We Are the Killers – Albert

 

 

Dear Americans,

 

 

You yourselves are the killers. You who desire a home, a car, a family. You are the killers. All of those who choose to live this life with a smile. You are the killers. All of those who accept the mechanisms that place money into your pockets. You are the killers. All of those who live life day by day and are happy. You are the killers. All of those who make a nice living. You are the killers. All of you who watch the news. You are the killers. All of you who travel. You are the killers. All of you who stay home. You are the killers. All of you who curse the travesties of society from your living room. You are the killers. All of you who eat. You are the killers. All of you who dine. You are the killers. All of you with children. You are the killers. All of you without children. You are the killers. All of you who live in a society that appreciates law and order. You are the killers. All of you who side for the good guy. You are the killers. All of you who allow things. You are the killers. All of you who can’t afford lawyers and therefore have no voice. All of you who desire medical care and have no insurance. You are the killers. All of you who do not run for office. You are the killers. All of you who run for office. You are the killers. All of you who drive by bums. You are the killers. All of you who are human. You are the killers. We are the killers.

 

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Published in: on July 21, 2020 at 4:59 am  Leave a Comment  
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Letter to a London Literary agent (never sent)-Albert

 

January 17, 1998

 

Dear London Literary Agent,

 

I have written a musical play tribute to Princess Diana. Initial reaction to the script has been very positive. I am seeking a British agent as I wish for London to be the place of my musical’s first showing. A pair of British theatre professionals in the U.S. are interested in the project, but I am hesitant to hand it to them as they seek Power of Attorney over it, I suppose, to have a greater hand in it creatively. I am not yet ready to give this power away.

I have no better way to explain to you the premise but by showing the script to you. If you are interested in the script at all please contact me soon. I have enclosed an SASE in case you are not interested. The story is fantasy based upon the events of Diana’s final day at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. I do not know what the feeling in Great Britain is towards such a project, but I can assure you, the play was written in a spirit of love and respect. The first draft was written in less than two weeks time, a mere two weeks after Diana’s death while I, like the world, was still in mourning.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Albert Jones

 

Published in: on July 8, 2020 at 12:33 pm  Leave a Comment  
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hey hey whoa whoa

 

hey hey whoa whoa after petals on albert jamz goes into let it be. The end of Petals. I sing I hope you didn’t hate my play today. Jed backs me up. This song actually turns into “don’t fight” drop curtain. Jed peaks his head out of the curtain while the applause is still going on. He steps out. He has a tshir tthrown over him that says Operation Smile. He goes up and taps on a microphone. Hello, well, then whatever he’s going to say and then they’ll all go into a jam of chuck berry’s johnny b goode. The armed guitar brigade.

 

 

Published in: on July 8, 2020 at 1:50 am  Leave a Comment  
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What’s Happening?

There is a lot of stuff going on these days. Stuff. Can something actually happen? What does it mean to happen? If something happens what does it become, the thing that happened? An ongoing happening? A million consecutive and fluid happens? Anyway, I guess we’ll never really know whether or not something can happen. Anyway.

 

Okay, so people say “this is happening” as a joke. This is happening, Stephen… I get it now. Something that happens can take time. It must be some sort of strange sort of thing where time is mixed in with space and within that funnel is a happen, but it can be long, years maybe. Maybe there is a larger bit of space rather than just the moment that something happens. Maybe a happening can last thousands or even millions of years. It’s good to think of time like that…long. It releases you. The Hindus have calendars in the millions of years. Time. This too shall pass, they say, this too shall pass.

 

Mostly it’s darkness. Clouds whispering in winds cooly wrapping round vents in the waterless sea and falling. You see. You don’t see. You keep going. All that you can do is just survive. All that you can do to help yourself is stay alive. Rush.

 

But I know there is more than that. I know this. This world is not meant to be wasted and family should not fight and that goes for extended family which means everybody in America and the wider world. Everybody. Everybody love.

 

 

Published in: on June 20, 2020 at 9:05 pm  Leave a Comment  
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the fargo kantrowitz’z literary campsite

Before the night fell the grasses swayed. All life was somber and still. A cricket bleeted alone as crickets always do, this one, too early to sing, waiting for night as the orange sun disappeared behind the mountain. The water of the lake was smooth, not a ripple, grasses grew out of there too. Tall grasses that sticking up like trees with thick stems and the brown, very brown, dark brown almost browner than the trunks of the trees on the shore stalks, as I said, stood perfectly still. What happens when the stopping begins. Eyes wide open we seek movement. The poets always sing of themselves in the whisps of winds and sways of leaves, but when selves disappear the remaining former proof lives on, soulless, unknowing, lost.

