Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Ohio Revisited as a Flemish Belgian Imposter Just Directly South of the Most Southern Tip of Canada


Exhausted after closing at work - laying on the floor in front of a TV in a house with no furniture - propped up with pillows and pilled up watching The Vampires of teendom: Edward and Bella...Rosalie and Emmett ....Alice and Jasper....Esme and Carlisle - Characters from Stephenie Meyers Twilight books brought to life on the big screen by Catherine Hardwicke in remarkable understated ways that corporate Hollywood could never comprehend. Sort of like True Blood from HBO for high schoolers and adults like me who want to remember something better than our own dull and miserable past lives in the time of youth.

I miss Anne Rice and her Southern grandieur, grace and polite society - her literary history and knowlege of art history - at least in print. That Stephenie Meyers does makes Vampire stories much less gratuitous excuses for blood and gore as a metaphor for our planetary ecologically consuming human selves . But the other "supporting cast" characters from Twilight wether in the book or the film intrigue me more than the plot dominating Vampiric forms of Scarlet and Rhett as Bella and Edward.

That movie Twilight I must have seen in the cinema ten times... Like when a boy I must have seen the film The Lost Boys at least 25 times during matinees of loneliness.

Tired of this alone-ness, these Twilight DVDeez go better with klonopin king pins in a solid state lonely life, lived out on an existential road trip to nowhere.

Super paver parking lots - trapped in retaildom - Dreaming of Arab North Africa and on towards Easter-wards...

Having seen Twilight so many times with Ben - hanging out tonight with Rusty the black dog as such - it's like someone - anyone, human or non-human, are curled up here too on the floor - farting like that darned dog.

Catherine Hardwicke understands the Twilight Vampires like no one else could or will - perhaps even better than their creater Stephenie Meyer.


If you got a man or wo-man in your life named Khaleb or Khalil or Khadeja then my advice would be:
Hold tight to that Khaleb you won't regret it. Vivian Vivance Kalebz or not keep him closer to you than your own hearts beat.

My only pal Benoit is a good buddy bender friend of the discarded animals lives like mine - it is like he has a psychic power to find discarded lives of field mouses, cats, dogs and people like me. People like Ben for all their self abusing bad habits go to heaven for their animal charities.

See you Ben around the bend, like in the blog Baghdad Burning, "where hearts can heal and souls can mend". Ben. Bender. Bendahar from Kumar....

All I look forward to are the visits to the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) to visit my sister Margo (or to see or hear or read you buddy Ben or dear reader if you even exist)....

Rusting and broken down neon signs along the roadside of the old Ohio high ways and free ways all cluttered with wildlife roadkill and garbage - discarded - former life forms that we all were - if we can just admit that everything we want and desire are already in this big Universe now in the past tense. At least in the West.

... Betty Butterfield and the Scientologists or the Buddhists - I've seen it all on Youtube! Seen it a hundred times to keep myself laughing when I have no reason for laughter or a smile. Google it - Youtube it - Betty Butterfield -Forget it - car insurance and the community meetings... super paver, meaningless, cosmic, existential, parkinglots to nowhere...
....read.... ....write... ...recite...

Nowhereville or is it Ghettoville or is it that Bronte Villette or did I loose my heart to Bruxelles mon amour back in Belgique and old, really old and forgotten Flanders - Vlaanderen - from the south of Hollandia and into the north of what is now France. Miscellaneous Flemish dialects of the Old Dutch language mixed up en Francais Belgique Bruxeloises....

Back in Brussels there is a museum with a room full of ornaments in the shape of hearts. My heart is nailed there to the wall also.

Pharmaceutical electronic driven to distraction and subsequent life, now replete with an Ohio emptiness - alone in my aloneness. In this prison nation I care for no one anymore. Even though I don't want to, or forget how to, care.

Even though my pal Benoit - there is nothing he can do or say to help make a difference in me or our collapsed world.

But its the laughter and stories he seems to pull out of a magicians hat that keep me holding on...

Yeh, I guess I've been a psychological, emotional, psychic vampire mess for everyone who knows me, one way or another, including through this here blogette to nowhere.

Some of my getting back in touch with myself has been in those long belabored bloggetry of personal essays to you dear reader.

I suppose if/when I get a boy/girl/(or both-tranny-lol) - friend then I'll stop needing companionship. Elusive and non-existant companionship at present in my empty (literally and figuratively) home life. Life lived off the floor keeps me humble and connected to the mother Earth.

But, whatever, I deal with things stoically now - learning how from my sister self surviving in her personal Palestine in Marysville, Ohio in prison incarceration.

....But that house in Brussels that was once home - all nine feet wide of it with five floors - under terra cotta roof tiles and red brick and all just endless wooden stairsteps - my friends there in the neighborhood, the dogs, my being so easily replaced as it were, the things of mine from before all that which were shipped over from Ohio; things accumulated during those long years in Brussels or things I accumulated abroad - or even say charcoal drawings from college art school days - that all ended up over there - never guessing in a million years I'd be back to Ohio - I guess until all of that is dealt with - as if it could be dealt with - I just feel lost and without family or tribe or clan or place or purpose or language - like you, dear reader, if there is one at all - you are all that is stuck with me - which is better than the alternative of....

...being ignored... negative attention Oscar Wilde once said is better than no attention.

I don't want to apologize for writing too much - I do it to survive mentally and I though we were having a good time. I was at least I thought I was. But, yeh, I am always happy when I see the rare comment post on this here blog. I do though feel sorry for anyone who reads me and gets into my self torturing brain to read...

Americans here are generally so much more so literally and figuratively embracing than Europeans and everyone in Belgium who all to easily accept the inevitable detachments in life with a sturdy sadness. So it makes it hard to be that way with myself - that now foreign, collective and material past, still in Villette, as my old self back in Bru-town. Confined now to memories and non-existance.

Forgotten by Belgians with disregard that is considered polite.
Keep your drama, mama said, to yourself.

I really don't like being American again: Me and my past Euro-Belgian-Moroccan Muslim life are in such vastly different realities and time zones and cultures - Like I have separated into the ultimate Geminoid contradiction where both of us have changed in ways the other doesn't know or that we wouldn't recognize ourself in the ourselves - That it makes holding on impossible. Maybe i should stop trying to understand the Salvadore Dali persistant Pesistance of Memory.

My Flemish pal Wannes just in says "in life these little tragedies happens in between the big tragedies"...

So I just try to understand Wannes' logic about these things...I really have been wanting for two years from someone from over there to arrive here and find out who and what I am (and what I am not) in this post relationship void. A void to avoid in life.

Relationships should not end like this in excommunication or dislocation.

I wish I could just face all that I am not now - and be cool with it - I've adjusted to it. But I am a fraction of what I once was in Belgium as a Belgian-American - here or in Belgium. Maybe I don't want to see all that. I can't say that I blame anyone for not wanting to be remembering me back there - back then as such. I still try to live in the past because things on some level were better than this Ohio Revisited life - a life here as a discarded human being in a literally discarded and disregarded part of the world.

I used to spend a lot of time with my dogs in old town Brussels named Buddy and Sagan both like me from Ohio - it is hard just having to ignore them - to have to forget them back in Belgium in another home and hope they forget me and the many days and ways we spent together over so many years and miles or kilometers and dog walks along the canals of Brussels.

