Peace Marches

Running from the gas in the UT crowd

I remember some of the Peace Marches, though I don't remember much. Most of them went on without me; somehow I was always somewhere else. I was not very deep in the "feet on the ground" politics, but sometimes the crowds would attract me. I knew what they were about, but I didn't know any "ringleaders" as the media likes to call people at the head of any "snake". Of the couple of marches I attended at the UT campus in Austin, I recall being gassed in only one of them. I don't know why it started because I wasn't that close to the front of the crowd to see who did what to who or said what! All in a couple of seconds the crowd had reversed it's direction and was running back over me. A gas canister came sailing over their heads and hit my friend John Bowen in the ass! Two seconds before he'd been beside me, but he was quick. He had just had time to turn around and be a few long gaits ahead of me when he was hit in the bottom. John was one of my two roommates at the time. Later he said it hurt. But at the time, the bad part was the tear gas enveloping him. I was close enough to him that I began to tear up immediately and to feel choked, although I could see well enough to squint my eyes and turn crosswise to the crowd and head for the nearest large building to hide in, out of shooting range of whatever might happen next. Once inside the cool building I sought water at the nearest location. The bathroom might have been better, but the water fountain would have to do! Then I just let my eyes continue to tear. Other people crowded into the building behind me to do the same thing. I knew a few of them. I suppose we congratulated ourselves and each other on not catching any bullets, though later it became clear that there hadn't been any bullets and not many of the gas canisters. The papers said next day that some of the students had become unruly. Maybe so, I wasn't well placed to see any of it. So it happened, yes, but to some extent I'd have known as much to have stayed home and read about it in the paper. My roommate John became a little bit famous, but it didn't last for long. We went home and smoked a little dope, listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and were quietly glad that we hadn't marched at Ohio State. For us, it was just a small adventure; we hadn't lost anything at all. Not to mention, anyway.

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Slinky Marlene

It's been a dead-duck day in the email box. Somebody could send me a cool note about Marlene Dietrich's glamorous 70 year old breasts in 1972 and lift me up. I could use a lift, couldn't you? Of course, Marlene lived to 90, but had the good sense to cease her career a little later in her seventies. After this, she was a recluse, except for interviews and phone calls. It was said she'd spend $3000 a month on phone calls. That IS fucking weird!

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Reminder of Gross Humanity

J.D. Salinger: "The thing to listen for, every time, with a public confessor, is what he's not confessing to. At a certain period of his life (usually, grievous to say, a successful period), a man may suddenly feel it Within His Power to confess that he cheated on his final exams at college, he may even choose to reveal that between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four he was sexually impotent, but these gallant confessions in themselves are no guarantee that we'll find out whether he once got piqued at his pet hamster and stepped on its head."

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Opportunties

Walt Kelly: "We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities."

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Justice?!

WHY is Paris Hilton out of jail early again? Did she fuck everyone in her local legal system or did her lawyers just pay everybody off?

This is too much time to waste on one of the least important persons in the world, but we do it, anyway. You can never punish rich people, I guess, because you always have to go through a system that is controlled by the authorities that toady to rich people.

We gave justice to Charles Manson, because he was poor! If Paris Hilton ever rehabilitates herself for real, pigs will fly, and the likelihood of that is very low.

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Errant Erratic Rat Relapse

Y'all don't know nuthin'! It's that goddamn simple. But then, neither do I. Shit. Fatten me up. Smack me down. Shoot the doctors and the priest! Don't let anyone escape!

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Peasants or Pissants?

Michel de Montaigne: "I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly."

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Changing Places

E. Joseph Crossman:
"Middle age is when your broad mind and narrow waist begin to change places."

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Eugenics And Depraved Popsicles

Crap, I'm melting in the snow. And you know it never snows in the southern half of Texas! Now someone will tell me that fresh crap always melts the snow, but that's not what I said! I don't have any that's fresh and I'm too busy melting to argue!

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One One One

I briefly had my MFBQ question/answer blog at exactly 111 posts and I thought that might be a good place to stop, but that only lasted about 10 minutes. By then, I'd forgotten my idea and had churned out another one! Hello, number 112!

What was that drug song that Richard Farina wrote and sang about

"Teaspoon, teaspoon, give me back my brain..."

I've got an answer jones, I guess. Blogger monkey on my back. Oh woe.

So what if I'm just showing off?

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Beauty Is A Pig!

Miss Piggy: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."

