“One of the effects of living with electronic information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload.”                                                      
                                                                                      Marshall McLuhan
So, let’s review:
Man is a thinking animal.
Stanley Kubrick took us to space to get us to think.
Marshall McLuhan:  “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”
Hemetucky: what was I thinking?
The Rapture for the 1%:   The Language of the World and The Language of Enthusiasm explains why Sir Richard  Branson’s ****** Galactic will only be taking the richest among us to space.
Ian (Limey Futurologist) Pearson:  “Binary is already the dominant language on Planet Earth with today’s machines having more conversations in 24 hours than the whole of humankind since the birth of Eve.”
Larry Flynt:  “**** is the answer to everything.”
Goofy:  “Yeah, I ****** Minnie. I shagged her rotten, baby!”  
Winston Smith:  “Do it to Julia!”
McNugget Buddies:   “Parts is parts.”                                          
Stunod: “Donuts-a -spella backwards issa stunod.” Think about it.
Tony Soprano.  “You ****** stunod, it's a joke.” (Stunod:  in southern dialect Italian means stupid, or a stupid person) http://(www.urbandictionary.com) define.php?term = stunod  / buy stunod mugs & shirts
Marshall McLuhan:    “Jokes are grievances.”
Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino:  “Antonio Gramsci thought that Stalin and Bolshevism could save him and Italy from Fascism:  stunod.”
The Cloud:  My acceptance of the Cloud into my life and my changeling cyborg self is by no means a capitulation to the surfing life.
Paulo Coehlo:  “The God you seek; that someone who awaits you is you.”
Howard Beale:  “That’s the God *******.”
God:   “Because you’re on television, stunod!”
The Elders of Zion:  Nu?
Meir Kahane:  “Let us not suffer from a national amnesia that causes us to forget who and what we are. No trait is more justified than revenge in the right time and place. I know that American and Israeli elections must be limited only to those who understand that the Arabs are the deadly enemy of the Jewish state, who would bring on us a slow Auschwitz - not with gas, but with knives and hatchets. Vote for Newt!”

