BOING! or Mykel's December 2024 Blog: YOU'RE STILL WRONG
You’re
STILL Wrong
Mykel's
December 2024 Blog/Column
BOING!
Satori
is a brief flash. Suddenly the light breaks through. For a short
timeless time we experience eternity in its unmanifest form.
– Frederick
Lenz
Sometimes
a revelation comes with a flash of heavenly light and a booming voice
and sometimes it is jotted in a sun-bleached spiral notebook.
-- Jeffrey
A. Lockwood
I don’t know how I missed it… must be a new one. At least a dozen people.... in the middle is a guy… early twenties… shirtless… barefoot… in jeans… five people around him. Running their hands over his body… up... down… across his chest… stopping to caress a nipple… watch it harden. Another two pairs of hands between his legs… one pair around his calf, the other higher… on the inside of his thigh… higher… moving toward action central. A hand moves up... strokes his fly… the bulge behind the hand becomes bulgier. The fingers of that hand fiddle at the top of the zipper… slowly slide it down… move back up to the metal button at the top of his jeans… The other pair of hands reach up hook over the waistband… pull down… pants and underpants together… moving slowly… until BOING! Up it pops, now revealed… hard and ready for action. Me? My action is spent, and needs a bit of cleaning up.
That’s what I want to write about this month. That BOING moment. The instant that gets me off. In American haiku and Japanese zen they refer to the Aha Moment. Christians call it an epiphany. The Buddhists say satori. It’s a second… or sliver of a second… where you realize something or think in a way you’ve never thought before… a kind of revelation.
I’ve had several in my life… but all too often I let them go and though I learn from the moments, I lose the experience… the thrill… the fun of that second. Part of the problem is not recording the moment… not putting virtual ink to virtual paper and training my muscle memory to use what I’ve just discovered.
In porn, BOING moments appear in every decent segment. I shout BOING from the bed just as it happens… that flip of the flesh baton… and often relieve myself exactly then. But, even without orgasm, those moments in everyday life change me… sometimes giving me insight… understanding… that I’ve never had before.
FLASH TO THE PLATFORM OF THE 6 TRAIN… UPTOWN TRACK. As a New Yorker, I know enough that the end cars are the emptiest and the middle cars are the fullest. During the crowded day time, I stand at the end of the platform, knowing that I’ll likely get a seat. At night, I stand in the middle of the platform, knowing in the fuller car that stops there, I’ll be much less likely to be mugged.
It’s about 4:30 in the afternoon... peak of pre-rush hour traffic. As I go down the stairs, I see that the train is already at the platform. I run to the front… the first car... where the engineer sits. Today, that engineer leans out his window as I stand in front of him. I can see that that car is nearly empty. I lift my leg to step in.
“You may want to move to another car,” says the engineer.
“Thanks, but this is fine for me,” I answer.
He shrugs as I step inside.
I take a seat by engineer’s compartment and look around at the nearly empty car. Sitting on the other end of the car is a naked man. A black guy… late 20s… early 30s. Sitting on a narrow seat. Good parts hidden between his legs… no BOING moment here. A few other people sit singly around the car. No one is talking… or even looking at anyone else.
STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS booms the voice over the loudspeaker. Just as the doors start to close, a white guy… truck-driver type... pries them apart and enters the car. He takes a seat at the end of one of the long benches against the train wall. The doors do not close, but open fully and we sit there. The white guy… shaved head, some kind of working class work clothes… stands up and stands right in front of the naked guy. He shouts at him… gestures… points his finger.
The naked guy takes a pair of gray sweatpants from the seat next to him… slips into them. The white guy continues his harangue. The now not-quite-naked guy stands and shouts back. My punkrock-wrecked hearing prevents me from understanding the words exchanged. All I can tell is that the semi-naked man is losing his patience and begins to stomp around the car. My cheek muscles tense in ever-growing fear.
The bald white guy continues his barrage of words… but slowly backs away from the now-shouting-no-longer-naked guy. I stand and head for the still open doors. The few other passengers in the car do the same. We leave and walk into the next car where a few seats remain… not empty, but with room to squeeze in.
I squeeze into a narrow space forcing the man-spreading guy next to me into a more closed-knees position. Finally, the doors shut and the train chugs north to Astor Place. A respectable-looking… lightish skinned black guy with a gray goatee... sits across from me and says something. I cup my hand behind my ear in the universal sign for HUH? He speaks louder, tilting his head to indicate the car we just left.