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Rock and Roll Circus

The other night, quite late, I ran across something on the public TV channel I'd never seen. I didn't even catch much of the beginning, but it was the Rolling Stones in a studio setting and looking very young. There was some sort of picked audience, and among them I kept glimpsing John Lennon, Yoko Ono, various members of the Who. It turns out that it was a taped concert made in 1968 or so, intended for TV, but not released at the time because The Stones didn't like the quality. I guess now that they're old and feeble, they realize it's better than they'll ever do again! I don't know, but it has been released since about 1994 and I STILL didn't run across it anywhere! I just don't keep track of music like I used to do. It was fun to see The Rolling Stones do 3 songs in a row: Can't Always Get What You Want, Sympathy for the Devil, and Salt of The Earth. Apparently there were other musicians who played earlier, and I missed it. But that's okay. At least I filled a tiny hole in my education. The Internet informs me that it's available on DVD these days. My first reaction to that a minute ago was to think, "Well I don't have a DVD player." But in fact I do; there's one on this computer that I've never used. I wonder if it works? I don't expect I'll find out, though. As I don't spend much time on music any more, I also don't spend much money, either. Sigh. I'm a goddamn bump on a log, apparently, and mere raindrops erodes me even more!

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Another Bore

Voltaire: "The secret of being a bore is to tell everything."

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Another Damn Dead Author

Kurt Vonnegut: "Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."

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Why Believe?

Is everyone now beautiful? Is that what we have come to? I'm in favor of it, though I'm not sure that it's true. I'm in favor of the notion even if it is known to not be true. After all, what else is there? Why believe in self-defeating things?

Most of the ugly people I know are strangers. I wonder if there's any meaning to be harvested from that? The seemingly heuristic only thing is that I even like myself now, at least as far as appearances goes. If all the ugly people are strangers to me, I would seem to be in a very good place, wouldn't I?

Where are the rest of you? I wonder about shit like that. You need not necessarily expect a big wet kiss on the mouth, though! Life goes on, and halitosis prospers while brain cells decrease, you know!

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What's The Difference?

Czech Proverb: "The big thieves hang the little ones."

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Rich?

Benjamin Franklin: "Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody."

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The Big Klonk

My nephew's son John is the only son of the only son of my deceased sister. John and his older sister Shauna are still well-loved, but they are sometimes completely nuts. John, whose middle name is the same as mine, was not named for me--we were both named for the first Clifton, my deceased father who was dead before the kids were born. He would have liked them, too.

But John is crazy. Just in the way that all kids are, I guess. Just like his sister before him, he can watch the 2 or 3 Barney tapes around here over and over again. I'm sure he's seen them hundreds of times. It is therefore peculiar to me that one of the commercials before the Barney Movie scares John and makes him go hide. He acts like he can't stand the commercial for a version of the stage play "Cats". The other day he screamed like a banshee and ran behind a large chair to hide from the monsters--the Cats! I had the feeling the same thing had been explained to him before, but his mother took the time to explain how it's just people dressed up to look like giant cats, that's all. He nodded and accepted her logic so quickly and with such an earnest look that I was reminded of a "scare" that I used to pretend to have when I was little, though maybe a bit older than 3. I may have started out really being afraid of cemeteries when the family car passed by them, but I ended up pretending to be afraid long after I knew it was no big deal. I'd cover my head and then start grinning! It was fun to pretend there was some Drama going on! Just as well I remember that; it'll maybe keep me from klonking John Clifton on the head with one of his shoes! Silly Rabbit.

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Nudity--Amen!

An Interesting fact about Miss Winters is that she once roomed with Marilyn Monroe and they wore one another's clothes.

Shelley Winters: "I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience."

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The Button

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Delightful Love

John Barrymore: "Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock."

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Empty Hallways

Shee-it, where'd the world go? Anyway?

I hear my snores echoing!

I see the rat was tracking through the art palette again and making a fucking mess everywhere else. But he's very quiet when he does it!

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Harm To Hilton?

I don't know if harm would come to Paris Hilton in a California jail. Maybe so, maybe not. But I'd have to wonder if harm would come to Paris Hilton if she

1. got out of her car at a service station and hung out with the guys.
2. went to a movie theater at 6 o clock Friday night.
3. tried to use her charge card at a greasy burger joint.
4. tried to walk 3 or 4 dogs around the block without an assistant.
5. bent over to fix her sandals in front of a group of Boy Scouts.
6. tried that crybaby stuff in a regular beauty shop.
7. sent her hamburger back more than once in a busy diner.
8. insisted she was "good for it" at a Good Will store.
9. had to shop for groceries.
10. shaved her head and was mistaken for a Britney Spears imposter.

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Anyone else want to add to this or make their own list, you're welcome to it. Who could possibly give a shit?

An Old Doors Poot

We want the world, and we want it NOW!

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Groin

Rita Rudner: "I got kicked out of ballet class because I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn't mine."

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Not Enough Porn?

I'm going in the house. Need a sugar-free drink and a piece of pie. Even a peanut butter and jelly sandwich would be good. I've got some sugar-free grape jelly. Didn't answer many questions in Blogger Help Group tonight or at least it doesn't seem so. I kept rolling back to the zero point in the various categories and finding my own gold stars or questions that I already couldn't answer. Too weird.