Too much silence can kill a man says huxley. But huxley doesn’t know anything. He cuts corn down when seasons of corn cutting come. He rushes out to strip the land and comes home a richer man for a season, the good season, in between the times of waiting and loneliness. The poets are always looking for friends in nature. Somehow they know how to relate. Sunshine becomes God and moon the almighty mother. Loneliness doesn’t grip them. They don’t need the flesh and blood of their soul sisters or their brothers. We all fall down.

And stories, expanding in underwater silence, our talents bubbles bursting upon the water’s skin.If we could tell our stories, let our stories come up and be as real to each other as they are to all too often unknowing selves, then we could breathe. But breath is but another dream, another wasted thought to the drowning man, his story and his being watching the round orb of the sun blur and decrease. Eyes on deck. Keep watching says you, but the poet knows that even the underworld is there for him to relate to. Even then.

 

 

Published in: on May 1, 2020 at 5:31 pm  Leave a Comment  

Of Psychonaughts and Perspicuity

We’re in the middle of something and then bam, wow, watch out! Here comes something totally random. Ooh, just around the corner a long word that makes no sense, a portmanteau word is what they call it. He wishes so that he could have made up the word portmanteau because it is the near perfect word, but alas especially after Joyce he knows he is just another psychonaught on the way to perspicuity. Ah, c’mon, man, you say. Perspicuity? Really? And then you laugh and you go on your way and say mommy did you see, he said perspicuity and you’ve got your brownie points and so you’re all over a cheeseburger or something whatever you do at the fargo kantrowitz’z literary campsite sort of thing and all that, but anyway, the moral of the story is this: the fklc delivers some of the finest (see I’m trying to illustrate it to you) writing per se in the world today. The fklc is proud to present a whole plethora of writing plethorianations that will tan your hide. Find out more. For $14.95 you too can make all the difference in the world. Suport the fargo kantrowitz’z literary campsites fund for cool words that will never, ever matter to anyone) or something ike that. Gaaaawd!

 

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Published in: on September 18, 2019 at 11:24 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Make America Love Again – Joey Kantor

 

 

 

My mother was born again in 1973, the same year she opened a Bible store in Las Vegas where I grew up.  When Jesus’ love walloped my mother, boy, did it hit hard. I grew up with a mother who praised Jesus all day long and quite openly.

 

Hence, being eight years old at the time, I was introduced to the Christian religion. I was immediately saved, of course, and Jesus took the place of my “word” which was a part of the practice of transcendental meditation that my mother had been involved with just the year before.

 

It became Jesus Jesus Jesus. Jesus loved everybody. I mean everybody. He loved His enemies even. When people got mad at him for telling the truth they actually put Him on a cross, hung Him there to die, and He still asked God to forgive them. He had a lot of patience, this Jesus. So I followed Him too.

 

When I became a teenager in the early 1980s I occasionally attended a non-denominational church, Calvary Chapel, at Rancho and the freeway. I remember one day an associate pastor telling us something that just didn’t jibe with what I thought I knew about Jesus. He said that unless you became a born-again Christian, you were going to go to hell.

 

Think about it. You’re going along -love love love- when suddenly, boom, hate. Jesus would throw you into an oven! Okay. Now, did Jesus condemn other religions of other cultures? If so I must have missed it what with all of the talk about love. What about the good Samaritan? It just didn’t make sense. I later took a two-year Masters degree in mythology, other people’s religions really, to find an answer.

 

What I discovered was interesting. Time after time the religions that I studied said the same things that Jesus said but in different ways. I saw the game clearly. The loving God I had known wouldn’t be so stupid as to condemn everyone other than Christians just because they spoke a different language, had a different mythic vocabulary if you will. The heart was what mattered.

 

Along came 9-11 and then Iraq. It was a mad rush to war, and who was cheering it on the most? The right wing evangelical Christians. The swiftness with which they abandoned the command not to kill, but love only, was breathtaking and very sad.

