Hate, Zits, & Spirituality

                                                                       

As Henry edits Hate, Zits, & Spirituality, he's getting a sinking feeling the story is rubbish— his inner anger and hate seep between the lines, hemorrhaging through the story's seams.

Regardless, he'll publish the wounded bit. 

As the French say, 

Comme on fait son lit, on se couche. 

You've made your bed now lie on it. 

People are going to do what they do and you can’t tell them what to do because their egos tell them they know it all.

They feel love and hate inside, but it’s not cool to come off as a hater, so we hate in private, or share it with our best friend.

The less you hate the better, but hating feels good, it's addictive, like junk, cigarettes, or In and Out Burgers.

Hitler, Vlad the Impaler, and Pol Pot were consumed with hate. 

Gandhi, Jesus, Moses, and Buddha transcended hate. 

Willy Nelson the cowboy Buddha says this about hate— 

Every negative thought you have makes poisons that go into your system that will kill you and give you cancer, tumors, or whatever you can think of. 

Willy is spot on, if you’re a person who values longevity, being mellow pays off. 

But for many, rage and temper addictions are a bitch to conquer— Henry is one.

When you’re raging mad, your foot slips off the brake and you puke nasty words all over who or whatever.

Surely, going postal spritzes a few ounces of poison-ridden adrenaline throughout your system.

People who blow up regularly in public, commonly known as Type A Personalities, should be required by law to wear warning lanyards with index card-sized badges reading,

WARNING, I’M EMOTIONALLY RIGGED TO EXPLODE. MY FURY CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO ANYONE IN A THREE-METER RADIUS.  

When anger meets restraint anger usually wins— 

I’m trying to hold it in, BUT, you two-bit pint-sized motha fucker, your mama...

Meditation, and or Valium can soothe anger. 

Meditating on Valium is a boon.

During the sixties, the US Public Health Department directed municipal water systems across the nation to put fluoride in their water supplies because it helped prevent cavities. 

Kids living in the sixties consumed so much candy and pop that the fluoride in the city water systems failed to save them from tooth decay.

You could put Valium in the local water supplies, but nobody drinks tap water anymore. 

Since a lot of people drink Coca-Cola— Cherry Coke, Orange Coke, Diet Coke, Vanilla Coke, Watermelon Coke, Coffee Coke, let's put Valium in Coca-Cola.

Most folks love the mellow feeling they experience on Valium because the drug is relaxing and their troubles disappear. 

Big pharma, pharmacist, and physicians keep Valium under lock and key, doling it out, doing their part supporting the Food and Drug Administration and the DEA in the war on high times and fun in America.

Why not make Valium legal and put it in Coca-Cola to boot?

America and the world need Valium Coca-Cola, NOW. 

Leon Russell, the Hall of Fame rock star, composer, and session man played on endless recording sessions, with— The Supremes, Dion, Aretha Franklyn, George Harrison, Joe Cocker, JJ Cale, Tina Turner, Cher, to name a few.

As a rule of thumb, he made it a point to keep his mouth shut while working sessions because he despised the scene, thinking it was pretentious. 

On one occasion, while working a Phil Spector produced Cher recording session, Spector told Leon to treat him with respect. Leon Russell then jumps on top of his piano, and begins boogalooing, saying to Spector, 

fuck you. 

Everybody working the session, including Cher, laughed like loons for 10 minutes. The nut-job Phil Spector didn't find it funny.

Leon left the session and never worked for Spector again, going on to compose his own songs— a string of novel, high-powered, and emotionally stirring rock albums. 

As the newly released Leon Russell and the Shelter People CD played in a New York City limousine on a rainy night in Manhattan, the passenger, Aretha Franklyn, asked the driver to set the song on repeat,  

Aretha listened to Leon's song, Stranger in a Strange Land over and over. After the twelfth replay, she began to cry.

Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of  Queen spent his professional life fussing over his severe hormonal acne. 

He spent millions of Euros on creams, medications, make-up, even having his face sanded by a dermatologist with 200-grade sandpaper until pinpoint bleeding was observed, then having his facial area massaged with creme disinfectant and a special potion.

Freddie’s dressing room at Queen concerts was off-limits to everyone, even band members. Only his makeup artist, Jan Sewell was allowed in to do his makeup, put on his prosthetic nose, and secure veneers over his crooked teeth. 

