At the mailbox, again:
“Who loves me, baby?”
Well, let’s see: there’s a flyer from Mercury Insurance,
Reminding me that most middle-income customers
Save an average of $4 million smackaroons when they switch too.
The Penny Saver USA.com is here,
Thank God, almighty!
So now I know that Thomas Roofing & Paving
Is having a special on 20-year leak-free flat roofs;
"All work guaranteed & insured.
No job too big or small.
Free estimates/Emergency services/License # I8U-69."
And thank you, Jesus,
For another $4.99 Farmer Boys 3-Egg Breakfast
Combo with Coffee coupon, and that
Little Caesars Hot-N-Ready, $5.00 cheese or pepperoni,
Mae-West-“why-don’t-you-come up and see me sometime?”—mailer. And, of course, another technology Siren’s song:
Verizon FiOS delivers entertainment this big,
Dish me up some dish NETWORK, $19.99 a month . . .
Are you ******* me?
For 12 ******* months?
AT&T;: whack me off on 120 channels.
DIRECTV.com - DIRECTV® Official Site‎
Worry-free 99.9%  . . . cue Joe E. Brown,
"Some Like It Hot“ Osgood:
"Well, nobody’s perfect!"
Time Warner/Sprint/T-Mobile;
And ******* Leather, Polk Street, San Francisco.
******* leather?
Must be for my neighbor: that ***** ****!
And here’s the weekly 8-page color fold-out from Stater Bros:
Lowering prices every day, large cantaloupes
(Jessica Lange, are you back?)
10 for $10.00, 32 oz. Gatorade
Or 24 oz Propel in 30 assorted varieties @ 79 cents
+ CRV: California Redemption Value?
Nice euphemistic cover-up for a TAX.
Nice, nice, very nice, CA elected state officials;
Nicely done, Sacramento.
Everywhere else in the country you get real money—
A fixed number of pennies, nickels, or dimes—
For your plastic bottles and aluminum cans.
But in California, the licensed recyclers
Get to pull the market price out of their *** each morning.
California Redemption Value?
What ******* genius government kleptocrat thought that one up? Conspiracy Alert: who gets all that CRV money?
And what are they doing with it?
Feeling plain, Jane?
Marinello Schools of Beauty, want you,
Offer you hands-on training in cosmetology,
Skin care esthetics, manicuring and vaginal deodorizing—
Just kidding, Babaloo.
Food tip for the Third World:
Never try to write poetry on an empty stomach.
Sizzler 6 oz juicy & succulent.
RENEGADE DEAL:
El Pollo Loco guacamole chicken sandwich,
Coupon free, small drink and small chips,
When you purchase a guacamole or jalapeno sandwich,
includes pepper jack cheese and a southwest sauce.
Gardenas sandia con semilla, 7 lbs 99 cents.
GARDENAS: “en precios, servicio y calidad, nadie nos iguaia.”
Bud Gordon’s Quality NISSAN:
One at this price after a $1500 factory rebate.
TERMINIX: get them before they get you!
The Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Arthropoda, Class Insecta
Bug up my *** again.
And a form letter from the VA
Asking me to please update my whereabouts.
And a form letter from the VA asking me
To please update my whereabouts.
And miles to go before I sleep.
Bite me, Mr. Frost!

An outing, at last.
I am going for a walk around the inside of my gates.
I live in one of those gated over-55 lunatic asylums.
There are gates. It is gated. Get it?
GATED! We feel safe here.
Probably a good thing at our age:
Self-imposed institutionalization,
Putting oneself in an asylum to ferment and die.
The fact that so many of us
Need it so bad at only 55
Says something itself about the current state of
Baby Boomer metal-fatigue.
I am now standing at the far end of the golf course.
I wait at the far end of the 18th Hole.
A ball bounces past my head and
Rolls off past the green into the far rough.
The 18th Hole is perched atop a small plateau,
Out of sight, far above the horizon for anyone teeing off.
I am Puck, invisible and impish.
I pluck the ball up.
I scamper to the green.
I pop the ball into the hole.
Which is better than popping a hole in the ball,
Surely, kind of a drag,
As we were once fond of saying.
Deflated Ball.
Deflator Maus.
OPERA can be ****.
Bodice-ripping corsets, whorehouses and naked ******!
