Post Script from Ghettoville

I must say with all due respect that the Phase 3 and The Arrivals - the online remarkable series and programs have been very compelling for me and my friends - This series certainly make the unaccustomed to thinking - think. Through these vague and hard to find online programs and my online curiosity I slowly figured out that the US Federal Reserve which was created in 1913 despite being unconstitutional - a global corporate entity that pinned the US dollar to abstract numbers and debt to the future; while removing the dollar from being based in silver or gold... is our nearly 100 year old slave master. What are the numbers behind the debt that defines the US dollar standing on? What is the US dollar pinned to? The Answer: Human lives - from when ones parents pay the Hospital for the birth of a new soul - for the necessary medicine and vaccines - for the very food to nourish - for education whether state tax payer or private - for health "care" - for work or a "career" as an "occupation" - for mortgages to come home to - to find shelter and family in - To retirement and finally the cashing in on the dying process in a hospital or nursing home to the inevitable death tax: A dying process strung out on medicine to prolong the life span of a living human as a resource to be tapped out. That is what the Allah Almighty US Dollar is pinned to. Souls. ...and now there is no where to run to - no way to live outside of this control grid. No way to unplug like in the film the Matrix. You can wake up and see your chains but you cannot exit Plato's cave of control for the blind. And if you do open your eyes and wake up it is as a prisoner of Palestine - which is held captive to show the world what non-compliance means. And now Palestine can be erected anywhere for anyone. Hell begins on Earth and there is no way to avoid it when you have no soul it is your destiny. I'm glad I know this but the resulting personal depression and feeling of powerlessness is all I am left with. I still would rather know. But I cannot change this Matrix of Control. My very life compels this system - I am guilty of it an accomplice for playing a part in it - however small and pointless. My conclusion is I want off the planet - in a space ship that looks like a coffin. Wake Up but there is no way out. After a lifetime within this control grid one has no soul left. I do not have the time or space even to pray or meditate - even if I believe in some form of Allah Almighty God of good and wisdom and compassion. No one here gets out alive. Wide Awake in the prison of life in today's world. I am waiting on the Angel of Death but fear there is none. I am a slave without a soul or a life. I am the silver and gold behind a worthless international currency. In short I am meaningless. Like oil I am a resource to be used up for someone else. ...Wide awake and free thinking in my mind only from a prison played out on either side of the retail checkout counter - in a life lived out of discarded super paver parkinglots to nowhere. I can't see the razor wire but it is everywhere and inside me. Ghettoville, USA Matt

Sunday November 29th 2009

Midsummer's Summer Garden Before the Color Fades

Random backyard snaps of wildflower seed results... Flanders Field poppies remind old folks of WWI Vets.

A Cactus blooms in an Ohio garden. The rest of the photos look like a moment from The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and friends fall fast asleep thanks to Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West distracting the Yellow Brick Road travelers with a field of poppies in bloom - distracted by their destination of illusions while in Ghettoville people chase weedy pipe dreams from parking

lots - car parks - not city parks... parks for cars - not parks for people:

But of super paver parking tarmac places to nowhere, of nowhere for nobody...

In a nation who does not know what "place" is or why it is important and why a monument - not a retail marquee are imporant things for the soul set in place in those very places to make space for place.

I can't put up flowers for all of the dead in all the cemeteries I know so this is my garden to those loved ones who have passed on.

When I see this riot of colors I have to remind
myself that November always brings the death of winter frost and freezing cold. The anniversary of tragedy and loss returns again and again - decade after decade.

It just doesn't seem possible right now from a balmy green world where I am barefoot and in jeans and a T-shirt...

Parkinglots are dead places, for the walking dead - never moreso aparant than in this economy of rubble.

Let the markets decide - they did and they packed up, boarded up and moved out and left us behind in Ohio.

Debt is the liquid in the broken up dreams of a failed nation's veins and the parkinglots stand cracked, weeded up, fenced up, forgotten in front of old strip malls of the cheapest buildings possible.... Mocking the reality that Western Societies only present the illusion of Democracy - and that Western Democracy's only present the illusion of freedom. Freedom is not just a free market for the wealth.

