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A Mouse In The House

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

house-mouse

I was on my computer

And saw movement in the hall

Was it Abandon?

Or maybe a ball?

I looked over

And in my house

Was a furry little creature

Some would call it a mouse

I said, “Hey, what’s up?”

He said, “I was looking for some sup.”

I asked, “Did you succeed in your plight?”

He said, “Not even a bite.”

I asked, “Is there anything else I can do?” without any ‘tude

He said, “Well, I’d really like some cheese. I’m in the mood.”

I told him that this was a vegan house

It contains no cheese, as I wasn’t expecting a mouse

And that I have a dog, who might give him a roust

That he better move his tail if he doesn’t want to joust

He told me, “No need to get up, I’ll help myself out.

I’ll tell the others that coming here to eat is in doubt

That for food they should find another route

And that if they don’t, with a dog they may bout.”

And so he left

As quiet as a mouse

And no one was left

Except Abandon and me in the house

I didn’t even get up from my chair

Partly so I wouldn’t rustle my hair

But mostly because I didn’t really care

Posted in Casual Encounters, Poetry, Shorties | No Comments »

I was taking the subway home from the whorehouse last night at 12:30 a.m. I was a little tired from all the fucking and was looking forward to a nice quiet 7-hour ride to Bumfuck Heights where I now live. Apparently the Universe was worried I would run out of ideas on which to write about and so she provided me with a doozy which was neither nice nor quiet.

In NYC there’s a lot more to do than have sex with prostitutes, although personally I haven’t explored outside of this pastime, and being a Friday night after midnight the first round of night activists were heading home for the evening and the subway was crowded, but not so crowded that I couldn’t get a seat. In my car there was a 350 lb. black woman with breasts as large as a Brontosaurus Rex shouting at the top of her lungs to a black man holding a Koran whose volume came a close second the Berthasaurus. She also had a couple of big fat black bookends that were her friends who periodically chimed in.

At first I didn’t think anything of it, figuring it was just like being in a black movie theater where in between dropping chicken bones and spitting watermelon seeds on the floor, everyone shouts their comments at the screen.

“DON’T GO INTO THE HOUSE, BITCH! HE’S WAITING FOR YOU WITH A KNIFE!”

“YOU DROPPED YOUR GUN, DUMMY! NOW WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?”

But soon I saw the conversation was anything but pleasant and the fingers weren’t open and filled with chicken parts but instead clenched in fists.

My assessment was that they had been discussing religion in the way most people do: “You’re going to burn in Hell for eternity!” “Screw you and your God!” and things had escalated to the boiling point, once again not a reference to chicken which, as we all know, in the black community is only prepared fried.

Jesus, the prophet of peace and forgiveness and Islam, which literally translates as “Peace” seem to lead more people to anger and violence than inner serenity. The reason it leads them there is because they are not following the prophets but their own inner anger at their mother or father or last boyfriend or girlfriend or boss or the world and all they are doing is cutting and pasting words of prophets to justify their anger as a holy crusade. A Christian may lack money and because they are angry and jealous of someone who has money they will quote Jesus and say, “A camel has an easier chance of going through the eye of a needle than a rich man has of getting into Heaven.” A Muslim will have a constant raging hard-on and want to stare down every piece of ass that passes by, but because he has been conditioned into guilt for having a dick, he will quote the Koran and say, “The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that women have to cover themselves up.” It would almost be comical how people cut and paste the words of inspired people and texts to justify their bad behavior if it weren’t so destructive to them and everyone around them.

Despite finding the whole scene a bit pathetic, Berthasaurus had a few funny lines that even made me laugh. At one time she grabbed her gargantuan breasts and said, “THESE GIRLS ARE MORE MAN THAN YOU EVER WILL BE!” This cracked the entire studio audience, including me.

In another incident of tragic comedy, Koran Carrier might have gotten to the deterioration of argumentation where he resorted to the, “Forget words, let’s duel with swords!” stratagem and called Berthasaurus a bitch. Louder than it would be if you were sitting in the front row of a Megadeth concert and stuck your head flush to the speaker, she shouted,“YOU’RE THE BITCH! YOU’RE NOT A MAN, YOU’RE A BITCH! EVERYONE SEES THAT YOU’RE THE BITCH ON THIS TRAIN!”

Now I grew up with the understanding that if a woman calls you a bitch then it’s fair game to backhand her offering-her-unwanted-opinion ass. But I guess the rules of engagement were created before there was a fast food restaurant on every street corner and some women grew in girth to the size where they now had their own zip code and men got wise that if they placed a hand on one of these triple-sized honeys, those crazy dames would eat you up—if not metaphorically than literally!

To add to the bizarrity of the event, there was a black man with a beard in a dirty light blue jumpsuit with the zipper opened to his belly and a rhinestone-studded belt wrapped around his waist. He looked like he could have been one of the Village People playing the part of the Flaming Garage Mechanic, which was short-lived and soon replaced by another icon of gay life in the West Village—an Indian Chief. Regardless of looking like he worked out at the “YMCA”and was getting ready to enlist “In The Navy” because he was a “Macho Man,” the words he spoke were the only ones that made sense to me.

The Village People blue-jumpsuit

Berthasaurus was bellowing out, “IS THERE ANY MAN HERE WHO WILL KNOCK THIS BITCH’S ASS TO THE GROUND?” The Village People Mechanic told the Koran Carrier to remain calm and disengage. He cautioned her that she was inciting violence. This didn’t stop the melee, which would continue as long as it took Moses and his peeps to cross the desert. I had grown tired of it and prayed to a god not of the Koran or the New Testament to make it end, seeing how useless those gods were in creating peace among their worshipers.

One passenger on the subway pulled out his little camera and started filming, for as we all know the world doesn’t need anymore messiahs or holy books but instead a few more well-crafted YouTube videos of people making asses of themselves. I actually started to pull out my new pocket camera and finally conceded that while I can be a douchebag, I didn’t want any physical proof that this was a real event and not a figment of my imagination. A 350 lb. black woman…a man in a light blue jumpsuit with a rhinestone-studded belt…a man who wasn’t a man but a bitch holding a Koran—I still can’t be certain that I didn’t dream the whole thing up like those pervert priests who wrote The Book of Revelations.

At one point Berthasaurus started bellowing a new mantra: “FUCK ALLAH! FUCK ALLAH! FUCK ALLAH!” I would have considered hiring her as a contract writer for my un-blog as she had started speaking my language but I knew her “Fuck Allah” was incomplete. If she shouted, “FUCK ALLAH! FUCK YAHWEH! FUCK JEHOVAH! FUCK ZEUS!” I would have hired her on the spot. But she was too unconscious to see that they were all just different names for the same thing. She was cursing the other guy’s Red Delicious apple while eating the same apple while calling it a Granny Smith.

Finally Berthasaurus stood up and charged the Koran Carrier, well, as fast as a fat cow like her could charge. She raised her hand and while most people just bark—that dog bit. She slapped Koran Carrier across the face. She then raised her bottle of Snapple in a threatening manner, indicating that if the solid glass didn’t kill him surely the sugar and artificial colors would.

PH2008072802924

I sat dumbfounded for a little but then jumped up and told that fat bitch to sit the fuck down. “That’s enough!” I said. She looked at me and again I said, “That’s enough.” She knew better than to talk back to me because I wasn’t a pussy like the Koran Carrier and I would have flattened her fat ass if she so much as opened her mouth to me and even a small whiff of her supersized fries and shakes and Quadruple Big Mac with the works had infiltrated my nostrils.

I assured Koran Carrier that I would see that no more violence would be directed at him. He said to me, “Then call the police.” I told him that I’m not getting any reception on my cel phone down here and if he keeps it up, I’ll be the one to knock his bitch ass to the ground. At this point the other two fat black card-carrying members of the Nation of Fast Food were chiming in their decibels. I was thinking of saying, “Can you fat bitches change the song to some ‘Praise Jesus’ choir piece?” Either that or, “I miss the days of slavery when we could just whip a nigger to death if she so much as cried out when we raped her.” I kept my mouth shut, for throwing blood to sharks only makes them more crazy.

Just like how one’s whole life supposedly flashes in front of his eyes before the hooker pulls out a blade and tells him,“How about I fuck YOU up the ass?” a scene played out in my mind in milliseconds that I wondered if enacted if it would turn this horror show into an educational film, or just an even more pathetic comedy.

I saw myself standing up and shouting, “ENOUGH OF THIS ALREADY! What is going on here? All you self-professed ‘religious’ people are showing the ugliest parts of humanity in the name of your so-called religions. I don’t care whether it is Jesus or Muhammad—does anyone really think that either one of these men, or prophets or gods or whatever you want to consider them, would condone this behavior as the highest expression of mankind? The Book of Genesis says God created Man in his own image. Is THIS the image of God? Jesus said that everything he did we could do and more. Is THIS the ‘more’ he was talking about?

