Leaves follow me on my wake-up walk through the over cast marine layer morning. Have you ever noticed that when the leaves are rustling and concrete licking the sidewalk behind you, that if you walk faster they desperately want to catch up with you? Many of them went Helter Skelter this morning and found themselves on the black asphalt underneath car tires spinning against the road and helping autos to careen through green lights at sixty miles per hour.

I spent the other day on the Hill and found out, much to my dismay and disgust, that teachers now use megaphones to conduct the recess business of unruly munchkins, heathen children. Then I realized through the distorted Charlie Brown teacher ‘wah, wah, wah’, that it was simply kids being kids and doing nothing wrong. Sad. Scary. Lazy.

I am left to wonder in my recuperating and settling noggin: “When will we be using megaphones to conduct the business of leaves that exhibit a stalker like behavior before committing suicide in the glaze of their mania?”

It is not much.

Too be honest, I wasn’t going to write tonight either.

I was going to finish picking all of the black feathers and beak shrapnel from between my teeth.

A little taste of what it shall return to on Saturday, maybe even tomorrow.

For a review of my regular rant on rave, refer back to at least the eleventh of August, which is when the prose of enormous proportion begins.

If not and you are already familiar, strap in and strap on.

I shall return.

And I don’t need to quote Arnold to get that point across …

It appears as though I have eaten the black bird.

I will get better. They always do.

I just need time to breathe and straighten things out.

Six days left on the chain gang. One week from tomorrow it is done.

I hope tonight brings clarity.

Sorry, for the momentary indegestion.

Black bird is a tough bird to swallow ...

I was going to write nothing tonight. I then wanted to jot down a bit more than I had thought. I now want nothing to do with writing, the world, women, reality. I am torn like a taint of twelve pound birth. I HATE everyone, everything; every cruel and ironic card ever dealt at the table of chance known as my life.

I don’t think that I will write much more.

Nana always mused over the saying, “Red in the morning, Sailor take warning. Red at night, Sailor take flight.”

Every morning in Southern California is red, quite red indeed.

Mantra number two: I am over it.

Time to save myself, as of mantra number three; and know things will work out, as of mantra number one.

It all comes down to my mighty three.

Like The Band says in 'Ophelia', “Why do the best things always disappear?”

The answer is me.

I am sure there are a few readers, the ones that involve blood, that will be smiling high and wide upon reading this.

Fuck them.

Fuck ‘em all.

Everything was beginning to be as clear as crystal.

Shattered against a wall slam of indecent head-sand.

It now is as murky as Mississippi mud, rock bottom coffee barrel.

To think that it could happen better than it had, or has, is shear ignorance.

No chain gang drama.

No BS drama.

No political drama.

I load up the cat and hope we make it to Tampa, to see the kiddo before the feline becomes feral and I become a dweller of refrigerator card board boxes.

It could be worse.

I could be dead right now.

I suppose that is solace to some, in my summation of it, it is merely a cliché.

Cliches are just that: phrases that we use so much because of how real they are to our individual deaths on Earth, as all of our clocks tick away. We use them too much, they use us too much.

Done.

Death.

All said and done, the World could have been worse, it could have been so enjoyable that I would hate this moment, this day. Instead, I great it with open arms: My Demise.

Move or not to move? That is the question.

Stand tall and strong or lay down and die?

Lay your old man down to die.

To think I shaved for all of this.

I must have thought something proper and of dignitary stature to come of this evening.

Nope.

Just another day to hate.

Hate it, I shall.

What does a man with no money, bad credit, no license, no car, no possessions of worth (except to the holder), no direction, no family, do when the ticker tape is not being thrown anymore? The parade has stopped. The World ceases to spin.

Walk.

I walk on.

I HATE it.

I hate it ALL.

Too many riddles, too many days of wishing to be dead.

Too many, too many’s.

I am now a closed book. The chapters will not ensue. The words will cease.

I may still type here, but I will be bereft of joy and vigor, of creative juice, like you have all come to know.

Again, I repeat mantra two:

‘I am over it’ …

Zoe, the once thirty pound calico, spread eagle mama of my existence, has lost a few pounds. She meows at me, in order to say, “Drop those L-B’s”; I wonder what those track running girls of doe, fawn, and fauna thought of as I strutted by looking like Paul Prudome having a friggin’ stroke. If I had been hosting a cooking show, than it would have been great. I was not. I was walking. Zoe meows, once again.

My blisters re-pounded their way into my pain threshold, as I walked to the Hill today. Willie is still gone. Conception says that he is, “probably sleep on the concrete bed”. Yep, that is right, even the new pit boss, crew chief, Heffe, thinks (after one meeting of Willie) that he is back in the poky, the clink, the hoosegow, the pen, jail. Funny how the first take on someone can be the most insightful?

