You're Still Wrong March 2019 or LOCK UP!

You’re Still Wrong

Mykel's Blog for March 2019
or

LOCK UP!

The prisoners assemble in the shape-up room. Standing at attention… most of them anyway… a few slump… in rows of twenty across… about a dozen deep. The warden is in front, addressing the crew.

“Okay, now listen up. New rules starting today,” he shouts in that kind of voice that means here’s an announcement and you’d better fuckin’ pay attention.

“This bag,” he says... holding aloft and shaking a cloth bag... like the ones in old cartoons. This one, however, is not stenciled with dollar signs. It jangles. It “is filled with keys. They are the keys to your cells... the keys to each section… and the keys to the jail itself… I’m here to distribute them.”

Inmate eyebrows frown in near unison.

“We’re downsizing and figure it’s a waste to pay someone to turn a key. You can just as easily do it yourself…. So, when I call your names, I want you to walk up here and collect your keys. You’ll sign your name in the book as having received them. If you lose them, it’ll cost you big… so don’t.”

“Excuse me, sir,” says a voice from somewhere near the middle of the crowd, “are you giving us the keys to our own cells? I mean, are you saying we’re going to lock ourselves in at night, and unlock ourselves during exercise periods and visits?”

“You got it, Einstein,” the warden shouts back.

There’s a low murmur among the men… like the walla walla walla background noises in movie restaurant scenes.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” shouts the warden. “Wait for your name to be called… then walk up here and get your keys… then go and stand back where you were….”

He looks down at a clipboard. “LeRoy Anthony!” he shouts. “LeRoy Anthony, come and collect your keys.”

A guy, late 60s, slightly stooped... walks from the far end of the third row… toward the warden. Meanwhile, the warden sorts through his cloth sack… looking at the tags on the keys.

HOLD IT! HOLD IT MYKEL… What’s the point here? What are you trying to prove? You think a prison would ever give inmates the keys and trust them to lock themselves in?

It’s that damn Literary Device. She just can’t keep her mouth shut… breaking in at key points… spoiling the flow with stupid questions and stupider statements of the obvious. Just when I’m setting the stage.

“Yo! Literary Device,” I say, “Give me a few paragraphs.. I’ll explain the point… and YES, I think inmates would lock themselves in by themselves. How many commit crimes just to get back in jail because they can’t handle the outside world? How many WANT to be there? How many would be on the street sleeping over a subway vent if it weren’t for prison?”

She (Literary Device), makes a sweeping be my guest hand gesture, like the doorman at an expensive restaurant… and says nothing.

FLASH TO 2019: I sit on my bed… laptop on a tiny… shaky… wooden table… The laptop shares the table with a postal scale, a cup of green tea, the empty DVD box of NYMPHOMANIAC VOLUMES ONE AND TWO… subtitled Forget About Love.

In the next apartment, Harry Back sits at his desk, finishing his business plan for a start-up company: Your Bedroom, Your Spaceship. Through the wall, I can hear the DINGS, PINGS, and BABOOS of his computer… every once in awhile... a heartily whispered SHIT! or YES! FINALLY!

BZZZZZ! It’s the door buzzer. Someone is trying to get in the building. They ring all the buzzers until someone lets them in. Barefoot, I pad over to the intercom and shout into it.

WHOWIZZIT? AND WADDAYA WANT?

“Food delivery for Mr. Back.” comes the staticky answer.

NEX DAW! I shout back. DIS IS D. YOU WANT C.

“Sorry,” comes the heavily accented voice, “I try once more.”

In a minute or so, I hear the elevator open and someone walking down the hall. My neighbor opens his door, mumbles thanks and quickly closes it again. The elevator closes… then more PINGS and DINGS from his computer.

FLASH TO The New York Post, December 6, 2018: It turns out millennials love Amazon so much, they’d give up sex or alcohol to keep shopping there. A new survey revealed 77 percent of millennials would go without booze for a year rather than quit Amazon, and 44 percent would forego sex.

It’s 2PM. I sit naked but for boxer shorts, and an old TRIBE 8 t-shirt. I type these words on my Lenovo laptop. A large sticker on the outside of the laptop shows a picture of an apple with a bite taken out of it. The apple is in a red circle. A diagonal red line runs through that apple. Yeah, I’m making a statement.