I’m sorry, brother, I can’t quote the Koran. But even if I didn’t judge all the terrorist action and cries for bloodshed I see around the world as exemplary of Islam, is your behavior tonight any better an more representative? If these pieces of poisonous fruit offered from your mouths are the gifts of Jesus and Muhammad, I’d prefer to bite an apple from Eve before I accept anything from their hands.

“And you people sitting there and enjoying the show, do you feel proud of yourselves for being audience members to ‘Jerry Springer Live’? You read in your history books about the Roman Coliseum and how barbaric they were to making battles to the death entertainment and yet you sit back and watch a brother and a sister go at each other’s throats and cheer for more carnage. You are even more pathetic than these two, for violence leads to bloodshed but apathy leads to enslavement.

“Think, people. This is not a sit-com or a Shakespeare tragedy. This is real life with real humans. And real humans don’t bite into blood capsules; their blood comes from their veins. And real people don’t have make-up artists and catering and fan mail; they take care of their own blemishes, struggle to find their own food and if they have a spouse and kids who think them special they are considered lucky.

Why can’t we stop being entertainment for a second and start being authentic human beings? Why can’t we stop laughing at another’s distress and actually see if we could do something to lessen it? That requires caring. And no one really cares about a fiction. Because at the end of the day, the television set goes off and you are back to face your own life of the ‘Not So Rich And Famous.’ And then all we have is each other. And love is the force that makes us all equal in the ability to share our riches.

I will call you my brothers and sisters regardless of your behavior. But I much rather boast about you than laugh at you. Or scorn you. Jesus said that if you hurt the least among you, you hurt him just the same. Can’t you see how your behavior directed toward a single individual hurts us all? Is the pain inside so great that you need to witness human suffering in order to purge yourself of your own? Or rather mask it. Well you have to look no further for an example of suffering than me, for I am hurting here. I am saddened to be a part of this. And I seem to be standing alone. You people can’t even stand up to stop this garbage, how the hell are you going to stand up to take out your own trash?

I don’t want words from your so-called ‘holy books’ or your dead prophets. I want living humans saying simple words to express the simple idea that they care about their brothers and sisters more than they do a friggin’ book or twenty-minutes of entertainment in the form of suffering to distract them from their unhappy lives.”

The train ended up being held at a stop while the Koran Carrier asked someone to call the police like a little pussy. The cops ended up arriving and I told one of them that the woman did strike him. One of the two circus fat ladies said that the man was lying about Berthasaurus hitting him. I told the cop that she was the liar—and a fat and ugly one at that. The cop seemed nice enough but useless, acknowledging later in his own words that the whole situation was a “clusterfuck.” I told him that as a Mormon I didn’t appreciate his language and I would pray to Joseph Smith to save his Hell-bound ass.

When a train across the tracks came, the hoards of cockroaches rushed out of the stopped train and onto the other train; they liked to be entertained but it was late and if seeing justice done required missing a train, then they were out. I let the train go and talked to the other cops about what I witnessed.

They seemed dismissive of what I had to say and finally let the train with Berthasaurus and the two Fatasaurus sisters go without so much as a note in his prescription pad. I questioned this. “I don’t understand. She assaulted him and you just let her go without taking down her information?” They then proceeded to school me in cop philosophy that was a Bizarrro World version of a Zen koan. They told me that if a man is slapped in the forest and there is no cop to witness it, then it is not assault. I was like, “What the fu—?” My understanding of the law was that it was even considered Assault if you put your hands on someone against his will. The cops told me that if they didn’t witness it, it wasn’t, that at best it was Harassment.

Looking online, I found this as a Common Law definition of Assault, where they said that the Criminal Law definition is pretty much the same:

An intentional act by one person that creates an apprehension in another of an imminent harmful or offensive contact.

[http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/assault]

Seems like what I saw was Assault. The cops told me that people complain about a million things and if they didn’t witness it, they can’t just arrest someone for the crime. They told me that unless the supposed victim was injured, as far as they concerned nothing illegal had occurred. I said, “So what happens if his cheek shows bruising tomorrow?” They said that then it might be considered assault—which was totally useless, as they had let the Jabba The Fatso Girls leave without any way to get in contact with them.

I can understand their dilemma—but I was a witness! I saw my arguments were falling on deaf ears and so I gave my business card to the Koran Carrier and told him to contact me if he needed my testimony and took the next train out of there.

Every time I want to let the world do whatever it will and just stay on the sidelines and watch it build or burn, it seems I am pulled back into the game. It is hard for me to see how far we have fallen and sit idly by, as hard as I try. God keeps asking me like he did Abraham about Sodom and Gomorrah, “Why shouldn’t I just destroy these entire cities of sin?” I don’t really have a good answer to give the Big Guy. All I can say is, “They are still my brothers and sisters and if you fuck with my family, you fuck with me.”

But I’d rather be able to boast about my family than try to save them from destroying themselves—which I can’t, as I am no savior, as in “save-your ass.” And even if I were, when you are unwilling to sacrifice the old patterns of behavior that no longer serve you or humanity, the only thing left to sacrifice is a savior and I’m not really down with that aspect of the job.

When I have more confidence in my family that they are willing to put away the scissors and glue for cutting and pasting other people’s words and take up the pen and paper for creating their own holy words, then I will step up and fight the good fight—no matter what the odds. Until then, I can only observe silently and periodically make sure they don’t play in traffic.

Posted in Casual Encounters, Religion | 2 Comments »

Those Three Magic Words

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

OJ Simpson

Abandon was a Whirling Dervish in a previous life and so before she drops a load she will spin sometimes twenty or so times in a circle. One time she actually created a whirlwind but thankfully FEMA was there to “take care of,” in the Mafioso form of the phrase, those who hadn’t already died.

So I was walking Abandon in my hood the other night when she found a dirt spot surrounding a sidewalk tree and started her circle dance of fecal evacuation. There was a group of people sitting on a stoop, which is kind of a superfluous thing to say, as in Washington Heights just about every stoop is covered with locals sitting all night. During Abandon’s dance, one girl around twenty or so said, “What’s wrong with your dog?”

“She doesn’t like to defecate in front of dirty Spics,” I was going to answer but it is a known fact that every Hispaniard carries a blade—guys, girls, geriatrics, babies in the crib—and I didn’t feel like being filleted that night. So instead I said, “This is what she does before she goes to the bathroom.” Because of the distraction, Abandon had stopped her whirling and instead took to smelling the local urine of those parts. I added jokingly, “But because you distracted her, she missed her chance,” just like when Kramer from Seinfeld had to take a dump but after being unable to find a bathroom he, too, had “missed his chance.”

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4qiPSJo3pQ&feature=related at 4:35]

As a wordsmith, I find word choices to really tell a lot about a person. For instance, when someone says, “I axed you a question,” that is usually an indication that they are an uneducated moron. If someone says, “Them niggas should swing from a tree,” that is always an indication that they are an uneducated moron. And if someone says, “What’s wrong with her?” or “them,” it shows that they think that anything that falls outside of their miniature circle of understanding has to be “wrong.” And while many might not label these people morons, I will.

The world is so vast and information too grandiose for us little peebles to think we will ever be able to absorb every little tidbit or have an understanding of how it all works. That is perfectly acceptable. Knowing how all the tricks are done only creates a person whose eyes no longer light up when he goes to see the magic show. But to assume that something we don’t understand is “wrong” is not only idiotic, but arrogant.

A medical doctor that says, “You will die unless you inject this poison [chemotherapy] into your system” is an arrogant ass. His education consisted of breaking down humans into categories of diseases and memorizing which drug, provided by the same pharmaceutical company that paid for the construction, upkeep and textbooks of his medical school, to prescribe. He knows little to nothing on nutrition, fasting, herbal and other natural medicines. There are countless amount of people who were told they had no other option from their medical doctors, took another option, and are living well past the time when the doctor told them they would be dead. I know of a few personally. One had cancer and was given six months to live—14 years ago. Another beat two crippling disorders, one being Multiple Sclerosis—which has no known cure in the medical field—with nutrition and exercise. More accurately the medical doctor could say, “From what we know, this is the best recommendation we can offer,” and while I might disagree with his recommendation, at least he wouldn’t be an ignorant, arrogant prick in his offering.

We look at other religions, where the followers seem to pray to hundreds of different gods and goddesses (Hinduism), or shave their heads and give up sex, excluding the occasional circle-jerk among monks (Buddhism), or blow shit up in the name of God (Muslim) and think they are all “wrong.”

