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.

(MRR 345) Penn State vs Apple a not so rosey bowl

You're Wrong

An Irregular Column

for MRR 345, February

by Mykel Board

aka  Mykel continues his Steve Jobs attack, enlisting the Penn State football team to help.

“As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.” Proverbs 26:11

I lie naked on on the bed... gasping... my mouth half open to let air in and out. Each breath hurts. My lungs whistle as they struggle for air. I'm going to suffocate. Half blind, I feel for something to clear my nose in. A cloth... soft... white... a t-shirt turned inside-out as if worn and discarded. I can vaguely see GG Allin through the material... I don't care... I pull the crumpled t-shirt to my face. Using what little lung-power I have, I blow air out my nose. BLLLLLAAAR! BLLLLLAAAR! BLLLLLAAAR! For a second I breathe. Feel the air through one nostril-- like mint on a spring day.

I look at the yellow glob of snot in the t-shirt. It's flecked with red... blood... looking like veins in a leaf... nourishment for the pus... a living organism, that'll drop off the cloth... onto the floor... and start crawling. It doesn't.

The fantasy of crawling mucus doesn't last long. The snot I didn't expel has lodged itself in my lungs. I gag... cough... gag again... manage to pull myself up... to my elbows. The coughing doesn't stop... deep heavy coughs... below my lungs... into my stonach... more gagging... I'm gonnna choke on my own vomit... like Jimi Hendrix.

I can just roll out of bed and crawl slowly toward the bathroom... too slowly... Before I reach the toilet, I cough hard enough to dislodge the food in my stomach... taco salad... shot of ouzo... nacho chips... with beef and cheese... all in various degrees of digestion... all pouring out of my mouth onto the tile floor.... not pouring, but spraying... hard... onto the floor... up and out my nose... everywhere... with enough force to splatter... to splatter my hands... my arms... drip down my face... hang in strings from my beard.

Green... gray... yellow... white... clear... this too, flecked though with tiny rivulets of blood... it's not over... more coughing... violent... puke... not like a beer puke... not like a fever puke... puke without nausea... a hard puke... coughing food from my stomach... inhaling the puke and coughing it out again ... spraying the floor like a machine gun sprays Iraqis.

The fluorescent light in the bathroom brightens the viscous mess on the floor.

Flash to a locker-room in Pennsylvania: A big, smiley gray-haired man is naked, kneeling next to a pre-pubescent, also naked. The kid is a white boy, with a shock of brown hair, falling Justin Bieber style, over his forehead. He lies on a wooden bench. He too is naked.

The grey-haired man lowers his buck-toothed mouth over the boy's crotch. He laps, starting low, between the legs... he raises one eyebrow to watch the boy move from limpitude to youthful stiffness. Then he takes that stiffness into his mouth...

I don't know if that's what happened. The coach says he only “horsed around with” the boys. It could've been nothing more than sharing a shower.

You (think you) know the story. You saw it on TV. TV news and the press have turned the adventure into something more disgusting than my vomit on the bathroom floor. They spray it in your face whenever you turn on the TV. The latest, in Pennsylvania: Jerry Sandusky, the defensive coordinator of the Penn State football team is charged with sexually abusing eight boys over a 15-year period. The man played football at Penn State and was a coach there for 32 years — 23 of them as the team's defensive coordinator.

Along with him, Joe Paterno, the long-time football coach-- and the winningest coach in college football-- and several other people were fired. No trial... except in the press.

Sandusky talks about showering with the kids and “horsing around,” which means things like snapping towels... not things like licking testicles.

A Janitor had reported Sandusky in 2000... saying he saw something lewd in a college lockerroom shower.

What is the coach charged with? Seven counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. What the fuck is involuntary deviate sexual intercourse?

We get more. More spew from the press... right and left... from tsk-tsking conservatives who say that's what happens when you let GOD out of your life... to tsk-tsking liberals who say that's what happens when sports and its idea of winning is the only thing take over.

Excuse me while I puke.

Did the kids complain? Was there an injury? A visit to a doctor? None of that.

Where's the crime?... I'll tell you.

Flash to Zhengzhou in the Henan Province of China: On the 25^th floor of an anonymous factory building. It's slave labor. Workers forced into 12-hour days, at about 50 cents an hour. Chung Tang, about 25-- but looking 50, has been working for 36 hours straight. He's forbidden to speak to his co-workers... he couldn't anyway... he has to put a circuit board on some pegs. One every seven seconds. If he misses, he's fired... out on the street.

The smell of chemical solvents permeates the air. They use the chemicals to etch circuit boards. They also etch lungs. It's painful to breathe. Straight thinking is impossible. The man's brain is fried from the work and the chemicals. After work, he drags himself to the single room he shares with five other workers. Not today.

All he can do is count. 36 hours... ten more boards and he can go home. Nine... Eight... Seven...

His supervisor walks to him.

“You have more,” he says. “There is a new order. You must stay.”

A scream wells up in Chung's throat like vomit wells up in mine. It escapes. AAAAARRRRRRR!

He pushes past the supervisor heading for the window. He jumps. He dies.

It's just another day at the APPLE FACTORY. Another few million iPhones assembled and ready to go. Another worker out the window.