Cement block architecture and metal sheds with plate glass windowed fronts... Facades of plywood all boarded over... set back behind colossal monuments of flat tops to nowhere to the trickery of free market Capitalism and the power of the nightmare of the American dream. The fear of the dream being a nightmare is the fear that controls the masses...

There are no corner shops or corner cafes here. There is no here or place - no metropole. Nowhere to walk to. A drive through, yes, for too hot coffee or a drive through for liquor, beer, cigarettes and greasy junk food for

a nation with a huge hole in it to drive through...

A hole where there was once soul - even Route 66 is a phantom memory of stretched out tar in chunks for miles.

Not much need for a flag pole this fourth of July given the legacy of the Bush trauma years...

The ghosts of Reaganism has come home on the horses of the Apocalpse to roost. The Beast of the Apocalypse was Capitalism who seduced us with a shiney new car... As a nation we have lost our dignity and our wallet. As a nation founded on stolen land and stolen lives what did we really expect?

We sit in cars that aren't moving - and if they are moving
then those cars really aren't going anywhere, nor are they, like we, who are not really from somewhere, going anywhere - while the air conditioner is on and the electronic music plays.

Parks for cars, Parks for houses, Parks for golfers but very few parks for citizens... or people. The forgotten city park and it's importance cannot be revived when there is no
place here in Ohio.

No healthcare, no jobs, no unemployment office. No one to call for help with these basics on the hard facts of living. But the creditors will call you but they won't help you - even if you ask.

How many people sit with a hand gun in their lap and a creditor from health care bills on the telephone.

And there is no one to ask for help. It's the Fourth of July, I despise the sound of fireworks - especially this year. Illegal fireworks from a neighborhood brought up on contra-band fire works from the over sized sofa with an over sized pizza and cable TV... for over sized people. Cars that go boom to houses that go boom - for the red white and boom. The reverb is on and everyone has passed out intoxicated and oblivious.

A President of such proportion walking through history calls on us to have Hope - Hope in ourselves - but right now we need a hand up and not a hand out. We need to brush ourselves off and take a much needed vacation - a holiday. We need to sit in cafes and at talk - talk at the corner shop about what we are going to do but those places don't exist like much that we once took for granted. Working poor in debt to time working for corporations while indebt to other corporations.

Carcasses in the abandoned super paver parking lots to Nowhere - Lives played out at the bottom of the retail food chain from both sides of the check out counter - Lost souls on an existentialist ride around and around - year in and year out with no place for destination.

One more trip around the sun - on an axis of four seasons - sure why not - but why? How many more times around in this repetition of ignorance - this annual banging our collective head on the wall to learn what...? What exactly of why we are here and what we are to do with what we have - the stolen, polluted ground beneath our feet or the hijacked and polluted sky above our heads. What kind of sinister place is this that we have made with that mantra of let the markets decide? A grey November gardern not so far away awaits - What do we see in reality mocking us from the parking lots of a nation when the color fades.

Recent Letters Between Belgium and Ohio

Belgium: Hi again

Ohio: I'll try to answer your e-mail letter questions this way -- the rain has stopped and the heat and humidity have set in I can't write a proper letter to answer your great and kind letters...

Belgium: Matt... there is so much sadness and bitterness in your mail. That is so, so sad.

Ohio: jawell c'est la vie, non?

Belgium: I always like to remember you as the guy that made us crack up when he was talking about the things he experienced in good ole' Brussels.

Ohio: yeh well its still me - i was always depressed - its the source of my art and humor...

Belgium: Never thought you'd miss it!

Ohio: what Belgium, Brussels, Bart anything with a B in it?

I miss people and places... Bart got the house, the neighborhood, all my belongings that were shipped over, even the things from before I met him - stuff from my family - they are still there (i hope - Bart says they are but who really knows), the dogs, my friends - jeezus - all he needed was a power dildo and dishwasher and he wouldn't need me or Gert.

Belgium: Why on earth are you staying in Ohio!!!! I don't get that.

Ohio: well you just answered your own questions... where am i going to buy a house in Belgique for 12,ooo dollars... Aalst? Genk?

Belgium: Of course you have your house there now - but still. If you're not happy, go away. You lived here - and I KNOW how different it is - and even if we're the 'old country' we are SO MUCH more 'modern' (the word is 'vooruitstrevend' but I don't know that in English)

Ohio: Progressive i think is the closest match... but yeh you all are very modern - and sometimes i think trapped in that very modernity.