Can you not see that someone outside of our cult of reality might think that praying to a hippie that we believe turned water into wine and raised the dead and walked on water and died to magically remove all of our sins and then came back to life three days later—and all of this was recorded sometimes a hundred years after the fact without a single Kool-Aid drinker wondering why nothing from age 12-30 is recorded about this magical hippie in these same books—may be considered “wrong”? (Christianity) Or how a religion based on the sole goal of accumulating money and taking over the world could also be considered “wrong”? (Judaism)

The people in the West can’t understand why people in the East sit around all day with their eyes closed. The people in the East can’t understand why the people in the West can’t sit still without having to check their email, or turn on the T.V., or grab a snack, or call their friend on the phone, or a myriad of other things. So we look at the “other” as a group of back-ass freaks and this somehow makes us feel better about ourselves, all because we can’t say those three magic words:

I DON’T KNOW.

The supposed hippest, coolest people around seem to want everyone to conform to their understanding of how to be or else they ask, “What’s wrong with her?” These radically “cool” cats are just as square as the mother and father they are rebelling against—just as tyrannical. The only difference is that their parents don’t understand why a boy would wear his hair long and prefer to sit on the street corner with his homies all day and these copycat youths don’t understand why their parents think making an “honest” living is where it’s at and why they wear suits that actually fit properly instead of loose jeans that hang below their asses.

I went into a Verizon store and the Moonie-trained employee by the door asked me, “Can I help you?” I told her that I needed to break this $100 bill I had into either two fifties or some other derivative that added up to a hundred so that I could put $50 on my pre-paid phone. She started to talk out of her asshole, which reminded me of the time I was using a girl’s bare ass like a pillow after a good round of sex and she blasted a fart in my ear. To this day, I still can’t hear the same out of my left ear and gag every time I smell the Q-tip after cleaning it. The Verizon Moonie said, “Yeah, they probably won’t have change over there.”

This might not have been totally baseless. Perhaps she knew they were like those stores where the sign says, “OUR CLERKS NEVER HAVE MORE THAN $20 IN THE REGISTER” to prevent hold-ups. One time I held up one of those stores—because I’m not greedy; I would have been happy with just $20—and the score was $49. I initiated a lawsuit against the establishment for false advertising and won $8 million dollars in a settlement. I spent all the money on Michael Jackson’s Pez dispenser collection, which was filled with Ludes to give all the little boys before he Catholic priested them. I ended up selling them on eBay for $20, which is all I really wanted in the first place.

But I could tell her comment was baseless. This little cookie-pusher couldn’t just say, “I DON’T KNOW.” So, because I can’t just let anything go and because she was a total moron, we continued to have a discussion about why she wouldn’t just send me over to the register to see if they could break my fuckin’ hundred. Our whole conversation was a complete waste of life for me. It was probably reinforcement for her that she was a viable cog in society’s grandfather clock whose time has been off since it was created, serving no real point but preventing her from having to say those three dreaded words—I DON’T KNOW—like when someone tells you, “I love you” and you stumble back in return something lame like, “I’m very fond of you as well.”

Go to any self-proclaimed “expert” and ask her a question that she can’t answer and rather than say those three magic words, “I DON’T KNOW,” she will probably come up with a bunch of bullshit and hope the noxious smell will prevent you from querying further. I’ve done it. They’ll cut and paste whatever trivia they can remember from all the texts they’re plagiarizing and if nothing applicably applies to your question, they will still fill the emptiness with words. It can seriously come out as bizarre as this fictitious exchange:

“If cooking food breaks it down and, in effect, predigests the food outside of the body, why would it matter if the digestive enzymes to help break down the food are destroyed, which seems to be the main talking point from the raw food community?”

“I mean, raw food is in its natural state. Did prehistoric man have microwave ovens?”

“No, but they also didn’t have books where they memorized certain facts and as a result couldn’t think on their own.”

Because we identify our self-worth with what we know. We are rewarded in school through test scores that record for the life of our studenthood how much we know (really how much we can memorize for the test and then immediately forget afterwards.) We are rewarded by parents who smile broadly and say, “That’s great, Jimmy! You got a 100& on the test!” If I were a parent and my kid came home with a 100% test score, I would probably say something like, “Seriously, do you not have a life outside of memorizing useless facts?” If my kid brought home a 50%, I would probably beam with excitement and declare, “That is awesome! Now we know what you don’t know. Don’t ever be ashamed of that.”

We have gotten so away from living naturally, and by this I don’t mean in a palm leaf thatched hut in the woods somewhere but true to our nature—eating when we’re hungry, going to sleep when we’re tired, leaving a tired-ass classroom when we’re bored stiff, singing when we feel a song coming over us, playing hopscotch even though all the other boys laugh at us and chant meanly while pointing at us, “SISSY, SISSY, USE YOUR VAGINA TO PISSY!”—that we grab onto useless “information” as our means of feeling good about ourselves. We feel naked without being clothed in memorized nonsense.

And it is this same fear of those three magic words, I DON’T KNOW, that close our hearts to others who behave differently, who believe differently, who think differently, and who dress differently than us. Why not ask them what is up with the robe, or the underwear on the outside of the jeans, or the hair with a bird’s nest on top of it? Too risky. It may show that WE DON’T KNOW. Much easier to call them names, insulting epithets, put a label on them, than to show a sign of weakness.

We’re all so “street” nowadays, whether we hang out on the stoop or in an office. “Gotta be cool.” “Can’t let them see you sweat.” “Gotta know it all.” But we don’t. Why not have the balls to be honest about it, to question what we don’t know and maybe LEARN for a change?

Who knows, maybe I’m just WRONG. I can admit that I DON’T KNOW. The difference between you and me is that I don’t give a shit. I know my worth doesn’t come from books or videos or classes or workshops or awards or trophies or 100% test scores or a job or mission or “good works.” I don’t believe in an angry and mean “God” that I should fear who will only accept me into his family if I behave like a goody-two-shoes little bitch. I don’t have anything to prove to anyone and this makes me free.

“Well that’s fine but you’re going to burn in Hell for eternity for it.” I DON’T KNOW. Maybe I will. But I rather burn in Hell for eternity than to listen to your insecure self-righteous ass for a single second. THAT, I do know.

REFLECTION:

How many people or groups of “others” do you think as wrong or stupid? If it’s a group, what do you know about their culture? If it’s an individual, what do you know about his background that brought him to the point where you are seeing him today? For an easy example, take the Middle-East struggle. If you wave the Israeli banner in your viewpoint and see the Palestinians as savages, think of the issue from the mind of a Palestinian who feels displaced and mistreated. If you wave the Palestinian pom-pom and see the Israelis as oppressors, put yourself in the shoes of an Israeli who only wants security for his family. Does filling in your I DON’T KNOW change your view of the “other”?

MEDITATION:

Take any individual or group that you either don’t like or think is moronic. Imagine you are one of “them.” Dress like this perceived “other.” Speak like him. Argue the issue that the self with which you tend to identify may disagree with. Live a day in the body, mind and soul of this “other.” Walk a mile in his shoes (wear socks, though, as you don’t want to funk them up!)

Come back to the self that you identify as your own. Do you think any differently about this “other” now? Perhaps you will see him in a whole new light, the light that shines from within the both of you, and less from the individual behaviors and dress and thoughts that only make up the surface.

Posted in Casual Encounters, In The Heights | 1 Comment »

Spicito

Monday, July 12th, 2010

ist2_10493198-little-hispanic-boy-wearing-a-black-derby-hat n544131037_1340855_3537

The little pussy The future orange juice vender

I was about to head out of my apartment to run a boot camp and yoga class in Central Park with a personal trainer I paired up with. By “paired up with,” I don’t mean we’re having gay sex or anything. At least not yet. It was raining cats and dogs and at one point even Abandon fell from the sky and I had to tell her to get back in the house.

As I exited the first of the two doors of my building a Spicito, which is Spanish for “little Spic,” said something to me. I turned around and said, “What?”

He couldn’t have been more than four years old. He said, “It’s really raining out there!” Visible behind him was his brother who was probably only two.

I said, “Thanks for telling me the obvious, Einspic. That is why I have this umbrella here. And I’m not a little pussy like you who is afraid of a few drops of water from the sky. What are you, the Spicked Witch of the West? Are you going to melt if you get a little water splashed on you? Is that why your family’s always roasting corn in your apartment, to cover the smell of your unwashed dirty balls? Do you shit your diaper whenever the sun goes behind a cloud? Here’s a little suggestion for you: when people ask you what you want to be when you grow up, why don’t you start answering them, ‘A man, instead of the pathetic little pussy wimp I am today.’”

He burst into tears and ran back into his apartment, the little crybaby. I looked at his younger brother and said, “Do you have anything to add, little bitch?”

He said, “No, I’s awright.”

“You’ve got a little pussy for an older brother,” I told him. “Don’t let that turn you queer or nothin’.”

“No, I like the vag more than the pene,” he said and my heart suddenly warmed with the knowledge that this little bitch, living in a drug-dealing building, with shootings on the block and a pussy for an older brother—with all the odds stacked against him—just maybe had a chance to make something of himself in this cruel world, like being one of those guys that squeezes fresh orange juice or something. I’m not one of them sentimentalists but I’ll tell ya, it warmed my fuckin’ heart.