James (Yames) was back in rare form. He had worked a Saturday and completed it with a heavy dose of Heineken and Vodka martinis that led him to quite the catatonic and food consumption state of a Sunday, which he did not work in order to recuperate. He did so regrettably at first, but then grew to like the day of nothing, complete with fatty foods of rejuvenation, recuperation, regeneration. His Saturday stories made me laugh, pissed me off, made me jealous, and in the end (as well as one burst of simultaneous stimuli) made me happy that I am on the program that I am in and that my hard work ends in me being relieved of what could easily be a cancerous cankerous cacophony deep within my soul.

He was quite friendly with Conception by the time this morning unfolded. He met a man named Tom, who was doing weekend CWP for a three-time DUI and knew the whole place and strutted as if he were the weekend King. Tom smoked cigarettes and cell phone blabbered and blathered throughout the banality. Even Mike, the weekend boss, who dropped me in the hay field’s of Modjeska’s parking lot on my first day, bummed cigarettes from him as the day progressed. Ah, to work a weekend.

I can not because I am a full time CWP convict, not a weekend convict on the same program, just a separate schedule. James is in the CRP program which is court ordered, not sentence mandated and let go through the benevolent fingers of the Sheriff’s department at the correctional facilities. James can pick the days he works, much like Johnnie could. Everyone has an upper hand, a different gambling lay down. Cards are dealt, drinks are served. We all remember things a bit different than the dealer does.

Him and I and Conception stayed at the Hill till almost nine thirty. We then trekked out to the bastion of blah, blah, blah known as the Ranch. It was a relatively easy day. Lots of elongated breaks. Lots of mundane what-not activities. They actually think that the Irvine Ranch will be a tourist attraction of sorts for the locals who demand some root learning glances at what California farming was like and what the Irvine Company was before it was a company and just a family farm. I laugh, belly roll and droll, and guffaw with vomit pains from mention of such delusions.

Government employees are meant to take some drug upon their induction into the tax subsidized work force that makes them completely detached and separated from reality. Not even a glimmer of fact or truth is held within their over exercised pupils. They are gonzo. Morrison, James (or Yames) that is - not Toni, is wondering where to get what they are given. Truly a wonder of modern petro-technology.

I worked with the Hula Ho once again. I raked, I swept. It was a rather productive day for a vegetable. I did not see it, but according to James, Conception scarffed down a Prickle Fruit the second we got there. He must have wanted the energy buzz. Damn those cacti spheres!

The worst part of the whole day was arriving back at the Hill at 4:15 and having the walk ahead of me. No rides from here out.

We all spent time in remembrance of 9-11 today. I also recognized the fact that, one month ago, on 8-11, I was being checked into the Theo Lacey Sr. Correctional Facility. This made my day go by much quicker. It made my blistered feet thankful for the walk home. I thought of that whole night, replayed it in my head, as I meandered through the day and tried to swiftly arrive home upon it’s completion.

I have eight work days left after today. I have less than two weeks. I will be done with this phase, a week from Thursday. I can not wait.

I want to be home in the morning. I want back my regular job. I want to move on. I want Zoe to see the pounds I have lost.

I want to move onto my big Christmas diet, upon this completion.

I will see the kiddo in October. I can NOT wait for that long weekend of Thursday through Monday. I then get her for a couple of weeks at the year’s end, not Howard’s.

I know that she will love reading all of this when she is a grown up, or even just a teen. She will respect her Daddy more because of the explanation of absence and his struggle to come to terms with who he was, is.

I wish my Dad had had the internet to do the same.

He would revel in it’s soul spilling words and swords, as I hope the Gooners does too.

Simple is as simple does.

I am still wondering if Johnnie is reading.

I hope so.

Rock ‘em, sock ‘em, and stock ‘em.

Load up the shelves and mark the price right.

I will be here all week.

Applause are not needed, but comments are enjoyed …

I wanted to write a dribble drabble of word volley for today’s post. I thought about phrases and words that conflict so highly beyond what we intend them to be, words and phrases that are in their own right - hypocritical.

I have stayed away from politics so much lately and upon viewing my insight to them, reading blogs, reading papers and magazines, watching the news (more than the jelly on toast minutes that I get in the a.m.), and listening to a bit of Saturday radio (which is not the same as day to day radio during the week - much more fluffy); I want to comment, I need to comment. I will, however, refrain. I am a good boy, all said and done.

I would like to ask a couple of questions in order to seed plant an idea or two for a post I will be surely putting up come the end of September. I think of Wyclef Jean and then I get back on subject point.

