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SCREED FROM THE (END OF THE) ROAD #15

PORTLAND, OR…PLANTING ROOTS IN A MOSSY NEW STOMPING GROUND

By now most of you, whoever you are, must be thinking that I’m dead, burnt to a crisp in a car crash on a deserted highway or at least a quadriplegic from a cliff diving accident or something, but no, I’m at least still half alive in the Great Northwest where I now call Portland home. It has been five (5) months since the great escapist road-run began and my ability to document and make any real sense out of it all has been pitiful. There is no point drumming a laundry list of excuses out of my ass because, after all, they’re just excuses which are boring and worthless.

Portland, Oregon is a weird flocking ground for eccentric liberals from all over the country who love expensive organic food, strong beer and ride bikes when the sun is actually shining, which is something like a quarter of the year. As luck has it, summer has finally descended on the city like the heat of a hundred-foot tire fire. Hoards of desperately hip “young professionals” seem to drive the progressive city, and then run amok at the thousands of bars and restaurants and strip clubs. Needless to say, I’ve managed to slide unnoticed and successfully into life here like a raven into a flock of crows. The percentage of people who are actually born and raised in this city must be less than the number of underpaid players on the New York Yankees. I can’t even count the number of transplants from Wisconsin alone, which is scary since I thought I was getting away from the people of my own soil, but somewhat comforting at the same time. To get more strangely ironic, the bar I’m sloshing around behind five nights a week is owned by a guy from Madison. Pouring strong drinks in a long dark cabin of a tavern while people eat the coronary clogging Midwestern fair of fried cheese curds and fancy bar food and love every bite. It’s not the worst work though because I make fistfuls of cash and girls/women throw their phone numbers at me like they’re paper airplanes and I’m a substitute teacher.

Life’s rough ain’t it? The real aim here is to inspire a rash of atavistic jealousy within us all, a lust for enlivenment that breathes life back into a plagued and increasingly sedentary culture. Just wait for the barrage of disjointed and fiery SCREEDS that may or may not create any sense of rationality of the past five months on the over-trodden and bastardized symbol that is THE ROAD. I’m holing up in my lofted spacious writing lair, where I can step out on my balcony to have a smoke or take a leak while traffic whizzes by on a highway twenty yards away, and climb up on my roof and see Mt. Hood and St. Helens looming off in the distance with the blurry skyline of Portland in the mighty Willamette River. This is the smoke signal and next comes a barrage of my disjointed yet lucid recollections and sneering objectivism like a hail of flaming arrows.

Sincerely,
John Dick.

The End of June, 2008

2008 07 01 Johnny Dick Observations
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American Guns Protect US

June 26, 2008
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a sweeping ban on handguns in the nation’s capital violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice Antonin Scalia noted that the handgun is Americans’ preferred weapon of self-defense in part because “it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police.” President Bush said: “I applaud the Supreme Court’s historic decision today confirming what has always been clear in the Constitution: the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear firearms.” http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080626/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_guns

June 27, 2008
A heroic effort by hundreds of townspeople, volunteers and National Guardsmen to hold back the Mississippi River failed Friday — undone by a burrowing muskrat. The furry rodent dug a hole through the earthen levee in this eastern Missouri community, allowing water to penetrate the floodwall, which failed shortly before dawn. “It’s so disappointing,” said Linda Wilmesherr as she peered through binoculars at water pouring through a gap that appeared to be 30 feet wide. “With all the guns in this county, couldn’t we kill a muskrat?” http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hw95ek5Sllmi4SoQ_N4HJvwHE0ZAD91ILVLO0

Yup. America. It speaks in such juxtapositions.

2008 06 30 publisher Observations
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PLATFORM OF MY PITH

(A MISPLACED FLASHBACK FROM WINTRY UGLINESS IN MILWAUKEE)

“I am guilty, Lord, but I am also a lover - and I am one of your best people, as you know; and yea tho I have walked in many strange shadows and acted crazy from time to time and even drooled on many High Priests, I have not been an embarrassment to you…So leave me alone, goddamnit, and send Mr. Screwjack back to me; and if the others have any questions or snide comments about it, tell them to eat shit and die.” - R.D.