Posted in Casual Encounters, In The Heights, Shorties, Stories About Nothing | No Comments »

Spooked

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

I never thought I would come across someone with less of a sense of humor than Roach seemed to possess—or lack, however you want to view it. Roach was so dim-witted…(“How dim-witted was she?”) She was so dim-witted that after Robin Williams performed a private 3-hour stand-up comedy routine for her to not a single laugh he said, “Fuck this, I’m going back to cocaine!” [See “Lighten Up, Francis!” http://rebelyogi.com/lighten-up-francis]

But she would still laugh here and there, for instance, at an old classic like the following:

Two carrots walk into a Southern bar and sit down for a drink. “What’ll it be?” asks the bartender. “I’ll have a Black Russian,” said one carrot. The bartender said, “We don’t serve niggers.”

Mind you, she would like not because she was a card-carrying member of the raw food cult but because she was a racist. But as a man who disconnected his cable television and has only watched three television shows over the past three years, all of which are cartoons and two of which cross lines of tastelessness that would even have Wolfgang Puck say, “Dowse that dish with some friggin’ salt!” you can imagine that after I ran through my repertoire of vegetable jokes, I was pretty much done. “Um. How about those Yankees? Oh, you don’t watch baseball? Neither do I, I was just…Um. You wanna fuck?”

But at least I was aware that she was capable of laughing, that is, if one so happened to have the Holy Grail of a nigger, fag, Kike, Wop, Spic or Chink joke available. I can’t say I approved of her sense of humor. But, like most guys, I put up with it for the only raw food I like to eat—pussy. This is more than I can say for Spook.

I met Spook at the second annual Yoga & Raw Food Expo during the yoga class I taught. After class, a few of the class participants crowded around to listen to me share some extra words of wisdom; I think the topic was the benefits of gargling with piss. Spook was among the group to which I was trying to convince to let me give a golden shower to.

I remember one guy asked me the age-old, “What’s your real name?” and Spook came to my defense and said, “If he wants to go by ‘Swami X’ then that is what we should call him.” That comment and a sense of humor would have put me on one knee before her. Unfortunately, I was the only one bringing any humor to the relationship that never was and so the only bending I was doing that night was bending over a table for Bark Mecker, the old phogi I had to pretend to respect so that I could teach at the next expo. [See “Old Phogi” http://rebelyogi.com/old-phogi]

Spook signed my mailing list and I would periodically bump into her in Midtown going to work as I was coming back from my 8:00 a.m. client. We would generally share pleasantries and a quick ass grab and be on our merry way.

I should say that Spook is somewhat cute. She is a mix that contains Guyanese, English and a few meat by-products. So she looks kind of Indian and speaks with an English accent. Add to this a body that is pretty thin and a pair of relatively large breasts (which I never actually noticed but this was pointed out to me by Ninja when we bumped into her at the Westerly Health Food Store) and you have someone who is pretty fuckable by most guys’ standards. Who am I kidding, most guys live by the derogatory female golf analogy: “If she’s got a hole—FOUR!”

After I slayed the Ninja [See “Dead Ninja” http://rebelyogi.com/dead-ninja], I tapped my Rolodex, which I wear on my wrist so if anyone happens to ask what that big, awkward looking thing I am wearing is I can mumble with bravado that, “It’s a Rolodex!” I called up Spook, as well as a dozen or two girls whose vaginas had given me so much action that they could be squeezed dry at the local sperm bank for a small fortune. Spook wasn’t great at getting back to me but when she did I realized that I had more stimulating conversation talking to her answering machine than talking to the robot that pretended it was a human being.

Spook is one of those people who has an attitude like, “Life is just such a gift and I am always pleasantly blissful,” you know, the kind of person you’d like to hit across the side of the head with a shovel. I made an effort to suffer through my time on the other end of the phone, as sometimes when you finally get some of these doldrums into the bedroom they come alive, telling you how “And this one time, at band camp, I stuck a flute in my pussy.” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYWQAg12Ko0] After a couple of conversations with Spook, I didn’t care if she shoved the whole Philharmonic Orchestra up her vag!

The first long conversation we had—and by “long” I mean the kind where you put the phone on speakerphone and let her ramble on as you check your email, take a piss, fix a snack, watch a television show, wack-off by mistake into your snack, eat it anyway, walk your dog and come back just in time to say, “Uh-huh,” and receive praise on what a good listener you are—involved her boring me to death with her raw food lifestyle, which she has been doing for nine years, and her current fast and the shape and texture of her bowel movements. I considered suggested anal sex to help keep her pipes flowing but at that point I was pointing a revolver at my head and flipping the barrel.

Spook told me how she broke her juice fast because she was feeling the need for comfort. In one final attempt to get some action, despite the fact that my dick had already packed it’s two bags and left for the Cayman Islands, I told her, “I could have given you comfort,” by which I meant a 14” cock between her legs. She responded, “Oh, you mean you’d have some words of wisdom for me?” I realized that she probably saw me as someone whose costume at the Yoga & Raw Food Expo was that of someone with “wisdom” and I saw her as someone who could be a decent piece of ass…and “ne’er the twain shall meet.”

Another conversation was going just as tediously, when I made a joke—probably the racist carrot joke above—and she had less of a reaction than the group of rigor mortis corpses I used to perform stand-up for during my graveyard shift at the morgue in between fucking them. We started talking about sense of humors, and while she knew what the term meant, she never actually took the time to develop one.

“I don’t have the need to go out to something like a stand-up comedy show or see a funny movie to force a laugh.” During my last recent bout with an overriding feeling of “What’s the point of anything?” I had committed myself to fast from engaging in anything controversial, as debates usually led to murder or the desire to commit such an act, and instead just wallow in self-pity and wish that the next shooting on my block would find me the lucky recipient of the bullet. [See “The Day i Died http://rebelyogi.com/the-day-i-died] But I couldn’t help myself. I mean, she was not insulting me, or my beloved guru Osho, or my loving companion Abandon, or my creativity. This was worse—she was insulting comedy!

“It’s not necessarily a ‘need’ like a junkie. Many just enjoy laughing. And I don’t think the phrase ‘force a laugh’ is really a fair representation.” Call my mother a cum-catching whore but don’t insult laughing on my watch! And for the record, as she’s gotten older and lost her agility, she doesn’t quite catch it the way she did in her youth, most now dripping down her face, at least that’s what happened with the last four loads I shot.

We got into a mild argument over this, where she seemed to react as if she were blindsided and that I was taking it personally—which I was, as I would sacrifice my life for comedy—thinking that she could diss on laughing and just move on without commentary, instead of it being a scene like when Rex Kramer dropped the N-bomb in the middle of a group of inner city brothers [Scene from “Kentucky Fried Movie” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwk6r8TJD2U].

In our final phone conversation, the topic again came to comedy. I don’t know, maybe I brought it up. She asked me what I was up to. I said that I just came back from walking Abandon and was preparing her meal for her. “What else have you been up to?” I told her that I had been doing some writing. “What kind of writing?” Here’s where I steered the conversation back to the old topic of “Do you even know what a laugh is?”

“Nothing you’d like.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, one piece is for this magazine about financial freedom. And the last piece I posted was a silly one poking fun about women wearing high-heal shoes. I don’t think you’d find it too amusing.”

“I think you have me pegged wrong. I laugh,” she defended. And so I asked her,

“What exactly do you laugh about?” She told me that she laughs at life and doesn’t have to force it. I gripped my shovel firmly at her word choice. “Like what? Give me an example.”

“I don’t know, life…seeing children playing—I’m smiling right now.”

“But smiling is different from laughing. Have you ever just rolled on the fuckin’ floor with friends over something idiotic, like how you were going to go down on some woman who was in “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” and her pussy smelled so bad and so for your buddies’ amusement you pantomime sticking a finger up her ass and wiping it under your nose to mask the smell as you dive in to that nasty stank and you’re all holding your stomachs and pissing your pants and gasping for air and thanking God for putting a pussy on this planet that smelled as toxic as burnt plastic?”

She said she didn’t have the “need” for this. That’s like someone saying they don’t have the need for love. Or food. Or a finger up the ass. It’s just preposterous! I told her that you could go to the most remote village on the planet where Bushmen communicate with clicks and pops from their mouth—and still they will belly laugh at something they find really funny.

The conversation came to a pretty abrupt halt when she said that she had called, “To check in on me” and I said, “What, did my mother tell you to do that?” I realized she was having trouble with that one so I added, “Because she worries about me.”

First of all, telling someone you called to “check in on him” is on par with ending a conversation with the lame, “Okay, I’ll let you go.” Whenever someone says that stupid closing line to me, I usually respond with, “Thank our Lord Jesus Christ! I was trying to go at ‘hello’ but you just wouldn’t let me. Thank you and our Savior for finally ‘letting me go!’”

