Blogging: People actually take this seriously?

Upon receiving my first strongly worded comments on this blog, more specifically about my patented bridge hate, I remain surprised how seriously people take blogging and in a general sense the internet itself.  For those of us who troll on youtube comment boards on Billy Ocean videos from 1988, tweet every waking thought, photograph their meals for instagram and status update their unfortunate bus ride or new hipster sport they have created.......please realize how absurd life has become if this is how we bide our time and communicate with strangers and friends. 

We are the generation that can't.  The internet owns us and forces us to behave in counter instinctual ways.  I don't need to socialize every night with all 350 friends and circles.  Where is the time for work or sleep?

When famous people and artists tweet offensive things, let it go, its not worth correcting.  Lena Dunham and her 3 million book deal can say whatever she wants on twitter about victims of Canadian serial killers.  When there is no hockey Canadians get agitated.  If the internet has offended you holden caulfield i think its time to sit this life out because its not going to get fair anytime soon and the phonies are going to win.  The next life is anyones guess.

I am a hypocrite and lost in a world of perpetual boredom that requires me to seek attention and self-promote myself until I am a talentless multimillionaire like Dane Cook.  Punchlines and conclusions to stories are overrated anyways.  I am not surrendering to the mores of today, its more like adaptation to my changing surroundings in order to exploit it for my benefit.  My reach may exceed my grasp, but what's heaven for?  to plagiarize and paraphrase a poem line and a film.

Revolution Soul Train

Despite the title of this episode there was no Don Cornelius only a steam locomotive that may or may not be sabotaged with an explosive log.  It would be difficult not to find this amusing.

Don Cornelius

After a long period spent aimlessly wandering through the woods our heroes arrive in Noblesville, Indiana to find Charlie Matheson's hunky brother about to be shipped to Philadelphia, which is important for an undisclosed reason?  This show has the annoying habit of either telling you nothing or telling you everything without that natural balance. 

Much of the show is devoted to the backstory of Monroe Militia Colonel Tom Neville.  Before the power went out he was a cowardly insurance claims adjuster, much like General Bethlehem in the Postman, who repaired copiers.  He is now a martial figure with little compassion for weakness or impediments in his way.  He has an extremely hot wife, played by Kim Raver, and his son, Nate, is the spy who has been chasing Charlie, father and son have similar tastes in women.  We meet more rebels and the secret of the 12 pendants that will bring the power back.  Now we must, ugh waste more time with whining dull characters, and find these devices.

Kim Raver, her real name.

The train arrives in Philadelphia with little real threat of derailment.  No one thinks to rip up the tracks or place a tree over the tracks before the train arrives?  These idiots could not win a guerrilla war against the Soviet Union let alone a set of melodramatic monochrome dressed grave speaking neofascist militiamen.

The guy in the shades is the drummer.  These guys are the Beatles of the Alaskan militias.  Guess who is the lead singer?

Revolution Plague Dogs

You may wonder why I have been spending so much of my time focused on this soon to be forgotten and erased from NBC silly drama that the actors and producers have been coached to call science-fact. 

If you can recall the marketing campaign for the Denzel Washington film, Deja Vu, they refused to say that it was a time-travel movie because it was possible that the past could be viewed from the present for a brief window.  A window that allowed Denzel, and only Denzel, to travel back in time and stop Swiss Jesus (Jim Caviezel) from bombing a New Orleans ferry boat while saying "Ha....HAW," "my man," and "excuse me?!."  All based on fact apparently.

DENZEL



Anyways in this week's episode, Plague Dogs, there were many easily escapable death traps, maudlin flash-backs, a tornado and actual dogs.  There was not much to report from this episode other than Miles Matheson was a "murderer" and the mildly hot older English woman, Maggie was killed.  Things are slowing down and the Joseph Campbell circles are becoming unwound with story lines that seem to allude constantly and offer random events rather than direction.  This is not on purpose to befit some nihilistic existentialism, more likely its poor writing and remote production work via email/skype from Jon Favreau and JJ Abrams.

Jon Favreau believing that he is the only person with a smartphone.



Revolution is like the Branson version of the Walking Dead.  USA Today version of the Postman.  

becoming a loser and retroactive salmonella recall

When you begin writing about derivative tame network dramas as if you are engaged in passionate literary warfare against various ideologies, such as the NBC show REVOLUTION, you are a loser living in a basement apartment at the dog racetrack.  Living and dying over the minor details and indistinct characters in non sequiter flashbacks is not healthy.

On this week's episode, "No Quarter,"  Miles and his niece, with a groups of rebels trying to restore the United States (like the Postman), find themselves trapped by the militia and decide to tunnel out.  We learn that Miles used to command the militia where he killed people (like the Postman was a member of the Holnist militia).  The characters are aghast, its not like he raped or pillaged which seems more likely in this alternate future than this tame outrage.  Meanwhile the brother Matheson remains prisoner to the militia and the English woman, Maggie, and Aaron, google exec find a computer.  The mysteries are beginning to unravel at a pace that puts one to sleep rather than spark interest.

As a loser of the highest order it is my humble duty to waste more time and complain bitterly about this show's inability to overcome its silly nature that makes the Adam West Batman show seem like an progenitor of Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones.  Sword fights are lame unless there is the threat of death or decent choreography.  Again this brings me to the more important issue at hand, JJ Abrams is lazy.  There it is its only libel if its not true.