 

Now, of course, we have Donald Trump. Eighty-one percent of evangelicals voted for him even though his actions, even before the election, were blatantly vile. The evangelical Christians wanted to acquire the worldly power that Jesus Christ himself would have vehemently disagreed was worth having. Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s…

 

Evangelicals have drunk the Trump Kool-Aid because it has been in Trump’s best interests to say and do whatever this sub-culture wants even if he has to lie.

 

I’ll stick with the loving God instead of this politically motivated facsimile of Christianity that feeds off of the notion of tough love. Love isn’t tough. Love is love.

 

Perhaps someday right wing evangelical Christians will once again embrace the idea that their worldly beings are nothing, that there is no greater thing to do than to give your very life for your brother, that you should give your enemy the shirt off of your back, that a real Christian cares for the “least of these,” that kindness is actually not weakness, as some would have you believe, that must be destroyed.

 

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just make America love again?

 

Published in: on August 31, 2019 at 12:48 am  Leave a Comment  
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Outcast – Jed

Outcast-Jed

There is something that I know now but didn’t know most my whole life. You’ve got to control, to some degree, where you let your mind go. I remember the time when we were living in San Francisco and Moxy kicked me out of the house until I got clean. I was using so hard I wasn’t even thinking about what it was doing to Moxy.  I just stood there and it seemed like right out of the blue Moxy is mad at me in a way that was really important I recognize. I’d gone on and off of heroin and other hard drugs since I was fifteen years old. We’d been a band for almost two years by this time. She wasn’t no angel. She did a lot of coke on the road, but she always knew how to say no. What got her this time was the way I was handling myself around the women on the tour. I swore a thousand times to her that I would never cheat on her, but one time after a show there were these two girls. I didn’t know they were only sixteen. They looked about 26. We’re at the party afterward and these girls are hanging all over me the way they do when one of them, I guess it was a dare by the other one, rips off her shirt and pushes her tits right into my mouth. That’s a strange predicament to be in. When a man has got a nice pair of tits actually pushed into his mouth there is a big moment there for contemplation. A tit tastes good no matter whose chest they’re connnected to. I can’t say that I wasn’t pleasantly surprised, but I was just as much irritated because what if Moxy was looking. She wouldn’t understand. Which she didn’t. That girl just kept pressing her tits in my face and then tried to roll on top of me. I was like a rag doll. I didn’t know how to stop it. My first thought was that this wasn’t necessarily something that needed to be stopped because, like I said, it was quite nice.  But I got to my senses after a second or two. Maybe it was more like fifteen. I don’t think that I licked them at all, although I can’t be quite sure. Anyway, Moxy did see it all and I found out about it in the limo back to the hotel. She didn’t say a word to me until we got back to the hotel. She took a shower and got ready for bed. Then I did the same and was about to get into bed when she threw the pillow at me and just told me to go, that she didn’t want to see my tit-sucking face. Then she threw the alarm clock at me, but it was connected to the wall so it just fell to the ground. Next, since she wasn’t going to allow herself to fall victim to the same mistake again, she jumped out of bed and unplugged the lamp and chucked it at me. It would have hit me in the head had I not deflected it with my arm. She says “Go do your smack. Go suck some more titties. I don’t want to see you anymore.” I tried to reason with her, but it was impossible.

Everybody must have gone through that empty feeling when you think that you have blown the best thing of your life. It’s like the only feeling you’ve got, the only blood you’ve got in your body is just about an ounce and it’s sitting down there at the pit of your stomach.  I kept thinking “what did I do? What did I do?” I kept thinking that over and over again, going over and over what happened with that little slutty girl backstage. But it was too late. I was released. Cut free.  When I walked out of that hotel room I was in shock. Bewildered. I sat in the lobby waiting for a car rental for a half hour.  When I got it, a blue Mercury Topaz, I just started driving. It was two a.m. It was just me and the California coast and that’s the way it was for the next two weeks. Just me, my heroin, and later, an acoustic guitar bought in Santa Cruz.

This little trip was different than the second time that Moxy kicked me out of the house, many years later when we lived in the Village.  These two weeks were spent in a despair that I realize now went deeper than just Moxy kicking me out for an accident. I knew in my heart of hearts that she would come to understand the nature of my sexual accident if that’s what you can call it.  Whereas the second time I knew that the bullshit was over, that I’d gone too far in my insanity and my unbelief that Moxy would ever really leave me. That time she really did. To her core she did. This California trek was the journey of a man who didn’t know what hit him, a man in shock who believed that the end was at hand with the only girl he really ever loved. Yet, it was too unbelievable that these years would be negated by such a cause. But it seemed to be the case. For two weeks I wrestled with whether or not it was truly the case. When I believed it I would sink down into the recesses of my mind.  I sought refuge in the stupidest things. I let myself go crazy. I followed every thread of thought and allowed it to be the truth when in fact it was the wriggly nerve endings of a mind too fucked up over many years to know that a mind has its fair amount of peripheral bullshit.

