Upon entering into the reveal and revel of the morning's face, one of Jack-o-lantern saw tooth and smoking man cigarette flare and flame in the eyes of the smoker, I knew, I knew more so than any other time, that the day held my completion, not closure, of an evil act and Godly end of what presents to one’s self of consequence.

I figured I would take this opportunity to sum up what has been the extraneous cast and crew of my experience known as CWP. The incarceration characters that may or may not have found themselves into your minds as well as they burned themselves into mine.

These are the instances that were missed, or left roadside as rubber kill, the last week. These are the ones that will leave my mental belly full after the consumption of the act.

First off, would be the man known as ‘Biggun’ of Black Star (we jokingly call it Black Tar). He works the mulch gate at the Black Star Canyon facility that helps support the private trailer park and picnic area found within the sand molestation of canyon walls hardened by time. Biggun lived in a trailer next to the mulch keeper’s gate and made me look like an anorexic Umpa-Lumpa looking to be fed and cuddled. Biggun worked in the entrance shed with the bugs that had 'wanted' posters. He wasn’t very concerned about the bug or the ‘Have You Seen Me’ milk carton sign on his exterior workplace wall. On my third day of CWP, Pedro and I rolled up with a stake bed truck full of hay with Rogelio and Rogelio had to honk three times. Biggun was not at his gate. He came from his adjacent trailer/home with a plate of two burritos and corn and mashed potatoes, and said he was sorry as he just wanted lunch. This was Biggun. He wore a vest like ours, mostly out of security, and had a bent over biker mustache that did not attach at the chin as a Fu-Man-Chu would. He was very concerned about his lunch as his stomach would imply. His home was a rusty trailer; with an even more rusty air conditioning unit projecting from the roof as if it were to point out of the canyon to God, himself.

I came across Biggun again last week while depositing some branches in trade for a load of mulch. He smiled big and hearty through his lonely Black Star Canyon smile and asked the fellow vest wearers (although for very different reasons), “Are you with the County?” We were convicts in a truck with a huge County emblem on the side with a driver wearing a County uniform. I wondered who he thought we were. I wondered if there was a gang of hoodlum mulch stealers trying that hard to pass themselves off as County employees. Biggun said, "Ok" upon the response of yes and then told me and Yames to “Have a good day.” You have many a good day Biggun. Smile when you do it, just as you always have.

There are others as well. Let me lay them down to rest in my mind.

There is the ultra drag net duo of either Fed or Detective status that carpool in their ‘unmarked’ squad car, complete with side light spots and a raming grill in the front. Nothing says undercover like a Crown Victoria. Anyway, the two of them carpool and often when I arrive at the Hill they are awaiting each other’s company. They like to carpool. I think they like intimidating convicts awaiting their sentence completion and promptness even more. I called them Fric and Frac.

Upon this past week, they had neighbors. A buick with Washington plates was parked out front. A Hispanic man and a Caucasian woman, who was very, very thin, lived there. Based on the debris that they left behind, they enjoyed smoking and flossing. I watched them bathe and change clothes one morning behind their open trunk lid. California makes strange bed fellows. At least they are serious about dental hygiene. I think they were meth heads looking to get from one deal to the next.

In the parking lot we also found a couple of other agents of surreal chopsticks, trying to pick up foods that would be considered impossible to consume with two tiny, thin sticks of rubbed down splinter sharpening:

There is the dog walker. A very beautiful Mediterranean woman who would smile at me as I swept the front walk. During the last week she arrived late. She then proceeded to smile and wave at the same time as she ran into the back door of her job. I guess some people can over look the day glow vest of being a criminal.

The other dweller of the back alley is the owner of ‘Bagels and Brew’ who sits in the back about every ten minutes in a plastic chair smoking cigarettes and gossiping about her beyond pathetic life at very loud volumes. You would think that this woman thought her world to be that of television quality - not necessarily reality, but rather sitcom. I thought her chatter to be obnoxious and over bearing to the sensory perception of her clientele. However, her over priced chateau of morning get together was and is always packed and, in the end, who am I to judge?