I try to just think in terms of not owning things: Animals or material possessions. Not because I want to but because I have to in Buddhist like ways - detach from all that or go insane trying to hold on to something like mercury - the Geminoid quick silver that cannot be held in your hand that is so poisonous. I try to think of animals as having a home or a place "in a family" - being a part of a family - not owned. Nothing stays the same - So I just hope those dogs have a place as I know and trust they do - even if I can't be with them throughout their lives. The only consolation in going back recently to De Hague, in not going onto Brussels, was that I thought it better that the dogs not see me briefly. I don't want to think about any of this any more - it all yields so much grief of things now out of my hands.

I sometimes show a good neighbor Witch my writing here - she is astonished - floored even by my writing ability. I like the things she sees in what I write that I cannot see. It's not writing I consider I am doing - it is called surviving this brain and body and society and modernity of soul-less-ness and nowhere-ism.

I see my sister Margo tomorrow. Going to the Ohio Reformatory for Women - the old ORW - it is hard for her to comprehend me now or my previous life's decade abroad. Margo can't even endure car rides to the world outside ORW just to the medical clinic at the Ohio State University which she is occassionally taken to like a lab rat. Because she lives in such a small non-automotive world in confines of a locked down convent like community that covers less acres than what people without cars can easily walk - imagine that for three decades - So being in the prison transport van to drive into Columbus makes her terribly car sick - whole years can go by and she won't be in an automotive van, so the effect is something the rest of us can't imagine - extreme car sickness. Imagine what that means for everything else in the world outside ORW since time for her stopped in 1977. Time Suspended like Time was Suspended for Palestine in 1948 - waiting with lives defined by razor wire and concrete control. She can't go on a long walk without getting dizzy because there is no long distance except in circles within all that razor wire control, locked down, over populated, prison community. To think about her or my life now, it induces grief. Just grief that is to the core - to the bone - to the flesh of this souls mortal coil that I am entombed by until death stuck with a brain that won't leave me alone. As if that brain were some Alien implants brain without a mercy for its symbiotic host showing me the world I live in from a foreigners point of view.

Like when I think about Brussels it induces grief. People do not come out to the sticks of Ghettoville, Central, Ohio where I now live - it is hard - people do not walk by - there are not even sidewalks - and the house is set far back from the street. Then what is close - the neighbors to the east and the west - my kitchen window looks into to theirs - in the summer we can talk to each other through open windows for a laugh or over hear each others conversations even if we don't want to. My neighbor to the west where the bedroom window looks into their bathroom and bedroom windows - we keep these windows shut for privacy and mutual respect.

When I look around the strange and empty and foreign house I live in - my clutter piles must provide some comfort - if everything was in order - I'd remember what I don't have here that was left like a refugee in Belgium.
If all that materiality from my past life were here that would be worse - Then I'd really feel trapped here. No going back.

I guess I should just return my Belgian passport and ID for it sadly won't get used anytime soon now.

My life now plays out on a retail dance floor of a stage, like a cheap version of Belgian Art groups like Damaged goods, her holiness of dance mother Anna Theresa deKeersmaaker and that immense woman from the Need Company - The best Belgian Diva since I don't know when Tin Tin's only female character. Then there is also my fellow American Meg Stuart or Stewart... Willem Dafoe from the Wooster Group days performing at the Kaaitheater and it's studios - my life played out like some student work at P.A.R.T.S., stage life like Rosas dancers. Jan de Corte and Siegred and Tooneelhuis. Not to mention Toona and the marionettes. Or Arno and other local Bru-town celebs like that flakey Christophe Coppens the mad hatter of Brussels... my life was suffocatingly fabulous compared to this present spartan monk like solitude - stage performance without an audience. In a land with no Art funding or public concept of Art.

I wish you knew - dear reader - but if you did - I would be ashamed.
The people I do encounter here are the lost souls of post United States American ghetto life - They are not always people you want to speak to for you see the frightening and wild and feral look in their eyes.

And yet I want you to see, to see what you would approve of in my self determination of a life. It is just nothing to write home about.

I just don't have relationships and exchanges so I suffocate anyone who will listen or read me - like old people do. When I look into my minds crystal ball... I see... through the fog of pollution and Ohio haze:

I see hard work loneliness and a road ahead of indeterminate length that ends in death with not much else by way of distraction.

That is why I dream of travelling across Arab North Africa - from Morocco across the Atlas mountains on to Algeria and Tunisia and over and across to Libya and into Egypt - across the Sinai to Medinah and Makkah - south to Sana'a and Taizz and Aden and Mukallah - eastward into Oman and Muscat - over to Dubai and the multi-colored desert sands of the UAE - stopping in Qatar and Bahrain and Kuwait City before checking out old Damascus or bullet riddled Beruit and on into what remains of once grand and humane Palestine. Across Jordans dreamlands and tranversing Iraq and into Iran over land to Afghanistan - to see - really see for myself - what is going on and where. To find the Khyber Pass and make my way back to Multan and without missing stops in Peshawar and Quetta - passing somehow via airplane through Baku in Azerbaijan or wandering around Kazakstan.

Really it's all a trip to go on to never return from.
Dreams like this are how I hold on.

When I dream of travelling like this I want to be captured by Yemeni tribes men - held ransom for government money as a human collateral of a tool of negotiation - except that is a dream of mine - they would never get me to leave their tribal village so I wouldn't be of much use.

Being truely free means being willing and able to die at any moment in time - even if most of the time - there is no reason in doing so - living or dying. But until everything including my pulse can be lost - I can't live.

Ohio is a nightmare trap sort of place. Run by an Oligarchy of merciless self serving Capitalists who care nothing for Ohio or its remarkable history or its once beautiful land and ecology - to say nothing of the weird modern people now stuck here who have no work, no healthcare, no where to walk to, nowhere to drive to and nothing much to do but drink liquor, smoke cannabiss to bliss themselves out with - get caught up in Crystal Meth, Crack or the Heroin hills surrounding central Ohio's flatness....

One begins to wonder if we don't have Al Qaeda and the Taliban all wrong. To places filled with urban ghetto warfare - or anarchy in Moghadishu or post Soviet/American Afghanistani tribes, lost in the vacuum of all that confusion, by Western and Soviet meddling - for all their primitive applications of Islam - those forces, however primitive, might bring stability for people. I'm not so sure we can blame them for the harm the US or old Soviet or present day China induces, ironically, for the free markets of Capitalism. Wether its the Somalian coast guard being branded pirates so that the West can dump toxic waste in their territorial waters or so that China can fish all the fish out of those waters while Somalians on the land have no food and water and not much governance left.

And G-ville, Ohio - or Detroit City - despairing lives and parkinglots to nowhere might eventually need some of that Taliban bearded chic to restore order because the greed of American styled consumerist human commodification of lives lived as human resources for Capitalism isn't going to build inner city towns and gardens for food much less flowers and trees.

I'd move to Afghanistan or the SWAT area of Pakistan in a heartbeat. I'd move to Sharjah if I could get a job there. Dubai - I'd rather be a retail slave laborer there than here in Nowhereville, Ohio...

All that is left for me here is my sister self locked up for good without end in a womens "reformatory" with no chance for release even after three decades and still going - how does someone locked up like a Palestinian for six decades re-emerge into a strange, super fast changing, technologically advancing, mercilessly fast, for a Capitalists world based on shameless, self serving, greed? Explain to me this womens reformatory reform process then, exactly - Ohio. My life is locked up there too with all those women - like all those broken families and people and children in Gaza.

