i could brag about my night
but to who?
what sentient being is epicurean enough
to appreciate my palate?
cosmopolitan enough
to follow my exploration?
who has mastered the physics
to dig my trajectory?
there’s only one
back to the mirror!

had a great time in new orleans this year
sad to hear about that brain-dead *******
with an empty life and nothing better to do
than launch his truck into a bourbon street crowd
on new year’s eve
14 dead, dozens crushed
and oooo, he served honorably in afghanistan
and probably had unmet mental needs from the war
and yeah, wonder where this twice-deployed vet
got the bug to slaughter folks he never met?
he was a hardworking family man
he helped out the lady upstairs
all these random mass murderers have a story
and the search for their motivation
is served up to us as entertainment, really
at this point we have to dodge the raindrops
you can't go to the supermarket
without the possibility of assassination
the world is brimming with violence
but this growing american compulsion
for murdering arbitrary strangers
much less executing first graders
seems unprecedented
an especially nasty example
of american exceptionalism

rick owned the monkey bar
not the one in L.A.
but his own knock-off in cleveland
and rick wasn’t a big fan
of african-americans he knew
but he was REALLY no fan
of strange african-americans in the bar
however, the pandemic arrived
the white people stopped coming
and the black people kept coming
and rick sat on a corner stool
making money overseeing a black bistro
called the monkey bar
it was like ****** opening a bar for jews
and calling it the chamber

"Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord
a founding text of the Situationists
it's like social media was invented
to intensify what he's talking about
our reality is a manufactured representation
of course Guy Debord's life
was yet another glorious failure
his canny analysis changed nothing
but it can be argued that glorious failure
is the way to go
otherwise you're not thinking big

the secret of life is simple and two-prong
one, you gotta be LUCKY
two, appreciate things when they’re good
because they won’t be good forever
don’t sweat the small stuff
the big stuff’s coming

sitting around the thanksgiving table
the turkey was yummy, the weather turned frigid
conversation mellowly roamed to tales
of childhood abuse
"when our son was a baby," i recalled
"we watched him trying to crawl
and our then-brother-in-law Nick
a self-styled hardass and an *** in general
asked what do you do to discipline him?
discipline him from doing what? i asked
pooping his diaper?
you know Nick, as a kid my mother slapped my face
when she thought it appropriate
we negated that strategy for our kids"
my wife, who often recounted beatings
she took from her dad, then told a story new to me
her mother's family were russian immigrants
and when her mother was a kid
and did something to set off her dad
he would make her kneel on a wooden plank
until her knees bled, then he'd rub salt in them
we all thought about that
until my wife said, "we have cookies"

all you need is $$$$$
it’s the illusion that dissolves
all the other illusions
but it’s reality, you say?
strangely it’s both simultaneously
like the fantasy that donald trump
will solve people’s problems
which has led us to the world
we now live in