No classes today. I have a few minutes to spare. Yesterday, I couldn’t write before I had to catch the subway uptown. I taught until 9... as usual. Then out with my students. Thursday, was Drink Club. Wednesday was Drink Club Secret (no link to that one). Tomorrow, I’ll probably go see Jennifer Blowdryer at Otto’s… or else go out for dinner with an old girlfriend… one of many who my Midas touch has turned full-time lesbo. Tonight, though, I have some time.

I still hear Harry through the wall. I mute my beeps and pips… he doesn’t. I wonder if he has his pants on yet. He’s not that good looking, so  thoughts of him sitting at a desk in his underwear do not bring blood to my limp asparagus. I bet his computer doesn’t have a NO APPLE sticker on the front.

I wonder if he ever goes out. I know he works from home. On at least one of the few occasions we’ve met, he’s told me how lucky he feels that he can be in the corporate world and not have to put on a tie. He did not mention putting on his pants.

I imagine his life: He sits… possibly pantsless... at a high-tech desk... One with an actual keyboard tray rather than just pulling out a drawer like normal people do. Behind him sits a small table… swivel distance… so he can type… turn... eat… maybe watch television… swivel back and keep working.

Lightbulb burns out? Pull up Amazon… he’s gotta be a prime member… maybe super-prime if there is such a thing. BING! Lightbulb delivered… right to the door. Time for dinner…. Uber Eats… this time… Chinese or Indian? Indian… great, there in half an hour… Wow! Vindaloo you could die for… uh oh… speaking of dying… it’s kind of a heavy hitter.

Pow! Off to the bathroom… exploding toilet inevitable… Whoa!! Almost out of Charmin! Use that last bit and call CVS for an emergency supply. They deliver and it’s quick… they’re just around the corner. Better order a dozen rolls. That’ll take care of Indian, Szechuan, and a runny nose for a month… almost.

You’re gettin’ it, huh? It’s not a fantasy about prisoners locking themselves up… with the keys to their own cells. We already have that. I go to a punk club… the only people in the audience are recent immigrants who don’t have the delivery system figured out-- or-- THEY are the ones delivering all the stuff to the voluntary inmates… self-locked in their apartments The bars empty out around 10PM… Few people eat out any more… restaurants close… unless they’re just a window… for delivery only. Ms Literary Device, do you get it now?

People don’t leave home… not even to work. They lock themselves in their private apartment cells and turn the key. They think they’re CONNECTED to other people, because they see a few memes on facebook. They think they’re involved in the world, because they can watch a YouTube video of sheep-herders on the steppe.

Folks in modern times have less physical contact (the Japanese call it skinship) than jailbirds. Don’t jailbirds fuck all the time? Isn’t that where the original meaning of PUNK comes from? The Harry Backs of the world jerk off to XNXX and that’s what passes for sex. It’s safer that way, huh? No disease. No pictures from someone else’s cellphone to get them in trouble when they run for… I donno, City Council?

The Harry Backs of today don’t go out into the world… they expect the world to come into them. They don’t go to India… they have it delivered. They don’t shop… meet neighbors at the supermarket… handle produce… squeeze the fruit. They have it FRESH delivered.

Jews and Latin folks are famous for touching each other… for making bodily contact. I once read about a 1960’s sociologist who watched same sex pairs at a table in an outdoor cafe. Two WASP American men talked to each other for an hour… they touched each other once. Two Frenchmen talking touched each other 160 times. Two Puerto Ricans… 180 times. (The report did not include Jews… but I think it’s clear that there’s not much difference between Jews and Puerto Ricans.) Two Brits… NEVER TOUCHED in an hour of conversation.

But now? NO ONE will touch. The way we’re going, there will be no one to touch! We’ll just sit in our little cells, locking ourselves in… opening the door for home delivery… then shutting it quickly again. I’m fuckin’ glad I’m old and won’t live to see 8 million jail cells in New York City. Delivery please! But then again….

Shit! There’s the doorbell. Hold on a minute…. Oh hi, you must be from the escort service… Your name’s Literary Device??? Come on, you’re shittin’ me. Well, come in… Can I get you something to drink before we start?