Despite all my built in life contradictions to it - Islam - is the only way out of this prison planet lifestyle in this here decadent and declining and self and annoyingly righteous West. What do you do when you find that the rainbow of the rainbow flag takes your life on a ride full circle? There aren't no red or silver shoes to take you back to Kansas because Kansas is a McWal-Mart-ers super paver Chinese owned parkinglot to a boarded up store front.

So much for the amber waves of grain and endless mind boggling vast prairies under big blue sky with little fluffy Orb like clouds...

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

From the Jungian Archetypical Landscape of Nightmares and Parkinglots


...its only 4am:
I awake to a dream in which I am holding or clinging, in some humiliating begging style, to Barts knees while he sits in a chair - sobbing into his lap because he and Gert are going to sell the house and I can't buy it for the price they could get for it on the market over there.

Bart tells me "...you can never,
never come back, etc..."
My heart hurts - it just doesn't stop - this heart - the beats or this pain.
Before also:
Dreamt I was in the Ardennen/Ardennes trying to drive in those hills and valley's during rain and fog and heavy dark low looming clouds.
I commented to Bart that I forgot how not flat Belgium was.
Now: Here in my Ohio waken life.... before sunrise...
....lost in a test market city
stuck in retail with no way out.
Like Bart came and went
Into my life and fifteen years of my life just vanished like they never happened
I just cant bare any of this interior pain...
...during the day or night
I ache - my heart aches
My hair is nearly blond again from the Ohio spring sun, my face brown and older looking
I do not recognize myself or where I am.
I speak the language but do not understand anyone. I wonder does anyone I know or don't know:
Know these depths of senseless, seemingly self inflicted, pain?
....it's probably Demonically true but I forgot one sinister dream sequence where Bart snapped back to my crying:
Speaking in implications the way that Euro-types do in cold hearted and nasty ways,

saying:

"...none of this would have happened if it wasn't for your little fad" - meaning my interest in Islam which I learned of and went on an Odysseus like experiential journey within Moroccan Brussels and then abroad to places Americans never go.

After acquainting myself with what I call the New Tangiers of the North

Meaning present day old city Brussels,

That new part of which Belgians try to ignore and pretend isn't there, yet, all that is crazy and wonderful and enchanting about the culture and people of Morocco in Brussel or Bruxelles and throughout Belgium - was what ended up intriguing me the most about old Flemish Bru-town... They, "the Marocians", like me (American ex-pal Matt) back then, we shared a common denominator - lost and stuck there in le Belgica - after having forgotten why or how we all got there: But life went on, caught up with us there anyway. Playing us out in ways we didn't like.

Now, I dream of going to al Maghreb, Maroc, Arab North Africa and on a transcontinental Saharan road trip headed East to Makkah and beyond - in some fantasy version of Nicholas de Bouvier (the 1950's euro Jack Kerouac - book, le livre en Francais, translated into English) "The Ways of the World" - Trying to be post literary Rimbaud selling guns in the Yemen of the past or building a rainbow window-ed lit house in Ethiopia of another century. In this sense my life is all different - like a wrecked car.

...all dented beyond recognition... ....if it weren't for these dreams or nightmares....
...it really would be like that Bart never came and took me away from here
as in Ohio here
saving me inadvertantly from the tyranny of the Bush II years
only to drop me off back here for the Obama Administration of our collective self empowered counter corporatist Hope and Change...
So we in G-ville could believe in ourselves again.

and I went back to where I never wanted to be
alone
or in
Brussels
or in
Ohio centrale
I forget which now.

This is when I am grateful for the mercy in ritual.

Right now, right here, as I write this: It is al Fajr - predawn prayer time in G-ville, YO'hi-O...

In that Qur'anic Arabic recitation and ritual repetition, in a foreign language I scarely know, there is comfort. Consolation, if not purpose.

I wish I could hear the call to prayer from the nearby but silent Minaret which stands aloof and in eye-sight - just down the street. A street I call Koning Albert2delaan or Avenue de la Roi Albert II - King Albert Avenue of Belgium - my street chez moi maison bleu - that here passes through what I call lil' Mogadishu: Where the minaret stands architecturally punctuating with grace this dusty third world style road I now live off of.

The birds are singing like it is the end of the world but it's just the end of one more night alone at the begining of another day. Alone again. Outside the air is fresh and a morning star or planet looms in the sky too bright and too low that it is unsettling.

Last night at Magreb time (evening prayers around dusk) - at that time just before al Fajr arrives to Makkah that I follow via Satellite - the crescent moon here hung over head in this comforting ways at twilight to be found in the tree tops.

Two raka's figuratively kiss the Earth and give thanks. Obedience yielding and returning dignity.

On a psychadelic magic carpet ride that I pray in prayer that takes me back to somewhere I have been - anywhere but here.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Dream Journal or Uncommon Nightmares

I've been reading online from links sent by e-mail (or is it e-female lol) pals to stories featured at Common Dreams... Some of which make me think that e-paper should be titled Uncommon Nightmares...

I had an uncommon nightmare of my own last night... I awoke to psychic network of dreams of Zionist Israeli demolishions and incursions into the old remnants and quartiers Arab East Jerusalem. Never been there but from what I gather, what is left of Arab Palestine - be they Christian, Jew or Muslim - the soul of that place and all those people now around also scattered around the world - resides there - not in sentimental notions of a mythical land without a people, for a people without a land... and fantasies of a new state - the I-Word state... Those old and paved over Palestinian towns and villages that spawned Christianity fared better under multi-cultural Palestine and the forgotten 600 year old Ottoman Empire, than some sort of Sci-fi American version of the Israeli-ification of an unwanted past, people and all the cultures and societies that went with that old place - in favor of what exactly? Some bland form of automotive culture and red roofed McInternationalist style and relentless Capitalism that could be anywhere and simultaneously nowhere. Nowhere-ism at it's best or worse....

Why am I though on some psychic frequency dreaming of Old Palestine and Her last stand in the unique parts of Jerusalem? Not to mention Ramallah or Gaza City or what was once under Tel-Aviv. I'd rather not be in bed here in old Ohio waking up to other peoples present day suffering over there that my tax dollars here help fund. I'd rather be in Arab North Africa, from anywhere in (Morocco) al Maghreb to Cairo - or Arabia - or any one of the cool stans... Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan - Iran - Azerbaijan - somewhere with Mosque and Minaret is where I day dream of travelling to.
But East Jerusalem - old al Quds should be saved - preserved and not forgotten as too many people from too far away see it as a spiritual metro pole and a cultural antiquity of sorts. A place like that should not be demolished and repressed to be replaced with an bland Westernized uniformity of modernity.

Aren't we all sons and daughters of Abraham/Ibrahim?

Who here remembers Rachel Corrie and her brave selfless last stand.

What the United States doesn't understand is that if we don't rise up and start pointing our collective conscientious finger at Zionism then all that razor wire and checkpoints will be sprouting up over here in the other big Israel. All those Wal-green/CVS intersections with cameras at the traffic lights will be the future checkpoints - enormous concrete walls can be built anywhere and justified by fear.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Nightmares from the Ohio Wildlife Roadside Roadkill

So, I am just awake... so this might all be incoherent...