Hardly what you might expect from
A night with the Welsh National Opera,
But they found their way into this production of "Die Fledermaus."
Ripe language, contemporary jokes and
Toilet humor thrown in, adding immensely
To the pleasures of Strauss’s operetta.
"Die Fledermaus," or The Bat’s Revenge,
Is all about drunkenness and adultery.
Despite being written in the 1870s,
It remains equally pertinent to today’s pub culture of excess.
Daring; Colorful; ****: PGA golf.
I steal a golf ball on the far end of the 18th Hole.
I pick up the Titleist and stick it in the hole
(Steady Jessica, not yours.
I hide behind your bush.
(Cue up PSA, First Lady Bird Johnson’s 1960s
Nationwide Beautification Campaign:
“I want everyone in America to plant a tree,
A sherrrr-rub, or a booosh.”)
The golfer now searching frantically:
Why is the cup always the last place they look?
Then, wham, bam, he looks:
A legend is born.
A hole in one,
His name forever immortalized
On a plaque over the bar, the proverbial 19th Hole.

As you know, I speak for all mediocrities,
Safe in my 55+ gated-community.
I go next to the Club House,
"The Lodge" as it’s called.
Each afternoon, the usual suspects
Claiming first come/first serve tiered mini-theater seats
Where Netflix matinee gems are screened.
It is two minutes to DVD show time.
I walk to the front of the room.
I stare at my audience.
I count the house slowly,
Making meaningful eye contact with each wrinkled face.
I cup my hands behind my back and speak:
“I assume you are all here for my lecture on Kierkegaard.”
No one reacts.
I turn to leave but do a double-take and smile.
One old woman in the top right corner of the amphitheater laughs, Perhaps the one other human being within the gates
Who has also smoked a joint today.
For an instant, I am overwhelmed with paranoia,
Perhaps I’ve gone too far over the line:
No longer “oh-he’s-a-character;”
I am now “that creep is ******* nuts.”
Is it time for someone to approach my family,
My next of kin, my “who-to-contact-in-event-of-emergency” number? Who will make the call on behalf of the HOA—
The Homeowner’s Association—
The Tsars, the Duma, the Supreme Soviet in these parts?
They are the power inside the gates;
Those who determine the state’s enemies,
Who govern its community norms.
Power within the gates.
Law within the asylum.
Little Hitlers one and all.
Hopefully they reach my sister first.
She’s been briefed.
KEY POINT IN THE NARRATIVE:
The new narrative is non-linear.
We can no longer sustain a narrative understanding of ourselves;
We are each an individual stream of consciousness,
All of us random, non-linear and disconnected.
We grow more and more disconnected from others.
We may be neighbors in space and time,
But we remain deprived of any significant human contact;
Any spiritually significant human contact.
Our social circle narrows to what can fit in The Telescreen;
We become more intimate with a legion . . .
Did someone say a legion? SPQR:
Am I having some sort of genetic-linguistic seizure here?
Am I channeling Benito Mussolini again?
Il Duce speaks to me from the grave,
Still blowing smoke up my Hopi-Jew-*** ***,
Filling in my insecurities,
Plugging the holes in my character
With delusions of classical Roman grandeur, glory and empire. Hmmmm? Quite an appetizing pitch for the average *****,
A message so completely, so ethnocentrically slick,
Olive oily, and so seductive.
A non-Italian would have thought
American Legion or Legionnaire’s disease,
Or The Foreign Legion, The French Foreign Legion.
The French: a virulent, promiscuous people.
Do you want fries with that, Simone?
No, I don’t get out much.
Only an occasional brisk walk around the asylum,
In and around the golf course, around but inside the gates. (LINKS) Bill Gates. Daryl Gates. Billy Bathgate’s Gates? Ghiberti’s Gates? The Hot Gates? Thermopylae? 300 Spartans/700 Thespians:
“The noun causing idiots to think of
Two girls sloppily eating each other’s mighty vaginas,
When they hear mention of someone being an actor.” http://www.urbandictionary.com
Not even close.
No, I rarely venture out.
This is Hemetucky.
There are methamphetamine-stoked
Teenage zombies at the gate.
Note to costume control:
Perhaps camouflage clothing is the safe choice?
No loud red Hawaiian.
No garish Indonesian batik.