“That’s why I voted for Donald Trump!” He says with the verbal exclamation mark clear at the end of his sentence.
BOING!
FLASH TO UNINTENTION: I had planned to avoid politics in this post. But in order to get that BOING, I have to bring them into the mix. First some history: My analysis of the election went something like this:
There were two sides in the election. One side was a radical group of outsiders... extreme and unafraid to express that extremity. Aiming at Americans who were fed up… who wanted change… and wanted forcefulness and principles. The other side was a group of people with no principles… changing willy-nilly to fit what they perceived to be the mood of the audience. No ideas to offer except Vote for us because we’re not them.
The radicals won.
I still think that was largely true, but at this BOING moment I realize there’s more. Fear and anger… mostly stoked by the press… sometimes by real-life chaos… by a naked man in a subway car. People are angry. They don’t want more of the same… they don’t want wimpy here today changed tomorrow solutions. They want big changes NOW. Their fear needs a cure.
Get it Mykel? It’s not (only) a bunch of rebels who want the government to take money away from poor people, throw “aliens’’ into concentration camps, and keep women barefoot and pregnant. It’s ordinary people just fed up with what’s going on around them. It’s everyday folks with no ideology or political bent… but they want SOMETHING DONE. They want some control over their lives… or… if not control… they want stability. They want to be able to walk into a subway car and NOT find a naked man sitting there. They watch the news and see reports about some crazy guy stabbing strangers with a kitchen knife and they wonder who’s next.
The reasons for the Trump victory are many. We each like to frame it our own way. With the reasons we like substituting for the reasons that are. People voted for Trump to oppose abortion… whoops, most of the pro-abortion ballot initiatives PASSED. So that’s not it. People voted for Trump because they wouldn’t vote for a woman. Whoops, Trump’s key cabinet positions were given to women. And on and on.
Just wait for the BOING moment. Maybe you’ll learn. That grey-goateed man gave me mine.
Ah, here’s another BOING moment… and it involves a train. It happened a couple years ago, but the memory of it returned to me as I was talking with a couple Indians (red dot, not feather) at the Bleecker Street Bar. (Not on Bleecker Street, by the way.)
Maybe I wrote about this before, but it fits so well into this theme that I need to do it again. I’m in Mumbai. Staying with the friend of a friend. You’ve probably seen the pictures of Indian trains… people grab onto the outside of the train as it travels from place to place above ground…. Hanging off the car like Mardi Gras dancers hang off parade floats.
On either side of the doors on Indian trains there are metal poles… parallel to the doors… perfect for hanging on to once you’ve climbed up a step or two toward the doors. (In India, the trains… at least THESE trains… have doors that never shut.)
I’ve just walked to the station… shocked and pissed off at the way people on the street will push me out of the way in order to pass. I get so angry at being pushed, that I push back… once… but really hard. One guy nearly falls to the sidewalk. Boy, did I feel good. That’ll teach him a lesson.
Back at the station… the train pulls in. After a few people enter the car, I jump up… on the second step… grab ahold of the poles… lean back and prepare for the ride… but whoa… the poles are greasy… likely from the sweat of the hundreds of others who have grabbed onto it during earlier train journeys. I feel myself tilting back. Losing my grip falling backwards… likely head first onto the platform. Will I die in India? In Bombay? The train’s engine has started… it will move any second now… flinging me to the side.
Then I feel it. A pair of hands under my ribcage on the right side…. Another pair of hands holding tightly on the other side. The two sides working in tandem lift me into the air… completely off the trainsteps… suspended… shifted away from the train and set down… a whole Mykel Board… alive and well on the train platform. Heroically saved by two strangers who missed their train… two anonymous heroes. BOING!
Instant awareness. The gentle nudge out of the way comes from a crowd culture, and a fixation on time. But the people here… yes the people… the people are great… deserving of respect rather than a glare of hostility… They are ready in a moment to give up something for the benefit of a stranger. NOW I get it.
One more… It must’ve been a quarter of a century ago… or more. My father then was my age now. Like mine now, his body was starting to fall apart. He, like me, was post-prostate and not enjoying it.