JJ Abrams



In the middle of writing this post I received a robocall message from Kirtland (COSTCO) on my answering machine.  The smoked salmon may have salmonella.  What more fitting bacteria could there be than that?  The irony escaped them.  Its raw, obviously it may contain bacteria and cause health problems.  I have been eating their smoked salmon every morning for over a year and now realize I may have been food poisoned every day for over a year.  I appreciated the phone call.

  

Revolution or the JJ Abrams version of the Postman

Apologies if you are expecting the cast list for Steel Man, the Joseph Stalin sitcom.  Its difficult getting actors to sign with a fictional tv show that exists entirely in my head for no money.

The new NBC drama REVOLUTION is a story set 15 years into the future following a total electrical blackout rendering the world in an apparent survivalist mode as marauding militia roam the country enforcing their law for a mysterious warlord named Munro, although spelled differently multiple times between two episodes.  Continuity is not priority one here, this is a JJ Abrams production after all and its about speed not content. The show is definitely a network program and often restrained in its silly action sequences that resemble Errol Flynn in Robin Hood. 

Giancarlo Esposito

The main character, Katniss, I mean Charlotte Matheson is a teenage huntress living in a hamlet with her family.  When the Militia lead by Giancarlo Esposito kills her father and kidnaps her brother Charlotte and her coterie that includes her fathers English? girlfriend and an overweight former google exec, the comic relief,  head to Chicago to find her Uncle, Miles Matheson, a former Marine.  Charlotte is the moral compass and heroine on her journey from the ordinary.  There are some emerging storylines and dimensions to the characters that give the show some mystery, such as why the power failed and what is on those pendant flash drives?  This is a solid start and has great tv potential to survive its first season.

Charlotte Matheson and coterie

When I hear people talk about how original or new this is, especially the producers, network, and the actors, I have an epileptic fit because its grossly untrue and I don't have much going on in my life.  Its like when the film 3 Kings was released and the studio denied that it was a ripoff of Kelley's Heroes, the entertainment reporters didn't understand what plagiarism entails.  Or passing off an adapted screenplay as original, it becomes meta problems.  This show was heavily "influenced" by the 1997 epic Kevin Costner flop, the POSTMAN.  If you don't remember the basic plot of the Postman, and the David Brin novel it was based upon, it is thus:   the story is set 15 years into the future following a total electrical blackout rendering the world in an apparent survivalist mode as marauding militia roam the country enforcing the law of 8 for a mysterious warlord named Nathan Holn, here under the command of General Bethlehem (Will Patton).  The Holnists bear brands of the number 8 (infinity) on their arms as the Munro Militia all bear the letter M.  Both burn American flags and forcibly conscript soldiers, as well as repeating lines from the movie and tv show verbatim.

General Bethlehem





Because I have thoughts about this show that are not groveling praise does not mean I will not watch the show.  Despite these meaningless details REVOLUTION has a heroine with a crossbow in skin tight pants, subtle HUNGER GAMES nod production team, who looks a lot better than Kevin Costner.

Stalin Sitcom

This is an idea that I had with my friend Jeremy Millard that deserves to be heard.

Here is the pitch for the situational comedy show that is 2 Broke Girls, Anger Management, Black Adder meets Gulag Archipelago.  Before you say that's a terrible idea and esoteric, the theme song is "I'm a Steel Man" (Soul Man by Sam and Dave).  That should set the tone that this is not history just a mockery of television and the Soviet Union.



The premise its 1938.  Stalin's Mom moves into the Kremlin to live with her son and ruins his life.  Stalin is a single father trying to raise sons Yakov and Vasily and daughter Svetlana.  His two dead wives, Ekaterina and Nadezhda are feuding characters that visit Stalin on a periodic basis.  Stalin cant get anything done with his mother hovering and getting in his business about the five year plans, the gulags and why he never called her in Georgia.

Stalins Mom



Stalin's bros are Molotov, Voroshilov and Beria who wander around Kremlin aimlessly pretending to be busy and avoid Vasili Blokhin, the secret police executioner.  Blokhin keeps trying to lure people into the basement to shoot them.  Blokhin kills at least one guest every episode.  This is one of the running gags, like Trotsky being blamed for the rain or soggy pancakes, and keeping young children away from Beria.  Beria is like the pedophile George Costanza.

Beria

 



In the first episode we find Stalin and writer, Isaac Babel having a discussion at dinner.  Stalin tells Babel, "You have not written anything in twenty years!  Why am I paying you?  Ill bring Gorky back from the dead."  Stalin's Mom hits Stalin in the back of the head, "Ioseb you're being rude to your guest, its not like hes a Uzbek."  Queue the laugh track, rimshot and Kat Dennings effusive cleavage.  Had to make a reference to 2 Broke Girls because that is the kind of mathematical sitcom form that would work.

Kat Dennings



STALIN, would work for CBS.  NBC likes the handheld camera and monkey doctor thing.  FOX if Married with Children was still on.  ABC is too family oriented and may not get such a dark storyline.  Cartoon Network is too lazy and approves anything that came out of an improv skit.

STAY TUNED FOR CASTING IN LATER POSTS...Rowan Atkinson?  Charlie Sheen?