Fleet of feet are these Hemet tweakers,
These cranked up Riverside County teenage barbarians,
These Huns & Visigoths,
These amped up, ravenous jackals.
And why stop there?
These Vandals & Vandellas.
A Motown flashback:
“Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.”
With or without Martha—
They remain dangerously lethal.
Yes, let it be camo clothes for me.
Those **** heads may be young.
They may be fast.
They may be able to run me down
On a dry grass dog-legged fairway savannah,
Tearing the meat from my carcass.
But the sons-a-******* have to see me first.
Besides, we know who are real friends are.
Hooray for our media peeps!
We become more intimate with a legion
Of television personalities on 125 different channels.
Most of these we know by name and context.
We know their families, their friends,
Their histories, their tragedies,
Their favored hyperbole and manner of speech.
Sometimes we establish intimacy with celebrities
Strictly on the basis of universal body language.
At times–in the absence of any other
Empathetic facility of identification–
We connect on instinct alone.
Instinct: perhaps animal at its core,
An animal kingdom affinity group,
Connecting on a bio-linguistic level,
Particularly when the Korean, or Spanish,
Mandarin, or Arabic,
Japanese, or even Hebrew language version is broadcast.
All languages cryptically alien,
A dense boundary, a barrio border wall,
Undecipherable, impenetrable concrete.
But we’ve never spoken to our neighbors,
Nor do we know their names.
Celebrities are the neighbors we know best;
Although the intimacy is an illusion,
Permission to invade their privacy presumed,
Tacit in the relationship between celebrities and their fans.
I am an independent contractor now,
An outside consultant to the NSA.
Try as I might I cannot crack the enigma,
Kim Kardashian remains far beyond my code-breaking prowess.
I repeat myself:
We can no longer sustain a narrative understanding of ourselves;
We are each an individual stream of consciousness,
All of us random, non-linear and disconnected.
We are more and more disconnected from others.
We may be neighbors in space and time,
But we remain deprived of any significant human contact;
Any spiritually significant human contact.
Our social circle narrows to what can fit in The Telescreen; we become more intimate with a legion . . .
Back to you, David Ulin:
“Sometime late last year—I don’t remember when, exactly—I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read. That’s a problem if you do what I do, but it’s an even bigger problem if you’re the kind of person I am. Since I discovered reading, I have always been surrounded by stacks of books. I read my way through camp, school, nights, and weekends; when my girlfriend and I backpacked through Europe after college graduation, I had to buy a suitcase to accommodate the books I picked up along the way.”
Thank you, David L. Ulin.
I cannot help myself.
I grow more eccentric each day.
My eyeballs glued to that flat screen!

Cosmo Kramer: "The bus is outta control.
So I grab him by the collar, I take him out of the seat,
I get behind the wheel, and now I’m driving the bus."
Jerry: "Wow!"
George Costanza: "You’re Batman."
Cosmo Kramer: "Yeah, yeah, I am Batman.
Then the mugger, he comes to and he starts choking me.
So I’m fighting him off with one hand,
And I kept driving the bus with the other, ya know.
Then I managed to open up the door,
And I kicked him out the door, ya know,
With my foot, ya know, at the next stop."
Jerry: "You kept making all the stops?"
Cosmo Kramer: "Well, people kept ringing the bell!"
(Share this moment with a stranger.)

I speak for all mediocrities.
I am their champion, their patron saint.
Boom Chaka Laka. Boom Chaka Laka.
Boom Chaka Laka. BOOM!
Isn’t it time Salieri tempted Constanze–
Frau Mozart–with a plateful of Capezzoli di Venere:
“******* of Venus.”
You had me at hello, Kidman.
I know you too well, Nicole.
I knew you from before,
Way before Tom’s Oprah couch freak show.
Listen to me, Nicole:
We are face to face
With the most profound question in American literature:
"What is the grass?
The flag of my surrender?
The flag of my disposition?"
I resort to Socratic maxims: Know yourself;
The un-****** life is not worth living.
Is it stress? Is it lack of conviction?
Everything Jeff Lebowski neither wants nor needs in his life?
I watched you *** in "Eyes Wide Shut," Nicole.
Now I know you with my eyes and your legs wide open.
Thank you, Sidney Pollack.
Sidney knew.
Sidney dealt us cards
From his Hollywood Tarot deck.
We are intimate, Nicole.
I watched you squat.