**** Jagger:    “Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out” (40th Anniversary Edition, Rolling Stones)
Keith Richards +Fijian palm tree = Stunod.  
Marshall McLuhan:   “The more the data banks record about each of us, the less we exist.”    
Howard Beale: “If there's anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me: That man is not only full of *******, that man is  stunod.”
The Nam, Part I:   a demented slaughterhouse within a microcosm and grains of beach sand inside micro-Cosmo Kramer’s shorts. When I was in the Kingdom of The Nam I was always under the influence of some drug, mostly my own pure adrenaline when scared shitless--a frequent condition for me—not only my own piquant adrenal juice but other stuff like ****, hash, Thai stick, *****, amphetamines, H-Horse ******, quaaludes, horse tranquilizers and Russian *****. The drugs were always a welcome and needed friend, a respite from the horrors of war in Southeast Asia. To meditate & levitate, to transmigrate & navigate, to negotiate & regurgitate myself, I needed a head start if I was going to SLIDE through what would be called a wormhole today, making a three-dimensional movement between different parallel universes, a conquest of time and space. Cue our favorite narrator:
Rod Serling:  “You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension--a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.”
WWII, Part I:  A slider now, I SLIDE to my father’s war—the War in Europe in the years before V.E. Day, May 8, 1945. Suddenly I’m flipped right out of the jungle to Germania, to Deutschland in the winter of 1945. I am a P.O.W. of the Germans, sent out into the economy as slave labor. It’s February in Dresden, Germany, the Baroque capital of the German state of Saxony, the city called lovingly by her (****!) many lovers: “The Florence of the Elbe.” It was a long time ago, during the war and I Survived to Tell the Tale. I am a wet floppy Kilgore Trout; I’ve flopped right out of the Twilight Zone into what appears to be an underground meat locker in Dresden. There are animal carcasses hanging from the ceiling and the building is known as Slaughterhouse Number 5. I am a lucky ******* because even though I don’t know it yet, I’m in the safest place in the entire city. Cue the Bombing of Dresden, a strategic military bombing by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and the United States Army Air Force (USAAF).  In four raids, 1,300 heavy bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on Dresden. The resulting firestorm destroyed 15 square miles (39 square kilometers) of the city centre and killed many thousands, according to **** figures-- largely discredited by the victors who not only get the spoils but get to spin the history any which way but loose. Casualty figures were 200,000 and death toll estimates went as high as 500,000. Or maybe just 25,000 total, if you believe the ******* Anglo-American valkyries who unleashed the wrath of Khan’s Smoking Joe’s Barbecue Ribs and Hotlinks. Win a war, get a medal and a seat in Congress, maybe the White House; lose a war, get indicted. You’re going to Nuremberg, pilgrim, or the ******* Hague.
Kurt Vonnegut: “World War II was over and I was standing in the middle of Times Square with a Purple Heart on and a purple hard-on.”
Colonel Kurtz:  “We fight for the land that's under our feet, the gold that's in our hands, women that worship the power in our *****.  I summon fire from the sky. Do you know what it is to be a white man who can summon fire from the sky? ...What it means? You can live and die for these things, not silly ideals that are always betrayed  . . . I swallowed a bug. Who are you, captain?”
Willard:   “Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste. I've been around for a long long year, stolen many man's soul and faith. Stuck around St. Petersburg when I saw it was a time for a change. Killed the Tsar and his ministers, Anastasia screamed in vain. I rode a tank, held a gen'rals rank when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank. Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.”  
WWII, Part II:  The bombing of Dresden had to have been some kind of a violation of some International Code or Geneva Convention. But, of course, the bombers, the Victors, ran the Nuremberg show trials. The bombees didn’t get a chance to say much, didn’t want to make a fuss, seeing how generous the Army of Occupation was with their coal, gasoline, clothing and food handouts. But I was there when it was safe to climb out of the meat locker, and immediately got put to work on the après les bombes clean-up. I was there doing the ***** work, a corpse miner, tasked with collecting the fried grasshopper remains of so many unlucky Krauts who were simply burned alive, like heretics at the Inquisition. So it goes.
William Tecumseh Sherman: “War is Hell, Babaloo!”
Colonel Kilgore: “You can either surf, or you can fight!”
Sam Bottoms: “I dropped a tab of acid at the Do-Long Bridge, so I think I’ll surf for awhile: ‘I see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.’ Reading Blake: for years it was the only way I could block out the war, that and losing myself in a bunch of undercover assignments. Yeah, it was William Blake, I-Spy and lots more acid; that how I dealt with PTSD.”
The Nam, Part II, LT DAN:  “Good job, trooper; those ******* drugs got you coming and going, sliding so fast you’ve missed latrine duty 3 times this month. Now go get 5 gallons of diesel fuel and gasoline, mix it together and torch that ******* feces, soldier.”
** Chi Minh:  “This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around.”
***** Friedman:   “The Democrats and Republicans are the same guy admiring himself in the mirror.”

Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak:   “Vote for Pedro.”
Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard:    “Fight Fiercely!”
Marshall McLuhan:    “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.”
The Author:   I am a disaffected angry old man, formerly a disaffected angry young man; a Hopi-Italian Jew with Chinese offspring, namely my left-brained son, a mathematical genius but having a tough time dealing with idiots, the many truly stunod people in the world.  Then there’s my Rose, my sweet King Lear-jet daughter, like her half-brother, not yet finished paying for my sins. My offspring are haunted, visited upon daily by their father’s  ghosts, ghosts created, ghosts hovering over me, from wars hot and cold and peace lukewarm and cloudy, like the uranium ground contamination on the mesa, visited upon mothers and infants  and children who seek only a glass of cool water from the spring not to be glow worms in the dark, leukocytes made insane by something in the water. My sins, a father’s sins; things I did to curry favor, to ingratiate and advance myself with the 1%, things I did to get ahead in life, to get what I thought my father and others in the ancestral slipstream had failed to get, twice to the Rabbi for a get (Hebrew: גט‎, plural gittin גיטין), to get the edge my kids need now, the edge I never had, and life reduced to an exercise in ultimate combat, little more than a cage fight, man against man and God against all. The things I did for money and position shame me now. And shame is a large  source of my anger.  I will remain angry. I will hang on to my anger at God and myself and all who have been disappointed in me, by me, especially the cavalcade of short-term caretakers, women used, abused, left behind and forgotten. Why am I me? Sometimes I think that’s the way I’m programmed. But it’s okay, like Gaga: “I'm beautiful in my way 'Cause God makes no mistakes I'm on the right track, baby I was born this way' Cause God makes no mistakes, I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way and will I continue to surf the Cloud: even though God is dead and I don’t believe you, or me, or them.
Basic: remember Basic?

