Thought Xperiment @JEWanon #jfds;lfjrjfsdr

There's a fluid stasis
as the basis
for those thoughts
that hound and chase us
reduce and trace us
and would erase us
and debase us
if not waste us
real head cases
that mentally race us
instead of pace us
and embrace us
and truly face us
in our places
of oasis.

No my country's not made of good people who make sick things up and stick by them because they know it scares and intimidates everyone else. No it couldn't be..We're better than that. We're not total nazis yet. Are we? ARE WE?

THE MENACE APPRENTICE

The Menace Apprentice

is a fate that's not meant us

just a mistake life's lent us

come to divide and rent us

an unreality show star

whose known wide and far

for his inimitable genius

for lying and meanness

and the smoke and mirror

make his confusion much clearer

a mental hologram of blubber

fool's gold and used rubbers

The Eternal Dolt

a dodo in full molt

a pitiable ignoramus

who will die trying to shame us

loves the suffering he causes

accepts only escape clauses

feels nothing but threat

even his saliva's flop sweat

he's a blob of self-pity

what he touches turns shitty

he's all about the teardown

and meltdown and beatdown

mad clown with a shit crown

he's a nervous condition

of demolition absent contrition

a public masturbation of dissipation

his excitation now a capitulation

to his fear of a fight

a scared dog with a bite

drowns in the hate he's sown

with us in the splash zone

and a pandemic he's blown

it's your very life he'd own

he's an exploding supernova of gall and bile

the only space force we'll see for a while

a dark matter show of hook and crook

of deny steal lie plunder and rook

our suffering his happy place

good ol' larceny and bear mace

he and his axis of weevils

their role models medievals

minds in constant upheavals

I may yet believe in evil

Larry Piltz

April 14, 2020

Five Pulitzer Winners Walk Into A Bar In My Amazon Dream


I realized tonight I've known five Pulitzer Prize winners. They are described below, not in chronological order, but with attempted aspiring candor, wit and cleverness.

The first one I'd known had been a high school friend and a fellow member of the school choir, she as celebrated and accomplished pianist and accompanist. She won her Pulitzer in 2005 for Biography and Autobiography with a Willem de Kooning biography, co-authored with her husband. I took heart when she told me it had taken ten years to write it. She and I at the earliest had been fellow participants in, I think, a local 4th or 5th grade patriotic speech competition. She recited "I Am An American", and I recited "The Gettysburg Address". I believe she won the competition, despite my earnest gratifying Lincolnesque performance (if Lincoln had had the larynx of an elementary school boy). She was a most talented girl, which is a vastly understated compliment. She is an excellent person of highest integrity and is sweet, kind and charming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annalyn_Swan

The fourth Pulitzer winner I'd met, Lawrence 'Larry' Wright, I met in Austin because I knew his equally brilliant wife from a helpful but now somewhat embarrassing personal growth seminar called Insight II (I demur from describing the exhaustive energetic hysterics of its Limiting Characteristic Theater; that's all I have to say about that). Larry won his Pulitzer (Those words put together in that order!) in 2007 in General Nonfiction for the book The Looming Tower. He wrote for Texas Monthly at the time I met him in about 1988. I was impressed when meeting him even then, and his ego was not at all corrupted by his talent and his already gathering reputation for insightful well-crafted writing. Talent wins out sometimes. That Larry can write! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Wright

The third Pulitzer Prize winner is Ben Sargent, editorial cartoonist for the Austin American-Statesman when I worked there at the City Desk from about 1984 to 1987. He had won his Pulitzer in 1982. He was the lanky friendly bearded legend (way back before not-shaving was compulsory lemming behavior) padding around the newsroom as if he were merely mortal. Ben was quiet and unassuming and had a wicked and sharpened sense of diabolical humor that gave incisive hilarious hell to people who well-earned it. Luckily for him, Texas politicians even then were especially mock-worthy, as were the national 1980s Republicans, and the Pulitzer committee likely especially enjoyed Ben's fearless skewering of them and of their precious cherished right-wing delusions. I was city desk assistant and, among other celebrated duties like 'hand-populating' the template with temperatures from around the country and world and calling area funeral homes to gather the names and information about the most recently Hill Country deceased and writing their obituaries for the afternoon/evening edition of the daily paper, I also received and solicited public information and then conveyed it to reporters and editors and other staff including Ben, the gentle giant with a mighty set of drawing pens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Sargent