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Dying Of Nothing

Redd Foxx: "Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing."

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Heart Attack, But Not Me

Found out the other day that my cousin's heart operation took place without me even knowing about it was going to be! I knew he'd had some symptoms and was going to a specialist in Houston, but I didn't learn about the surgery until J.W.'s wife P. was driving him home from Houston ( 2.5 hrs). I knew he had an appointment with the specialist in Houston, but I didn't know they decided it couldn't wait because it was 95% blocked! Now the operation was so successful that the news is now as good as it was bad at first! He's my favorite cousin (really the only one I have any traffic with) and I feel like a dirty damn dog that I didn't made some effect to call him over the last several days. If I had, I wouldn't have known why he wasn't home, but I could have called and harassed his other relatives. I called him and he didn't care about me being a dog, though; he was alive, even if he's not allowed to play golf! He had bypass surgery 30 years ago (he's my age, so that procedure sure did last him a long time). Maybe this will last the same, long enough to live out his life. It might be close, though, since his mother and mine are both burning up the roads to 90. He may live that long himself! That is too weird to imagine about oneself or one's close friends or kin. But this (almost 60) used to be unimaginable too. It's all too weird. It could make me ill.

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Artistry

"We’re creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world." Henry Miller -- Sexus

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Team Blogs On Parade

Shit, where am I? I get confused. It got confusing a week or two ago when I added some friends to a Team Blog so that I could have one to test. And to get a Google Groups account so that I could test that. I've accomplished some of that. It ain't good enough to share the url with you yet, but who knows? Then almost immediately I chose to accept membership in someone else's newly formed Team Blog. Now when I type a post or send a message, I frequently don't know where I am, goddammit! I think I already gave away the Secret Handshake a time or two. Oh, well, Shit Happens. The site owned by Tiphanie is The Sharpie Chronicles. It's good to go, but don't look at it too hard, it's new. Now open your Xmas present and don't complain!

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Oodles of Sweetness!

For all of you who like to think there's a lot of unconscious sweetness in the world, I admit there are some times you are right. Let's Be Friends offers some proof of that. Be careful about your glucose levels!

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Henry Miller: The Sage And The Garbage

On the radio (National Public Radio, I think) I heard some felicitous and refined-sounding lady quoting Henry Miller as part of her sign off--you remember him, the fuck-shit-piss kinda guy who DIDN'T beat around the bush and who didn't just refer to some 7 words you couldn't say on radio because he was too busy saying them in his books--anyway, the nice lady was quoting him, and I thought it was peculiar. It wasn't any of his vulgarity, but one of the numerous times he happened to say something philosophical like

"If a person pays enough attention to anything, maybe just a blade of grass, one will eventually be forced into the inner dynamics of existence and be overwhelmed by the beauty of all things in life."

That's not actually a quote, but my approximation. Lord knows I read enough nasty Henry Miller when I was a young man that I SHOULD be able to quote him, but that is fodder for another day. I thought it was pretty weird for the nice lady on the radio to be pulling the wool over the public's eyes like that, because she didn't mention him in any context; she just quoted the loony sex-crazed penis-swinging bastard. Don't get me wrong, I used to read him and like it. He was able to take his mind anywhere and was willing to talk about anything that occurred to him. I feel like the fact that he was frequently on the make for any woman who passed his way or fucking more than one or two them at once gives his quote above more gravitas, not less.

But in the world where I grew up, women could not read his worst literature without wanting to throw it down. I know, I tried to introduce some women to it! No sale. All the budding young feminists back then (the sixties) just found him vulgar. He was. Yet that wasn't all he was. I wonder what the age and experience of the nice lady on the radio was? Was she experienced or inexperienced? Did she just get a quote out of some damn book of quotes, or did she know that her Wise Man was also the Garbage Man?

I think I would still like parts of Miller, if there weren't better things to do. I don't need to dredge up that old excuse for women (most of them) to have the solid-gold chance to be pissed off at me again. I'm vulgar enough on my own! Now that I mention it, I consider Henry Miller as the most extreme of all bloggers and honest in an era when there were no bloggers!

If he were here now, I'm not sure he'd be the pornographic leader he was considered to be any more! That's because he effected the culture that we were raised in, even for those who didn't much read him or even know of him. You'll end up reading him out of context, at the very least! Thanks, radio lady, it was fun!

END.

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Nother Post Title List Without Posts

1. Waiting For The Undergarments To Clear
2. Cowards In Redaction
3. Blogger Blossoms Into Concrete
4. Blogger Falls In And Dies In 4 Inches of Concrete
5. Yellow Man In The Purple Kitchen
6. Dead Men Dancing
7. Cretin Bull's Mythology
8. Transparent Winnying
9. Purposeful Diametics
10. Callous Corndogs
11. Upsetting Stomachs
12. Chagrin In Determined Chins
13, Baker's Dozen?

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