“Mickey,” he says to me, “I just don’t get it… the piss urge. I can walk around all day… drink a beer… or two. No problem. But as soon as I get within a football field of home… I can’t hold it. Psssshhhhh. Blam! I just have to let go.”
“But Dad,” I say. “You know that means it’s psychological. If the urge hits hard when you near a familiar crapper… you know the urge comes from your head, not your bladder.”
“Tell that to the Depends,” says Dad.
BOING! Just knowing that something… pain or piss-urge… is psychological, doesn’t make it hurt less or the urge less urgent.
My 50-year old self never realized that. I figured that once you know that something is psychological… I mean really know and believe it… then you have control over it. BOING! THAT’S WRONG. All those medical tests… with control groups. They’re just wrong. Scientists call it The Placebo Effect and in most medical tests… BOTH the placebo group and the “real medicine” group get better. Just because something is “only” in your mind doesn’t make it any less authentic than if it lies in the scar tissue of your prostate.
See you in hell,
Mykel
Board
ENDNOTES:
[You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com.
Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music
or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137,
New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified
when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in
the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at
https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]
–> Pet Peeve Dept.: CNN reports that shit frequency affects general health… or responds to general health. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk POOP! Since when did that baby-word come into general (and medical!) use? Feces and defecate I can put up with… they sound medical… and shit is shit. But when mainstream news organizations start using baby talk to avoid taboos… It just makes me want to pee pee on them.
→
BOING!
Pee Dept:
No, Boing Pee is not a city in China. It’s one of those ahah!
Moments
discovered by travel writer, Rick Steves. He talks
about post-prostate
incontinence as a way to understanding. His
view is different from Dad’s. For
him, it wasn’t understanding the
psychological
vs the
actual
medical problem… For him, it was about understanding women. We all
know that the girls gotta go… and they worry about laugh-pissing,
cough-pissing, fart-pissing… Things that boys never think of…
unless it happens to them. I
never before thought about what it must be like.
→ Kenya Contacts Wanted: I finally bought my tickets. I’ll be going to Kenya via London in Feb-March of next year. Stay tuned here for reports. Right now, I’m looking for contacts and info about Kenya. I can’t find one Kenyan restaurant in New York City! I don’t even know what Kenyan food is like. I’m trying to learn a little Swahili. When I was in my 20s and had a memory and the ability to hear stuff, I could pick up languages like a dog owner picks up dog poo. Those skill are gone. In my experience, Africans are the best in the world at language. Most Africans I know can speak three languages (trade language, colonial language and local tribal language) before they sprout pubic hair. So, I should be able to get by in English.. but I don’t want to. Nimejaribu angalau Kiswahili kidogo. If you have any Kenyan connections, please connect me. Give my email address freely to any Kenyan you might know. mykelboard@gmail.com. I hope I can hold it until I get to the airport.
LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:
LINKS
I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.
Here's a start:
I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.
Here’s Ricardo Wang with a “micro-label” in Seattle “specializing in 8-track tapes and CDs. WOW! Check out one of their label staples: The Dead Air Fresheners, best band name of the year.
Also
on bandcamp: My very long time faves in NYC, the BLACKOUT
SHOPPERS. Featuring pals Seth and possibly the next
vice-president of the US
Sid Yiddish has posted a video of
a show done for WZRD in Chicago. Great live performances, and if you
catch the video around the 20+ minute point you might see a familiar
face doing the lyrics to his songs (some unrecorded) as poetry.
You’ll find it here.
And this sounds right up Sid’s alley. The Bilderberg Jazz Arkestra on Bandcamp!
Eric Grayson has an online music review zine, Sobriquet. Full pictures of the sleeves too! Something missing from too many zines. Sometimes you CAN judge a… er… book… by its cover.
Steen Thomsen is a Dane I’ve known ever since Lincoln was shot. I put his band THE ZERO POINT on the great WORLD CLASS PUNK Cassette for ROIR. It must be worth a mint now. I don’t have any left, I’m afraid. You can (and should) connect to the Zero Point on facebook. Tell ‘em Mykel’s blog sent you.
Sorry Dorothy, we are STILL in Kansas. And it’s as weird as OZ. Check out Bob Cutler’s DISTOPEKA.
Finally, for this month, Margaret O’Brian asked me to include the site: anti-war.com They seem to be folks after my own heart.
Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.
Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. mykelboard@gmail.com