The third Pulitzer Prize winner, Raymond Bonner, won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of writers while on staff with The New York Times. He also won first prize in 1985 for 'Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador,'' in the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Awards program. Bonner was a NY Times reporter when I met him in 1982. I had called the NY Times Washington bureau office because my Austin neighbor's ex-Marine boyfriend had a hot story to tell and hopefully sell. Bonner and another NY Times reporter, Philip Taubman, Jr., son of a senior NYT editor, flew the next day from D.C. to Austin to secretly interview the ex-Marine, who had been one of the earliest pot smugglers across the Rio Grande into Texas and had contemporaneously in 1982 been a part of the CIA's then-secret operation to create a right-wing guerilla army (The Contras) in Honduras along the border with Nicaragua. He scouted landing zones for C-130 Hercules transport planes.

The two reporters and my scary new friend and I spent two days scouting isolated locations around and outside of Austin where the interviews were then conducted. I was taught to conceal my activities and not be followed. My friend's story was to be part of a larger story being written about other ex-military people also taking part in that covert operation. By that time, Bonner had already made journalistic history with a 1982 NY Times story that first exposed the weighted fist of oligarchic capitalist genocide and oppression in Central America at the hands of the American-trained, American-supplied, and American-denied El Salvadorean Army El Mozote Massacre in which 800 to 1200 fleeing civilian peasants including children were hunted and killed in the countryside in 1981 by that army’s Atlacatl Battalion, whose officers (and other members) had been trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia in Columbus. Bonner continued in the same journalistic vein with a lifetime of equally intense and historic other reporting elsewhere such as Rwanda, Bosnia and Indonesia. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Bonner

Lastly, the second Pulitzer Prize winner I'd known was a journalism professor at Louisiana State University whose Advanced Typography class I signed up for and dropped in 1973 after coming to terms with the fact that I had no interest in typography whatsoever, advanced or primitive.  James Shoaf Featherston won his Pulitzer in 1953 as part of the reporting team for the Vicksburg Herald's coverage of a 1953 tornado in Vicksburg, Mississippi.   Much more famously, Featherston was the Dallas Times Herald reporter on November 22, 1963 who, immediately after John F. Kennedy was shot in his motorcade, secured a witness (Mary Moorman) for the police to interview and himself later testified before the Warren Commission.  Also, in the 1950s, Featherston covered Emmett Till's Mississippi murder trial for the Jackson Daily News.  It's remarkable his Pulitzer Prize was not given for either of those but for coverage of a tornado.  He probably assumed he'd peaked early until the Emmett Till trial and the events of November 22, 1963.  

The dream was that I win a Pulitzer. I've wanted one since I first learned what a Pulitzer is. So I majored in journalism in college, where I dated a woman last-named Pulitzer. She was a real prize, actually, but not THE prize, and I wasn't convinced I wanted to 'win' her, nor had she shown evidence she'd want to be 'won' by me.  Since then I've come to understand more fully that someone actually needs to write an especially outstanding cohesive series of articles or one really gigantic blockbuster of a news story to win a Pulitzer or a book.  There's always a catch.