But forgetting that idiotic phrase, let’s stay with my joke. Now granted, it was not really that funny. We can probably all agree that on the grand scale of comedy, it wasn’t any racist carrot joke. But the reaction I got was so shocking to me that I felt like Cartman after he saw the Ass Face family and thought it was so funny that he lost his ability to laugh at anything else thereafter. [http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/152984]

“I haven’t had any interaction with your mother.”

“It was a fuckin’ joke! Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” I almost expected her deadpan boring self to say, “My name is Spook, not Jesus Fuckin’ Christ. And I don’t think that was his middle name either.”

Needless to say, she got mad thinking I was comparing her call to my mother for real and not in jest, for even though she never met my mother, the buzz around town was that she is a fat whore. I pointed out again that it was a joke, “You know, one of those things you’ve heard about but never actually spoken or laughed at?” and that she shouldn’t get her panties in a bunch over spilt breast milk.

She told me she was not mad and my eyes rolled up into my head like I was having an epileptic seizure, as I couldn’t stand another New Age denier who will claim all is bliss when it just fuckin’ isn’t and then when she feels “out of bliss” she’ll just label it something else. That works about as well as stepping in a pile of dog shit and then saying, “Oh glory, I just stepped on a bed of roses!” See how far that lying sack of “positive thinking” carries you.

She told me that she was not enjoying this conversation and pretty much hung up on me. I went to my phone’s directory and immediately erased her name and number. I doubt she’ll call me again but if she does, at least I won’t have to be “Spooked” by her name. I probably should have changed her name in the entry to “Jesus Fuckin’ Christ” for a good laugh.

It is somewhat amazing what a man will do to get laid. He will put up with more bullshit than a cow herder. As Jerry Seinfeld said talking about twenty years of dating, “I spent most of my time pretending to be fascinated.” He’ll spend countless hours on the phone, countless dollars on dinners, sit through countless movies about girls and their stupid antics regarding boys and love—whose screenwriters should have been shot to spare us men from having to endure being dragged to this kind of tripe. All for the pussy.

And once he gets it, he will either be a slave to a woman who he considers nothing more than a life-support system for her vagina, or he will think, “That really wasn’t worth all the bullshit!” But to face that latter truth will be more than he can handle so he will pick up his shovel and instead of rightfully smacking the bitch on the side of the head with it, he will probably marry her and spend the rest of his days shoveling the shit that she gives him with nothing more than a wimpy, “Yes, dear,” that indicates that his balls are sitting in a jar on a high shelf somewhere out of reach and that for the sake of pussy, he has turned into one.

I still like me some pussy here and there but putting up with the bullshit is losing it’s flavor for me and even Wolfgang Puck and his massive salt shaker wouldn’t be enough to make that nasty pussy taste sweet as pudding.

“The philosophy of positive thinking means being untruthful; it means being dishonest. It means seeing a certain thing and yet denying what you have seen; it means deceiving yourself and others. Positive thinking is the only bullshit philosophy that America has contributed to human thought—nothing else.”

—Osho from Fame, Fortune, And Ambition: What Is the Real Meaning of Success (p. 135)

Posted in Casual Encounters | 1 Comment »

Old Phogi

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

His bark is worse than his underbite!

The New Life Expo, a collection of freaks, geeks and Sheiks, psychics and medics, UFOs and LSDs, happens twice a year in New York City. I’ve been attending the Expo for about 13 years straight, almost never missing one unless I am serving out a jail sentence.

A couple of years ago, Bark Mecker, the creator of the Expo added a Yoga & Raw Food Expo to the line-up. It was a smaller, less Bizarro World event that I rather enjoyed, not that I don’t enjoy sitting on the point of a pyramid and feeling my anus Egyptize. I pitched him for the second year to see if I could get on the roster, promising to be not something “old” or “borrowed,” which is already rampant in the world of “experts,” but something “new” and “blue,” as I would be wearing my Smurf outfit.

We had some back and forth emails. Bark has supposedly been teaching yoga for about 35 years but he is a businessman before he is a yogi. His first question to me was not about who I am or what I have to offer but whether I wanted to buy a big booth or full-page ad in the magazine. I told him that, unlike all the snake oil salesmen, I had nothing to sell but only something to offer that would be different and challenge popular thinking—even popular yoga and raw food “thinking,” which is often not thinking but “reciting.”

Finally I wrote something like, “I find it ridiculous that all I want to do is offer something that people could use and I have to sell myself.” To his credit, Bark sent me an email with his number and told me to call him right away. And I did.

It was like I was pulled over by a cop for speeding and was getting a lecture on the dangers of speeding, all the while me thinking, “I’ll listen to this friggin’ speech for as long as you want to spew it but I better not be getting a ticket at the end of it!” Bark told me how we do have to sell ourselves and blah, blah, blah. I finally couldn’t take anymore and said, “It was a bad word choice. I meant that it was ‘frustrating.’” Bark chimed in, “Frustrating, that would have been a good word.” All of a sudden he thought he was the Editor in Chief for the New Yorker. But more importantly he said that he would give me a chance. Cool!

I had one lecture and one class to guide. About fifteen people showed up to the lecture, from about age 20 to about 80. I could see their eyes lighting up as I talked, certain cogs cranking in their heads that had rusted shut due to being fed answers from the “experts” instead of what all of us really need—more questions. I expected Bark to be there and check out the new blood but he just bopped his head in once and left.

I brought my drummer friend, Lenny Hoops, to the yoga class. There were only about ten people in attendance, many from the lecture, and I taught a class that was like nothing any of the people had ever experienced. Six months later at the next New Life Expo, one girl who had attended the class came up to me and expressed how deeply it had impacted her. I had hoped she wasn’t talking about fecal matter but was prepared to tell her to “sit and spin” on the pyramid if this were the case.

I had a really great time sharing what I do and the teachings that come through me. Many of the people who attended one or both of my gigs came up to me and told me what a fresh breath of air I was, how much they appreciated what I had to share and how my voice was desperately needed in this New Age movement that was becoming rather Old Age, with the same line-up of people giving the same tired presentations with different names.

Another thing I was very proud of was that Bark and I had come from a place of head banging to a place of union. I thanked him when I saw him and he would place one of his hands on his heart and nod with a soft brotherly love smile that made me believe that it would be the power of yoga that would bring peace to the Middle East. That was until I realized it was all a farce.

Roach was in town and we were attending the Expo together, or rather the last day of the Expo after I had already shared my two classes, as she always had busy work to do and no amount of my excitement for my first invite to share at the Expo could sway her from her “duty.” She started out the Expo often holding my hand or with her arm around my waist and by the end I seemed to be relegated to a foot or two behind her as she made her rounds among her raw food business associates. I remember her telling one of her friends about how she bought a Samson juicer there and got a really good deal and from my shadow behind her I had to jump in to remind her that she only got the great deal because I was very friendly with all the guys from that company and got her the deal. It seemed clear to me that her public image was more important to her than I was and as long as I didn’t mess with that, I could hold her dress up from behind like a little bitch.

It wasn’t until we got into an argument days later that I became privy to what probably contributed to her acting out more definitively in a way that seemed to tell everyone, “He’s with me but not with me.” I forget what the specific argument was. It probably had to do with me saying something like, “I’d like to eat yourraw peanut” and her responding in her typically humorless way, “Why would you say that?” [See Lighten Up, Francis! at http://rebelyogi.com/lighten-up-francis]

She told me how Bark had pulled her aside and asked her, “Are you seeing Swami X?” Even how she told me her response showed that she felt of me like a Down Syndrome kid: you love him but when he takes off his pants in the McDonald’s playroom full of balls and someone asks, “Whose kid is that?” you deny to the hilt that the little reetz is yours. “I said, ‘well, um, kind of.’” And if I didn’t have so much self-confidence I might have gone home and stuffed myself with raw pastries.

She then told me that Bark had voiced disapproval and said that I was “combative.” I was like, “What the fu—?” First of all, that would be a dick move for any guy to do to a brother, let alone a supposed “yogi.” But what really hurt was that I had actually thought that Bark and I had come to a serious point of understanding and union and that this was a good thing. Suddenly I realized that what Bark was selling was “out” and that his hand on the heart-bowing smile was as much of a costume as the faggy green silk Chinaman shirt he wore that weekend. That he was a Phogi, a “phony yogi.” And a douche to boot!

Like at the end of The Sixth Sense, I started to have flashbacks replaying past events with my new understanding that I was a ghost to the raw food cult. FIRST FLASHBACK: The last New Life Expo when I was helping cover a friend’s booth with another helper and the 61-year old Bark had hit on and asked out the 22-year old girl. At least that’s what it looked like from my vantage point five feet away but as I couldn’t be certain, I asked her. And she told me this was the case. I took a little pleasure in her saying that she would never be interested in a shriveled up phogi like him.