10   A IS FOR ANGER NEXT 20
20   START STEP TWO ANGER KUBLER-ROSS INFINITE LOOP
30   GOTO 10
10   A IS FOR ANGER NEXT 20
20   START STEP TWO ANGER KUBLER-ROSS INFINITE LOOP
30  GOTO 10
10   A IS FOR ANGER NEXT 20
20   START STEP TWO ANGER KUBLER-ROSS INFINITE LOOP
30 A IS FOR ANGER NEXT 30
30  GOTO 10 Ad infinitum

10   A IS FOR ANGER NEXT 20
20   START STEP TWO ANGER KUBLER-ROSS INFINITE LOOP
30   GOTO 10
10   A IS FOR ANGER NEXT 20
20   START STEP TWO ANGER KUBLER-ROSS INFINITE LOOP
30  GOTO 10
10   A IS FOR ANGER NEXT 20
20   START STEP TWO ANGER KUBLER-ROSS INFINITE LOOP
30 A IS FOR ANGER NEXT 30
30  GOTO 10 Ad infinitum

hospice is the admission
they bring morphine
the good stuff
it’s six months or less
a one way flight
of hosts and guests
now numb from the blast
there’s no turning back
it’s inside out
and your hardwiring  
is resiliently engaged  
to move you forward
into this final encounter
day after day
drinking red tea
with spoons and cups
of Bonanno and Kubler-Ross  
their ghosts slurp
with you -
in your prepped room
your James Dean role
now flickers with light
on the ceiling
and you dream
a third stage bargain
that your son had been hit
instead of you
with this wicked sickness
then coolly counseled
by your wife
that it was no dream
just your mind  
regulating - processing
you slump there
dying there
in front of a familiar wall
where you once taped
painted olives green
and sipped scotch
with your books
at night.

No.

Simple as that,

It’s not happening, I refuse.

You can’t deny me as long as I pretend,

Deep down, I know that this has come to an end.

There’s no fooling me anymore.

It’s crystal clear, beyond my fears.

I wonder if there will ever be a day,

When my mind will go back to normal,

And every time I close my eyes,

I won’t see your stupid lovely face,

And I won’t think about the things,

That I know you love and hate,

These now useless facts,

Are cluttered in my brain.

They occupy too much space,

And drive me close to insane.

On the brink of desperation,

These feelings transform into hate,

But this amount of rage,

Is unheard of and strange,

Completely misdirected.

I wonder who, and if, and what,

Or if I was neglected and dejected.

All of these futile things.

But really, I’ll do anything…

To deaf ears my promises plead please.

It was worth a try, I guess.

I know I need to quit.

My heart cries in vain,

Because it’s a stubborn *******.

The sadness comes so naturally,

I’m drowning in it,

Drained lifeless from the melancholy.

It spreads like cancer,

Ravaging my body.

The worst disease is memory.

Why can’t you just be normal?

Just another person on the street.

I’ll give it up, I’ll try,

Even though it’s still a part of me.

Each day I’ll think, and laugh, and grieve,

Until the point where it’s not unfeasible to dream,

Of complete and total inner peace, acceptance finally.

I watched a man die from a distance the other night at work.  
He was a patient on my unit,
                                                    a BOP, a bedded outpatient.  
Came in for a routine procedure, it ran long, so they
stuck him in a bed overnight for observation and
discharged him the next afternoon.  

Came back three days later.  
Valve exploded in his chest.  
Transferred to CVICU.  
Coded twice.  

The first code was cancelled almost immediately.  
False alarm.  Critical condition, but not a code.  
The second code they called dragged on and on and on.  

I know this because someone pulled him up on the telemetry monitor by our nurse’s station, and we watched him flatline, watched him asystole, watched his heart at zero and zero and zero.  Watched them bag him, give manual respirations.  Watched the forced waves on his flat rhythm from each compression.  Every palm to sternum.  Every electric shock caused a wave and then fell flat.  Zero.  Zero.  Zero.  Absolute zero.  Like in space or whatever.  So cold.  No life, no movement.  Zero, just zero.  Flatline.  Asystole.  No life possible, no life attainable.  
I watched him die from a distance.  From two floors above on a computer monitor.  Secondhand death.

They stopped compressing,
                                                    stopped bagging,
                                                                                   and he stopped existing.  
Became stagnant, static.  No longer
held in the balance, in the limbo,
in the purgatory between life and death.  
                                                        ­                    He crossed over and
                                                             ­             stayed at absolute zero.  

I never met him, just knew of him, so
                                                              wh­at does that mean for me?  
                                                           ­   What am I supposed to do with
           the knowledge that many of the patients I come in contact with
                          die sometimes very soon after I meet them?  