Anyway, that's a Rubicon I super duper likely will never even locate let alone cross. However, having been exposed to actual Pulitzer winners will serve me well if my writing stars align well enough for me to essentially win what would be for me the journalistic lottery. I'll be able to name-drop as I awkwardly negotiate interviews, and perhaps I will have learned by osmosis how to behave accordingly. At least I've gotten close to the Pulitzer Mojo of the five Pulitzer winners I've known and met, good people all, and my life's been elevated and enhanced because of them.  I count that as a win. And finally, here's the Amazon part of the dream.
https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Urban-Primeval-Larry-Piltz/dp/1530871085
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Coming Eventually....how as a Little League shortstop I made an unassisted triple play (without any help!) with the bases loaded, and of how in one game I made all three outs - AT BAT!!! - in the last inning of play. A true hero's journey.
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ERGO WHERE GO?

Where does the time go
the same place the years go
the same place the winds blow
and the same place as flies the crow
in our mysterious status quo
our lives a happy hobo
without a care or need to know
if there's some final glorious show
or a surprisingly gentle undertow
either way I've got to go
tomorrow's the only thing I know
and tonight I have a furlough
and fields of love still left to sow
so good night from this old fellow
who wishes you well and says hello

For Eli on his upcoming 40th

YES, IT’S ALL A FREAK SHOW, INDEED* I can well believe it takes all the air out of the room. I didn't watch Frontline’s Charlottesville** documentary though. I know what happened, basically, and may see it someday. I'm very happy it's televised and available. Right now though, it's all too real and near and possible. I need the mental cushion of just knowing, and not looking. I well know what it looks like already. As did many of my relatives back in and around The Pale, who didn't live to speak of it, and I've lived the entire silence about the subject with an extended family for 60-plus years. It's too loud a devastating subject to ever even whisper about. What are ya gonna do? Anyway? Well, I could join my son, wonderful young man now of dual American-Canadian citizenship living in B.C. It's tempting. I'd love to live near him anyway! Go Northwest, old man, I hear myself think at times. I have felt the strong presence all along, from childhood, riding along with me on a continuum where the past is still happening in its original form, as well as in newer different forms with different victims and different perpetrators, and have followed its course, surfacing here and there, the evil of Rwanda being a signifying manifestation, for instance, Columbine, for another, knowingly perpetrated on Hitler's birthday, subscribing for years to the Southern Poverty Law newsletter which recounts all reported hate crimes in the U.S. in climbing monthly totals into the dozens per month after month and rising with a bullet, with accounts of the crimes and those committing them and why. You don't have to look far or long. You can scan the headlines every single day. It's too easy. What's hard is to block it out. It's amazing how many people do, for different reasons. Two of them: Because it could never happen to me. Because it could happen to me. You're both wrong! It's happening now, somewhere, all the time. The fuse is lit. The race is on and here comes heartache. And now that "it" has the American presidential and one major party’s personal approving imprimaturs on it, with no American institution yet proving capable of seriously restraining it or cutting its power off at the knees with one swoop of the sword of justice, I think it's okay to begin to feel, or anticipate the beginning of feeling of...It. Is. Happening. Here. And yes…It. Can. Still. Be. Deterred. But it's easily as likely that it won't be. Already it's underway, with the easiest victims first to be demonized, officially denounced (yes, that is key), and gotten rid of like slaves at auction, with their prospects torn limb from limb as if by wolf packs, if not brutally imprisoned. Yes, not too cheery lately. I’ve even felt the need to reach back eight years for an upbeat song to record, just to feel like I'm doing something positive, that something's worth doing, and hopefully to soon send it out into a cold perplexed confused world that's looking for some warmth and clarity. I'll keep my warmth, thank you, until 'it' pries it from my cold dead body, but the world should have my clarity. It’s refreshing, and terrifying. With this song maybe I'll finally make a buck out of art! Or at least out of music. It'd be nice to be rewarded for my long harrowing doctor-it's-my-eyes personal monitoring of what's now emerged right from under our own 600 million feet**, and my musical response to it. It'd be almost cleansing, so to speak, though not ethnically. It’s easy to get lost in such a big parade*** * Title borrowed from Liz. ** Other potential and real documentaries among a galaxy of possibilities: Andersonville Georgia (not far from Plains) 13000 murdered, Sharpeville Transvaal South Africa 69 murdered, El Mozote El Salvador 800 murdered, Kigali Rwanda up to a million murdered, Srebenica Bosnia 8000 murdered). And the beat goes on. Drums keep pounding rhythm to the brain. Maybe Cher can still do something. Sonny Bono wrote a hell of a good song, ya know? Distracted yet? *** Actual carnage may vary.