Bridge Hate 1: Champlain Bridge

While I hate many bridges and other inanimate objects, there are those people, you know who I mean, who love bridges and waste their lives trying to convert us to join their cult.  It is only a bridge.  It cannot love you back or hold your hair back over the toilet seat when you have had too many shots playing can I out drink Richard Burton?

The new Champlain Bridge opened in November 2011 replacing its rusted predecessor, which had been there since 1929.  It is a beautiful blue structure with fluid arches at its crest looming over the narrow passage between the ruins of Crown Point in New York and Chimney Point in Vermont.  Completed in two years by a German engineering firm, it cost was estimated at $76 million.

 

When the states demolished the old bridge with explosives in late 2009 hundreds of Vermonters living and working in Western Addison County lamented the long commutes and disruption to local businesses because they had to take a ferry across the two thousand feet passage.  The New Yorkers did not care and moved on like rational people.  The hundreds, needing more attention than a single actress or any of Judd Apatow's children twitter, convinced the local television stations in Burlington, Plattsburgh and Albany to do emotion driven stories about the hardships that the people of Chimney Point had to endure bridgeless.  Remember, its just a bridge.  The hundreds got their golden bridge and swindled millions from NYSDOT and the Vermont Agency for Transportation that should have been spent paving roads that more than fifty people use in a day.

 



"It's a critical link for west-central Vermont and New York State, and vital to Vermont's economic strength, as well as for the people who rely upon that bridge for work and recreation," said Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin.

In the press release, linked below, Governor Shumlin is not the only elected official cashing in on the bridge and making it the greatest human achievement of all time.  Remember, its just a bridge.
http://www.governor.ny.gov/press/110711OpeningofLakeChamplainBridge

As the politicians take credit and inflate the critical existential importance of this bridge to the few hundred voting people and their taxable revenue, they should remember like any wide receiver celebrating catching the ball that it is their fucking job to fix the bridge and do not deserve the adoration for following protocol. 



The two minutes hate for the Champlain Bridge is not because of the object itself but rather because the bridge lovers were so indignant about their bridge from nowhere to nowhere and how obviously important they are all hundred of them in the cosmic scheme. Remember, its just a bridge.

If you would like to join the cult of the Champlain Bridge please use the link below:
http://champlainbridgecommunity.org/index.html

Brownell Hall (Heartburn)

In the ghost darkness of the cinderblock room,
under the faded covers, waiting for sleep
uncomfortable dreaming of food. 
stomach wrenches hard
acids against its walls
burning flesh inside out. 
Ephemeral flashes of silver morning light
crash through wired window curtains
blow nascent heat into my chamber of vomit.

Talus Road (1 July 2005)

twilight yellowed after the storm
forest mountains hold low vapors
shades of devoured trees; chrysalis tents
in empty homes still silence

muted humid colors flood
branches bare maple, birch, poplar
harsh pink cast on stones
property lines unclear and open

trucks pound down gravel road
pond rests collapsed trees beneath surface skin
village green crowded and loud
eve comes with cold blue fog

this wasted day, this arriving night

16 August 2004

Lying in the deep center bow of the horrendous Castro bed sideways with the aging jack Russell terrier, Millie, in my armpit and the brown dachshund, Gus, in my crotch. My back is as numb as my small hands are trapped underneath the reddened flesh festering in body odor and the burning pinpricks of heat amassing on my skin.

Through the hand-blown sash windowpanes projected up on the studio roof I see the trickle of opaque light and shadow reflecting from the front and rear lights of dumptrucks, diesel rigs, loud subwoofered bass house tracks exploding out from a disheveled Japanese car that escaped death from a scrap metal yard.  Through the muslin veil of dust mite infested curtains the cars zoom by leaving a trail of dust and faint sounds in low decibels vibrating above the murmur of crickets, flies, and owls.  I hear their songs in and outside of the tattered and shred screen porch off to my distant left behind the pillows out past the kitchen/dining room to the mowed valley floor beneath Spruce, Burnt, the Gallop and Derby Hill on the mountain road.

Above me through the ceiling window, the glimmering stars and specs of folding Venus, red Mars and the gas giants surface currents flowing in tandem rhythms of riverine matter held together firmly by gravity and other forces of physics.  Thoughts flicker like drunken pixies in the forest groves about existence, our odd species and my futures that cannot escape our future.  Wandering back down from ethereal nonsense I hit the granite face hard in the echo chamber of my mind, into aimless desultory depression dreaming of future ex-wives.  Names that I will forget cascade down through the subconscious cataracts.

Contentment Island 6 July 2004

On a stone terraced hillside behind the abandoned hulk of a house that served as JA White's laboratory and his home wasting the clear day.  The winds pick up across the Sound and Scott's Cove.  The rising water laps up white caps.

There is goose shit everywhere.  The house waits to be destroyed and replaced by a greater asymmetrical behemoth that will be overvalued to eight digits because of its acreage at the end of the peninsula in the "special" tax district.  The boat launch has been broken by underground roots from the overgrown trees along the private beach and rock jetty.

There is a green wood hulled fifty footer sailboat anchored out in the cove.  The heavy breeze and tidal currents are pulling its anchor in towards the shore underneath the burning sun of a late summer day in Western Connecticut where we are beholden to Long Island and its face tattooed mother, New York City.

