The ebb and flow of the Jesus crowd washed nostalgic candies into the streets of LipLock, Tejas on a sweltering Sunday school day gone mad. The bacon was loaded. Mosaic scrawlings of jelly looked like sparkling guts on the sourdough. Coffee was but swirling blood fueled by cream and sugar. The roar of the hungry throng was like Madagascar jungle traffic. Everyone was full of the holy spearmint, and everyone was hungry for a hot breakfast at the very same time.
So, we swirled through the stuffed parking lot looking for a space and I just knew it was going to be bad. The porch swings out front cradled the starved corpses of those who had to wait too long. The list of names at the front podium was a mile high and the hostess chick was losing her mind as people moaned and bitched. We held our ground in the lobby, but it was tough. I tried to examine a sack of maple nut goodies but dames and dudes with urinary urges kept bumping into me.
“Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me …”
How it dinged and donged in my throbbing head. It was like riding a stream train by clinging to the under belly. Too many people. Not enough space.
And that is what it is like down here in LipLock, Tejas. The infrastructure is flawed. The streets are designed to encourage collisions. It’s a great bulging bubble all steaming and hot and there’s nothing to do but eat, eat, eat … at Cracker Barrel, on a Sunday morn after worshipping super fresh Bog and all his hip angels. I had never seen a crowd like that squeezed into such a mediocre joint. How could anyone expect a fine dining experience amid so much chaos? Shove them in. Take their money. Clear them out.
Our one-star waiter was a lanky and shaky fellow who could barely keep up with the maddening buzz all around him. He managed to pour a few cups of decent joe but brought us limp bacon and not enough coffee cream and no jelly for the biscuits and I felt bad for the dude as we piled more and more demands upon him, but hell, it was his job. But did he deserve to have to eke out some paltry living this way? Does anyone? It all seems so futile and petty and yet Big Biz tries to fake us out with the corporate propaganda and the sterile smiles of robotic clerkies in glossy advertisements. It’s not real. None of it’s real. Yet we buy it, and we pay for it time and time and time again until our lives are completely absorbed and then wrung out by the pretty-polly machine. And it’s accepted as the social norm by the big bugged-out mass audience riding around in bumper cars, staring at smart phones, listening to factory-farmed crap music. It’s brain stew with no meat and no hearty gravy. We live in a watered-down world where the stooges flock like fire ants to pay for the privilege of emptiness in a vacuum of noise.
The pumping, screaming arteries of the static cling are unnatural. I think I would prefer to dine in the pines with only the sounds of the wind and the water and the wine, sans the flaring of the human crack pipe. And so, it goes no matter where one goes – east, west, north or south – the same strip mall mentality all lined up for the gibbons to feed. It’s all so lacking character, so lacking old-world charm, this architecture of capitalism, boxes stuffed with crap that we just can’t live without. We work all week to spend the weekends spending wages on Chinese goods packed into big metal boxes with drab neon signs and bullshit slogans – the flame thrower fluorescents sunburning us with sacrificial radiation, to crack our knees and send us down to bow to the almighty escapade of enslavement.
They advertise perfection but deliver the exact opposite.
this angel skull of Harlem doesn’t sing or sink like the wind. it’s laundry day in Manitowoc, the MAT is down by the old Navy ship resting in its watery grave and the sky and the rain is so damn gray and sad as I hoist canvas bag over shoulder like some old-time dirty clothes beatnik hobo with wrinkled clothes and wrinkled charms. cigarette smoke burns the eyes at the frantic cross walk, the digital intersection and all those mod bods in the cars have dingy faces glued to smart ass phones. you got to watch the itch they have in their eyes, or they will just run you down. you got to be defensive at all times, a defensive posture and mind that is. no one pays attention except me. some lady comes up to the cross walk with some kid and she gets mean when smoke trails into her face then swirls around her balding child with the bad cough. she talks about asthma or some other respiratory illness and berates me for fogging up the public spaces. she says something about going off by myself to suck poison. maybe over there, she points, a lone picnic table beneath a low branch of a big old pine tree. sit there and suck on that thing is what she says. I answered with a big ol’ I was here first … and she huffed and the light changed and I stepped out into the street and nearly got hit by a car but they slammed on their brakes at the very last last last second and I did not die but instead went to the lone picnic table like that mothering broad said and sat there by myself and watched the dumb world be all mindless and beautiful even so and I just stayed there for a very long time and in the very background I could hear the crashing of the lake waves against the not too distant shore and it made my belly feel real lonely and then it was made worse when the bell tower of some ornate stone church a couple of blocks away started tolling away too and the lonely belly feeling started to feel even lonelier and then it was the dropping sun cracking through the clouds that added to the whole mix of lonely sadness, an Americana downtown’s brick and glass in sunwash light now. that gutty loneliness sweeping me up and getting me all choked up. it was all too lonely to sit still and think about it. I moved on, my bleached canvas laundry tote slung over my shoulder, into a rainbow all wet and smelling like gasoline as a magpie ate paint chips.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 