Now I don’t necessarily hold that against Bark. I mean, I have hit on people 39 years my junior. I had to do this by offering free lollypops at the pre-school but, like Bark, I am attracted to extremely younger women. And I can assure you that when I am 61, I will be hitting on anything that can make my shriveled peen-asana unravel. But I would never go up to him when I saw him at the Raw Spirit Festival in D.C. with a girl on his arm more his contemporary and say, “Hey, it’s great to see Bark dating someone like you who is not four decades his junior like the little blondie he was trying to bang at the last New Life Expo.”

SECOND FLASHBACK: the yoga class Bark taught at the Yoga & Raw Food Expo, where he constantly said things like, “If you take a class and the teacher doesn’t give you an adjustment—leave immediately. If you take a class and a teacher doesn’t give you breathing exercises—leave immediately.” For someone who was worried that I was going to be dissing on everyone and specifically told me that the Expo was not about this, he was certainly taking a big dump on anyone who didn’t conform to his limited way of teaching yoga.

And in the class that I guided at the Expo, I didn’t do a single adjustment nor did I cover much more than some basic breathing. And yet I challenged not only the yogis’ bodies but their minds as well and everyoneleft transformed with a more expanded idea of what yoga can be. Six months later a yogi told me how much she appreciated my class; six minutes after leaving Bark’s class it was forgotten.

[The instructor I got the most from during my yoga teacher training almost never gave adjustments in her classes. Check out a long-winded but very good response to a question (with an attitude of a comment!) that I asked one of my other teacher training yoga instructors four years ago about if there is really a need for adjustments at all: http://www.yogascope.com/blog/2006_05_28_archive.html]

THIRD FLASHBACK: I was in the stairwell with Roach and we saw Bark and some girl, perhaps one he was trying to bang. I said, “Bark, I have to tell you that I was a bit hurt that you didn’t come to my sadhana [kind of a community teaching] at the Raw Life Expo.”

Bark had to play the old “here are a few words of wisdom” card and told me that we should never feel hurt by others. I said, “Nigga please! I wasn’t really ‘hurt’ but was disappointed that you had an opportunity to see what I do in a more relaxed setting outside of your own expos where you weren’t running around like a chicken without a crown chakra.”

He paused and said, “You could have invited me.” And somehow this lame excuse completely hooked Roach who was like, “You see, you just had to invite him.” If you’re in a cult and you see someone pissing on someone’s back and telling him it’s raining, you try and justify the action. “Maybe the lying down man was on fire and the pisser knew that he had to put it out but that if he informed the burning man that it was urine that was accomplishing the job, he would be reticent.” Roach was in the cult and Bark was pissing on my back.

His comment was completely insincere, as over the past year I had invited Bark to numerous workshops I was teaching—and charging for—as my guest, at least one yoga hike to a State Park through a group I’m affiliated with and for which I would have to pay for him, as well as several classes I was giving in Central Park. Bark never ever responded to any of these. At the Raw Spirit Festival he had an opportunity to not only join in a “real” spiritual talk for a change but to get a closer glimpse of Swami X so that if he were going to bash me behind my back at least he could be a little more accurate.

FOURTH FLASHBACK: Sean Morton, a headline speaker with a lot of personality, was giving a talk to a packed house of about 120 people or so. Bark walked in with his faggy green silk shirt and Sean, ever the humorist, made a joke about it. “Ladies and gentleman, the man responsible for the New Life Expo—Bark Mecker! Hey Bark, did they sell men’s clothes where you got that shirt?”

Everyone laughed and Bark calmly walked up to the microphone and took it. He said, “Have you noticed how each year Sean is getting larger and larger?” Now if I were going to make a fat joke, I would at least be clever about it. Here would be my version:

“Years ago, Sean guaranteed me that he would become the biggest speaker at the Expo. I thought he meant in popularity, not in girth.”

Now my version is playing on the double meaning of the word “biggest.” Even the punchline doesn’t say, “You’re a fat shit!” or rather it does but the word “girth” is so non-offensive that it becomes an enjoyable dig. Bark’s remark, which stayed in the air like a stale fart, was not clever and as a result of his unfunniness was actually mean-spirited. He would have been better off saying, “I’m not sure if they sold men’s clothes in the store but the salesman sure gave me a great blowjob.” Yoga is about awareness and dissolving the ego.Phoga is about denial and creating a more “spiritual” ego. Bark is what we call in the world of comedy a “dying dolt who should be sent to the glue factory.”

I discovered another example of how Bark can’t think on his feet and offer an original thought that is remotely spiritual or useful when I was following Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and researching my “enemy.” Sun Tzu didn’t have the advantage of YouTube. I found a clip where Bark was interviewed at the Yoga & Raw Food Expo. At the end of the clip, the interviewer asked him to share with us what five things at the Expo would really leave one changed and improved.

Bark was like Brick, the borderline-retarded weatherman in the movie Anchorman in the scene when each of the crew was sharing what they loved. Brick was like, “I love lamp. I love carpet.” One of the others said,“Brick, are you just looking at things in the office and saying that you love them?”[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VGM_jAzPj8]

He looked around and just mentioned the items from the booths in his vision. One of the items he mentioned was Himalayan salt. Now I like Himalayan salt. I use Himalayan salt. And phogi, you ain’t no Jack Kennedy. Himalayan salt isn’t going to rock someone’s world to change his or her whole outlook on life.

After the salt, he mentioned Zukay salad dressing. I have talked in length with the creator of this raw fermented salad dressing. I have bought a bottle. I find their product delicious. But friggin’ salad dressing isn’t making someone think, “Amazing grace, I was lost and now I’m found!”

He ended by talking about how one of the five life-changing things one should see is the Acid-Alkaline water-purifying booth where you can “drink the good part of it and utilize the bad part of it,” which sounded so childish that it was like I was watching a dying comedian and as much as I wanted to laugh at this pathetic man drowning in his own unfunniness, I almost felt bad for him. Almost.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLhdE8CH3og]

I even found out from some main player vender friends of mine at the Expo that Bark’s business practices are questionable regarding ethics. According to them, he was known to use the credit cards of venders and charge them for the upcoming Expo before they even agreed that they were going to do the show. A phogi is allowed to throw out the yogic principle of satya, or truth, and asteya, or non-stealing, and aparigraha, or non-possessiveness, hoarding or desiring more than we need, when it comes to making a buck.

This caused a FIFTH FLASHBACK to pop into my third eye, or was that my third nipple. It was a Nutrition Panel at one of the past Expos. Bark popped in and, thinking himself the Hugh Hefner of the Mansion, he took over the mic and started to babble. He talked about how in yoga, “We believe in ahimsa, which means not eating animals” (ahimsa actually means “non-violence”) and then dropped the little aside that he eats fish. I guess in Phoga one can eat an animal if it is tasty or supposedly nutritious enough.

When I contacted Bark this last time about being a speaker and instructor at the upcoming Yoga & Raw Food Expo again, his email came back almost identically to my first year’s request, making me think he may have his email set on auto-phogi. “To make it a win-win we ask the lecturers to support their lecture with a 1/4 page ad in the expo magazine.”

I told him that I really didn’t have the money for an ad and that now that his task of “asking” was done, can I lecture or not. Now, for the record, I am also aware that there are many who have lectured or taught at this Expo that didn’t have any ads in the magazine.

After several back and forth emails, I saw that Bark was trying to have us play out this archetype of him being the wise master and I being the doting student. I wasn’t having it, as I was willing to bend but not bend over for a spot at the Expo. Instead I gave him a teaching lesson in an email that I entitled “The Gift and the Flower Bush.”

When a man leaves us a gift and by accident steps on our flower bed, if we just focus on—and tell everyone—that he flattened our flowers, we are not only representing the man unfairly but are focusing on the aspect that keeps us in separation. And that is our choice. While I would like a final decision from you, it is more important that you ask yourself, “What choice will I make and does it bring me closer to union or into separation?” It is your expo and your right to fill it how you desire. It is also your yoga and your right to explore it or not.

After more back and forths, with Bark desperately trying to hold onto his egoic phogi costume, I finally brought up the issue of him badmouthing me to Roach behind my back, knowing full well that this would not enhance my chances of being a presenter at the Expo but that at least I could buy some Himalayan salt or salad dressing if I needed enhancement (especially after the disappointment of the Johnny “Wad” Holmes Penis Enlarger.)

I reworked the email for about an hour, as I didn’t want to sound petty or just make it into a put down but really wanted to express that I was disappointed that what I thought was a great coming together in union was totally soaked with urine when he pissed on it. I never received a response. At the next New Life Expo he gave me a big fake laugh in passing that was so fake that even the Phogi Union would have been like, “Dude, a little too much.” When I finally wrote him again and said, “I never heard back from you regarding my last email,” he wrote a short email that said, “Thank you for offering to teach at the expo. Unfortunately you haven’t been chosen as one of the teachers this time. Feel free to attend as my guest.”