An that brings us to …

The most recent addition to the work crew was a CWP, not CRP, Hispanic man that I originally coined the “Buena Vista Social Club’. He wore a floppy bendable and placed wicker hat of almost Soupy Sales quality. His head was shaved. His fingernails and the end segment of his digits were swollen and bizarre - they were like that of an Alien pod-sucker. His name is Mario. For his first two days he stood at the bottom of a ladder doing nothing except watching Conception hang Halloween lights on the various buildings of the Hill for their big Hollow’s Eve Gala. I then abbreviated his name down to ‘Buena Vista Gilligan’. He was the new Latino lil’ buddy, the Pedro part Deux. He became a over animated nightmare of snot rockets, lung butter, and lots of over emphasized inhales and exhales. His English was ok, but it became muddled as we repeatedly covered the same subject of his second DUI and his recent trauma of serving 60 days inside and having 240 hours of CWP. He shook my hand today and wished me well. I gripped is over bearing alien mitts and said, "Thanks". I wished him luck back. He was, at the very least, an odd fellow. I also warned him of continuing to drive without his license, which I had with Pedro. It fell on deaf ears, selectively dead ears. He’ll keep driving (and probably drinking) and I am done with my service to society.

Again, another fabulous mention is the Ace Hardware store stock receiver on Friday mornings. He is a burly fellow with long hair, both on head and face. If Biggun and I were related, this man would and could be our cousin. He likes to crank the outside sound system speakers full blast at 5:45 a.m. while listening to Howard Stern on Serious Satellite radio. If I were the owner of a house across the street from this crap-out high volume public fart of audacity and animosity, I would have John Madden by the balls until that Ace Hardware was shut down. Ace is obviously not the place on Lake Forrest and Serrano in Lake Forrest, CA. I saw him one day on an afternoon break combing his beard while sitting in his truck. Man, I was tempted, so tempted, to tell him where to shove the volume knob. I didn’t. I do know wrong from right. It is a shame he does not.

One more little side step is the elderly fellow that we became to know as J.I. James Irvine was the owner and proprietor of the Irvine Ranch for many Joad decades. He made millions and his name is synonymous with the town and the corporation. This elderly man was his ranch foreman. He was touring about the other day as a group of high school kids (guided by a food bank worker who looked and acted, as well as sounded and laughed, like Bill Cosby) picked avocados from the trees. This ancient gent was relaying the tales of J.I. and him on the ranch. The were of a devious nature, as we all assumed, as farming in California for many decades, following the dust bowl era of the Midwest, was racist and down right violent. Hence, Caesar Chavez. We coined this man J.I. and we talked in almost the same gravely deep Biggun voice to make fun of the enormous garden gnome of Black Star. Funny how hatred, bigotry, and violence can be almost cute and very, very surreal when spoken from the lips of a 900 year old man with a walker. I think they are looking to wax his elderly ass into an animatronic display when the museum of rusty equipment is up and running. Funny how everything rusts.

That is it.

I am not looking back.

Done. Finished. Finito.

I learned a lot of Spanish.

I ate a lot of good produce.

I was agriculturally educated.

I walked more miles than Forrest Gump.

Over 200 as of tonight - so maybe not as many as Gump.

I rather be a Gimp than a Gump anyhow.

Bring out the Gimp.

I will be around on Saturday to celebrate and say a hoo-rah or two.

Politics resume on Monday.

I will have a few more bonus’ pieces in store before everyone begins the Roman feather tickle of reaction from reading my political opines.

Hold strong young man, the trough is not that far away.

This weekend I will study hard to get down the rhythm and knowledge that I have only glimmered and glammered.

4:30 a.m. hikes are fine …

I don't need Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy to know

Forty-Eight hours to go ...

Three days left and I am already beginning the happy dance!

An experience to last a life time and a lesson learned lasting through death.

Politics will resume come Monday Spetember 25th. I promise to get my news on and be as impecabley informed as ever.

Brushing off the ol' news suit (complete with Les Nessman bowtie) as I type.

