed in a Virginia prison. And I began to wonder why domestic political terrorists don’t seem to scare the shit out of the power structure like Islamic terrorists do? When Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols took out 168 people on a beautiful day on April 19, 1995, there was no one clambering to take down every chapter of the Aryan Nation or any of the separatist groups that openly advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government. Why wasn’t there a domestic version of the Patriot Act? Wonder why? Maybe its because some of these fringe groups are very convenient at times to certain parts of the Military/Industrial complex. Check through the company formerly known as Blackwater, and the cross connections can be quite interesting. I can personally attest that the best prices for bulk ammo I’ve ever received came from a group of Klansmen from Pascagoula, Mississippi. I worked for an unknown employer a few months in the Inter-coastal waterways with a “crew” of Klan members, moving large amounts of merchandise (it was some sort of crystalline substance in bulk, I never asked what it was, but when handling it my heart would race like a rabbit’s) back in the 80’s. Although I could never relate to their racial politics we both shared an appreciation for high-powered weapons, prescription methamphetamines, and ladies of African descent. This Pascagoula “crew” hated Black people but any chance they got to hook up with Black women, they did. It was always a weird contradiction that made my head spin. Which leads into the love/hate relationship that America has with domestic political terrorists. Ask the British, who were the first political terrorists in America? And the Brits will tell you, Paul Revere, John Adams, Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry (which they hung) most of which participated in the first Tea Party, yet in the U.S. they are the Fathers of our Country. You see, business oriented political fanatics not religious fanatics founded our Country, so there is an inherent soft place in our hearts, for those that fight the “man”, especially if there's potential profit. In some of the circles I use to travel in, Timothy McVeigh is a fallen hero. Mr. Tim died without “ratting” out his brothers and fought the New World Order to his death, taking out as many Federalists, as possible. Tim and his associates' anxieties are very similar to the present day frustrations of the people that fear government more than anything. Which makes it curious to see if a Tea Party supporter kills for the cause and subsequently dies fighting for their version of liberty. Because as people from the right and the left ratchet up the rhetoric, sooner or later someone is going to go “Timothy McVeigh” on the government. It will be curious to see whom they’ll attack; I’m betting the next attack will be against the IRS. Almost everyone on the far right or far left hates the IRS. So I’m handicapping the “Over/Under” on the next Domestic Political Terrorist Attack at 12 months.

                                         Betting on under,

                                               hoping for over,

                                                       Brother Gregory

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