Belgium: ....(more modern) than the States.God, it IS better to live here! We saw some real poverty last year, quite amazing. Patrick's host mother lives on 2 euro a day for food. That is incredible! I don't think I can make breakfast for that money - at least not a breakfast that is good & healthy.

Ohio: yeh life here is really bad - i have never seen it like this.... Europeans just have no idea... I am glad you have a feel for things tho.

Belgium: About Bart... We see him once in a while. We meet. I've always liked Bart a lot and I still do. Don't be too hard on him. I think he's a rather traditional guy and he needs things he can 'hold on to'. Gert is more like that I think. A lot more traditional. I'm sorry I talk about him - but that'll be all.

Ohio: I love Bart a lot more than my own life - he is my best friend and my only family. He divorced me - whatever... good for him and Gert...

Belgium: You were a VERY different person in the end than when we first met. We didn't really understand things in the end.

Belgium: What with Yemen?

Ohio: (i consider Yemen my home - i live to go back - i belong there - it might seem like a contradiction but its a very good way of life)

Belgium: With the beard?

Ohio: (what is it with post Roman society still being obsessed by a clean shaven face - after Yemen and those places - western men all look effeminate to me now - like you can see their mothers faces in their clean shaven face - I call it the Gillette Conspiracy)...

Belgium: The Muslim thing?

Ohio: 1.6 billion people can't be wrong can they? Or do you just think they are - all - wrong - all one big thing - all with the same views etc... Lahore - my god i never saw so much sex drugs and rock and roll - it beats Amsterdam any day - and none of it commodified... it is not based on money...

Belgium: I mean - those people are very homophobic,

aren't they?

Ohio: again I think you answer your own questions... you have a bright mind - don't fall into the traps of dominate (white) cultures ways of thinking....

Belgium: We don't have anything against Muslims - not at all - but there are some of their ideas I really find appalling.Not like they're all that good with minorities or even majorities - like women!

Ohio: You can deconstruct and analyse that sentence for yourself - it sort of really says it all...

They all find the wests attitude very frightening... our relentless support of Zionism despite the appalling human rights abuses by the Israelis... The US's economy would tank even more than it has already if the US didn't invade other places and create enemies to manufacture war....

The answers to your question that relate to me personally are in all my blogs and on Facebook whether it's about sex, drugs and rock and roll or my own quest for personal spirituality and mysticism - its all there and been self published and charted and posted as it all evolved from the point my mother died until now - past my father death and past the relationship that will remain the love of my life - i will not have another relationship like that nor do i want one... I just hope i don't kill myself hurting from Love Lost - I am trying to evolve beyond that but I actually might not... time for me might just have stopped when I got served those divorce papers.

c'est la vie... ultimately life is really sad. every relationship ends - either in life or death, both are murder for those who survive.

The answers to your questions about Islam and the Muslims are apparent to me in how you have framed those questions - which come across more like accusations... your mind has already been made up about the answers with western media like views based in fear and misunderstanding so lets not waste each others time on that.

Belgium: What's with your sister? A maximum security prison? What on earth happened?

it was a terrible tragedy of banality:

She was raped at 13 which sent her life on a different course than any my parents could comprehend - she ended up with a very bad man - had three kids before she was 21 and all in less than four years and then he abandoned her - she tried to commit suicide after a long history - since the initial rape (the first of three violent ones) of mental illness - (no surprise there) and in the process killed her children but didn't succeed with herself... she received a paupers plea bargain of three life sentences rather than the electric chair. She wanted the electric chair but my parents didn't want to do that to me and my brother. In Europe she would have received mental health care for a few years and been rehabilitated - not locked away for three life sentences which she will never live long enough to serve. It is very hard to live with - grow up with. Very, very hard... Most people i know find it fascinating but they do not ever have the capacity to comprehend the grind of it all over three decades - Margo is the only family I have now - She is my best friend - we talk and talk and talk - we joke about how we carry out the tradition of the family Sunday dinner at Grandmas at the prison once a month... it's our way of laughing at the whole tragedy of our lives. I need to be near her - she is much older than me and going blind. The sadness just doesn't end.