The two return of phrase twist, razor wire lexicon, verbal vermillion bolley that I think of constantly are:

Racism vs. Reverse-Racism.

And the battle of …

Tolerance vs. Non-Tolerance.

I have been told to steer the ship hard, and to the port side, in order to avoid this rant. Much more so than feminism or homosexual marriage. I bared down and held the wheel strong and hard. I will go into the topic head strong. I like a challenge at high sea. The compus jiggles so hard that maybe only the BS Capt’n can hold it straight, but I fight that damn spiked wooden guidance derivative of the high seas and know it needs to be said.

Funny beards, rum and whores!

Think hard of the term racism. What does it mean to you? To me, it means the feeling of one’s race to be superior over one, or more, races. Racism. Pretty simple, huh? If I were to bust out the Webster big book of leather bounding and binding, than I know it would back me up. That is the definition of it. This is a commentary piece, not one of fact juggle reassurance, so I think that that definition is good enough for the debate at hand.

So, with that definition in mind, the resulting definition for reverse-racism is: The feeling of one’ s race to be inferior to another race or many others. Right? Are you with me so far? Do you get and grasp the handle in front which desires grasping?

If a white man is a decimator and over bearer of discrimination, than he is a perpetrator of racism. If he feels the same sentiment back from any other race he is a victim of reverse-racism, right? Horribly wrong!

If an African-American, a Hispanic-American, or a Asian-American perpetuates racism on a Caucasian-American than it is reverse-racism, which does not jive by the definition previously defined, through simplicity, as such.

Racism is racism.

There is no ‘reverse-racism’.

Racism is bad whether or not it comes from some white guy. It can be given forth from a black man, a brown man, a yellow man, a purple man, or a plaid man. Racism is just what it is - bad news!

Do you get what I am pointing out? When we use the term ‘reverse-racism’ to provide a phrase for something bad administered to a white man on behalf of a racist of another ethnocentricity, than the implication is that it is not racism, it is the opposite. This is what lexicon and verbiage abuse has done to our society. It has led us to believe that only white men are guilty of racism. That is simply a load of shit, bull hockey, horse puckey, crap, and garbage!

This brings me to point two:

Tolerance vs. Non-Tolerance.

We all try to be tolerant. We all want to tolerate of the other’s that do not see eye to eye with our dementia and dimensions. We all want to be tolerated with our idiosyncrasies and eccentricities that allow us to be us, who we are. This is simply not the case.

Ok.

Look at it this way: To be truly tolerant we have to be tolerant of those who are not tolerant. This is utopian at best. In being not tolerant of those who are not tolerant, you become non-tolerant. Right?

Maybe not, but I will give an example that may work better for this than others may:

Say I hate purple people. You like purple people, and are a self proclaimed tolerant person. In order to accept me, and be tolerant, you must then accept my dislike of purple people. Unless I am the famed ‘purple people eater’, then you are kinda screwed.

It is a great example of the transitive property of mathematics. ‘If A equals B and B equals C, then , of course, A equals C’. Right? Does that make sense?

Math does not lie. It gives us insight. The greatest philosophers of our time were mathematicians. This is what we forge on through the ice cold fjords to make truth. Aristotle, Archimedes, Hippocrates, Euclid, Ptolemy, Zeno of Elea, Thalos, Plato, Cleomedes, Hypatia, Heraclides of Pontus, Proclus, and Pappus would all agree. They would actually give me a frat name and make me do keg stands while I wonder which broad I shall ruffie and get down with. That is not to belittle them but to make fun of the seriousness of it all, I figured I might need a ‘key’ or ‘legend’ for my posts these days.

It is simple; you can be a prick to one and not the other, and claim you are of ‘prick-less’ nature, unless you are Eunuch of Crete. That is a subject for another time though. I am not tap dancing this. I am not named Greg. Mel will check in later, even though she hates that nick-name, and this Mel is not her. And there we are, back to nick names as subject from posts ago.

Did anyone else do math that much?

Did anyone else dig calculus, or ‘Cal-Cool-Us’ as Edward James Almos calls it in the film “Stand and Deliver”?

I took it to phase two. I took advanced physics. I studied logic and statistics at University. They were the classes that I took form from , even if I did not participate in them as far as test scores would imply.

Math is that thing that we will all need when we move on. It is really something that could save you someday.

Math aside , although that is extremely hard to do - if not impossible, look at the logic of it.

Math is logic - sorry to burst bubbles and walk away evil.

Think of what I have table tossed on this Sunday night. Take it to court or core and make it work.

Know it to be the thing that makes sense.

Know what I say to have thought behind it, not anger.

I am sure this stirs debate or thought, if not I would not jibber-jabber it with such seriousness.

Be good.

Smile …