Meanwhile, in America, the Steve Jobs worship continues, despite revelations that Foxconn, their Chinese contractor, operates such a horrible sweatshop that 12 workers jumped out the windows, killing themselves. The crisis is so deep the company installed safety nets between buildings to catch the jumpers. No shit.

Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based workers’ rights group, released a report about Foxconn. It details the exhaustion of 12-hour (or longer) shifts, the alienation from not being allowed to speak to co-workers, and the frenzy of a rapid just-in-time production model that has workers putting in a phone motherboard every seven seconds.

With conditions worse than prison hard labor, workers see no alternative to a flying leap out the window.

Two stories:

One: seven young guys who may or may not have fucked a football coach. Two: a dozen people a killing themselves rather than facing Apple's working conditions. Which is worse? Sex or death? Apple or Penn State?

Look up the answer on your iPhone. Me? I gotta go throw up.

ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or blog readers (mykelsblog.blogspot.com/) will get live links and a chance to post comments on the column]

-->NOT dept: My defense of, and support for the Occupy folks (in last month's column), looks like a direct answer to Lefty Hooligan's column about how they're too tame. It is not. Because of the advance deadline, I had not read Lefty's column before I wrote mine. Not that it would change anything. He's wrong. I'm not.

-->How they keep a majority dept: It's clear that MOST Americans support the Occupy folks and would as soon vote for Jerry Sandusky as any 1%-Republican. The only way for the Republicans to keep control of Congress is to prevent people from voting. So, that's what they do.
      In Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, voters will have to show photo IDs to vote. Ten percent of the citizens of those states do not have photo IDs... mostly poor and young... the same people who would wish the Republicans a good ass kicking! Hmmmm.

-->Imagine ordering the cops to do that? Dept: NY Police commissioner Raymond Kelly has ordered his cops to “follow the law” when making arrests for pot. Until that order, cops would routinely stop and frisk people (mostly young, mostly black) and then, when they found weed, claim to the court it was in plain sight. Cops are now prohibited from doing this.
    Hmmmm, strange how the rest of us have to follow the law all the time, but cops (finally!) only have to do it when making pot arrests. And that's a NEW rule.

-->Fire me, please! Dept: HP CEO Leo Apotheker was fired for disastrous performance for the company. He was replaced by failed California gubernatorial right-wing candidate, Meg Whitman. (Fat chance I'm gonna buy anything HP!) Don't feel sorry for Apotheker, though. His “termination benefits” are valued at 31 million dollars.

-->On my turntable dept: So Shut-Up Records sent me a buncha stuff that laid on my cabinet for months. Then WOW!!
       I guess you guys know THE STUN GUNS. I'm out of the vinyl loop... I shouldn't be. This colored marble piece of vinyl is so strong, it gives me a hard-on! Quick find me a a locker-room in Pennsylvania!

-->Mentioning it again dept: It should be a requirement that every judge spend at least six months in jail. Then he'd know what he was doing when he sentences people to that hellhole institution of new slavery.
     I've written before about Waldo, my artist jailpal. He will draw you a picture from a photograph, or his mind. For free. I used one of his (me licking a Japanese samurai sword) for my Facebook profile pic. Just write to him and tell him what you want. He's got a lot of time. Waldo c/o Ryan Homslay #747267, MCDC 1120 SW Third Ave., Portland OR 97204

-->Get on the List Dept: It's always a good time to be a spy. How can you fight the badguys if you don't know what they're doing? Wikileaks? We need 300 million Wikileaks.
      A front group called United in Purpose, is supported by a couple California venture capitalists. Among them Ken Edred, a wealthy Republican donor, and Reid Rutherford, who, when not working for the Christian right, beats doors to promote solar power. (Yeah bad guys like solar energy too!)
     The purpose of United in Purpose is to data-mine, forming a database of “every unregistered born-again and evangelical Christian and conservative Catholic in the country.” What happens to that list is anybody's guess... but it shouldn't be.
    What to do? Register with a Christian conservative group. Put your name and email address on some stupid Right to Life petition. Send for information from The 700 Club. It probably won't take much to get on the list... then see what happens. Let me know what you find out.

-->Who wudda thunk it dept: Ok, buckaroos, guess who said this, “Even where the protection of children is the object, the constitutional limits on government action apply. Individual famlies must set their own rules, without imposing what the State thinks parents ought to do.”
   Is this the ACLU? The National Coalition Against Censorship? NAMBLA? Nope! It's our own maleficent Anthony Scalia, the most totalitarian and evil of the Supreme Court justices. But this broken clock was right once! He wrote the statement in his opinion rejecting the California video game censorship law. Credit where it's due.

-->What happened? dept: For awhile I was getting a buncha those kind of DVDs from fans. (I love that rub it all over me one from Justin and Samantha.) For the last month, or so, things have... er... dried up. Keep 'em coming! On the edge (but LEGAL!) of course. As always (Mykel Board POB 137, Prince Street Station, NY NY 10012). Don't send me links or attachments. I just delete that stuff.

-->Sure it was an accident dept: Yahoo has apologized for blocking the delivery of emails that contained a URL related to the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations.
    Yahoo admitted that it blocked the emails pertaining and issued an apology on Twitter, saying that the blockage was “not intentional.” The mega-corp blamed its spam filters for stopping emails that contained the campaign website OccupyWallStreet.org.
    Not intentional? Yeah, right.

-end-

Mykel's not-quite-functioning homepage is at: www.mykelboard.com