I lost my cool. I built fantasies out of the stuff of my life. I freaked on colors. I had musical epiphanies. I spent three days outside of Santa Barbara singing into a long tunnel that went under the freeway.  There was not a single minute where I was not stoned. I went into bars with good music.  I’d sit there and look at the band and the girls, but they may as well have been elephants. The thought of a woman other than Moxy made me sadder than I already was. It was really just a shit time.

But the original point is that all of those whacked out thoughts along the coast pointed more to hell than heaven. If I hadn’t allowed hell into me through the needle I’m sure that I could have rested out Moxy’s anger at a Holiday Inn somewhere.  Instead, I let my fantasies take me down. I let it. I realized you’ve got to control your mind.

It’s just that when the only girl you love leaves you you feel like you are dead. The eyes don’t work. They see, but they do not care about anything that they see. It’s the same with your breath. You breathe, but it seems like bullshit too. Eating sucks too. The only thing that matters is flying away on those dreams which ultimately all point down. Ronnie James Dio was right.  When a woman becomes a witch you must hail her.  Moxy’s wrath was that of a woman with great strength, the darker side of Moxy’s persona that is hinted at, but never fully exposed.  Ultimately, her power is in leaving you knowing that she is the reason for everything good in your life. She becomes the embodiment of the good aspect that the witch inside of her now controls.  You have been banished. You may never, never, ever go home. The only way is down. Yeah, Dio was right.

One day I called her and she apologized, saying she overreacted. Have you ever had your life handed back to you?

 

Published in: on May 24, 2019 at 10:09 pm  Leave a Comment  

The Girls Rub Their Noses

 

Skid row poor. Beat down. Nothing but. Black. Wandering some, purple power. Lost souls. Of course you’d say that. Wanna know the real world? Can’t get away from it. Have to talk about it. Nobody wants to know the real world. It’s all bullshit. And you’re there whether you want to be or not.

In our world we see nothing but chain stores, fancy shops, people who did good, young people who walk down the street oblivious to us. The walls are harder for us. There’s much less hope. We see everything but there isn’t any beauty in it. We catch highs where we can because we know the Christian right would kill us either way with their chewing tobacco, their church going blondes and good jobs where they make upwards of 20 dollars an hour or more. We know all this as we ride our bikes or walk down the street or look for something to eat. Some of us have money. Some of us don’t. I’m talking about the socio-economic class of nothingville where the older guys sit around and think they’re involved, but they’re pushed aside because they’re too old to make new. We know what’s going down. How everything is based around sex and beauty. You see a young average looking guy walking with a beautiful blonde and you know he’s a lawyer and you understand something about the world in that everything fits together. Money and blondes and their kids and the way they think it’s supposed to be and the way that it is and how they’re walking on tightropes and dare not fall off. And all the girls rub their noses when you walk by. You don’t know why really except you’re ugly and dirty. It’s a natural reaction, but you get sick of seeing them always referring to snot whenever you’re around. When you were younger and more innocent they used to lick their lips when they saw you. They couldn’t help it. Now they rub their noses and they can’t help that either. Did the world change or did you? You think about this all the time. You figure it’s you then you know it’s you and eventually you drop out completely, stop looking into the doors of the bars and clubs because you know that the girls want someone who doesn’t stink and if there’s anything that you do its stink. You stink to high heaven as they say.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. You used to have a talent and you used to believe that there was something in the world for you because you had a talent, but that talent fell away when you saw that the people that the talent is for were fickle and meaningless and you’d wander away and pretty soon you didn’t care anymore. Without an audience there was no reason to have a talent. To have a talent for money was just as meaningless as having a talent for the people who just didn’t care. After awhile you stopped caring yourself. Stopped taking care of yourself until you walk down the street and it’s obvious, everybody knows and the girls rub their noses. The girls rub their noses.