Most things I touch die.  Plants, fish, hamsters, my mother.  
We can’t spare everyone, that’s stupid.  There is
a natural order to things.  Darwinism.  Survival of the fittest.  
                                        All that *******.  

When my mother landed herself in the ICU, we knew
                                                   where she wanted her money to go, but
                not what we were supposed to do with all this ******* grief.  
                Not what to do with her body.  
                Not if we should keep her on life support to
                                                                ­                  drag out the suffering.  
She gave no directions on how to live without a mother.  

(But how do you direct something like that?
An idea so big, so lofty that directions will always fall short.)

The grief cycle will
                                     always fall short.  
Most days I don’t think acceptance is truly possible.  

Some days I’m there, and others I’m not.  
                                                          ­          It’s not linear, it’s not stagnant.  
                                                     ­                       It’s not absolute zero.  
It moves back and forth and
                                               becomes the snake eating its own tail.  
                                                         ­           Ouroboros.  

Where do you go from here?  How do you truly move on?  

I’m falling through a gas giant.  Nothing keeps hold here,
                                                         nothing keeps score (but the body).  

It’s 5:27 in the morning and I’m thinking
                                                 about that man that flatlined again.
Zero on the telemetry monitors, no heart rhythm, asystole. Spike for compression.  Nothing, nothing, nothing.  The body gets cold when there is no more blood pumping, no more heartbeat, no more brain waves; nothing to keep it warm.  Blood slowly slinks down to the lowest bend.  Becomes a bruise on the skin.  Absolute zero is the coldest theoretical temperature. No movement possible.  So cold, atoms cannot move.  Electrons cannot hum.  
                                                        The body becomes this. No life possible.

Have You Ever Felt:
Have you ever been able to feel someone else’s pain?
The sudden shock, the rush of emotion, the constant strain?
The notion that emotional pain doesn’t equate physical pain is absurd,
For they are one in the same.
Have you ever felt the pain and humility of someone who recently went through a breakup,
or the shot emotions of someone who couldn’t kiss and make-up,
Because it was already half past too late?
The effect of what happens when being in a constant mental state, of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Have you ever placed your feet into someone’s size 11 shoes, and walked through their journey called “Life”?
Have you ever tried to resolve their strife?
Or have you tried to evade it all together, simply because you were feeling under the weather?
The constant and crass repeated cycle through Kubler-Ross,
dealing with the denial, anger, and bargaining with depression,
but never coming to terms with the past, and finding acceptance.
Why does it take so long for us to accept the fact that not everyone’s situation is the same?
We yell at the victims, but they don’t deserve the blame, nor should they feel ashamed, let alone be shunned,
we should open up our minds and let our thoughts free run.

We need to learn how to listen with our eyes and not just our ears,
To step up and face our fears of not being able to understand the ones who we hold so dear.
We need to do more than just coexist, we need to learn how to live and be alive with individuality,
Reaching out, learning the ways of life of another brother or sister is our reality,
To learn how to read, live, and capture the book before judging it by its cover,
By listening, we learn how to give our time; it’s our lives that we learn to rediscover.
Our time is the cheapest, yet most valuable resource of our daily lives,
Helping others adds color to our lives painted in only black and white,
But we are the pen in this once barren and desolate book called “Life”, and we must learn how to write.

by: W. A. Marshall

I made the error
of checking the news
I rarely do that - anymore
dying death and attackers flight
court case narratives
Kubler Ross provisions
to lodge suspicious elites
denial and angry bargains
a process where authorities
preach their position
the bulletins remain unchanged
but my stage of hope
dwells there

Just how ******* angry can I get now?
Kubler-Ross got an answer for that?
Because I don't. And it isn't looking good from here. All the giving and taking of it. And menial use of a whole. Like a game it is. One where everybody loses but there's always one who loves to lose, isn't there? One who carries sorrow like a ****** sash. One who ignores the cold lonely thought of death, as if it will never come. And so they curse and dismiss the one and only thing that death can't ****. Genuine love. They take the easy way out. ******* cowards. Lying in your beds, just lying there detached and selfish and ugly. And oh how they multiply until there are more and more hideously smiling losers in love with only pride and the pain they inflict on others. Give them a ******* trophy would you? Let them take their ******* bows already and move on. Before a whole new level of wrath is unleashed upon the heartless. Like a ******* flood it will rise to their eyeballs, with one last look at me on my self righteous hill saying, "Told you mother *******." You just don't **** with genuine.