Contemptment Island would be a much better name.

Can you hate a bridge?

Yes.  I believe that you can hate bridges and all other inanimate objects including carbon rods, ears of corn, and fabric swatches.  The bridges that I hate are drawbridges, especially those over unimportant and small waterways that impede traffic for recreational or private purposes.  When drawbridges are raised they begin as quaint next annoying then boring back to annoying and the wait becomes infuriating as you watch the obese bridge operator smoking and texting his girlfriend while the uhf/vhf wails for his attention.  You think that anyone can do his job, press button make bridge go up and press button make bridge go down. Waits can turn into eternities as the backup cascades miles behind the bridge itself as a Hinckley daysailor 42 putters up or downriver.  This is magnified on interstates such as I-280 over the Passaic River in Newark and formerly over the Hutchinson River on I-95 in the Bronx.

The bridge that I hate is the Stanley H. Stroffolino Bridge also known as the Washington Street Bridge in South Norwalk, Connecticut.  The Norwalk River sees mostly recreational boat traffic and some commercial vessels such as barges and small tankers.  It is not a busy place.  The Stroffolino is a state operated maritime drawbridge that crosses the Norwalk River carrying the circuitous State Highway 136.  It opened on 2 February 1974 after being legislated to replace the old drawbridge in 1949 by the aforementioned State Senator Stanley Stroffolino from Norwalk, who served on the Roads and Bridges Committee.  The old bridge was damaged severely in the 1955 Floods.

The previous bridges were operated by the City and predate the creation of the state highway.   The Stroffolino Bridge is the second automobile drawbridge over the Norwalk; the first bridge was located closer to the railroad crossing and the row of Italianate roofed stores.  The first road bridge was finished in 1912 by the city.  Norwalk purchased plots of the Aisthorpe and Betts lands on the east side marsh and abutting the railroad bridge from the Bank following foreclosure in 1911. See Norwalk v. Kate Podmore (1913)

Hatred is not a logical expression it is emotional and rarely wins an argument.  Despite these set of facts, the Stroffolino drawbridge is unnecessary and should be replaced with a permanent structure or removed entirely.  For aesthetic reasons South Norwalk would probably fight a new bridge especially if the span is higher or incongruous with Washington Street and the urban renewal, but it would save the state on maintenance and rid it of another bridge operator.  Norwalk does not need a drawbridge.  No one needs another drawbridge.

Newark: A New England Colony

Most people think Newark emerged from the swamps as an instant suburb of New York City after the airport, seaport and Giants Stadium were completed.  Newark was actually founded by the New Haven Colony in the 17th Century, well rather separatists led by Robert Treat that decided New Haven misinterpreted a single word in Paul's Letters to the Galatians...scarf vs. shawl.  On 21 February, I came to Newark to watch the Seton Hall v. Georgetown basketball game.

Driving west past the PSEG plant that mirrors a Soviet iron foundry city or the set from Blade Runner, we watch the Xanadu Shopping Center in the Meadowlands sit in darkness on the shoulder of the turnpike.  Great name for a financial debacle, like the Olivia Newton-John film and Citizen Kane's house...name a ship Titanic and it will sink.  We take 280 through Harrison and wait for the drawbridge to let us enter the city and wander towards the Prudential Center, the Rock.  It was rush hour and to my surprise there were people leaving jobs in Newark and commuting home to the New Jersey suburbs.  My ignorance made the experience a great novelty, it rarely benefits me except now.

Seton Hall drew a good turnout of young and old fans to watch Joey Theodore, Pope, and Auda embarrass Georgetown.   The Rock was a pleasant and modern venue with good beer selection, bars, and local fare.  It is very Jersey, lots of Springsteen, the Devils, and Gandolfini look-a-like contest winners.  Apparently Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond is the anthem of New Jersey not the Boston Red Sox 7th inning stretch, who knew I had another reason to hate the song.  It was a good time with drunks shouting, the ladies dancing squad and Newark!  Although the male nudity in the student section was unnervingly creepy.

Newark was not the giant slum city that my grandfather loathed traveling to back in the 50s and 60s, it was like Hartford only more important.

Dulce et decorum est: A Story of Canadian New England

This short story was originally written for a Prose class I took back in Autumn of 2004.  It was set in Nova Scotia, a place that is very New England.  Try to go to the supermarket on a Sunday and buy Molson.  The Maritime Provinces are a strange part of Canada. 

Crescent moon in cloudless night rests above endless lines and frozen piles of spent bodies now empty buried deep in the dark olive earth.  Spikes of iced up mud rise above ruined soil.  Boots crunch through hoarfrost.  Beneath a sky of darkness on phosphorescent fields, I wait for sleep.

Lieutenant Mayfield Pike leaned forward over the raised abatis and crude muddied strands of barbwire.  His cold breath drifted across the barren landscape of turned over and rotting earth.  Obese and ragged haired rats scurried down the labyrinthine trenches among the hundreds of sullen soldiers absently smoking away their weekly stipend of tobacco. 

He kept his eyes upward away from the ugly and unchanging ground that he had come to know intimately over the last nine months.  A series of red flares lit up the sky rising meteoric above the silent corpses of horses and men that covered the endless battlefield. 