Had this strange long dream that I think my retired teacher pal who was visiting Maysville, Kentucky who posted all these fab old town photos induced... Maysville is on the Ohio River on the Kentucky side.
Those photos combined with where I now work at a deluxe Wal-Mart if ever there were one with an admirable politically correct vision at least - (that sits on an area which I remember as an empty farmland area of two lane roads and wood/wetland areas replete with native Ohio wildlife)....

So, the dream began and I was in an Ohio wetland area with woods flanked by forgotten old abandoned family farms... there were streams, trees, wildlife everything was green and shaded...
In the dream I was with a gaggle of people on a tour... a Wal-mart corporate tour... some executive-type was showing us where there will be a store entrance - right where he was pointing to were these tangle wood trees... I asked, "well, what about these unique trees...?" Everyone was silent - like collectively saying "duh" - CAT - as in Caterpillar would raze them all... then I said, well, at least wouldn't they make a nice natural and unusual alternative entrance to frame the entrance area.... silence...

And meanwhile it is the company Caterpillar who is the machination of bulldozing once grand Palestine.

Then the pasture like prairie in front of all that future Wal-mart-o-rama was teeming with insect life, I asked what would that pasture area be... (again, wrong question)...
...and everyone was silently saying - the super-paver parking lot...

I then said that I suspect that Sam Walton never envisioned all this - this is all just a cult - I then went on in the dream to say to my corporate tour director that my dad - rest in peace - used to dress formally - albeit simply - in brown leather shoes, actual slacks and a sports coat like tweed jacket - kinda dapper until that Wal-mart guy made athletic shoes socially acceptable - pull on synthetic pants with an elastic waistband and a zip up jacket, also synthetic - and that mom (RiP) - wore the same exact same thing - adult versions of children's pull on clothes without any dignity... and they were dead and I blame Sam Walton for their disgraces before the end of their lives, for having lived in such clothes, out of Wal-mart super paver parking lots, eating and dying from fast food and buying up recreational-ly - devoid of purpose - cheap made in china crap - that they thought was American made...Well, I didn't make any friends or sympathies in that strange mute gaggle of people I was with, all nameless and faceless and speechless...

Then, we, as the afore mentioned gaggle, were in an old Americana town somewhere in old and forgotten Ohio - old terracotta brickwork everywhere - streets, sidewalks, structural facades all terracotta brickwork with simple yet elegant arches - grand pillared churches poised on hilltops - Lots of business on the High street - independent opticians, A temple like Public Library, bookstores, barber shops for men and beauty salons for women, cafes, green grocers - butchers and bakeries... Remember, I lived in a small country called Belgium which still, at least in some half and half way, functions this with the independent family owned service businesses with corporate American style supermarket stores as competition.....

In the center of town was a beautiful town hall that still functioned as such - lots of trees, green spaces, shade, the ever present red brick that seemed vaguely Dutch or Flemish in style and hills and no grid of street alignment. Narrow streets too...

And yet all this was the 21st century and somewhere in forgotten Ohio..... and what was once a grand turn of the last century city park behind the town hall - get this - a huge three story deluxe Wal-mart was having its grand opening... and I was having, all of the sudden, visions of the beautiful old Ohio town going out of business and becoming obsolete overnight... then in the dream I was in the town hall standing in the waiting area of a grand lobby - again somehow with Bart the Belgian - like at the town hall in Brussels... (a grand medieval place still used as such).... anyway.... we were in this Maysville styled town hall - waiting on the Mayor... This Mayor - he had replaced his old carved paneled wooden door to his office with a security but plastic Tupperware brand or was it a Rubbermaid brand petro-product plastic flap of a door... From in his office Populist conservative like news was blaring from the radio or TV... and I realized that Mayor got paid off by McWal-Mart of this country's sinister Military Industrial Complex Corporate-o-cracy to build that Wal-mart in a town like that on top of a historic park... with the purpose to erase our collective American, once grand and yet simple brick and elegant history replete with architecture that yielded human dignity from its very proportions by some Jeffersonian intent - But that the media had an agenda to, like I said, just erase our past, which perhaps, was in reality all a modern day and socially acceptable Capitalists cult of all that. The local media which somehow by its incessant yammering, convinced all the groovy independent business people to go along with the Mayors plan to sacrifice the grand old park for a deluxe flagship Wal-mart with a parking lot out back (rather than in front - the effect of which would literally turn the town inside out - back asswards as it were)... because acres and acres of Dominion type vinyl housing was going to be built surrounding the town guaranteeing the independent businesses more business despite the obvious colossal competition... oh, it was just a nightmare...

In the dream I was having literal visions of new Dominion brand type gated community houses, McMansionettes and townhouses, condos and apartments, cheap chain motels, only a couple years old falling into foreclosure and disrepair and standing empty - the independent shops boarded up and empty - out of business signs - the Wal-mart - empty and closed up - denuded of its sign-age - the once beautiful gracious town looking like it was neglected and forgotten for years - and anyone still left there was stuck strung out on crystal meth...

Then I woke up...

Awoke to a rainy day of suicide skies...

And thought I felt like Jimmy Stewart opposite Donna Reed in the Christmas time black and white holiday film - It's A Wonderful Life.... I was remembering that film was referenced in that jerk of an asshole, Mr. (James Howard) Kunstlers book titled The Geography of Nowhere - that book is great but the author is a nasty sort of human which I experienced first hand through e-mail...

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Magic Carpet Ride

Magic Carpet Rides - or doors as Portal to other Kingdoms, other worlds as seen from G-Ville central Ohio.

My Palestinian refugee friend and Brother - A tall and handsome Arab named Muhammad - sent me a delux Saudi made Prayer Rug to encourage my cosmic journey explorations from within.

In Coleman Barks book The Essential Rumi - there is a

Jellaladin Rumi poem about a Prisoner receiving a prayer rug from a friend from the outside - when what he really needed was a key to the locks of his imprisonment. But through the prisoners use of the Prayer Rug in the pattern he noticed a design that was the tumblers and bolts of the locks of his imprison and thus found his way out.


I admit that has been my experience and longing with this Prayer Rug of a Gift from a generous Palestinian living as a refugee in The Kingdom of Humanity.
In one photo here in the backyard the rug points from the North American direction to the Qibla or towards Makkah. The rug is in a private corner of the backyard - Ironically or humorously - the satellite dish from which I stay connected to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - to Makkah and Madinah and the sounds of the call to prayer defines my homes Qibla - literally and figurately...
Those Arabian satellite TV networks from Al Jazeera to Sharjah or Qatar or the Yemen are all serving all of humanity - to those willing to tune into knowlege and Message of the Last Prophet.

I just don't trust any man without a beard regardless of their religion or lack of it.

New Doors

There is a saccharine Christian saying - or was it from the terrestrial TV days or rather nights - from the repeat broadcasts of the film the Sound of Music? I forget - it doesn't matter anyway - but it went...
"When the Lord closes a door, He opens a window" - Implying for one to crawl through an unexpected window as opportunities to move seem to close like a slammed door...
Then I can't help remember the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe....


Through that wardobe door one left one world and ended up in another... Where one could find Prince Caspian and take a Voyage on the Dawn Treader...

