C.F. Roberts' Useless Filth

Monday, February 22, 2016

ENTRY

I wrote “The Lost Diner” in 1990, sometime after finishing my first novel, HELLO, UGLY. It inhabits that same universe---Alice goes to Brookdale High, and the Cheryl she is talking to at the beginning of the story is Cheryl Kingsley, one of the dual heroines of that book. The dead girl she wants to dedicate the yearbook to, as well as her uncooperative boyfriend, are also integral elements of that story. There have been several related stories that I've written that all fall into what I call the “Brookdale Mythos”---”Old Man Delprete” (published by Susan Jenssen in GOTHICA), “Hannibal Shooting Fish in a Bucket” and “Hannibal and Sandi in the Afterglow” are all part of that cycle of short stories.

I ran “The Lost Diner” in the very first issue of my zine, SHOCKBOX, in 1991. I revised it a little for the blog, not much. I've known other writers, very good ones, who made a point of not running their own writing in zines they published...that was a level of integrity, if you want to call it that, that I never had. Screw it---it was my zine, woefully short on contributors at that point; I was a writer who wanted people to see his stuff and I had no problem running my own writing.

I'm sure Alice survives her ordeal and grows up to be a person of great empathy. Or not. After it saw the light of day in SHOCKBOX, one local reader asked me, “so, is the message of this story that we need to have more sympathy with those less fortunate?”

I shrugged my shoulder and told him, “it's just a bunch of stuff that happened.” He seemed happy with that and I was, too. I'm not gonna be like Bruce Springsteen and get up on a soapbox and fuckin' preach to you. You get it or you don't.

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

ENTRY

Friday, January 29, 2016

WE ARE THE GOON SQUAD AND WE'RE COMING TO TOWN

I've said for a number of years that most of the bad things that happen in Fayetteville are real estate driven. From the city's controversial decision to violate its own tree ordinance to the closing of the old Jefferson School to an ordinance that only allows three unrelated people to live together in one residence (making it a lot harder for low wage earners as well as the town's student population to get by) to a coloring book distributed by the city's Code Enforcement department that illustrates housing code violations with offensively stereotyped working class characters to attacks on my own public access TV show as a deterrent to “Young Executives” who might be interested in buying property there, I've seen example after example in my 20 years of living here.

Fayetteville's identity crisis with class and real estate could best be summed up with one incident: During the 2004 Mayoral debate, then-Mayor Dan Coody (who handily coasted to re-election that year) was asked what he would do for the perennially low-income south end of the town (where I, incidentally, lived at the time). He answered that it wasn't a case of “going-to-do”....” we're doing it,” he said, but it was a long-term project that wouldn't come to fruition overnight. He cited the development of the TIF (Tax Incremental Funding) district at the time--this was meant to finance the building of some hifallutin' tower/luxury hotel construct that fell through (I think it's now an ugly parking lot) and boasted of all the good it was doing. Specifically mentioned was the fact that they had gotten rid of some unsightly mobile homes and were going to build some apartments in their place that were going to be “beautiful”.

I watched the debate on TV. I wished I could have been there in person, because the question I would have liked to have lobbed in response would have been, “what happened to the people who lived in those trailers? Were they not also members of the 'Community'?”

To my knowledge, no one, other than me, ever bothered to ask that question. This guy, it should be noted, was the “Green-leaning, Liberal Good Guy” candidate....which probably defines my ongoing struggle with Fayetteville's liberal/activist community---most of them are moneyed, tenured types, and at their core, classist as hell. The Beautification Crowd are suave, educated and sophisticated, and the idea of what happens to human beings really never occurs to them.

The latest manifestation of this phenomenon recently reared its deceptively pretty head when plans were announced for a new suburb called “Willow Bend”. To quote their intentions from their own website, right up front, “the Walker Park neighborhood, located just south of downtown Fayetteville, lacks quality affordable housing “, and this development proposes, on some level, to remedy that issue.

If you're talking quality, they may have something. With the South End, you're talking lots of blighted neighborhoods and shacks....you're also talking a neighborhood Fayetteville seemed to turn a blind eye to when they shut down Jefferson School a decade ago. That, to many people, pointed up the elitism at the heart of Fayetteville City Government—-dismantling a civic focal point in a poor neighborhood as part of a gerrymandering stunt. Poor people----minorities----you know, they don't look good in Campaign Spots.