I am learning to embrace sadness - run towards it - die with it. like making peace with my own mortality - my own limitation - the fact that I will die with a broken heart from the summation of all of this....

when I got back from Belgium i was called up for jury duty coincidentally for the Judge who was Margo's prosecuting attorney at the time - he was young then - now ready to retire after a successful career - she made his career - i refused to sit on jury duty for him. Life is Gothic. This is my own American Gothic.

Belgium: Matt, I hope you will find some happiness inside of you. Don't let the bitterness take over. Life has it's turns and one has to accept it. People die, they go away, shit happens all the time. And we all get our share, you can be sure of that! It's a lot about the choices you make. Don't let unhappiness or bitterness choose for you, but look at all the options and go for it. Sometimes life doesn't treat you all that nice - but often that's because of the choices YOU and only YOU made. All things that are happening now, are your choice. If you realise that, you can change things for yourself in the future. Choose with your heart and only choose what makes you happy. You really, really, really need that!

Ohio: Well what you say is very true but it is also very Southern Lowland sort of thinking, typical to Northern Europe - it's just not my way. My friends from the Den Haag write to me in much the same way as you - it's all post Catholic/post Calvinist post religious thinking which doesn't set with well most other cultures.... The US is a very religious place in a grocery store variety selection sort of way. Bart never got that about me -- but it was my upbringing because my parents though mostly secular thought after Margo i needed a moral upbringing and all. Meeting up with Moroccans and Muslims and Islam in Belgium - where Catholicism is like an exquisite corpse was an interesting experience for me. It reminded me of the Christian Nazi upbringing i had. It was fun to reframe all that American Christian gay identity with Muslim same-sexers Moroccan transvestite Belly Dancers and bearded men in galalibiyyas - it was too much for the little Flemish Quartier of Brussel - but who cares... I feel like i contributed to Flemish culture in Brussel - but it was the Marocians in Brussels who spoke Flemish that I love - So that is probably why i bonded so well with Marocians and North Africans in Bruxelles - who though born there - were like me - we shared a commonality that I am very happy to have experienced - we were mutually confined to a life outside of the two Belgian mainstreams - occassionally we would get let in to be a part of things but it's not comfortable for either the indigenous Belgians or the Belgians whose culture is from abroad. There is some overlap but honestly Europeans don't want all that multi-culti stuff that has been forced on them. I just never expected my intellectual Belgian pals - be they Flemish or Francophone or both (lol) - to take my Orientalist bohemian ways as treasonous and cut me off - I thought they could just roll with it and evolve with their New North African origin Brothers and veiled Sisters - boy was I naive - even my Americaness was too much for most Francophones... but all of that was a surprise - so much for progressive northern Europe...

Over here even in Ohio - i have the space and freedom to continue doing Moroccan mens drag instead of transvestite drag... lol there are now many Muslims here - unlike in Belgium here they are the very rich and they missed out - like me - on the economic crisis that has brought so many people down from the tyranny of the Bush II years. Here we have Somalians - Palestinians - all Arabs - Pakistanis and a few Moroccans - I stay in their parts of town... African Americans just hate Somalians and the "sand niggers" as they call em - African Americans display acts of blatant racism to these new Americans that Whites from the nineteen fifties showed blacks... oooh times have changed and turned in on themselves... it is all rather interesting.... but there is space in North America - that Flanders reduced in size as it has been over the unkind centuries doesn't have the hospitality for. The mindset here is more medieval but we have the space to live in our own fantasies of life. But i prefer Brussels to be honest.

Belgium: You 'feel' very, very lonely to me. I'm sorry about that. I hope you will find a new, better way, one that makes you happier anyway! You have so much talent! You have a great sense of humour! Use it!

Ohio: Ever since my sister's demise in 1976 I have been a depressive - it is my struggle - it is a hard thing to grow up with - alongside... burdened by the state - then my love life with Bart was burdened by the state with all those residency issues (all of which were resolved ironically in time for the great divorce) - my life was harder than it should have needed to be... it made me a better person... Once bart achieved a petit bourgious sort of way of life in Brussel - something he would not have had the courage to find without me - he was content to level off - i still have to evolve even now... Right now I am just trying to figure out what is next. I really don't know... I am just trying to get over Bart - but he is with me 24 hours a day - i curse him for that.