I installed these doors in the photographs here in self determination Thomas Jefferson style on my post World War II Am-vets neighborhood cracker box house - decades beyond its expiration date... This is my own personal Monticello or castle if you will. I've got the red hair too with Jefferson and all the Liberal notions as well. Where you see 15 glass paned doors there were once walls...

The desk was my design my from re-used (Thanks President Jimmy Carter for that) Habitat for Humanity wooden kitchen cabinetry better built than any kitchen cabinetry on the market these days and some cheap counter tops - that's where my antique computer sits from the Ghettoville, USA blogette desk I write to you, dear reader, here from...

The things about Blogs is no body is reading them - not that I care. My broadcasts here are like all the mute and silenced Minarets of North America... They are there if you choose to see them standing like never before - unnoticed and especially unheard. I blog - keep my journal - write down the days and sometimes the nights as they pass through me. I wonder if science fiction like time travelling will bring a purpose to all these blogs on the internet. Uncharted Lives from unknown times across the Universe like a faint radio signal.

I would like to climb through the door of a plane and disembark through that door and find myself under the skies of North Africa, Arabia, Persia, or any of the cool Stans - Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan or the Cholistan desert.

Mostly, I long to return to the roof tops of Old Sana'a - the last place I travelled through that finally felt like my only earth bound temporary home. I would like to see Sharjah and visit Mosques in the Kingdom of Humanity.

I watch the al Fajr prayers (the pre-dawn prayers) on TV from the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia - KSA on Channel One (KSA1) for Makkah with the view of the Ka'aba 0r on Channel Two (KSA2) from Madinah with the voice over in English. When it is pre-dawn prayers there I can pray here simultaneously with those fortunate Brothers and Sisters in the land of the Prophets and beards and clean white clothes.

It's either that or Al Jazeera in English or TV from Sharjah or Qatar...

This might be Ghettoville and the West in decline and from social and cultural poverty but via satellite I can travel to more dignified places and in virtual ways - in real time - participate and learn to be a better person defined by self determination and self respect: From a willingness to know other things, other people, other places, other customs...

There is something about the media Sheikhs in white from distant lands that if you choose to see them and tune in to them with a private satellite dish - like some old terrestrial radio antennae - it is possible to tune into and find a key in the pattern of ones prayer rug to unlock the doors of restraint from here in the "free world" of the West.

I am not the job I work at.
I am not the car I drive.
I am not the neighborhood I live in.

In central Ohio dreaming of desert night skies from places like:

Makkah
Madinah
Marrakesh
Sharjah
Muscat
Sanaa
Jeddah
Kuwait City
Baghdad
Tehran
Cairo
Kabul
Multan

G-ville Backyard Spring Moments

Here are some photos du jour of G-ville chez moi: My washed clothes hanging out on the line, environmental activist style, clothes drying... I was even using the clothes line in the cold Ohio winter. It's not that I am not too cheap to use the electric clothes dryer - there is just something about the act of putting up clothes on the line and letting them wave like peaceful prayer flags. Plus on a sunny spring day like today out on a line they will
dry faster than in an electric and costly machine to run...
Maybe, I miss the sense of Mother or Grandmother that a clothes line invokes. In fact often times clothes out on the line dry faster than in the dryer anyway - hanging up the clothes is good for stretching the muscles without having to do Yoga. Once the clothes are dry I leave them out waving in the breeze because even my boxer shorts remind me of colorful Tibetan Prayer flags carrying prayers out along the breezes.

I planted a few small Spirea late last autumn that are starting to blossom - My folks had their backyard lined with Spirea, Lilac and Forsythia which they dug up from around the foundation remains of the old farm house that was torn down to build the housing development they moved to in the early nineteen-sixties... My folks, RiP, were recycling, unaware, long before the days of being environmentally or politically correct - they were just cheap! lol - Then again I am generally cheap or trying to practice being so as a virtue...

I still day dream and night dream of making road trips across North Africa from al Maghreb otherwise known as Morocco through Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, across the West of al Mesr (Egypt) and onto the Kingdom of Humanity - Saudia Arabia - before ending up in Dubai in the Emirates detouring to Muscat and back to Sana'a and Taizz and back to the UAE. From there I'd like to make an extension into Persia to pass through Esphahan and then trek across the mysteries of Afghanistan before finding my across the Kyber Pass to check out other places like Peshawar and Mystical Multan.

The thing is mostly I am at work or in my back yard just hanging out - but my heart was bewitched by Arabia - I fell in Love in Arabia with a place as if it were a mysterious and magical woman - My souls earthbound home is in Yemen - I learned that from staying there one summer...

I really don't know why I am in Ohio. How I got here, much less how I ended up back here. I don't know who is coming to take me elsewhere but I associate Ohio with some strange forgotten ancestral Native energy - a swampy morass of wetland and woodland and spirits mingling between the heavy humid sky and damp ground. Now entirely cleansed of Native people as if it were Palestine of today which is still being cleansed in progress due to our Western minded dis-regard. Here the wetlands and woodlands succumbed to farms - then factory farms - then subdivisions and strip malls and the rampant parkinglots to nowhere. Then came Wal-mart - Good Lord I get a headache just thinking about Wal-Mart. Those acres of retail tarmac were once pure Ohio woodlands and wetlands. And yet the wild life returns to where the cars are now parked - The drivers of those shiny metal boxes oblivious to what once was here...

Mostly the wildlife I see is roadkill which is why I identify with myself being Ohio wildlife roadkill. It's just a matter of time until my body is a discarded carcass strewn and forgotten alongside a busy Ohio road.

And yet I dream of North Africa, Morocco, Makkah and Madinah - Dubai - Tehran - Kabul - Quetta - Peshawar - Multan (the ultimate Sufi magickal mystery tour of a city!)... I want to make a road trip like none other - from one realm of Mosques and Minarets cultures and tribes and its modern city life - following the reminder of the broadcast Calls to Prayer from different areas. I really don't want to live anywhere where I can't hear the Minaret reminding me that this Earth bound life is not all there is, because this life is just in no way, especially right now, from Ohio, enough.

Ironically, I chose to live on a central Ohio street with a Minaret - the minaret was designed with architectural sympathy and a nod to the prevailing culture and architecture here from this region - Not a slender Egyptian or foreign minaret - but a sturdy thick barn silo style minaret attached to a Mosque built with architectural dignity and grace - not like an aluminum shed of the drive through church variety so common in this neighborhood. The Minaret I can see from house from down the street is a silent Minaret - And this is the land with freedom of speech and freedom of religion... The ice cream truck though daily broadcasts many times throughout the day hawking ice cream loudly to an impoverished neighborhood.

At least I've got satellite TV and can explore the dignity and grace of people and places who have not forgotten the real meaning of Allahu Akbar - God is Greater. Greater than any of this....