Any not familiar: Mon - Wed - Fri is politics.

Anything with the preface of 'Bonus' is just prose and social commentary.

Keep that in mind, as well, when looking through the pages of past rant, rave and scribble scrabble.

Tonight I rest easy. Tonight I rest hard.

Tomorrow is so much closer than I ever thought it to be ...

The answer is always nothing. It is always mute. It creeps up on us in dreams that we only find to be electric when we plug into what we want the answer to be. It is then amplified out to a mega watt that only Pete Townshend can hear in his worse nightmares of tinnitus.

Once the ear drum ringing of gracious and gratuitous sensory perception is pleased, amended, can we find the thoughts of hum drum that pacify one’s soul like no other. I have a friend that had the first feud. I just had it (hence the death post of anger last week). She is in a long term, long distance, newbie. I would hate to walk a foot, never mind a mile, in those shoes; even if they were comfortable and we were both svelte.

Sometimes smiley face IM icons mean more across the board than a foot or shoulder rub. Some people do not like feet. That is how it goes.

I am a toe sucker, I’ll admit it, in all of it’s Technicolor glory. I am not the guy looking to rip off your shoes on the Greyhound and suck a toe or two, but I don’t have an aversion to it. I will NOT be appearing on Mory, Geraldo, Jerry, Richard Bey, or any of them, to talk about toe-sicles, or footsie-pops. I am fine just where I am. I just know something about intimacy. Some things that cross most peoples boundaries. Some things that leave people ill. Too ill. Much like a Beastie, I have a license to ill.

I also know that I am a pleasure chest, a Pandora’s box of satisfaction and fantasy revealed. I am a bull stud, a he-cat. Some would say that Tommy the Cat is my name.

“Say, Baby do you wanna lay down by me. Say, Baby do you wanna lay down by my side?”

Sometimes ghosts walk into your life and the blood still pumps through their souls. I do not intend to mean that mystic vapors find me (although they have) but I proclaim that some people know better about you and your path than you do. This, most certainly, does not mean parents. I imply the dead of foot worn pilgrimage that find us and hold us tight, in worn blankets of warmth and comfort, are here among us as oversee-ers of our reality. I have one.

Something is to be said about being bathed by another individual in a hotel with bad paneling and flimsy micro-mesh sheets that would radiate the cum stains for a mile around given the right lighting. The ghosts walk in and out and hold our hands through the toughest times and offer up the spirit of Mary when they can. They are the interlopers of sin intervention (sometimes perpetuation). They prepare us for a sainthood that we think ourselves not capable of; a world we are not intended for. We find our paths without ampersands and dot coms. We tread heavy and light and hope that the mud does not stick to our feet but the apparition guides let us know that Guardian Angel directed mud is better than not walking the path at all. Dirty feet are what were nailed to the bottom of that cross, not clean, manicured, Vietnamese painted ones. Would you message those feet?

I met a spiritual guide about three and a half years ago. She guided me to a placid and serene source of spring fountain sprig. It was an odd and mind bending experience that revolved around a trip to Staten Island for seven days with a mere and meek 200 dollars in my pocket.

I wore my slick tan felt chapeau and my earth toned tweed over coat of slickster status. I drank many 7&7's as I was nervous, very nervous. She met me at JFK airport. We volleyed the shuttlecock of ‘hellos’ as we walked up and down the fairway of luggage return looking for each other.

We found each other. It was erupted with a hug like that of Vesuvius taking the Earth core belch to the black soil dirt. We were an elemental collide. Fire ~ Earth: and so the melting began.

If I could not have stayed at her house it would have been a very tight trip. I was sick the first few days and her son, a stunning little boy with big brown eyes that would make a fawn jealous, would peak in the room to say hello and gaze at the sickly bearded man in his mother’s bed. He was quite concerned. I liked to pat his head and let him know that I would still rock on - that is what men with cool hats and facial hair do - they rock on.

He is a cautious little man who needs hugs more than anything but sometimes he needs a good swift kick in the ass in order to remind him that those big brown eyes of chocolate drowning can not rule the world in all situations. His sexually ambiguous youthful smile made me feel welcomed to be in New York, something I had not felt since I had been there ten years before.