Friends, you know this is the truth, just like Raoul Duke and his blood-lusting tomcat, an imagined beastly desire hides somewhere deep within all of us. Not that there is anything natural, at all, about sodomizing an innocent animal, no matter if it has razor-sharp claws and a vice of bone-crushing teeth, but eventually one must get repulsed enough by wallowing with the human race to fantasize, on drugs or not, about the true possibilities of all life. To straighten things out, this is not a decree of bestiality, the pitiful people who fuck with animals should be castrated and stoned by an angry mob right on Main St. of whatever town they live in. The point here, which may or may not apparently lie within this obscure metaphor, is that the limit of sedentary, mundane living infects the human soul and psyche like the plague, and for me personally begs to be shattered like a brand new plate glass window.

As I lube the gears of my mind with slimy fistfuls of crude realism, and pump wild and impure imagination through the thin red walls of my beaten heart faster than raw sewage overflows into Lake Michigan, I grapple with the cold realization of inner plight. Pushing the limit of twenty-three years in this city, long gone past stir crazy, my flight is overdue so now I’m bracing myself and finally ready to get the hell out of Dodge. Naturally, West is the only direction to head, face the wind and burn out across state-long cornfields until the land starts to roll and the trail of rock jutting upward grows into the Rockies. The thin air will do my mind and lungs some much needed good, the snow will thicken my skin and fuel pointed screeds like spitting kerosene on an altar of flickering Virgin candles.

I will be reborn on a moonlit mountaintop in a blizzard dancing naked, except for a grizzly bear tooth necklace hanging around my neck, with a megaphone in one hand and a bottle of bourbon splashing from the other. A two-hundred pound Husky, more wolf than dog with eyes that change color with the seasons will be my only companion, howling strange duets with me into the basting handheld speaker and lapping from the bottle. A catharsis of pure madness will echo over peaks and down canyons into sleepy ski villages where tourists will be ripped from a fat cat dreamland by the unGodly song of beast and man. Livestock will turn wild-eyed and tear through barbwire fences, storming the farmhouses and trampling their owners tucked away in warm beds. The deranged swan song will ring out to resound in deaf ears and make the increasingly illiterate youth peel themselves from television screens and pick up books with yellowed pages that leave paper cuts on their frail little hands. With any luck at all, my words will become shards of broken beer bottles on the painful path to the enlightenment of this darkening Reality.

John Dick
December 2007

2008 06 25 Johnny Dick essays
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Walgreen’s is my god.

Walgreen’s is my god. I will have no gods above thee.

Down the street from where I live is a Walgreen’s, a store that is part pharmacy, part convenience store, and entirely without shame for the contradictions within. Where else can one fill prescriptions for pain killers, anti-depressants, and erectile dysfunction while also acquiring two pounds of Slim Jims, a carton of cigarettes, and Mother’s Day cards? I have been down every aisle of the local store, often amazed by the unnecessary and often capricious use of candy products in a store that largely caters to people with type two diabetes. I shouldn’t be too critical, I too am a customer, a sugar addicted zombie parsing the four rows of things that barley qualify as food for my next fix of Jolly Ranchers. Walgreen’s caters to my laziness and carelessness. I no longer seek food that needs to be “cooked;” I can survive on sugar and fat alone.

In some southern states, Walgreen’s also sells liquor. Alas, not here. That added benefit would create an even greater sense of the contradiction that is Walgreen’s. I hope one day that I will be able to motor into Walgreen’s on my hover-round scooter for both pain killer and vodka, perhaps some Slim Jims as well. Nothing would please me more than to experience this truly American dream before I die from consuming all the things they sell at Walgreen’s.