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Abrahamaic Monotheism Version 3.0


In Dutch the word for Tulips are Tulpen...
Pictured here are some evidences of Spring springing up - rising up from the dead of winter - from out in the backyard on my existential trip to nowhere from where I watch the seasons change and feed the birds.
I also had to mow the lawn today with my People Powered Mower - (no electric, no gasoline - just pushing)...
Meanwhile the laundry is hanging out on the line to dry... I hung it up myself on the line outside to dry after I washed in a machine - there is no Misses Crouch. The windows in the house are open letting in fresh air even though it really isn't warm enough for all that... No suicide skies today.
I can't help but remember familied Easter Sundays in years past - when I was a kid - before all this roadkill lifestyle of mine descended up on me. Those were happier if not more ignorant times - less alone times.
Meanwhile, this might be Ghettoville - or G-ville - but I hear a dog off in the near distance barking - not my own. Birds chirruping and some singing. Mostly I hear nothing but the gentle cool breeze which takes imagination to achieve.
Whenever some one asks me directly point blank: "Matt are you a Muslim" I suddenly fall into a K-hole of thinking and think, how in Islam, anything that is created by God is Muslim, including the person who just asked me that annoying question whether they know it or want to believe it or not. Then I get to thinking: "Am I created by God" (insert question mark) - For all I know I am a child of Shaytan in the land some Persian types refer to as the Great Shaytan - which, incidently, I agree with those Revolutionary old men. Well, I believe in God - like in Arabic - Allah Almighty Akbar - Allah is Greater. But God is God and he has 99 names in Islam and quite a few other as well in other monotheistic religions of which there are the Big Three - Abrahamaic Monotheism Versions 1.o, 2.o and 3.o and probably all the sub categories of the .1 and .5's plus myriad in between, but who is counting? Who cares if you pray sitting down, standing up, bent over or all three combined, 0r even, who cares if you don't pray at all...
It ain't, nor should it be, anybody's business if you do... or dont.
Is the point - if after I'm gone, as in dead and gone and some one wakes me up then asks me about what I believe, or believed and whatever I achieved, or didn't achieve - or thought and felt, or tried to do - good or bad - I mean, if that were to happen, as I believe it will, or hope it will, (because this life does not feel like enough!) - Not because I want to Believe but because it was chosen for me, long before there was a "me" or and "I" or a tooth for a tooth... I know what I believe - I know what I am running from and running to and how I seem to, statistically speaking, run back and forth.
I think the bearded Prophets of Old are cool - especially the ones you see on the streets and satellite TV of today. I really do want to visit Makkah under Arabian skies. I want to spend more time in Arab North Africa as well - anywhere within earshot of the call to prayer from the Minaret - before dawn or before sunset and all the times in between - but, no, I am not very good at what I believe or practice or disbelieve in but I try to keep it all to myself. Neither do I see myself travelling anytime soon - But I practice being optimistic about that. I need to travel - back to Arabia - which is like simultaneously time travelling to a dusty past and an inter-galactic New Las Vegas of a future when you land in that DBX - Dubai airport!
The Universe is very big.
I often times find myself remembering Yemen. The rooftops in Sana'a, Yemen are magical - they are divine and meditative places above the cachophony of a crazy modern and ancient Southern Arabian city of the Prophets of old. It really is the mystical Arabia Felix. Back there to this day in old Sana'a women glide along dressed in Ninja black... Those images of dark fabric dignity and mysterious eyes of silence and grace. I keep having this compelling image haunt me - specifically also of me laying on my back on a roof in some city such as old Sana'a with such a woman - a sister-wife in the religious sense - who like me - enjoys kicking back and watching the nighttime stars turn by on their big wheel. Holding hands in silence watching the stars in the sky - not side by side in some separate chairs getting fat together watching the stars on TV - but laying back on the roof, holding hands in silence - content with watching the stars glide by on a warm Arabia night breeze.
That dream is replete with al shay (the tea) with cardamon and sugar setting out in little cups and a metal tea pot.
Jellaladin Rumi translated by Coleman Barks, in the book, the Essential Rumi taught me a lot - that led me to read and re-read a mod translation of the Majestic Qur'an with the calligraphic Arabic and English side by side - I want to visit the Kingdom of Humanity - the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Are there any other questions and does any of this really matter in some Western styled pointed confrontation: Yes my past and present life contradict me but this is the Soul bound by the mortal coil that I am wrapped up in and all I know as me that gets called Matt or sometimes when I am really lucky, Mustafa. I really do want to travel more but essentially I just want off this planet.
On a side note, I sincerely wish Barack Obama and his family and the Administration of the White House at present would have inherited a much better National condition - all of non-white America deserved better - legal or illegal - We the People deserved not the discarded carcass of a gaggle of nasty blue eyed Zionist Corporatist Vampires of Capitalism - All of Us in G-ville have Hope and desperately want a form of Change we can believe in - one that will include all Gods children.

Friday, April 10, 2009

Crucifixations or Death and Taxes

Oh yeh I have to say I have had third world styled food poisoning - at a moment when the only toilet in the house had been taken out - and I was really in the shit sprays for days - still left with a severe headache from all that. More evidence if we needed any that life here in the US is a third world country - food poisoning.

I got hired today in some under-employmend situation but under-employed is better than un-employed - and despite being sick as a dog at that! Plus I contacted my old job and got them to FAX my W-2's and I have an appointment to get my taxes filed tomorrow... so once that's done i'll rest a little easier...

I keep asking myself if today has any religious effect on me in some lingering memory like way? I will say today I got a lot done despite being sick and felt like someone was looking out for me - maybe that was because I visited my sister yesterday - and seeing Margo is like seeing an old friend and hanging out with the good ol' Crouch family for Sunday Roasts... (back in the early 70's) plus seeing her connects me back to when mom and dad were around and even before Margo ended up incarcerated when Grandma (Crouch) was around - before all this that I now know as life caught up with and depressed me down to near half dead paralysis of a road kill life.

I still have to pinch and remind myself that I am also a Belgian and a "gay divorcee'" of a Belgian at that... But moreso - what seems ever more dream like is the time I spent abroad - Yemen now seems so exotic and dream like - I can't believe I not only went there but thrived there better than in Belgium.

For the short time I was there I still have vivid memories of the UAE. And then Pakistan except for some rough times there (which despite what I remember when I kind of tripped out in Lahore - from stress of all that full on culture shock that caught up with me there - where - I still remember the internet cafe in vivid detail where those e-mail correspondences to Bart and other friends in the west occured from - where I was saying "help, what did I get myself into?" - but then later recovering lol) is equally an exotic memory experience that I am tremendously proud of.

I never stop being amazed at how freaked out Midwesterners (even hip urbane ones) can get when I speak of having been to those places... (and sometimes all the Belgium years included).

...So somehow Margo and where she is connects me to the good past parts of the Crouch family - and my kinda cousin who is Margos only friend in the free world left - well - my visits with him connect me to my moms side of the family - and makes me feel less detached and like a lost soul here - that I feel that way here where I am from (meaning central Ohio) is baffling to me - maybe because this place lacks any real sense of place other than all the wal-mart super paver parking lots - oh the horror of wal-mart as Betty Butterfield says on Youtube.

But it is odd that, that old communal visiting hall, at ORW, which hasn't really changed in 31 years - now is an architectural construct memory in my mind more familiar to me than the home we were all brought up in. I must say it is weird having 31 years of my 40 years revolve around my sisters Margo's incarcerated, prison, check point, razor wired, humiliated, dehumanized life - and that somehow even when she needed mental health care and medicine - when she got nothing but a plea bargain poor persons prison (way to go Ohio) - she managed to succeed within the state imposed limitation on her life. She, not me, is the remarkable person here.

I should really think about all that some more because too many memories are coming back...But Margo has some great stories about Mom and Dad that either Mom and Dad would never have told me - for who knows what reason - propriety or their ideas of parental responsibility or because with their rigid twice monthly for years visits to see Margo - in some ways my living under my parents roof then kept me at a greater personable distance those years - I don't know...