He is a young man now, not a boy. He needs that ass kick swifter than ever now due to the arrogance found within the bindings of that age.

His mother, an angel of intensity, made sure I was getting better and cuddled me into health. She soaked my fevered brow sweat and I found the moist cloth of heat reduction to be that of cowboy quality. She was my frontier woman. I was a bandit.

We hit the streets with the fiercity of the ‘70’s punk movement. All revved up and ready to go. We were a force to be reckoned with. We had walked the streets of Manhattan one day and looked at everything from chicken death window dancing in China Town to Washington Square Park and the bereft bereavement of musicians that wanted to be junkies and vice versa.

As we misguidedly danced with the city island streets of historical hand crevice engraving and acid etched hide and seek, I screamed out of the car window. I hung my head out. The radio pumped the music of my phlebotomist careening. Lou Reed’s ’Viscous’ was on the airwaves of antennae connect. I had never heard him on the radio before, at least not like this, and on his home turf. I howled. Werewolves in Romanian lands were proud of me that night.

We ate at Yaffi’s in Tribecca and loved every sip of the drink and every chew of the meal. The conversation and company was devoured as well. To be in Manhattan and to take it all in was like swallowing a sodium orange street lamp and letting it guide me through the night as I vomited reflective street paint to guide the cars by.

We ended up at T.J. O’Keane’s which is in Hell’s Kitchen, just outside of Times Square. It is right around 47^th and 8^th. It is a true Irish pub and we cat scratched our way into it’s history. I had been there a few months before and knew the scene well. I closed the place at 4:30 a.m. four of the five nights I was there on my previous endeavor.

We ate, we laughed.

We drank from green bottles.

She smelled good.

We talked about Bob Marley’s hair.

We slip slide finger screwed days away on the living room floor while listening to Zappa and the Pizzicato Five.

Before the Hotel of Baths and after the slide show of metropolitan misdirection was the night of Staten Island Candles.

She had a surprise for me. I was eager with anticipation. I thought we were going to eat or drink or screw in nature’s bedroom of street lamps like the ethos/pathos of seventeen year old horn dogs steaming up windows to guide the police to the auto of fornication.

We ended up at a church. We ended up looking at a statue of Jesus and of Mary.

The little candle temple of prayer next to the Church was surrounded by paths that were littered with little bird house candle holder shrines of all of the Saints. It was a graveyard of wax. The little prayer shack/shed was something that made me scared. It frightened me. I know better now.

I would never take that night of fear and confusion away from me if it meant saving my life.

Inside was a very distraught woman who lit more candles than there are lights at a pro football game. She was about three feet tall and had a silk scarf babushka thing going for her. Straight off the Scicilian boat. She cried and huffed and stammered through her Italian praises of the Holy Mother. Upon seeing my heathen ass she fled. My friend did her candle thing and gave me my space sensing that it was not what I had expected.

That week in NYC changed me. It made me recognize my existence for both good and bad.

It made me feel week, vulnerable, open, superior, powerful, and meek all in one inhale/exhale of a cigarette puff in the shadows of a New York second.

I love New York.

I miss Manhattan.

I miss my very, VERY close friend.

She is always praying for me. She is always making sure I am ok.

We look out for each other.

She is in charge of the ‘Writings of R.E. Knowlton III Trust’ once I pass.

We will be neighbors someday. We will drink Long Island Ice Teas or crazy-ass high balls and smoke and laugh sitting in the shade of the Sun, while our yarns of yesteryear flow and fall from our lips with the ease of the waters of Niagra.

We will always know each other.

Thick, thin, thoughts, thoughtless.

We are the horses of a different colour.

Please, If you read this, know that we will negate the ‘miss you’s’ soon enough. Our kids will play. Our mates will laugh at our bond. We will laugh at them and scarf down another drink and smoke.

Be good in our trailer park.