“Get those masks on boys, here comes the Hun!” snapped the English Major from his perch atop of the trench wall.

Soldiers fumble stupidly pulling green plastic headgear over singed hair.  Triggers aim blindly for Enemy hearts.  Through the fetid mists shouting voices explode out of empty silence.

 “Royal Canadians!”  The English Major tried to rile up the men.  It failed to produce much excitement.  Neither would, “For King and Country!” or “God save the King!”

Dark green clouds blew in over the Canadian Regiments as the exchanges of artillery began to thunder barrages hard into their distant targets.  The earth shook violently as the cavalcade of Huns grew louder as they ran through the wild patches of razor wire, rotting maggot-infested bodies, and randomly laid mines. 

Huns with their sharp ugly helmets, bayonets fixed, scream at the top of their lungs plunging into the abyss.  Relentless the hunger for blood and death grows.  Souls consumed without end. 

The Canadians waited for the hated Huns to cross the lines until they began the counter-attack.  Pike climbed out of the hole leading his detachment of the living dead into the fray.  As he dragged himself up over the trenchwall, his boots slipped awkwardly in the half-melted mud.  He surfaced, raised his arms, and signaled the men to follow his lead.  They charged through the isolated machine gun fire aimlessly behind Pike.  Their heavy rubber gasmasks were iced over withholding their sight of the encoming Enemy. 

Pike halted his trot and aimed his rifle point blank at the temple of a Hun storm trooper passing in front of him.  He pulled down on the trigger.  Nothing happened. 

Misfire.  Jammed.  Trigger malfunction.  I’m fucked.

“Shizer,” laughed the Hun, as he stopped in surprise.  The two stood across from eachother staring ahead. 

The moment passed.  Pike felt a wrenching blow knock him hard into the ground.  The crunch of the hoarfrost reverberated through his body as an unbroken wave exiting from his contorting face.  His senses were numbed.  The men exchanged missed punches and rolled over the ground struggling for the advantage. 

Hearts pounding.  Adrenaline flowing.  Blood boiling.  There is only the now. 

Pike pulled his body over the Hun as he smiled in confidence as he choked the Enemy with his bare-hands. 

The Hun, struggling to breathe, thrust a rusted bayonet blade upward into his throat.  It seared through his skin cutting hard through the jugular vein.  Pike gasped for air as the torrent of purple blood exploded from his larynx.  Pike slumped over and fell onto the Hun.  The Hun angrily pushed the limp body off his, threw the blood ice-covered gasmask to the ground, and continued his blind charge towards the Canadian trench.  Pike watched blurred shadows and shapes run over his body. 

I wait for sleep, the Sleep of Death.

 “Looter! Looter! Looter!” A shrill voice called out waking Pike from his death.  His eyes came into focus out of the blackness.  He saw the obscured image of a woman falling over a pile of red bricks.  He saw the thin gray whisks of gunsmoke and the gaping exit wound in her chest, which revealed she had been shot in the back.

            The Shooter lowered his rifle and held it down letting the barrel drag against the dust covered pavement.  The noise was hard yet restrained.  He walked over to the limp corpse.  He leaned over the corpse and placed a wooden sign over her neck that read: SHOT FOR LOOTING. 

            He wiped the steaming spray of dark blood off his face and cursed the woman, “Shat your britches, did you?  Goddamn dog.  You got what was coming to you.” 

He hanged the standard issue bolt action rifle over his right shoulder and left the woman lying amongst burnt debris.  Her eyes were wide open staring up at the passing constellations and planets in the clear cold night above.  The heat from her wounds emanated as the vapors escaped out into the drifting snows before vanishing above the dark surface of the inner harbor and the Narrows. 

            The Shooter came over to Pike.  Pike was in the process of vomiting bile onto his great coat.  The last vestiges of his recurrent nightmare which lived in his mind as a lingering and unending poem were now gone, expelled with the contents of his empty stomach.  But they would return to him the next time he closed his eyes.  The blackness clung to him like the diseased beggar.

Pike had leaned his body up against the half-collapsed buttresses of the stone church.  “You fell asleep on guard duty, again, Sergeant, didn’t you?  I could have you court-martialed for that.”

            “Shut it, Private Keane.”

            Keane leaned over and helped the unshaven Pike to his feet.  “Now come on, Sarge, we have to be awake even for this duty.  Just because you’re some goddamn war hero doesn’t mean you can do whatever you like.  Sleeping all day and night, even in a place like this one.  I guess chewing on teabags or eating shoesteaks isn’t enough for you.  You need to keep moving or you’ll freeze to death out—.”

            Pike interjected, “Why’d you shoot that woman?”  He spat the bile soaked teabag out of his mouth and wiped the frosted sweat off his brow.

            “She was looting.  You know the law.”

            “How’d you know she was looting?”

Pike dropped his drawers and pissed on a ripped and wet newspaper sitting in the rubble of an apothecary.  Steam rose from the dark yellow stream as he read the headlines of the long past day, 7 December 1917.  The day after it happened.

            “What you’ve never shot a woman?  All those years in the war and you’ve never killed a skirt?  Not even a fraulein?”

            “Did I miss out on something special about the fairer sex?”  Said Pike as he shook the remnant urine from his urethra and pulled up his ragged trousers back over his reddened foreskin.