When the concerts ended, venue janitors were tasked with cleaning the mess in Freddie’s green rooms, stinking of glue, nail polish remover, and hydrocortisone.

The dressing rooms were also awash with used cotton balls and wads of paper tissues. Walking through them was like wading throw a snowy field.

Charles Bukowski, legendary barfly, recalcitrant, and laureate of American lowlife, had worse acne than Freddie Mercury— Acne Conglobata.

Buk suffered mightily from acne during the late thirties when he attended Los Angeles High School. 

He writes in his book Ham and Rye about taking ROTC instead of gym, because he was ashamed to wear shorts, exposing the boils on his legs. 

Around this time, his old man, Heinrich, finally sent Charles to a dermatology clinic where a nurse spent hours painfully sucking pus and blood out of his large cysts and boils with a syringe. After a few weeks of the horrid process, Buk’s face and body looked worse. 

At the advent of World War II, Buk dropped out of Los Angeles Community College because he was failing courses, wanting to drink and write when he wasn't working at the post office.

By the fifties, Bukowski’s Acne Conglobata was a non-issue. Freddie Mercury, on the other hand, obsessed over his zits for the rest of his life. 

Mercury was homosexual, and looks are an issue in the gay community. 

In Bukowski’s barfly world, LA rummy bars such as— King Eddy’s Inn, Frolic Inn, and The Spot, looks meant nothing, buying drinks, particularly for women, was everything.

Recently while writing Henry was experimenting with Kush weed, a 65 percent THC strain. He smoked every few hours for four days. At first, the buzz was magic, he loved the feeling, and never wanted to stop.

By the third day mental fog and paranoia set in, and he couldn't focus on writing.

On the fourth day, he gave the weed to his Cuban wife Lucia and their lover Summer Wynd— realizing weed didn’t work for him anymore.

Here's a beat-up adage that’s been around for the last couple of centuries, longer even, possibly coined by Shakespear.

one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

So, Henry decides to give up the pot and drink moderately, augmenting booze using Valium and Tramadol (synthetic opium), thinking,  

God fucking forbid, the last thing I want to do is booze urban fashion, like the rolling rich bimbees on the made-for-TV soaps Dallas and Dynasty— sipping zinfandel from tall stemmed wine glasses by the pool and in their marble and stainless steel kitchens at 1O AM in the morning. 

There's a film, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, where— 

a high-strung coat hanger magnate, Dave Whiteman (Richard Dreyfus) rescues a bum Jerry Baskin (Nick Nolte) from drowning in Dave’s swimming pool. 

Jerry's invited to stay at the Whiteman's Beverly Hills mansion by Dave's anxious and horny wife, Barbara (Bette Midler), and their bigender son Max.

Not particularly wanting to give up bumhood, Jerry accepts the invite anyway.

One day by the pool, the woebegone tramp bonds with the family dog Mattise, who has one blue eye and one black and is depressed, teaching him to fetch. 

Soon, Mattise is on top of the world, happy as a pup. 

Barbara who’s sexually frustrated because she and Dave haven't had sex in years is beguiled by Jerry’s hoodoo on Mattise, so she fucks him while Dave’s at work, having orgasms upon orgasms.

Then Jerry bangs the young and sensual Mexican housemaid, Frida, who's been having a fuckfest with Dave Whiteman for over a year.

Frida tells Dave she's balled Jerry,  jealous he plots revenge on the sagacious bum.

Soon the two smoke dope together and spend the night talking about life by the pool, ultimately bonding.

Everyone in the Whiteman family is unhappy, Barbara's sexually frustrated, Dave's strung out because he's overworked, their son Max wants to tell them he's gay but can’t, and their daughter Jenny, played by Ricky Nelson’s daughter Tracy is anorexic. A good part for her because she was anorexic in real life back then,

Dropped by the gods from Heaven, Jerry the bum spews wisdom he's picked up on the road, and from reading Kerouac to the dysfunctional family.

Eventually, each one of the Whitemans is led to the very thing they need to be happy by Jerry. 

The moral of this story is— holy fuck, shit, puke.

Money can’t underwrite happiness, but spirituality can.

Missiles, Fruit Flies, & Psychosis

Nothing is forever, not even change as evolving matter.

When evolving matter's sucked into Supernova it's stretched like hot taffy into nothing, still adding to the mass of Black Holes, because nothing morphs into a recycled mass in a Supernova.