Make my chair a comfy one …

Ever smudge the screen in just the right way that it bothers you for evermore? Makes you wish that there were no sword stones, no sought after chalices, no pristine maidens of pant diving glory. Making men less of the knights than they aspire to be is a past time of modern America.

You can cut my penis off now if you want, if you can find it, it is already gone - many years ago.

Chutzpah!

Oi Vey!

The overture of 1812 means more to me than just simple cookies, of a Madison quality, found at the local grocer. I want to stand tall and fight the world when I hear it. It maddens the mind and brings one softly onto a pillow of jazz/jizz that is rarely fluffed.

Why is it harder for those who know us to accept who we are than the strangers that furl up their anonymous masks and giving a willing salutation of acceptance for diversities sake? Is there something in the water, other than fluoride, that they are not telling us about?

Who are ‘they’?

Funny how a little pardon, of time lost and grappled with, can net a greater fortune than one exposed to a catch of fin flapping fury and wet whistle wonder. I have had many long talks with many a friend and foe today. I have charged the charge hard. I have made it be better than a reverbed voice sample of pitch switch challenge and gory gruesome gala. I want to dig up the ‘67 Swedish Frank Zappa show where he concludes with a stunning rendition of “King Kong” and the intro leading into 'said piece' is that of poignant quality regarding this diatribe, or prose pansy, depending on how you look at it.

I find irony, sarcasm and pun to be the best. A little riddle and play on words are raucous. I wish the world would melt like a microwave dream of swiss and provolone in an atom changing nightmare to benefit us all.

It melted enough when I was getting liquid LSD dropped into my pupils, to become a pupil of something greater. Of something that would make those on Monster Road cringe. The clay-mation would not keep up. It never could - no matter how fast you shot the frames. Did I become something greater or something less? The verdict and vote is still out.

It was years ago, a decade or more. It is my lego not my Eggo.

Fire and chains … fire and chains.

Ever wonder what eternal punishment would feel like?

Not my life on the chain gang. Not perpetual blue collar servitude. Not the white collar drudge of collegiate existence. Not a failed marriage. Not a failed ‘hotcha’. Perpetual evil oozing and gooing through your veins?

Would it involve today’s conveniences? Would those you thought to be insane seem pretty rational, ala Chekhov?

Would you be on a cell phone in Hell saying, "Where you at?"

Or would it just be a domestic flight from Manchester, NH to Lexington, Kentucky (a.k.a. - Cincinatti airport).

Would the whole world stop to melt with you?

I think of the culture of the World. The civilization of societal approved expression.

We are all getting West Nile from it. It is stagnant, complete with mosquito penises injecting, this and that fluid, with vigor and virile verbosity; all sauntered in the empty candy dish of sugar granules that mix and mingle with the lessons of too many treats before dinner. Tummy aches ensue and accentuate the acetone admiration of dilatable delectability.

The beats might have had their last finger fuck into the pie known as art. Is there a second coming of renaissance?

If so, I am there and ready, willing, and able. Able and con. Get 'er done.

Hear the baritone notes from a saxophone. Feel, really feel , their vibrations - their deep tone intestinal shake. Run to the potty and wipe twice, if not a baker’s dozen.

Life for me is a series of puns, of rebus’, of mad-libs that no one has let me into the privy prissy panty club of. I am ok with that. It takes too much cocaine to get me into panties.

Cocaine is expensive!

Ever wonder if the bubble wander wonder paint of feeling splendor mattered to the narwhal?

Rock Lobster!

Yuck! ~

Give me Maine!~

All said and done, we are going somewhere after this and it may not be where any of us want to go.

Family Guy is on tonight and that makes the jazz, not the jizz, subside.

It makes all of the forged memories of Aesop disintegrate into sand, not even the sand I rake - finer.

Like confectioner’s sugar.

"Candy is dandy but liquor works quicker."

Coating and melting that much easier.

Insidious.

Corrupt.

Done.

Someone needs to save the Krispy Kreme, someone needs to save Hell.

Without Hell, what does Heaven really mean?

Waiting at the gates, listening to the jazz, not the jizz, and reading the words of great men.

Waiting at the gates, indeed …