I do like hearing the family stories from Margo and my cousin that I just, stories that I never knew about. But really Margo is heroic - we all have to admit that now in her ability to survive - Including that Kafka-esque Parole Board.

My ex-teacher pal from dads old widowered condo life post mom was telling me about this LD kid an artist kid who burnt his art (in the sink in the high-school art studio - responsibly no less - and ended up being forced on medication - then when he turned into a zombie from meds he got put on more meds - which is ultimately the real control formula that made my condo pal retire from teaching early) - To which I said that really good artists have always burnt the work that they didn't want created - which I think is a virtue and a sign of some genuine rare genius...

The post Bush II Administration system in place that puts this sort of bright lived lives down is just plain wrong. I also told my pal that Americans need to admit that public school in the US is day care so that parents can be unhindered human resources - and that college in the US is really just to get those Americans who do go on to that to be on par with European high school kids. And that Grad Students here are only equal with European undergrads.

Until we can admit this is the education reality in this country we can not evolve and better this place as a nation - until we can admit that this country has huge population mass third world debt traps (houses, schooling, cars, healthcare etc). Even the whole idea of a middle class might be a myth of a pipe dream - an ever elusive pie in the sky American Dream - but life here is in reality an unending ever unfolding multi-faceted nightmare of debt and traffic.

While at the grocery foods car park today I saw by accident some female goose made a nest out of fresh mulch in the parkinglot under a parkinglot landscape area tree between parked cars. I remember when that whole area was a big wooded wetland that ran over the hill between the Scioto and Olentangy Rivers where it wasn't farmed - generations of geese later on still collectively remember that too.

Then while sitting in the car just taking in the suicide sky an old little woman walked up to the geesette offering bread and said in this little voice "you are doing a good job" to the mother goose - like the goose was some little teen mom living out in the parkinglot. Imagine what the goose was thinking - fight or flight... what is this crazy, upright, two legged, scary, white headed, two uncontrolled flaying armed, human doing to me now?

Everywhere I look I see Palestine under the Israeli Occupied Forces seige - even in the nature and parkinglots here. Well that little old woman meant well but can only think in humanizing terms with nature - as if nature were just like a childrens Beatrix Potter story - where all of Old Englands wildlife are characters like people...

This country needs more dissent - more public protest in the streets. Corporate/politician heads should roll in their own blood more often. Well despite all this and the house nearing completion and ready to be flipped (as if that is going to happen any time soon in this market! lol HA!)...

If I can't travel abroad like I used to again then really I don't care if my life ends early because this American Matrix experience is just not working for me in any way with meaning. I know you know what I mean but I had to write this... I've been sick with food poisoning for three days cooped up in the house with the shits - at one point the toilet had been ripped out and I was using a hole in the floor or a bucket for the endless shits - can you imagine...? My Gawd my travels in the third world were never this primitive!

Well I got through it and the toilet got reinstated - and I got a job - and faked it, though sick as a dog, in that corporate nonsense intimidating interview - that thank God I was just too sick to care about and that probably got me through the intimidation part - lol - Well - jobs these days in reality if you can find one are just a stepping stone - no company wants lifers despite what they might say about any of that - I just wish I could bicycle to work - because the commute is insane - Central Ohio should be a bicycle city given how generally flat it is like the whole of bicycling Holland or like Copenhagen.... who knows - maybe it will happen sooner rather than later... I don't know but this house is finally looking like it will get finished... Which is one big psychic relief to have a clean space to live my life in and out of.

The Mexican guys who work here though despite the difficulties of communicating are really great and actually put up with me and fix the things I complain about without loosing their sense of humor - which is actually nice to have around. But my gawdh that crazy Mexican radio they listen to loudly when they work drives me batty if I'm on the phone... I do use Spanish around these guys so maybe they appreciate that - I have learned a lot of Spanish with them just being around and I'm not afraid to try to use it. When I do they laugh at me - not with me - but I don't care - it's the laughter that I appreciate so much. Plus they work fast and cheap without being stressed about it all so who cares if they leave the beer bottles everywhere in the yard like they had a party - it kind of goes with the neighborhood...

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

On Al Jazeera in English As Seen From Within the US

I should be asleep... But I've had 3rd world styled food poisoning, the details of which I will spare you. But my physician DR kindly e-mailed me a remedy to care for myself since I don't have healthcare at the moment.
He suggested I go find that Pedialyte (electrolyte replenishing drink for infants) which for six and half dollars (at the corner liquor shop) for a liter I don't know how people can afford to breed...
Also got Gatorade to go with it. I must really have been dehydrated for all that I drank I have hardly had to go as it were. It is tough being sick out here in the sticks of Ghettoville alone - too far from friends. Though there are many nearby within sight churches and mosques - no one is in the habit of checking up on the neighbors...
I'm exhausted from having been so sick but now can't sleep...
I was watching al Jazeera in English via satellite and they had the most amazing examination on two things in the US:
1. Detroit - and how the current economy is affecting that already dead carcass of a once grand and beautiful place (real estate that can't find buyers at 50 dollars to 500 dollars for a house on some land, albeit in need of work but habitable all the same) - This because vast neighborhoods have no police department or fire department or city services like trash and garbage pick up that make up basic urban infrastructure city services - It was nearly sci-fi post apocalyptic Mad Max, Mel Gibson, Road Warrior like - Perhaps the scariest part of that report was on the newer suburban places being stripped down and left vacant or the (30 some storied) high-rises that make up the core of the center of downtown Detroit all being abandoned; (not just a few floors being empty or one or two abandoned hi-rises but all of them) - and then...
2. On the US prison population being 25 percent of the global prison population while our US national population only comprises 5 percent of the global human population... Then how the criminal justice system is preying upon the poor under classes in merciless ways... It was all really great documentary style production - but, my God, this country from an outsiders critical perspective is really exposing how, in places here, everything is in shameful tatters. I mean, we all know this on some level but it takes an outsider view sometimes to present it back to us. To hold up the mirror so we can see ourselve as we are.
If only this stuff were available on mainstream US media outlets. And it's al Jazeera and it's actually very concerned on our behalf in these overtly sympathetic ways that for media is quite sophisticated to present in convincing ways. I really must say Al Jazeera in English is impressive and very much needed. But who here watches it? But hey I'm unemployed can't they at Al Jazeera in English hire me?
There was also a point about the central train station in Detroit being this once grand and now abandoned structure that was in use until like January '88 which lasted longer than Columbus' Central Station or Union Station as I think it was called... it was also a grand structure... demolished - Reaganized... And now though Columbus is the state Capitol there is no passenger train service that stops here.
...And that poor people here end up in prison - where the state pays 60,000 a year on the inmate - and the inmate in their whole life probably never had access to that much money or care that money like that could provide - so it might be prison but it is better than Ghetto-life...
So I am really thinking - my God - those Islamic Republic for all their libertarian drawbacks might be statistically speaking on the whole offering all of their citizens a better way of life than the liberal democracy way of life here in the states that we identify with as being Lady Liberty's light and beakon to the world as an example....
And, Ironically, people in those Islamic Republic generally believe our liberal democracies are in theory a great way or method and that Islamic Republics have a lot to learn from our way of life, which is, actually, in tune with the Islamic sharia in ways we in the west are loathe to admit. So I am really scratching my head over this.
The question is why doesn't the states want to be the liberal democracy it is and why does it work so hard to undermine its own constitutional foundation - when Islamic Republics are defending and helping us undestand that which we ourselves as a nation are ironically undermining. I mean, would someone explain this to me... is it greed and Capitalism and Corporatism and economic despotism and Zionism all combined into this sinister Beast of our Biblical styled Apocalyptic making...? well it's food for thought.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Happier Images Under Suicide Skies