                                               Two Dreams of One Thing

After about seven or eight years in our home, and of those seven or eight years of immersing himself outdoors in our little woods, loving the outdoors as the Life Itself it is for him, because he is so fused with its grandness and its fascinating particulars, and its sensory wonderland, after all this time the seven or eight brutally hot summers have finally driven Tsavo to this August corner of the living room cottage surrounded on two sides by its five-foot tall rows of windows that provide a comprehensive visual immersion into his woods.

He finds rest and summer solace behind these windows and naps more deeply and prolifically in residence here than anywhere else in our home, instead of his more brief usual cat naps that have sustained his outdoor ranger forays and helped bring him home each day to complete the pride.

Even when one day he becomes old and can no longer be an easily vigorous embodiment of feline outdoor curiosity and investigation, he will be able to bask and nap in the windows to his world, his private enclave where invigorating memories of scents and sights and sound intimate knowledge of the creature kinds who inhabit Tsavo's world will play out before him, visible and real, beckoning him to knowingly inhabit his worlds in an expanded dream,
the dream of a lifetime.

Tsavo, the Bird Feeder, and the Journey Down to Home

He's still there on the roof now at dark, 9:18 Austin time. Coyotes prowl. Big hoot owls hunt, occasionally in pairs. A big loud hoot owl couple live here alongside us. Middle of the night yesterday they landed in our front yard and started a really loud hootenanny, for some reason, close to our open window. It sounded so raucous, spontaneous and odd it was fairly hilarious to hear and lasted a few minutes.

Will Tsavo make it past tonight's gauntlet and get home safely? Will I feel the need to pick up an empty laundry basket, hold it upstretched over my head, and coax him to jump into it from the roof as we've done numerous times, usually during the daytime? It's not as far down a jump as you might think. I stand on the steps to the porch so it's only a short drop for him. And when I feel his gentle touch plop down in the floor of the basket, I am genuinely relieved and happy, and he and I feel close.

Then I'll carry him home in his 'sedan chair' with him ruling over all he can see, including me, as he peers out over his realm. He will from time to time lean back and rub his head on my forehead. I am his and he is mine. And I am at your service, my liege, my King of the Forest and Rooftop.

When we make this sedan chair sojourn at night, nocturnal Tsavo truly becomes in his element, and if he's not high in a tree overseeing his domain, the laundry basket is his next favorite perch.

It's almost decision time for the basket bearer. I wonder if Tsavo's come down yet. Sometimes he stays there until I'm safely removed from the scene so he can exercise his now-free choice to wander the woods at night against my preferences. He knows about things like strategy, you see. A good hunter always understands his prey and his pack animal, of which, to be clear, I am the latter.

In the dark of the roof, Tsavo took several seconds longer than usual to trust I wouldn't drop the basket and him with it and also to secure his footing for the drop-in. Yet it went as smoothly as it always does.

He rode home in the sedan chair, was placed down on the living room floor still in it, jumped out of the basket (it became a basket again after being carried inside), ate his kibble dinner in peace, and washed it down with water from the big leftover dog bowl, and he probably is experiencing a bit of a letdown (oh, good accidental pun) after being up high alongside the big oak branches he's climbed by day and under a mellowing clear sky about to be lit by a big round bright orb on a pleasant cooling-down night.

The wages of being civilized. The Tradeoff. Not a living wage, I will add. But we make do.