Thought never ends. This is something you realize from your philosophical days before you realized that Camus was right that the only legitimate philosophical question was whether or not to kill yourself. Nothing matters out here. The world is pitted inside of a corporate monster. Architecture is the same. Its purpose regimented and intact. There is no store keeper, there is no love for you or anybody outside of money, but you don’t have that. There is no love. The world is a piece of shit and that’s as unpoetically truthful as you can get. You can’t gloss that up. People with their institutions and glass walls and revenue streams while you live outside of it all. You’re not clean enough to join them and the something inside of you that won’t mend won’t allow you to fill out a resume anyway. You know you would quit after a short while because you would feel like a slave and this form of meaninglessness is even more meaningless than simply walking around and seeing these places that provide jobs. You’re not a slave, but you don’t have money, but at least you are you and it is it, but the hunger and fear and bullshit of not having a job hurts and after awhile wears you down, but you still can’t go to the other side. It’s hell there.

Hate. Hate of yourself for every mistake you ever made, for every bridge you ever burned. Hate. Pure unadulterated hate. The eyes fall numb forward in the eye socket, not wanting to close, hating being open, but you got sleep last night so you’re awake. Doesn’t matter. Better to be asleep. Don’t have to be here if you’re asleep. Drugs are the only salvation for you in the city. Drugs lost s of drugs. As many drugs as possible. Because it steals the time before you have to die. It’s much grander than a 9 to 5. Drugs take the bite out of this American wasteland. It teaches you that you have an essence worthy of an emotion, even if the emotion is fake. You’ve got memory and you’ve got a little bit of hope when you’re on drugs because your mind takes you to places that you wouldn’t go otherwise. It at least takes you out of your depression or makes you forget about it. Everybody is on drugs. What the fuck do they expect? These Kentucky Fried Chicken corporate lords in St. Louis, Missouri or Chicago, Illinois or New York City sucking down their ten dollar martinis and chomping on their 50 dollar steaks as they think about who they’re going to fuck next or how their kids are doing. We don’t have kids around here. We are the kids. It doesn’t matter how old you are. If you are around here, of us, you are a kid. You were left out of adulthood. It just passed you by and you are a kid. Now kids can be ignored. The Christian right does a good job of that. They do their tough love on the kids and they don’t even know them personally. It’s all a scam for Jesus freaks to have more fifty dollar steaks and more kids. You see them in the glass windows eating two together sometimes three or four. They’re fashion conscious, they’re even liberal, want to see good come of the world, but they’re ordering those Tom Collins anyway and that special dish they heard about then they’re going to their little art functions and eat cheese and wine and then back to their lofts and watch television and maybe make love or read or do something intellectual, but the kids aren’t. They’re left to their own devices to die if need be. To be the representatives of the darker corners of society and everybody lets them, just watches them go. It’s ingrained in the society. It’s ingrained in the churches who blame and blame and blame so they won’t have to care. These churchies who back lil ______ in Washington because, and they won’t tell you this, they make shitloads more money through him than they do through more Christian-like democratic candidates. Money trumps the real Jesus every time. Shit. There is no meaning when Christians aren’t even Christians. Then it’s ludicrous. They should go  to churches that worship money instead of using this guy who was hung on a cross to do their business for them. It’s hypocritical and ultimately evil. If I were Jesus and I was with God I would be doing a lot of spitting out of my mouth with these “Christians.” It’s stupid how evil they are, how self-deceiving. I wonder if there are any real Christians out there. Maybe one or two, but I haven’t met them.

But smile! Everybody smile because if you don’t they’ll shoot you, at least lock you up. Try not to smile too much when you’re on drugs or a yuppie fuck will come after you and stick his nightstick up your ass. Jesus loves me this I know, for the bible tells me so…whatever happened to witnessing? There’s a question for you. They know they won’t make it very far with their modern philosophy of Jesus, the modern American Jesus who will kill you if you look at him funny. I don’t like this Jesus, in fact, I think that this Jesus is the Devil in disguise. Isn’t that odd, how the devil can impersonate Jesus? But he does. All things are turned around for me. Jesus is evil. Everything is weird. You’ve dropped everything that you had. All hope is gone and you realize you did it out of anger. You said enough things unthinkingly that you will never be able to return to an older part of your life ever again. The words were too strong, the impression made too great. Friends that fell away will never return and you know you can’t make new friends because you no longer care. Even words. I gotta go.

 

Published in: on March 23, 2019 at 5:17 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Love

Love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love

Love?

Love!

Published in: on October 7, 2018 at 4:39 pm  Leave a Comment  
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