On the other hand, if you're talking Affordability, where does it balance out? I worry when the pencil pushers talk about Affordable Housing, because their version of Affordable isn't the same as my version of Affordable. I don't look good in Campaign Commercials, either....

So, when I heard about Willow Bend, my initial thoughts were, okay, which poor bastards are losing their homes because of this? And how many of them won't be able to afford to share in the New FutureTM? (And in case you were wondering, my educated guess was, “not many”....)

As it turns out, I believe the future site of Willow Bend is going to be the wooded area behind Walker Park.

Walker Park has a reputation in Fayetteville---not the nicest park in town. It's a big homeless hangout. I remember in the late 90s Food Not Bombs had a lot of big feeds out there (before the first wave of gentrification saw a lot of the Autonomist/Radical element in town vacuumed up). The Salvation Army is nearby and I know that there was a Hobo Jungle out in back of the place----there may be camps in the woods that would be the future home of Willow Bend, also----it would make sense. And it would give our town fathers an impetus to bulldoze that space for something.....well, PRETTIER. Something where real estate could be moved.

And who could object to a nice neighborhood? I couldn't---could you?

You don't have to scratch the surface of Fayetteville's squeaky clean liberal community much to get to the classists underneath. One person I knew commented on the supermarket in the Walker Park area and its shabby clientele by saying “I'm afraid of getting raped there!” (because, as we all know, there's an epidemic of rapes happening in Supermarkets.) She talked about the disgusting caliber of people who shopped there---which my wife and I were privately horrified by---I worked in that area at the time and it wasn't unusual for the two of us to to stop by that store at the end of my shift to grab a cheap breakfast ....so we most likely could have been part of that disgusting caliber of people she felt so threatened by.

Yeah, well....if there's anything I've learned, that's Fayetteville for ya.

There have been problems of late in Fayetteville's transient community; there were two stabbings in 2015----(one occurred in a homeless camp around U of A, one in Walker Park, sparking a new wave of contrived anti-homeless hysteria). So what better time to clean the place up? Can't have all those nasty po' folks runnin' around, bringing down the property values!

Here in Fayettenam, of course, we've put a lot of hype behind how we're a “Compassionate” Community. Yeah. I know all about that. I remember the “Compassion” the city showed when one particular non-profit contractor's board of directors decided it was okay to ransack its employees' personnel files, even though that was a basic FOIA no-no. I remember how activists who tried to blow the whistle on this monkey business were vilified by local journalists and city-related bloggers. I remember this because I was one of those activists. But hey----don't ever get in the way of a good PR stunt, right? “City of Compassion”---that's catchy. And I'm sure it'll sell lots of high-dollar property to well-meaning Young ExecutivesTM.

And like the idea of a good neighborhood, who could argue with it?

As a “City of Compassion”TM, we don't Guiliani the hell out of our transient population, because that would be cruel. We will, however, price them out of existence with the building of lots of pretty things, and we'll bring in lots of pretty people to buy the pretty things. You know....people who bring the property values up. Pretty people. People who look good in PR spots. People who look good in campaign commercials. And then, I'm sure we can get rid of a lot of the other run-down housing in the area. The people who actually LIVE there? Well, they have all the wrong aesthetics and they probably don't even recycle. They can find someplace else to live.

“There used to be this unsightly park full of all these panhandlers and poor people and rednecks and minorities...now, it's really pretty, though, and we're bringing people into the neighborhood who consider that an investment worth supporting. And this whole end of town is looking so much better now!”

Well, who can't get behind that? Soon we'll all be able to shop in peace.

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It's been a few weeks since David Bowie shuffled off this mortal coil and I'm still surprised as to how wretched I was over that particular death. Perhaps it's that his demise came a couple of days after the release of a genuine masterpiece....most recording artists are resting on their laurels by age 40. Bowie's career had its peaks and valleys, but BLACKSTAR at age 69? Unprecedented.

I spent a good chunk of those weeks listening to good music and combing over the most recent videos for “Lazarus” and “Blackstar”, the latter of which I found spellbinding. What the hell was going on in that video, that song, and what the hell was Bowie trying to tell us????