            “No, I suppose not, Sergeant.” 

Keane became momentarily submissive, understanding that his rather brusque manners were not going to be appreciated anytime soon.  He usually got the Sergeant to at least grimace, but ever since the explosion nothing got through.  Pike was preoccupied with other more difficult matters.

It was his wife.  She had been originally counted among the dead in the immediate aftermath of the explosion.  The city was unprepared for catastrophes of this scale.  The inability of the civil authorities to take control was quite evident in those morning hours now nearly a fortnight ago.  Things were confused.  Later, after the military assumed control of the now shattered port, she was finally added to the casualty rosters in one of many triage areas.  The volunteer nurses released her to her family. 

The two soldiers walked down the street through the huddled masses of homeless families and piles of wreckage from the explosion the day before.  For as far as the eye could see, from Sackville Street north to the Bedford Basin, lay in ruin.  In an instant, the two cities on the Narrows had been thrown up thousands of feet into the air only to come crashing back down to the earth with a force unprecedented ravaging all in its wake.  Unbeknownst to the survivors, it was the most powerful manmade explosion in history. 

Private Keane, despite his earlier consideration, continued to talk as they wandered down the hill to the docks along the shoreline.  They stood at the edge of a collapsed pier staring out across the black water to the fires still burning in Dartmouth, just east of the city.  Contorted rail lines of twisted metal were strewn about like the dead in battle along the charred pylons of the naval yards.  Torn ragged ruins of the King’s cruisers and convoy ships rested aground, upside down and atop crushed factories and mills that once lined the shoreline.  The lone vessel in the Narrows, the fire ship Dorothy, shot a stream of pressurized water from its spout onto the razed homes. 

            Pike broke his silence, opening up to his subordinate.  “My wife lived here.  She worked at the brewery until ‘it’ happened.”

            “A lot of people lost their families when it happened.  How old was she?”  Keane asked as he looked down at the dirt on his leather boots.

            “My age, that is not important.  Bonnie survived.  They removed her, thankfully, back to her mother’s on Cape Breton.”

            Keane lit a cigarette clumsily before he asseverated, “Damned Huns hit us with our trousers down.”  He knew nothing but what the things he was told.

“You don’t actually believe it was a German conspiracy?  No one is that clever.”

            “I don’t know what to believe, sarge.” 

Pike sat down on the warped planks of the devastated wooden pier.  He pointed across the dark waters to the scattered assortments of shipwrecks and dilapidated buildings that surrounded the locus of the explosion.  The damage to the two cities, Dartmouth and Halifax, was inescapable and would have haunted its residents to no end, if they weren’t already ghosts.  Acceptance of the occurrence of the trauma itself had yet to pass.  Their world fell to pieces and now there was little more left for them, but numbness and fear. 

“See that ship there, with the hole in her, was the Mont Blanc.  She was carrying explosives, TNT, benzoil and gunpowder up from New York.  She had her red flags up, going under five knots, adhering to all the harbor rules.”

Through the abscess in the hull of the crippled cargo ship, the ghosts milled about trying to catch a closer glimpse of the damage dealt to their home.  Many gathered spoiled food and garbage from the rubble, eating whatever they could find.  It did not matter if they became sick.  The dictates of survival are not picky.  Just live.  Forget everything else.  It will only get in the way. 

            Pike pointed northward to Tuft’s cove, “That hulk there with Belgian Relief plastered all over her side was the Imo.  She slammed into the bow of the Mont Blanc at full steam.  Who do you think would actually set something like that up?  The Germans?  Even they are not that evil.

            “What you don’t know Keane is that bad shit can happen without malice.  Without a plan.  Without a purpose.  Get used to it.  Shit happens.” 

Nihilist rot, Pike thought to himself. 

Pike turned away from the derelict harbor to look west.  His eyes were transfixed up on the high granite parapets of the star shaped Citadelle.  The fortress was the symbolic guardian commanding the treacherous approaches of Halifax through the underwater reefs among the swift and powerful tides and currents.  Since the explosion, the Citadelle became a shelter for the survivors, well as a base for the green detachments of soldiers called in to preserve the order.  Pike was among the few who had seen real combat, let alone fire his rifle at the faceless Enemy.

Keane let out a puff from his cigarette and interrupted his intercession.

            “Hey, Sarge, did you hear why Calvinists are opposed to fucking standing up?”  Keane waited for Pike to return from his specious reverie for the punch line.  “Cause it might lead to dancing.”

            Pike laughed heartily, nearly choking on his breath, and responded, “My wife tells a joke like that, though, it’s funnier when she tells it.” 

He turned away from Keane, walking with a slow gait into the darkness of the comatose city.  From the sheath beyond the firelight, he saw Keane drop his cigarette on the ground before he stamped it out with his boots.  The Private’s face was illuminated, revealing its perfect condition without scars, age lines, or the worries of the world outside his grasp. 

Light ephemeral flakes of snow began to fall down upon the hellish ruin.  After another long midnight rest, Pike and Keane continued their patrol.  They circled slowly around the Citadelle and back through what was left of the Richmond District watching for looters, the unfound bodies of the dead, and the newly homeless masses. 