The Expo starts today and I will be in attendance. I will even spend some of it sitting at a booth promoting an upcoming Boots & Barefoot: Boot Camp and Yoga Session gig paired with a fitness professional—once again, by donation. I think it is a shame that Bark has allowed his ego and a personality clash with someone who doesn’t want to play submissive to his dom to get in the way of many seekers having access to the fresh perspective on ancient wisdom that I can share, as well as allowing himself to be open to the lessons that he could gain from me but for which he is closed off because I am not old and Indian.

I think Bark has done a great service arranging to have these shows where people who don’t necessarily think like the mainstream can come together and share some new ideas. Bark has been teaching yoga for about 35 years and this shows dedication. But it also shows that despite studying with all the supposed big “masters,” that if you are a phogi, the only purpose they will serve is to fill your gay green silk blouse with an ego that is as fake as your yoga.

Posted in Casual Encounters, Yoga | No Comments »

Right To Life

Monday, May 31st, 2010

cockroach

Three days at my new apartment and I had already seen more cockroaches than in twelve years at my last residence. In my last place, I only saw three. One was already dead. One I found later dead from eating health food. The other I let get away and spread the message that Swami X’s crib was a dead zone.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj3dOfNlD68]

I saw my first batch of critters near my dog’s food bowl, which I had grown into the habit of leaving out all crusty and nasty. I went on a killing spree that hasn’t been seen since the likes of Pol Pot. Then every few days one would crawl by with its fat ass like it was Jennifer Lopez at the Mtv Awards and SMASH!

And then I met “The One.” I was in the kitchen and there he was. I went towards him and was ready to smash him with a hammerfist—not to be confused with a hammerhead, which is a type of shark and a ridiculous thing for me to have in a kitchen; a bathtub less so—and he just stood there and looked up at me.

I thought how I had the power of life or death over this little creature of God who because of a public relations campaign that had the ladybug considered the cute little beetle with a score of children’s books and a full-length movie to her name and the cockroach portrayed as the dirty, disease-ridden, tyranny of evil bugs, it had seen the bottom of more boots than probably any other being on earth, besides Eliot Spitzer when he would rent a $5000/hr. dominatrix at the Emperor’s Club.

Normally his ass would be dead as fuckin’ fried chicken but he happened to crawl out when I was in a transition period and I didn’t want to kill him, I wanted to help him. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PeyiU3uWJ8&feature=related] And so I surrounded him with my cupped hands and said, “Crawl on. I won’t hurt you.” And he did.

I took him to my window and opened it and chucked him outside on the sidewalk, knowing that unlike the World Trade Center jumpers, he would survive the fall. Perhaps I should have looked down to see if any human was passing by, as this could have been quite traumatic for the little guy to land after a twenty-foot freefall on a human’s head who would most probably freak-out and try to swat and stomp on him.

Since that day, I vowed not to kill any of these beautiful brown bugs that happen to be running an exploratory campaign in my apartment and have caught and released at least a dozen of the little fuckers. Any bugs of other-than-brown color get the hammerfist.

When I was younger, we used to periodically find black ants crawling in our house. One time it was summer and we were out in the backyard and my father stomped on some of the black ants and their ant hole. I was like, “What the fuck?” as even back then I cursed like a drunken sailor who just banged a fellow sailor that he assumed was straight because of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. My Dad justified his Fatwa against the innocent ants with, “They’ll just come into the house.”

It made no sense to me. Here these ants were, minding their own fuckin’ business, crawling around in the area where they had always lived and, like a Native American, my Dad was wishing them to the corn field, which was a reservation in the sky with no casinos.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PeyiU3uWJ8&feature=related]

Gandhi said, “A nation’s progress can be judged by how it treats their animals.” Sure the statement is grammatically incorrect—as it should be “how it treats its animals” or “…how its people treat their animals,” but it still has merit, even if it has little syntaxically.

What gives us the right to snuff out the life of any creature, whether it be one we find tasty or one we find repulsive? “Because we can” is not a declaration of a right but a fact that has no bearing on consciousness choice. We can stab a kitchen knife into a baby. We can throw rocks at cars. We can have sex with little boys. We can blow up innocent women and children. But unless you are a psycho, me as a juvenile, a priest or a Muslim, our ability to take an action doesn’t make it a right.

When I was more active with animal rights, I was handing out information fliers to the waiting line of people outside of the Late Night with David Letterman Theater. Jennifer Lopez was going to be on the show and because she had recently started a new fashion line that featured the use of fur, PETA had decided to voice their discontent for her choice and her fat ass. I made an original sign: JENNY FROM THE BUTCHER’S BLOCK.

Most people on the line didn’t care either way about the issue, as they were typical of the mindless masses that just wanted to have their brains removed from their heads and washed, as they are entertained. One woman got aggressive with me. She said, “In the Bible it says that God gave man dominion over the animals.”

I told the sadistic bitch that dominion could mean “stewardship,” “leadership,” “responsibility” for the rest of God’s creations. I didn’t go into all the ridiculous things that the Bible says or the fact that it says God gave “man” dominion and that all he gave women the right to do was bleed from their vaginas.

She told me that this phrase meant that humans could exploit animals. That’s literally the word she used—exploit. How could we ever justify exploiting anything, which literally means taking advantage of, abusing, or “to make use of selfishly or unethically”? [http://www.answers.com/topic/exploit]

I ended up being shoved across the street by a 6’5” thug cop, filed a complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board and was notified 10 months later that the they found that the police pig acted within the law? What the fu—? I thought he would lie that he manhandled me! I guess in a corrupt system, there is no longer a need to deny your abuses [see The S.S. Persia: Ship or Nazi? at http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/Shop--ToDo/Activism/The_S1S_Persia-ShipOrNazi.htm]

In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, he lists the first limb of the 8-limb system of yoga as the Yamas. These are considered “attitudes” or “behaviors” and sometimes even “abstentions.” One of them is Aparigraha, which can be translated as “not seizing or grasping,” taking only what is necessary and not taking advantage of any person or situation. Perhaps we can utilize not only this principle but also a book that, unlike just about every “religious” bible throughout history, no wars have ever been fought over in its name.

Even if you did believe humans were designed and should eat animals, looking at how grossly obese we are as a nation, do we really need to eat that much of it, or even meat every day? How many of you have gone even a single day without swallowing some animal product or its derivative that resulted in the exploitation of another being?

“We were hunters and gatherers!” Really? I would argue that before our hunter/gatherer stage we were fruit and berry pickers. But even if we came from “hunters and gatherers,” do you think that they killed and ate meat every day? If you’re going to argue in order to justify your taste for blood, at least be moderately consistent in your logic. By that logic, because we come from a long history of violence, we would raise our kids on violent television and videogames. Oh wait, we do.

All living creatures have the right to life, be they insect, animal, human, cute or ugly, big or small. We don’t have the right to kill life just because we have the power to do so. So I suppose I’m a Right-To-Lifer.

Even in the case of a human fetus, paying a gonif doctor to Hoover out the little egg yolk is just beyond the pale. I am only pro-abortion if it involves cutting out the crooks and cutting up the unborn with a rusty hanger.

Posted in Casual Encounters, Self-Reflection | 2 Comments »

7 Days of Silence

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

So Ninja told me she would take me into her place in Bed Stuy. Granted it would be my first interaction with black people in awhile but I didn’t have much of a choice. At Peter’s big Food Feast event, as it was off-season for “Survivor” and the guests needed to follow something else that was equally mindless, K-Tron asked me how my move was going. I announced that the road trip to Poughkeepsie ran out of gas and that Ninja had picked me up in her 18-wheeler and was going to take me in, at least temporarily. [The fact that I wrote “18-wheeler” has nothing to do with the 18” depth of Ninja’s vagina which I have only managed to reach bottom on two occasions, one requiring the attachment of a 4” extension to my penile unit and the other involving a tantric technique called “Shove Your Leg In First,” not to be confused with “Shove Your Head In First,” which requires one to build up their lung capacity to that of David Blaine’s in order to avoid suffocation.]

It was a Thursday night, D-Day minus 9 days, that I called Ninja up and told her that she should sleep over my soon-to-be ex-place on Friday night, as my brother-in-law and sister would be coming Saturday morning with their van to help move my stuff into her apartment. She got back to me at 2:15 on Friday morning and told me that I couldn’t move in with her.

I was aware she was dodging her landlord for many months but we had talked about me moving in with her and she said I was good to go and so I never thought the “not paying my rent” factor would be an issue. Well, it was an issue and now the second plan was bad to the bone. What the fuck is up with these women giving me like no notice before kicking me to the curb, somewhat literally?