- end 1-

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at god@mykelboard.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. Subscribe to the MYKEL'S READERS Yahoo group readmboard-subscribe@yahoogroups.com]

→ I’ve been saying it for years… part one dept: I’m usually as interested in the Oscars as I am in the Superbowl... as I am in gardening or macrame. But this caught my eye from Pop-Buzz.com. It said,

After thanking his parents, the Academy, his cast and Queen, Rami stated: "We made a film about a gay man, an immigrant who lived his life unapologetically himself and the fact that I'm celebrating him and this story with you tonight is proof that we're longing for stories like this". The sentiment was sweet but fans were disappointed that Rami called Freddie "gay".

Bisexuality invisibility came the complaint. And going even further, the complainers pull out this 2005 study that questions whether straight (or gay) people exist at all.

          In the 80s, it took real OUTRAGEOUSNESS to outrage people… Today, publicly scratching your balls is enough to start a twitterstorm.

       There is something to learn from this, though. The evils of BINARY THINKING:

GAY or STRAIGHT.

Trump is GOOD or Trump is SATAN.

And its corollary,
YOU EITHER SUPPORT ANY SHITHEAD THE DEMOCRATS NOMINATE or

YOU PERSONALLY ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TRUMP’S REELECTION.

       The second facebooker I ever banned, I banned on the stupidity of his binary thinking. “Most of my friends are not white.” I wrote. “Mykel is playing the MY BLACK FRIEND card,” wrote the now-banned “friend”… as if the only two racial choices are WHITE or BLACK. Where the fuck does he live? South Africa?

        Binary thinking is too common for outrage… but it’s just about right for stupidity. You’ve heard me talk about that for years.

→ I’ve been saying this for years… part 2: An article in the Financial Times says that the vegetarian/vegan boom is a bigger boom for corporate agriculture than it is for the earth. Much of supermarket vegan food is genetically modified… usually so it can take heavier duty insecticides… which in turn pollute everything around them. Also, the harvesting of crops is done by petroleum-heavy tractors.. and processed by resource-using electricity. Cows and other animals are “harvested” on horseback.

          One thing the article does NOT mention is how veganism is bad for animals. Instead of choosing to purchase humanely killed /organically raised meat, vegans take their money out of the meat-voting pool. This means fewer meat-eaters care what they eat, which means less demand to raise animals humanely… So the farmers, antibiotic users, and legislators simply don’t care.

→Moving to Vietnam dept: I’ve often thought about leaving the US. It really is an awful place to live… a shithole country. My cousin voted with his feet and now lives in Thailand. I have plenty of friends who’ve ditched the US for places far and wide. I don’t know anyone who’s gone to Vietnam, though. But given that medical care is so bad here… there do seem to be doctors after my own heart on the other side of the world. Check out this Vietnamese doctor who successfully saved someone’s life by pumping beer INTO his stomach.

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

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 facebookme 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:

• David Goldberg's Busy Microbes Blog
• And another Goldberg:goldberg.wordpress.com
• I post a blog for Kyle Nonnemon, in prison for a ton of shit. He's a smart guy, with a passion for industrial metal and a general detestation of humankind. You can read his blog at: apothelema.blogspot.com
• Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency
• And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.
• And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.
• Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.
• Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.
• Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.
• George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently.
• And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his  Mishegas Master Blog.

CONTACT REDUX: You can contact me on facebook or by email at god@mykelboard.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. Subscribe to the MYKEL'S READERS Yahoo group:

readmboard-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

The Only Good Thing or Mykel's Post-MRR Blog #28

Mykel's

Post MRR Column #28

The Only Good Thing

by Mykel Board

Imagine a country whose foundation is subjugation... a country where slaves are written into the constitution... officially “3/5 human.”

Imagine a country whose national anthem talks about bombs and rockets... where citizens trust God and not each other.

Imagine a country that holds more of the world's prison population than any other... most of the prisoners descended from slaves... Where jail terms never end... where the right to vote is permanently taken away... your debt to society can never be paid... You are always a slave.

Imagine a country whose people are so stupid that they can't find their neighboring countries on a map... where more people know the names of movie stars than scientists or philosophers... where people have more guns than passports.

Imagine a country where students aren't challenged to think. Where they're warned about “upsetting ideas” and can opt-out of learning. Where “education” has nothing to do with learning, but is only a means to a job where you work to make other people rich.