Naturally, because everyone's supposed to be part of the IlluminatiTM, all the usual drivel about the Devil started popping up online, complete with the usual contrived psychobabble about “Pentagrams” (sorry, hacks....a book with a star on it is not a “Pentagram”), the usual Albert Pike misquotes and so on and so forth, and sadly when you look up anything occult-leaning or esoteric on the net, that will be the majority of what you find.

I was hoping to read some well-read or well-informed interpretations and eventually I found some thought-provoking stuff: kylebstiff throws around some interesting jazz about ancient astronaut theory and the Gnostic concept of Yahweh/Yaldabaoth as blind/insane god, archons feeding on the religious ecstasies of acolytes, etc.

And vigilant citizen built a pretty thoughtful overview of Bowie's career as an exercise in acension/descent and apotheosis.

I don't think there are necessarily any straightforward answers because Bowie was never a particularly straightforward guy. He probably upped the potential of the Concept Album by refusing to deal with linear storylines (find a concrete plot in ZIGGY STARDUST or OUTSIDE if you can) and I've always had a thing for mosaic-style narratives.

Being a writer and an artist (as opposed to a theologian or a soothsayer) I'm more comfortable with the grey area and the possibilities as opposed to black-and-white meanings. What really enthralled me in the run up to the release of BLACKSTAR was what conceptually, to me, almost felt like an aesthetic line poem of the man's entire body of work....of course, you get the “Major Tom” theme, which has cropped up from “Space Oddity” to “Scary Monsters” and here the man (or his remains, anyway) has literally fallen to earth (or someplace) to be venerated by this tribe of people who form a religion around it.... as stand-alones, there's some strange commonality between the promotional videos for “Ashes to Ashes” and “Fashion” (both incorporate this very cryptic, almost religious-feeling “bowing” gesture but in very different contexts) but cross-compare “Fashion” with that strange “bunny-hop” move the dancers are making and look at what the “acolyte” characters are doing in “Blackstar”....it's MORE OR LESS THE SAME MOVE. Coincidence?

Perhaps a play on culture, customs and orthodoxies? The orthodoxy of fashion and the orthodoxy of religion?

Not necessarily pinned on a linear meaning, here, but an interesting pull back when you realize the threads you may be able to connect in a much larger body of work.

RIP, Spaceman.

THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST (All Bowie all the time):

Blackstar (Blackstar)
Sue (or in a Season of Crime) (Blackstar)
Panic in Detroit (Aladdin Sane)
Five Years (Ziggy Stardust)
Heart's Filthy Lesson (Outside)
Fashion (Scary Monsters)
Look Back in Anger (Lodger)
Rosalyn (Pin Ups)
Future Legend/Diamond Dogs (Diamond Dogs)
Speed of Life (Low)
Sense of Doubt (Heroes)
Neukoln (Heroes)
Station to Station (Station to Station)
Beauty and the Beast (Heroes)
Memory of a Free Festival (Space Oddity)

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

THE CRITIC SAYS...

I used to read this one a lot at open mics. It primarily consists of actual critiques leveled at actual writers, usually by actual magazine editors....I was both a writer and an editor at the time, so I was on both sides of the fence.

FECAL ODE

The Critic says Confessional Poetry is the earmark of an immature voice!

The Critic says one must avid preaching to the choir!

The Critic pauses, scratches his balls and neglects to make a note of it!

The Critic says your genre parody is unintentional!

The Critic says you might hammer it through his workshop for $300 per weekend!

The Critic says you are suffering from Post-Beat Angst---take two New Yorkers and call him in the morning!

The Critic lists his priorities!

The Critic begs to differ!

The Critic declines to attend the Open Mics as they are notoriously lowbrow and common!

The Critic shows up fashionably late to extravagant functions!

The Critic insists upon a window seat!

The Critic maintains that the lesser poets write about handjobs in pickup trucks because only the lesser poets would give or receive handjobs in pickup trucks!

The Critic says it is crucial to remove all personal experience and pain from one's erotica so that he might retain his erection!

The Critic quickly adds that he is single and attractive!

The Critic produces excrement that is, in fact, transparent, textureless and virtually devoid of odor!

THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST:

MOTORHEAD-All the Aces

MOTORHEAD-1916

HAWKWIND-Warrior at the Edge of Time

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

YOU CAN PICK YOUR FRIENDS, YOU CAN PICK YOUR NOSE....

“Repeat after me,” said Billy Weldon. “AAACK!”

“Repeat after me,” I SAID. “AAACK!”