This aimless routine had become second-nature to Pike.  His life was trapped in a continous loop of nightmare and ugly reality.  The same day of desperate boredom never ended.  Sleep was the illusion.    

 

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The morning sun came through the gossamer window shades directly on the black eyepatches that covered over her orbital cavity.  Her eyes were gone.  In normal circumstances, the heat and light of the sun would have woken her from sleep, but that was before the explosion and the accompanying darkness.  She felt the warmth against her face, smelled the newly arrived Christmas tree, and listened to the movements of her mother working in the kitchen.  Something was boiling.

This is not so bad, she thought to herself.  Mayfield loves me.  He always has and always will remain devoted.  I will wait for his return.  He will love me.  Her mind drifted back to the first time she had spread her legs for him.  The warmth inside her and the grass swaying in the summer breeze above them filled her head with better days.  She smiled happily.

Bonnie opened the front door.  She threw her tartan scarf over her shoulder as she checked to make sure that her coat was buttoned.  Pressing on her head, she felt her winter cap among the strands of her dark hair.  She walked outside through the snowdrifts.  She remembered the way. 

The sun followed her as she descended the bluffs down to the rocky shoreline. Tranquil waves of cold water lapped against the stones pulling the looser material and snow out to sea.  These sounds were underneath the whipping of the wind, unheard by those deafened by life in the cities, mines, and countless wars.

She was there.  The blood of her hands and feet had retreated into her body.  Her face was red, turning purple and black.  She felt the wind in her hair buried underneath a thick wool cap.

Bonnie sat down in the snow beside a large exposed rock, marked by a rusted bronze plate with unreadable words and unknown royal seals.  She did not know heraldry, nor did such trivial things matter to her.   This rock was here when John Cabot landed on the island four centuries ago.  It was here that England first laid her claim to the New World.

She remembered this bit of local history quite well.  She prayed to herself and instead of the customary amen she asked, “For what have we suffered for?”  And this was her last thought before she dove headfirst into the water and swam out into the bay.

             

Mount Grey Lock and Herrmann Melville

After growing bored of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the American literati of the industrial period of the 19th Century shifted their focus upon Mount Grey Lock in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.  The Transcendentalists, Romantics, and Neo-Gothic writers like Emerson, Hathorne, and Herrmann Melville.  Melville wrote his great prose work, Moby Dick, at Arrowhead House on Holmes Avenue in Pittsfield in full view of Grey Lock and now the enormous industrial cathedral of the GE Plastics Plant.  These writers found peace in the shadow of the mountain knowing nothing of the violence of its namesake.

In August of 1723, a refugee from the Woronoke tribe, Grey Lock launched a series of stunning raids into the heart of European settlements from Abenaki villages in the Mississquoi and Otter Creek deltas.  Over the next four years, Grey Lock took hundreds of war captives and shed a tremendous amount of blood in New England, despite the efforts of the English and the Iroquois to find and kill him. He was never defeated on the field of battle and lived out his days shrouded in mystery to become one of the greatest legends in American Indian history.  As a result of the havoc and fear that Grey Lock created the scalp bounty rose to 100 pounds.  Grey Lock killed a lot of white people and with any luck would have taken out Herrmann Melville.

You may ask why do I hate Melville so much and why do I insist on misspelling his first name?  He knows why.  Herrmann Melville has always stood in my way.  Since 11th grade English when I scored zeros on Moby Dick quizzes and later having to read his entire published works for doctoral comphrensive exams, it has been a personal vendetta.  He is my white whale.

Bromley Mountain: Hipster Ski Resort?

For as long as I can remember my family has been coming up to Vermont to go skiing, at least once a year, at Bromley Mountain in Peru, Vermont.  Bromley was never the largest, most difficult, or most expensive.  It has always been a family-centric and cheap ticket, as ski resorts go in this part of New England, and thus the least snobbish.  This is aimed at Stratton. 

The resort was originally owned by the Pabst family of Milwaukee, makers of the hipster favorite Blue Ribbon.   The trails were designed by Fred Pabst, jr. and still retain some obvious names on the black diamonds, such as Blue Ribbon, Pabst Peril, and Pabst Panic.  Pabst, aside from ski trail design was an inventor responsible for advances in chairlifts and snow production, which is necessary for a ski resort with its slopes facing south and the sun.  The mountain trails were cleared by workers from the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) during the Depression.  Big Bromley is now celebrating 75 years.

The difficulty in answering the question is because I am basing my argument on that it is not hipster because there is no irony.  Vermont, cheapness (aka vintage or thrift) with exception to tech and PBR may be hipster Fred Pabst was not a pretender, he loved his mountain and the sport of skiing without a misguided sense of his self.  Drinking PBR has become an event, like cosby sweater nights for the hipster and those in the periphery, the rest of us can never drink it again for fear of being labeled to cool for school.  Any group that prevents drinking is pure evil.   

So is Bromley hipster?  NO!  Hipsters are allergic to skiing and families, and Pabst in this context is completely without an ironic sense of being blue collar or urban. 

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1074335/1/index.htm

Brockton: Planned or Accidental?