I miss Bart

I miss home there

I miss "our" things

I don't like the world Bart wants with Gert anymore than Bart wants my Arabesque Internationalist, post Western, post gay, world - where being gay is considered a from of white colonialist decadence and a byproduct of an aging demographic phenomenon... not that the Arabian world or Pakistan don't have same sexers - they do - they, just - like Marocians in Belgium - do not subscribe to the middle class, middle age, white identity of being gay - it doesn't apply in their world anyways.... All of that - their courage and their adaptations of our culture - really impressed me... Palestinian gay guys, whether Christian or Muslim in culture, are just the sweetest people you will meet and with the saddest family stories - stories that we can relate to each others with.

Like feminism in those places is hard work that goes on unrecognized by the women in the west - here where Feminism is a theory confined to academia and suburban rich women who complain a lot but know nothing of the struggle of women beyond Western media shock headlines... feminism is dead in the West but very much alive and confrontational and working itself out in Arabia and Asia... The West has closed its mind to everything - it just forces it all on the rest of the world but it is a one way exchange - the West doesn't learn from the East but the East is learning from the West and adapting... those civilizations that adapt will succeed - I am afraid the West won't - it certainly isn't working in the states....

Everyone says that i should write a book - i hear this all the time... people don't read. Publishing and journalism and newspapers are in a crisis of modernity and changing technologies... i fell through that huge crack... oh well...

but i do hear this a lot - why don't you write a book (it gets annoying to hear this) i know i already have - i have self published it on the Internet unedited - raw... now you need to read... go read... send me your money while you are at it....

I just wish my writing and illustrating would pay the bills...

I'm not impressed.

but yeh I do miss Brussels very much - i just couldn't do it again... it would break my heart to go back anyway with things as they are...

wasn't it weird though...

that time in the old Flemish quartier of Brussel/Bruxelles/Brussels/Bruselas....

and then it was over

just like this essay of letters I'm posting right now....

lol

Here Where Apache Tears are the Fragments of Black Glass Stones

I can stop crying now
'cept I'm not crying
because
I'm over medicated
but
if I werent
I would be crying
I can feel that.
and really
I wouldn't
no,
couldn't
cant
stop crying.
I don't get
any of this
but I will say
a lot
of all this
seems better
but harder
harder
at my end
of the pike
than yours
but at least
there is Margo
nearby.
And
the sky
is blue
the weather
warm
the people
embracing
it's just all
not me
not me
anymore
I am
trapped
within
an exile
of an exile
of love
and its a lonely
sort of place
that I can't seem
to get used to.
Waking up
with those dreams
those nightmares
is unbearable.
Nobody
but nobody
knows
or comprehends
and if i tell them
they scold me
about you
so
it just all
reinforces
my social
isolation
and loneliness
I was socially
isolated
and cut off
in Brussels
but not like
I am here
really.
That might
seem hard
to imagine
but my life
is lonelier
and harder
than it was
in that attic
in that apartment
in Sint Joost.
But
I have
to do
what I have
to do
to survive.
It's going well.
True
but me
and my alone
and interior
and subconscious life
are still
though medicated
suffering.
You can't change
any of that.
I'm just glad
my demons
cant hurt you.
no mores...
I'll be glad
when I am
off this planet.
But until then
I intend
to find the desert
again
and the blue sky
and as many
starry nights
from anywhere
on this planets surface
that I can find.
that gives me reason
and hope.
I really miss
those lands
with the calls to prayers
the roof tops there
or the desert rock floor
from the trance
I find
from all those over-lapping calls
from all those Minarets
to prayer.
Not this silence
of life
in the automotive
Midwest...Dreaming
of going there:
Back to Arabia.
That
only that
keeps me
hanging on
with what
I am doing here
if I am
honest
at four
in the morning
I know
I will
never have
such luxury
of travel
again
I will be
lucky
to get out
of this
glue trap
of Ohio
even.
For that
I wish
I would have
never
left
Sint Joost
in Brussel.
But look
at all
I have done
here,
will you
(experience it ever)?
but still
I am not
impressed
with myself
I want
something
else...
I should
have went
to Yemen
instead.
God,
oh no
not
now here
in
no where
Ghettoville
Ohio.
Mustafa_
Matt_
Matthew_
Mathijs_
Mathieu