Yeh so the posts here on the G-Ville blogette have gotten a bit heavy. So here are some images with a lighter message.
"That Car" - some local has made an art car of found art applique' on his own car. I see this car at the most unexpected moments quite a lot. One of the more interesting aspects of life in grey and boring C-bus town...
Then my pal Ben who lives next to a railroad track a few months back photographed some heavy tanks being transported south through town. That corresponded to a day Palestine got hit rather hard in time for Christmas '08. How quickly everything gets forgetten around here. Ironic that for Christmas '08 Israel invades Bethlehem which last I checked was in Palestine...
So yesterday I was at the corner shop run by this groovy Palestinian family and waiting in line to buy some phone credit for my cell phone and the guy in line next to me gets rung up and his total is $19.48 and he says to the woman "1948, Good year, hunh?" and she just sort of smiled back silently. And I am like ready to just yell out - "Dude, do you know your history? Do you know who you are speaking to? If it wasn't for the Balfour Declaration and that year - 1948 - this woman wouldn't even be here on this side of the planet!" - Instead I bit my tongue and keep my mouth shut. The man had no idea - People here just have no idea. I was always taught that ignorance is no excuse.
The donut shop bar stool still life photo is pretty much a feature of my weekend or occassional weekend of my solo life. I don't drink (well normally) but in central Ohio - maybe it's the pollution or just the perpetual overcast suicide skies but you wake up feeling hung over - that's when I go to the local donut shop and get coffee... It's an old Independent Donut Shop that looks like a forgotten relic of Route 66 - except this is no where near the forgotten, replaced and decommissioned freeway that headed West - from Chicago to LA.
You know I am trying to post happier ideas - but I don't really have too many.
I was watching Al Jazeera in English or maybe it was the Saudi 2 station via satellite - and they were saying that over 600,000 jobs in the US were lost in March. Hadn't heard any of that on the comparable US media outlets.
I'm unemployed too but who is counting?
Maybe it's the uncertain times we live in but I have been watching a lot of TV from the Arabian Penninsula. Mostly I don't want to forget how to haggle with Taxi drivers in Arabic in case I have the luxury of travelling back to magical Arabia sometime. But wether I am watching Saudi TV - from either channel 1 or 2 or Sharjah TV which I like a lot... Or Qatar - or even TV from Yemen - I don't know - I have to say that Satellite dish I bought sometime last year which wasn't really expensive - well, I got my money's worth of entertainment out of it. I've learned a lot more about life in Arabian Penninsula than I ever knew from my limited travels over there. What I miss about the Arabian Penninsula is the dignity of the place: People dressed up in Angelic beauty - and gracious people who, really, if you get the chance to speak with, are really the most generous and hospitable of people I have ever hung out with. I like how Arabian Satellite TV presents itself and it's various cultures - it's a different world - and it has the right to make its own rules - but the imagery I am impressed by is that the place doesn't cash in on passing itself off as disrespectable monied trash in way Hollywood is notorious for.
To be honest I've learned a lot from TV from Sharjah in the UAE or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - KSA, or Qatar. Sometimes when I look at the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia I think every citizen there is some sort of extended nearly divine angelic like Royalty - Right now in G-ville nothing feels respectable or pride inducing so watching programming from Saudi or Arabian Television in general has been a great reminder of the potential of human dignity from self determination.
So for that thanks Qatar, Sharjah in the UAE or from the Kingdom of Humanity - Saudi Arabia - from deep in the heart of G-ville.
You know, If you read my blog, I'm always complaining about something that shouldn't be so in this country here - the USA. Like, that we in the US live behind an electronic iron curtain of (mis)/information. Given that the general mainstream media in the US has it's military industrial complex propaganda agenda (that's no secret if you want to see it you can if you don't then you wont) - and that there is another side to that story that one never hears within the US - but then again - the US is still the land of the free in theory. So via the internet - if you are determined - it is possible to read about life outside and beyond the invisible electronic iron curtain of limited world media information that is allowed in - it is still legal to purchase a cheap satellite dish and receive free programming from around the world and watch whatever region that interests you - to find out about life outside. So I should stop complaining - I should try to be more optimistic. Thank God for Al Jazeera in English!
We have a unique President for a pivotal time in History - for this I am glad - really glad and hopeful. And when life within the confines of the US gets to be too much from all the social and economic decay - it is rather a relief to tune into Television from more dignified places like Sharjah, Dubai, Sana'a, from Muscat in Oman or Jeddah, Riyadh and even during religious time from Makkah and Medinah.
It's been a reminder of the potential for human dignity watching basic TV from those places. Plus the "soaps" even when you can't follow along with the spoken Arabic are hysterical and compelling because of the body language and the language of television. So, yeh, things here in the US seem grim - especially from here in depressed socially and culturally - Ohio - And so I'm not travelling uch these days - but while stuck at home inside - i'm usually - thanks to the internet and the satellite - off enjoying other parts of the world and learning something about myself along the way.
And the really nice part about watching TV from the Arabian world is that the sky is always blue and the weather sunny and warm!

Friday, April 3, 2009

Pills and Paperwork or What Healthcare in the US Really Looks Like


Pills and Paperwork are pretty much what healthcare or the lack of it in the US really looks like.
I find the commercials on TV for various Prescription drugs akin to gratuitous psychological violence.
Given the endless pills and paperwork from health insurance companies, medical centers and hospitals or clinics for procedures and tests.... It is just like beating an already sick patient who is trying to recover from an illness. I don't know - healthcare isn't supposed to be like this...
...like a for profit industry.
The pills in and of themselves are distressing - but the paperwork - the incoming and incessant bills are the sinister dimension of the Ohio healthcare system that thrives on keeping people sick to keep the profits in the healthcare industry.
It's enough to make you wonder if there is a Judgement Day or a God.
Will all the Capitalists, Pharmaceutical companies and all the medical Doctors and Surgeons - will they ever have to answer to the Almighty - do they care as care-givers?
It is modern and medieval but especially soulless at the same time...
Healthcare in Ohio is dismal given how merciless the state of Ohio representatives have been over so many decades.
It's not being sick that is so much the problem - getting sick - that is a fact of life... Or the medicine that makes you sicker than what's wrong in the first place. It makes you wonder if we are human lab rats for these pharmaceutical giants to test on. But it's the battery of bills and subsequent incomprehensible paperwork that follow sick people around for years - that's what kills your heart and steals your soul. That's the kicker to all this suffering.
That we have created such a merciless system for ourselves when each and everyone of us will fall into this morass at least once at one point in our lives.
How do we explain that to ourselves even? How do we justify this? And to think the hospitals have a religious affiliation is the icing on the cake - that's the abomination to the people.
That the politicians who defend this shocking system generally also consider themselves religious...
All of this makes me ask if our lives in the US are bought and sold and traded via corporations like cartells who own us - are we as people publically traded as human resource commodities? My guess is yes - If so then shame on us.