Driving west from Plymouth on route 14/27 on New Year’s Day, searching for the Fall River Expressway, we are compelled through the rotting downtown around the T station, bus depot, and juvenile court house.  In Brockton the trains are elevated on a stone viaduct that guarantees that you will never get run over.  As a result there are no lines of sight in the center of town, plenty of places to wait for passerbyes for muggings, throwing trash at passing cars, and defecating in public.  And the traffic cannot see around the stops, corners, and imposing blackened stone viaducts...imagine the Newcastle of Get Carter, the original with Michael Caine.

The MBTA and Commonwealth DOT have grand plans for Brockton and the roadways near Taunton, US 44, that they and other proponent of public works projects as a salve for unemployment like vertical housing structures cure social problems.  If you build it, put the shovel in the ground, you cannot be stopped.  This Robert Moses mentality has its inherent truth in the nature of such projects.  To say that it will stimulate the economy and keep the people from becoming restless is a misunderstanding of the work policies of Franklin Roosevelt.  Try stacking a court with judges, forcing millions into cheap labor, and making hillbillies brush their teeth, Obama.  If Michael Caine were President things would get done, the bloody door would get blown off.

Is Brockton in managed decline or managed growth?  Regional and Urban planners are often under the impression that growth can exists anywhere despite the economic and geographical realities.  Brockton was an accident, the industrial town that the city fathers envisioned and named after a canadian industrialist(an oxymoron), did not survive.  Brockton has been in decline for a century, although plateau may be more accurate in a technical definition.  Let Michael Caine, in a Charles Bronson way, bring Brockton back from the meta-ghetto to a new foxborough or newcastle instead of waiting for the half-assed throw money at it stimilus transportation/employment plan. 

Brockton: Hipster Colonies

In my last post I mentioned that there are no hipster colonies in Brockton.  The reader of this blog may ask what constitutes a hipster colony.  In my delusional understanding, a hipster colony is a neighborhood or community of pretentious pseudo-adults that are not natives to the urban centers where they have settled.  They stand out based on behavior and ignorance to their surroundings in regards to the realities of crime, culture, and environment.  The hipster, believing that they live in a society without class, violence, and racism, will leave their doors unlocked, go out all hours at night as they at home amid crackheads, gang-bangers and overeager cops, and instruct their neighbors to improve the community.  These colonies exist in places like New Orleans, see Treme or the Wire, for Baltimore.  David Simon's shows are a perfect reference here, think about it as is the Steve Zahn character in Treme.  Other places such as these exist in most American cities.

When urban crimes happen to these colonists, they always seem amazed that these things can happen in this day and age and plead ignorance.  There is no explanation beyond stupidity or arrogance.  The world is not how you envision it, it is how it is and has been...hard.  Hipsters do not think about these things, especially with Obama in office, he cured all social problems with his shatneresque diction.

Thankfully Brockton is not attractive to hipsters, who are busy turning once hard neighborhoods in Brooklyn into safe places deviod of their culture for one that values specialness, irony, plaid, and holden caulfield.   

Brockton: City of Champions

It is not hard to imagine the life of this city’s native son, Rocky Marciano, probably the toughest boxer to ever live and the one who was never defeated in the ring.  He defeated a 75 to 137 years old Joe Louis according to the barbershop in Coming to America.

Brockton has its champion of the Ring and is a champ when it comes to gerrymandering, its 9th Congressional district is a stunning achievement.  It is an archipelago of noncontigious spaces that would make a corrupt southern legislature blush.  I will not mention the party that it favors, but it is not a difficult guess who benefits from high-concentrated urban decline. 

Urban decline is not romantic in a place like Brockton, a place that time forgot.  There are no hipster colonies here, no one here chooses to live in poverty.  The factories are gone, likely away to cheaper labor, thanks NAFTA.  It is the real manifestation of my fictional Cranbury, Connecticut if Dickens, Conrad and Lovecraft teamed up on a project.  Think the Who, Led Zeppelin, and the Stones.  In New England the sad mill towns that immigrant labor fueled have become museums and the new nearly inescapable ghettoes.  None of this is said to be ironic in the hipster manner and insult those of us who want more out of life than self-indulgent smugness.

Brockton: The Flint, Michigan of Massachusetts

Brockton is the Flint, Michigan of Massachusetts.  Let’s get Tropical!  This is of course is in reference to the Will Ferrell basketball movie, Semi-Pro (2008) set in the 1970s where is he is the owner of a terrible ABA franchise.  He trades the club’s only washing machine for Woody Harrelson.  Never a good move.  The Flint of the High 70s is a city of industry, providing countless auto-parts to the land yachts of the Big Three car makers of nearby Detroit.  Whether the setting is homage to the hockey version of this film, SLAP SHOT, or merely a lovely coincidence is unclear. 

                Brockton is not known for its motoring history, but it is the city of champions.  The city is as about as unromantic as Flint or its neighbor Taunton, another island of industry in a sea of cranberry bogs and pilgrim towns.  Mini-ghettos that could stand in for Baltimore or Flint as mirrors or representations of certain aspects of modern urban barrios in post-industrial American cities.

I admit that this argument is flimsy at best and that the conclusion is unmet.  This is a blog and these rules of a persuasive essay, grammar, and punctuation need not apply.  I could write almost anything without consequences or ridicule, so I will.  This has become as meta as Ricky Gervais exploring the nature of humor, why are jokes funny.  He is single-handedly destroying comedy faster than Dane Cook could ever dream.