The last week in my soon-to-be ex-apartment involved my mother scouring craigslist (hey, she found my last apartment. If you can put up with a little nagging—okay, a lot of nagging—the woman is good with fieldwork!) and spending every day out of the apartment before 9:00 a.m., visiting various places and brokers and bears, oh my. I had some annoyances, from waiting half an hour for a 9:00 a.m. meeting with a broker who never showed and never called thereafter, to a broker, shall we say, “grossly overestimating” (read as lying about) the square footage of an apartment, to searching in Brooklyn, Queens and finally Washington Heights, areas I had never really explored and felt like a stranger in a strange land. In between all the researching and calls and emails, any free time I had was spent boxing and bagging everything I’ve accumulated over twelve years [See George Carlin classic on “Stuff” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPOfurmrjxo&feature=youtube_gdata] and fitting in a client or two here and there in order to pay for my crack habit, and by “crack” this time I am referring to Ninja’s vagina.

One night after a full day of being a walking zombie in a hellacious search to not become homeless, my parents called me and bugged the shit out of me. When I reported the latest places I had checked out my Mom said, “Why are you looking in that crappy area?” I lost it.

“You sent me that listing and I fuckin’ went!” Needless to say, my Mom got upset and got off the phone and my Dad was telling me what “you have to do” and I was like, “I’m already fuckin’ doing it! What the fuck is your petty advice accomplishing?” Granted I was a bit strung out, and by “strung out” I am referring to the shell shock of going down on Ninja and finding myself tangled up in a tampon string, but my parents useless needling felt like an acupuncture school drop-out with no graduation day for you-oo-oo. My parents hung up the phone and looked into adoption.

In the search, I did meet a few nice brokers, including Anthony who I talked with about the dead-end life of living just to pay bills and the life-end death of bullshit religion. Unlike the other broker pimps I met, Anthony genuinely wanted me to find a place and be happy, whether it involved him smacking around one of his bitches and getting paid or not and I now consider him a friend.

I went from considering a huge place in a bad neighborhood in Brooklyn, to a smallish place in nice neighborhood in Kew Gardens, Queens and finally settled on Washington Heights in Manhattan. The decision was in part because I wanted to stay in Manhattan so I could get to Grand Central to take a train to my brother’s once a week to go hiking with him and our dogs, as this was a great bonding moment between brothers that we had only started to enjoy about two years ago; since they don’t let dogs on the subway, if I were living in Queens or Brooklyn the only way to get Abandon to Grand Central would be via a cab and I’m just too cheap for that.

I also finally found a place that felt a little more “homey” and by this I don’t mean black. Unlike other places whose windows faced a brick wall five feet away, this one had a nice amount of windows and a big set of windows in the main room that faced the sidewalk where I could actually see trees from it! It was the last place I saw on a day when I was completely punch-drunk and I had hoped it wasn’t going to be one of those nightmares that you wake up to and say, “Jesus Christ! You were much prettier last night after drinking three pitchers of beer by myself!”

I remember The Jefferson’s theme song, “Moving on up (movin’ on up), to the East Side (to the East Side), to a deluxe apartment in the sky-y.” I was moving on up, alright—116 blocks uptown. But it was no “deluxe apartment in the sky-y” and there wasn’t an Asian guy and black guy dancing and lip-synching! [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcggr_23WJU]

It is mostly a Hispanic area. That’s “Spics” to you and me. When my parents and I went to lunch on the day of the signing, the waitress barely spoke any English and when I stood up on the table and shouted, “THIS IS FUCKIN’ AMERICA! SPEAK FUCKIN’ ENGLISH OR GO BACK TO WHEREVER THE FUCK YOU CAME FROM!” everyone just applauded, thinking I was doing the famous, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” scene from Network [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGIY5Vyj4YM]

I didn’t hear back from Ninja. Day after day I called and texted and sent Morse Code and talked through my two Styrofoam cups connected by fishing line and still—ring around the collar [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3N_skYSGoY]. I finally looked up and contacted her sister and mother to ask if they heard from her, as I was worried. I wrote the piece “What A Relief!” telling how I got to the point where if she finally got in touch with me relief would be my feeling of non-choice before anger, as I was hoping for irresponsibility over injury. [http://rebelyogi.com/what-a-relief.html]. Her sister told me to go to Vegas and put $1000 on “Irresponsible.” I didn’t have a thousand dollars or a bunch of friends to go with on a road trip and kill and bury a stripper and so I wasn’t in it to win it.

A week later I received a text message from Ninja saying something completely irrelevant to her not responding to any of my, “JUST LET ME KNOW YOU’RE OKAY!” messages, making me think she was off her medicine and back to salivating into her drool cup. Just like how if I were to screw around with other vaginas that would be a deal-breaker for her, communication is almost as important to me as pussy. Her lack thereof was my deal-breaker.

There’s more drama to tell: from non-stop music blasting all day and night…to working my Spanish to the level where I am street fluent, which means I can ask, “Is this crack cut with anything?” to either a drug dealer or a pimp…to major drug dealing across the street and in my building…to cheap fruit and, of course…cockroaches.

Posted in Casual Encounters, Self-Reflection | 4 Comments »

Umbrella Blonde

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

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The time was about 11:00 p.m. I had just left Central Park with Abandon and was heading home when she passed me. She was tall, blonde, wearing very high heals and looking a little tipsy. I wasn’t really attracted to her but thought that if she were both blonde and drunk that I could easily convince her that my cock was a martini and that she should have it shaken and not stirred. So I turned around.

I really just did it because my creativity ran out like The Divinyls after “I Touch Myself” and I was willing to do anything for one more hit from the Creativity crack pipe. It had started to barely, if at all, drizzle and because my mind is like my women–fast–I opened up my mouth and this is what came out:

“Hi. I have curly hair and if I don’t get under your umbrella right away, I’m liable to get the frizzies.” It wasn’t the best line I’ve ever uttered but it was a nice change from my usual, “Speaking of the Catholic Church–how would you like to stick a finger in my ass?”

She smiled, but less in a, “That’s cute” way and more as a form of dementia as she indicated that monkeys would have to fly out of Wayne’s ass before I would be allowed under her umbrella. Because I not only don’t like taking no for an answer but also have no shame as well, I continued. “Have you no mercy for the possibility that this could cause a really bad hair day for me?” At this she avoided all eye contact, the same way I tend to avoid contact with the guy sitting across from me on the subway jerking-off until he blows his load on me to which I usually stare him straight in the face and say, “That was incredible distance you got! You should be a porn star!”

Now at this point I was in a quandary. While she did attract one’s eye, she was really nothing special; if we were to get intimate, I would probably have to think of little boys in order to get it up. Should I accept a diss from a woman who didn’t even deserve to clean my jockstrap, which does need cleaning by the way, after the unfortunate incident of the, “I thought it was just a penile fart” incident?

“Is it really that hard for you to make eye-contact?” I asked facetiously. I felt like a loser in a bar trying to hook up with a girl in the following progression:

“Hey baby, what do you say you and me–?”

“Fuck off.”

“Well you’re a fat, ugly pig anyway!”

I walked away after this, pausing just a minute to consider whether I should ask, “Does this mean a blowjob is out of the question?” or let it ride. I considered how flustered I would be if she answered, “Not necessarily” and so I just left.

Posted in Casual Encounters, Shorties, Stories About Nothing | No Comments »

The Chocolate Conspiracy

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

The Native American young man had asked the father of a woman in the tribe for his daughter’s hand in marriage. As was the custom in this tribe, the father of the bride would assign a certain dowry that the suitor needed to give him in order to be accepted to marry his daughter. Because his daughter was not considered “a great catch,” not excelling in any particular skill and not endowed with what one would call “standard beauty,” the assigned dowry was for a single horse, which really wasn’t considered much.

That night the young man snuck into a rivaling tribe’s encampment and stole twenty-four horses. The next day, in front of the whole tribe, he presented all twenty-four horses to the father. The father was surprised by the gift and said to the suitor, “I told you that the dowry was for just one horse. Why did you give me twenty-four horses?”

The young man responded, “I only had one day. If I had more time I would have gotten more. I want my future wife to know that I value her more than all the horses in the world. ”

Ninja came over and brought me a chocolate bar called “The Chocolate Conspiracy,” probably because she knows I like chocolate and am a conspiracy realist. Coincidentally, I had met the young man who was the founder of the company at the last couple of raw food festivals at which I had presented. It cost $6.99 for a 2 oz. bar of chocolate. I asked Ninja incredulously, clearly still tainted by my Jewish past, “You spent $6.99 for a chocolate bar??”

She said, “You are worth it.” And suddenly I felt like an ugly Indian fiancé with no talent whose father had just been given twenty-four horses.

Posted in Casual Encounters, Self-Reflection, Shorties | 3 Comments »

Enlightening Nonsense