Voting for Parks and Nature on Cinco de Mayo

So, here, I, Matthew J. Crouch, being of sound mind and body - (despite being what some call, mentally "ee'ill") - am writing from the Ghettoville-USA blogette desk located in my home between Mecca Park and lil' Moghadishu at
2292 Albert Avenue,
Mecca Park,
Mifflinville,
Mifflinville Township,
The old autonomous area now within Franklin County,
Columbus,
Ohio,
USA

I voted today for the tax levy to help maintain, build and preserve nature while hopefully setting up bicycling paths with the tax levy money...

As you can see from the Park photos taken du jour some of the Area Parks are in decline... and logistical neglect. Me and the K9-unit named Rusty had fun climbing over this fallen tree...

At the voting poling station at the Mifflinville or Mifflin Township Community center behind the Mifflin Police Station I was one of a few
people who had seen the inside of that voting place today so the people working there were quite happy to see me walk in.

While there before voting when asked about the Mecca Park Estates park lawn which is hardly ever mowed - a park with at least two abandoned vehicles from various decades in the brush and overgrowth... I said "A neglected park is better than no Park at all"... Which is true - too much netty maintenance and the natural aspect of a parks conservation becomes out of balance with the nature and ecology of the land and all the life forms it hosts. For certain a forgotten and neglected is better than no Park at all. It beats a McWal-Mart Super Paver Parkinglot anyday.

The post on the limited and unconnected bicycle path had some public made art - graffiti which is the last stand of publically understood Art in these States by the masses - Art that is misunderstood by the powers that be - Someone had scrawled in neat hand writing "Muhammad The King Of Art" - which with its layers of meaning (intended or not) of course appeals to my Islamic sensibilities - for Muhammad the Last Prophet* - who was really the only Messanger who spoke the most of Nature and Art: (Despite the Catholic Churches disregard for that little fine print part of the Bible about no graven images) - So all of central Ohio Muslims should be voting for the parks and recreation tax levy today if they are bothering to vote at all... It seems in this neighborhood nobody is bothering to vote.... Indeed I myself didn't even know there were special elections today until one of my environmentalist activist friends e-mailed me about it.

I asked my African American neighbors if they were voting today - some of whom are inter-racial like our Great New President - Barack Obama - and they were full of out dated excuses from the decades of White Governance and Apartheid politics that ran the USA for its entirety... I guess old habits and ways of thinking - despite the Brotherhood connection - are hard to break even here in G-ville...

For that I am truely sad.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste - here it just isn't the minds that are wasted by cannabis (which should be legalized) and alcohol but lives and generations for people of color have been wasted by economic grid lock based on Aparthied economic isolation American style. This dynamic is Barack Obama's and his Administrations biggest threat - not the Repulligans and their Zionist Military Industrialist Media and McChurch agenda ready to trounce on this great country and resume their greed based economic policies based on lies and no compassion for We the People...

* At this point readers who are Muslim should meditatively reflect on the Peace and Blessings for their Prophet and His Message for the World.

Le Quartiers du Ohio Centrale

 le Quartiers du Ohio Centrale: Ghettoville, Gangstaville, Thuggahville, Nowhereville, Cristelleville, Metheville, Gothville, Cracqueville, Hashville, Redneckville aka Poubelle Blanche-ville - all surrounding the empty car park that is now the ever popular Marche aux Drogues - there really is nothing to do here but go to church and be a religious extremist or be strung out on dope all the time.

  In the photo are some families of tribes of wild geese with goslings afoot... It's not apparent from this photo but this is actually a massive parking lot - this is the reserved green space. I remember when this area between the Scioto and Olentangy rivers - where this view is - well - I remember when this once ridge and valleys was farmland, woodland and wetland with the occassional single family home. That's all changed in three decades though - now that whole area is tract housing, strip malls, apartment and motel barracks that look like minimum security facilities. There are Public Storage sites, car dealerships, condos - housing developments... But the Ohio wildlife Geese still remember in their DNA that this was one of their stops in their North American migrations. Needless to say there is the Ohio Wildlife roadkill strewn about the roadside and parking lots....

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...