After a recent visit I was overcome with the sense of impending doo. Not only did I buy a one pound bag of Lemonheads, but I was also consuming them with an energy drink. Has it really come to this? I live almost solely on sugar, caffeine, and mind-altering drugs prescribed by a friendly doctor. Walgreen’s has provided all of these things to me and, while I know this is not a sustainable lifestyle, I see no way out. Walgreen’s is my pusher. It won’t let me go. It keeps giving me a free hit with these incessant coupons for things I don’t need.

The only thing I can really fault Walgreen’s for is knowing their customer base too well. We are lazy, weak-willed people who love junk food and candy. They should sell hover-rounds. If you spend a thousand dollars at the store you should get 50% off on a hover-round. Maybe free insulin shots, or a colostomy bag.

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2008 05 23 Arthur Schultz essays Comments (0) Permalink

Today I…

Witnessed an informal poll with black middle school boys about whether or not they can control their erections. Let me back track. I teach at a small school that serves students who have been reassigned from Milwaukee Public Schools because of bad behavior. These behaviors range from use of drugs or alcohol, sex in school, fighting, or habitual level four disruptions, which translates to really bad class room behavior. Think toddlers with adolescent hormones and a whole lot of attitude. There are four of us who run the program, and in truth, it would not be possible without the force, warmth, and general black grandmother/matriarchal power of our principal, my dear friend, Ann.

So this day, like many of the days, we face a barrage of needs to attend to and to address, both academic and social. On this day I was teaching a version of Tales from the Arabian Nights, and we just finished reading and discussing the characters of Shaharazad and Shah Riyar. And despite my explanations and analyses of why Shah Riyar made the law to have his new wife executed each day after the wedding, one of my students said, “Dude’s a fag.”

Where exactly does one begin? First, I established the referent for Dude, though I knew who he was I feel I must combat the proliferation of the use of Dude, so I usually say something like this: “Could you please tell me which dude you mean?” Then another student (remember, this is a class of all black middle school boys) said, “Why is it girls” (that’s me I supposed) “don’t ever know who Dude is, but guys do?”

I said, “Please enlighten me.”

He said, “Dude is always the main Dude.” Ah, Shah Riyar then.

Once that was established I quickly launched into the rude and inappropriate use of the word “fag.” Ann entered the room at about this time, and she can never resist a chance to stand up to ignorance, so she joined me in the front of the class, and together we tried to discuss the studies about being hard wired for homosexuality. Just to be clear it is not easy to keep this group focused let alone on a topic where many have their opinions from their own life observations, for example, “I just don’t get it. Guys with guys. That’s just wrong.” There were a few in the class who got it. God bless them, and they tried to help us, but the wall of ignorance was pretty thick, and I, exasperated from teaching my class and feeling beaten by the world, slipped to the back of the class and sat at the desk while Ann forged ahead, trying to reach them.

Then she did something that could have gone very wrong, but as usual with Ann, it is spot on with making a break through with a difficult situation.

She said, “Okay, think of it this way, how many of you can control your erections?”

No one raised their hands, and there was some looking about the room in confusion, so Ann clarified, “Do you know what that is? An erection is a hard on.” Some snickering ensued, and dare I say it, some blushing occurred.

She continued, unflappable as ever: “Don’t be embarrassed, I’m a grandmother, I raised sons. You get a hard on in the bath tub or when the wind blows a certain way, so I’ll ask it again but a little differently: how many of you cannot control your erections?”

Every boy in the room raised his hand. And on this day, we had a new student, Leviticus. Leviticus. He sheepishly looked about the room, wanting to blend as new students do, no matter how rough they come to us, and he put his hand in the air with the rest of the hormonal bunch.

“So you can’t control those right. Well, it’s the same with sexual preference, you can’t control it, your body reacts,” Ann said.

Something clicked. This got through to them. There was a lot of nodding, and the boy who used the word “fag” was conversing with his neighbor and shaking his groin in his seat, commenting on how he tries to shake his erections away, to no avail. This was not the usual educational break through, but it was something.

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