“No! No! You're nor supposed to say, 'repeat after me'....”

Those childhood games confused me.

(They still do.)

Billy Weldon was my best friend in those days.

We climbed trees, caught frogs, built secret forts and sang dirty songs together.

When he was mad at his mother he'd call her “Bean Bag”.

She was none too amused but I always laughed. That joke was pretty funny.

His Dad was a weird, white trash neo-Nazi type

who never wore a shirt and always yelled at me to get out of his yard. I didn't understand that—I didn't

understand a lot of things.

Being friends with Billy was an odd experience.

One minute you'd be laughing and joking, the next he'd turn around and slam a rock into your face.

The subtle nuances of kid life were a a bit of a head-scratcher to me. You had your enemies and they were your enemies. You had your friends and they were also your enemies. Some concepts were never easy to grasp.

Once I was in a fist fight with Billy and he pounded my face in while his grandmother stood on his back porch cheering him on. I wasn't sure why she wasn't cheering me on, since it was obvious to me that I was the Good Guy.

My family moved away and Billy and I fell out of touch.

We met again in our early teens and hung out for an afternoon. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't quite the same.

He played football. I drew pictures.

He liked John Denver. I liked Alice Cooper.

Some differences are just irreconcilable, I guess.

Billy died when we were both in our early twenties;

He was in the Army and he crashed his jeep on base. Very bad form.

I was a dishwasher at the time.

I didn't go to the funeral—I had to work that night, but there wasn't really anything left

that I could relate to.

“Repeat after me. AAACK!” He said.

“Repeat after me. AAACK!” I said.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

BOLOGNA AND DEAD FLIES

Excerpts from INDIGO, a novel in progress

All our fathers' dreams.

I hate bologna. Okay, I know, short list, I hate a lot of things. But just par exemple, I'm going to throw bologna out there. I hate it, I've always hated it, can't even get it in my mouth without retching and puking.

No matter how much I cried and whined about not wanting bologna as a kid it was, “shut up an' eatcha fuckin' food! Kids are starvin' in China, ya spoiled brat!” The fight would go on forever until me being unable to choke it down was too protracted and ugly a spectacle for my folks to endure and so they would let it go.

My Uncle was a prison guard. He used to tell me all kinds of stories about what happened to guys who wouldn't eat their bologna in prison. He said, “we'd put 'em up against the wall and say, 'buddy, you'd better eat your bologna!' “. I had a couple of takeaways from this....the first was that my Uncle, and probably everyone else in my family, thought there was something wrong with me and I was going to go to prison.

My second takeaway was that bologna was way the hell too important to these people. And they had veto power over my feelings. “He's just cryin' for attention! Eat that food or I'll smack ya teeth outta that mouth!”

And if it were so easy to just shut up and eat that food, I would have done it in a heartbeat.

Listening to other kids wax nostalgic about this shit, though, was the worst.

“Oh, there was none of that behavior in my house! If that food was on your plate you ate it!”

“Yes,” (insert sage nod of head) “That's the way it should be!”

“The way it should be,” a pile of buffalo shit that slides down the chute of your brain and gets all muddled up with sentimentality and turns you into a gibbering retard. The minute anyone gets all pie-eyed and says, “that's the way it should be”, you should shoot them in the fucking face,. That's the way it should be.

Yeah----thumb screws. That's the way it should be. Hot pokers up your hiney. That's the way it should be.

Nail your head to the floor. That's the way it should be. Goddamn Bologna Seditionists.

Bologna was the official religion of my youth. Death, War, Jesus, the President and Bologna, and by God you'd better eat that bologna or I'll bust yer lil' face open with my big class ring. You're a bad kid----eat your bologna or you're going to prison.

You go out of the house and it's hell. Unbearable sun, chainsaws, dust everywhere, screaming and vapor trails in the sky, dirt in your mouth and the local neighborhood kids say “HI” to you and then they turn around and punch you in the stomach, Some lady is yelling her ass off the next house over and you don't know why.

That's the Bologna, day in and day out.

You go to school and they cram you into this tiny little space and that's your space. The kids at school say “HI” to you and then they turn around and punch you in the stomach, just to see the look on your face. The adults ask you a lot of questions. If you get them wrong everyone laughs at you and calls you stupid. If you get too many of them right they all laugh at you anyway and call you poindexter. If you don't wanna play kickball they make you play it anyway. If you don't do it right they beat you up. It's Bologna, it's all bologna, the great world religion. Our lives run on goddamned Bologna.