Imagine a country where the top 1% owns more than the bottom 90%... where huge, greedy corporations pay NO taxes. Where the answer to any violation of corporate interests is to kill people.

Imagine a country that defines “success” as being rich. That exports its love of money around the world, making fetishes of brand names, charging in foreign branches of its stores, a days wages for a cup of coffee... and through advertising and bribery... makes people want to pay it.

Imagine a country where the solution to EVERYTHING is WAR. Instead of looking at problems with a medical metaphor... like a wound that has to be healed... it looks at problems as THE ENEMY that has to be killed. WARS on drugs... Muslims... terrorism... hunger... even a (long ago discarded) WAR ON POVERTY.

Imagine a country that has, in this millennium, killed more people than all other countries on earth... combined. Image a country that continues to kill people, correcting past mistakes in killing people by killing other people.

What benefit could there be to such a pisshole of a country? What right would such a country have to exist? Why should the rest of the world tolerate such a gaping wound in its earthly body? Is there anything that fetid offal has to offer? Can we find one thing that hell-bent-on-world-destruction nation has done to justify its existence?

FLASH TO NOW: I'm in a 777 airplane flying from Manila to New York... via Taiwan. I've been in the plane for seven hours... with another eight to go. I can't sleep, having stupidly taken the aisle seat so there's no window to put my head against. When either of the two passengers next to me needs to take a piss... I gotta get up and move.

This is the end of my six weeks in Asia. The first four were in Japan: tightly planned... familiar... sleeping on friends' floors... couches... tours of sake breweries... a ton of drinking... a ton of innocent nakedness at public hot springs... a bit of not so innocent nakedness. Friends... familiar... comfortable... like slippers and a bathrobe.

Then there was The Philippines. I quote from my travel blog (mykelsdiary.blogspot.com)

Manila is a maze of narrow streets choked with barely moving traffic, blaring horns... people walking... hanging out... sleeping on plastic bags filled with trash.

Food stands sell Chinese pork buns or wooden sticks with your choice of pig's ear, pig's blood or pig guts. The narrow streets hold the auto exhaust of the immoveable traffic. Walking a block is like smoking a pack of cigarettes.

Every few meters, one young woman or another will smile at you... showing her braces and ask, “Hey Joe, you like me?” If you shake your head, she'll offer you her younger sister... or her daughter. My upper arm still has a bruise where a street hooker pinched me to keep me from walking away. Every few steps bring you to another encounter.

Backpacks become frontpacks here... watch your step...means a fuck of a lot more than be careful crossing the street. The heat is oppressive... a wet-heat. Your sweat mixes with the filth from the car exhausts. Simply scratching your neck leaves your fingernails black.

I love the place.

I've been sleeping on a thin mattress on the floor in Taytay, a Manila suburb. Johnny Deadbrain lives here... with his mother who barely makes a living selling ice to the neighbors out of her refrigerator.

I get the mattress. Johnny sleeps on the other side of the living room... on a cardboard box. 

The toilet, as most in this country, doesn't have a seat. You flush it by filling a plastic bucket from a cold water wall spigot and pouring the water into the toilet bowl. A plastic dipper floats in the water. It's not clear whether the dipper is used to scoop water to flush the toilet... or to scoop water to wash your ass in lieu of toilet paper. There is never any toilet paper. Whenever I buy anything in the country, I demand a receipt. That paper comes in handy.

[NOTE: A few places-- mostly high class-- have toilet paper HOLDERS built into the wall. They are for decorative purposes only. There is never any actual toilet paper in them.]

At Johnny's place, the wall spigot is also the shower and bathroom sink.

The Philippines are punk rock.

It's like New York in the 70's... when/where punkrock was born. Dangerous, mysterious, sexy, anarchistic, musical. Everybody and his father... grandfather... is a musician. Even the poorest homes have a turntable... and a collection of records that would make the Rev Norb envious.

Johnny shows me an original of the first Ramones album. From a small speaker attached to his android, comes The Ramones, GG Allin, and his own band DEADBRAINS.

Rock'n'roll came to the Philippines with American servicemen during and after World War II. Navymen wanted more than local nookie from the natives. They wanted their music.