Okay----done with the rant.

“You know,” says Gayla, “maybe your parents were just frustrated with you because bologna was all they could afford to feed you. Just throwing the suggestion out there.”

“No,” I tell her with great, sage, philosophical certitude, “it wasn't like that.” At least it never felt like it was like that.

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Fortune is a crime against us all.

Mike has a legion of dead flies lined up beside a spool of thread. The spool is mounted on a couple of pushpins so it looks like a cannon. He's recreating a famous battle, I guess.

“The place I worked at back in the 90s adopted this kid,” Mike says. “We had our own adopted kid.”

“What, did he run around the place and alla y'all told him to mind his Ps and Qs?” Dumb question, I know.

“No, nothing like that,” says Mike. “We sent him money. There was this big map of Oklahoma in the breakroom with the kid's picture in the middle, saying, 'INTRODUCING GILBERT GOOD-RICHMAN', 'cause that was his name---'FROM WHEREVER, EAST BUMFUCK, OKLAHOMA'. And he was our kid, you know, 'cause we gave him money----part of our paychecks every year were sent to him----this great fuckin' gift the company gave us.”

I try to laugh the whole thing off. “Well, you were a kind man, even if you don't wanna be.”

“I know, right? 'Gilbert Good Richman'----fuck kinda name is that? What's gonna happen if he joins the service? 'What's your name, Private?'--'Gilbert G. Good-Richman, Sir!!!!'---'Gilbert G. Good-Richman?! Drop and give me a hundred, ya fuckin' puss! Then when you're done with that you can go clean the head out with your tongue, Soldier!'

“So we're sending this pussy-ass kid money and then he starts writing us letters, and they start posting the letters in the breakroom! And the letters will kill ya,” Mike groans. “ 'Missus Johnson', she was our personnel director who dreamed all of this up, keeps saying I'm an Indian, but I'm not. I know a Cherokee Family that go to our church, but we're not Indians'. So the kid's not an Indian----he's not anything----I don't know what he is.”

“So his Suffering Street Cred isn't even that good.”

“No, it's not. I think he goes off at one point about how 'The Lord took our father last year', but the rest of the damn letter is him bragging about all this shit he has....his family has chickens. What kinda happy horseshit is that? I never had any goddamn chickens growing up! He's got a dog and goats....I never had a dog....I never had any goats. Why am I having to send this kid my money? Kid's bragging about his ten speed bike. I never had a fuckin' bike! Give me some fuckin' money!” Late at night after everyone went home I'd give Gilbert's picture cigarette burns and I'd stick pins in his eyes. Brag to me about your goddamn bike. Every night it turned into “it's breaktime and I'm pissed off----let's go torture Gilbert!”

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With this whole “Indigo” trip these kids (and their parents, if they're willing to buy the snake oil) are being told is they're going to be the Neitzchean Supermen and women, they're going to shift the fulcrum of the world, they're all going to be tomorrow's important dignitaries, intellectuals, movers, shakers, rock stars---the next JFKs and Bonos and Hiram Abiffs and Martin Luther Kings and whatever, and if they throw a hissy fit over not being allowed to wear blue sneakers, well, you're just going to have to deal with it, because they're special.

So they don't get stuck eating the bologna, but they get fed a whole different brand of bologna.

I think about myself, and the razamataz, double-edged sword that it is....Bessie, career thief and drug dealer, and goddammit, whatever anyone wants to say about her, whatever she believes about herself, I know she could be anything she ever decided she wanted to be....she'd never make these people's all-star roster. I think of Mike, recreating the civil war in the break room with dead bugs, battle by battle. Where's his pat on the back? Where's his hand up? Maybe he was on to something, putting cigarette burns in the picture of that kid.

I'll never be one of Norma's fucking “Indigo” Children and here's why. I'm too old at this stage in the game----I'm not cute....I've developed a mind of my own at this point and that's no good.

And then there's Gayla, the little disappointment waiting in the wings. Gayla's losing favor with Norma and her crowd fast because she's got a mind of her own and she's learning how to say “fuck you”. That doesn't bode well in Norma's bubble world.

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A Goat for all seasons

Thursday, March 10, 2016