They brought records... 78s... 45s... 33s... to these islands. Local musicians quickly learned the music to play for the sailors. It was as profitable as-- and less painful than-- an American maritime turgid sausage in their anuses.

From the songs learned from those sailors' records, the Philippines developed its own brand of rock... its own bands... its own style. Punk rock came here before anywhere else in Asia except possibly Japan.

BINGO!

That's it! The American contribution... America's ONLY contribution... its only value in the world. ROCK'N'ROLL... That great merging of cultures: black Jazz/Blues that came up the Mississippi River from New Orleans smashing smack dab into white Country music from the heartland. When Hank Williams buggers Muddy Waters... Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley are born.

That freeing, open, rockin music. That rock... that glitter... that punk... that hardcore... That rebellious, liberating, loving, aggressive force. That may be the only real gift America gave to the world... but it's a damn good one.

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me by email at god@mykelboard.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 by subscribing to the MYKEL'S READERS Yahoo group readmboard-subscribe@yahoogroups.com]

→ It ain't music, it's a concept dept: Chuck Shephard reports that the group Matmos released their new album, "Ultimate Care II." The LP consists entirely of "music" made by an Ultimate Care II washing machine. The machine's 38-minute wash cycle was "sampled and processed." Matmos previously played canisters of helium on stage at Radio City Music Hall and a cow's uterus at the San Francisco Art Institute.

→ Tax dollars at work dept: One of the many evils of the Obama administration was the bank bailouts and lack of anybody going to the clink for the tragedy. The government claims a victory because it took in billions of dollars in fines from those banks. Same for corporate polluters like BP in the Gulf of Mexico.

Not so fast.

The New York Times reports that the money those banks and corporations paid is considered “tax deductible.” So those same corporations just listed the fines on their tax returns as a “business expense.” They paid no taxes on that money.

→ Bathe in this dept: Brandon Terry and Casey Fowler of Spartanburg South Carolina were arrested after calling 911 five times to report possums jumping out of their refrigerator and microwave, worms emerging from their floor, and midgets in camouflage. They denied any drug use, but police said it was likely "bath salts."

→ Sex & The Serviceman Dept: It probably didn't make the U.S. newspapers, but a Philippine jury convicted a U.S. sailor of murder. He strangled a prostitute and drowned her in the toilet, when he discovered she had... er... extra equipment. The Navy removed the sailor from the country before he could be sentenced. At last report, the prostitute was still dead.

→ Further Evidence Dept: The Daily Mail reports that they've seen video footage that shows Israeli commandos rescuing wounded ISIS fighters from the Syrian warzone, Many of the rescued are enemies of Israel and some may even be fighters for groups affiliated with Al Qaeda. Almost every night, Israeli troops run secret missions to save the lives of Syrian fighters, all of whom are their sworn enemies.

Clearly, toppling Assad is more important to the Israelis than fighting ISIS. No wonder that Israel-obedient Obama calls for REGIME CHANGE in Syria, while the Russians just fight ISIS.

→ Endorsements Dept: Also on the Russian front. The Washington Post reports that Vlad Putin has damn near endorsed Donald Trump for the U.S. presidency. He called The Apprentice star, “the absolute leader in the presidential race.”

In October, Trump said that he would “get along very well” with Putin and applauded the Russian president for his intervention against the Islamic State in Syria.

→Vote Jew Dept: Next year it looks pretty sure I'll be voting for a Jew in November. If, by some (from my mouth to G-d's ears) miracle, Bernie Sanders gets the Democratic nomination... I'm there. If not, I'll have a difficult choice between JILL STEIN on the Green Party, or my pal SID YIDDISH on the Lincoln-Republican party. In any case, I'll be voting Jew in November!

-->Keeping the Pressure on Dept: I want to thank reader George Metesky for suggesting a continuing Bring Back Mykel effort directed at Maximum Rock'n'Roll for censoring me.

As their revolving editrixes move on to commercial ventures, they blame their predecessors for my demise... as if they had no control over the business... and couldn't simply invite me back.

Send your comments to mrr@maximumrocknroll.com (or post on their facebook page) with the subject line: BRING BACK MYKEL! Let me know how they answer.

-end-

MRR column for no 358 (Violence in Connecticut)

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