Say you combined the powers of every Marvel Comic Book hero and funneled them into one superhero, let's call him Ultra Ultra Mega Man— if he strays while rocketing in space, say, into a Supernova, he'll dissolve like a Pop-tart in a bottle of Coca-Cola.

Supernovas are most significant to the Earth, astrophysicists speculate on their magic by observing the holes gushing  X-Ray patterns. 

You can count on this, Black Holes are the most exotic secrets of space, and they're spiritually significant.

Further out in leftfield, let’s mix Heaven with rocket science, and warfare with mathematics and see where it goes.  

As the Discovery shuttle jets through the outer regions of the thermosphere, it blows spent rocket fuel and ghastly smoke out of its propelling nozzle. 

The astronauts are altitude sick, puking spent residues of their wet food lunch into paper barf bags, unaware their craft is soaring uncomfortably close to the doorway of Heaven. 

The intrusion rattles the Angels, the sentries at Saint Peter’s Gate — Like Roman warriors, the Seraphim execute a simultaneous action. God’s Guardians lock arms, forming a circle around the thrusting craft, flapping their wings, generating a strapping force, pitching the rocket out of Heaven’s sphere.

Next, 

HM=‐‐‐‐(4W/3)P!

Math is an integral part of waging war.

In this formula HM represents hearts and minds, W represents the weight of the average body containing the heart and mind to be saved, and P represents the total population of a (to be) bombed country.

Suppose it’s necessary to save the hearts and minds of Italy. How many pounds of bombs will we need? 

To get the answer we multiply the average Italian's weight (111 pounds) by 4 and divide the result (444) by 3, which gives us the hearts and minds winning factor number, 148. 

So, a ton of bombs is dropped on Italy, there are 1000s of victims, the Hearts and Minds formula skyrockets thousands of points (kills).

Fuck, hell, shit, puke, and fire— how can bombing non-combatants sway hearts and minds? No fucking buddy can win where it really counts by bombing.

There’s an evil genius roaming the corridors of the Pentagon, Russian Ministry of Defense, Imam Ali Military Base, HiKirya, resembling a 1986 Macintosh Plus computer on lizard legs.

Henry’s passed out on the living room sofa of his Key West bungalow, it's a hot July morning in1 986.

He’s a pathetic sight having drank himself silly the night before, laying on his back in his underwear with his shoes on, mouth open, sucking in fruit flies, and blowing them out.

It’s 400 AM, he wakes up and sucks down a half-empty bottle of warm beer, trying not to puke on the sofa— ready to call Key West Coastal Cleaners and blame it on the Chihuahuas if he barfs on the furniture.

By 600 AM, the fruit flies have flown to a pile of bananas, and oranges in the kitchen or they've croaked because they only live a month and a half.

Henry's nauseous, wrapped in a web of muddled silence, fearing the future. 

He gets up from the sofa and turns the TV on, hoping the morning news will clear things up, but, the electricity is off. 

Was there an earthbound hailstorm of nuclear rockets or meteors?  Did reality stop and freeze in the here and now?

Wanting to get to the bottom of things, he walks out the front door, looks around the neighborhood, unable to see through the fog.

Convinced that something terrible happened, he walks inside, lays on the living room sofa, pulls his blanket over his head, falling asleep. 

When Henry was in kindergarten there was Civil Defense Bulletin posted in his classroom that read,

Immediately after one sees the first flash of intense heat and light of a developing nuclear fireball, one should stop, get under his blanket or sheets, and duck and cover. 

Duck and Cover,  pull the blanket over your head, go to sleep, experience unearthly bliss.  

Eventually, Lucia shakes him out of his sleep saying,

get up baby, come eat breakfast.

He walks to the kitchen in his underwear looking disheveled like Christopher Lloyd's character Jim Ignatowski from the sitcom TAXI. 

Then, sitting down at the kitchen table that's adorned with plates of— cinnamon buns, baked apples, biscuits, scrambled eggs with chives, and a large container of brewed coffee mixed with hot milk. 

After munching on a buttered biscuit and sipping coffee Henry asks Summer Wynd and Lucia,

was there an apocalyptic event this morning? Whatever happened scared me, so I hid under the bedspread. Lucia passes Henry a bong with a Bic Lighter saying, 

Jesus mia baby— there was a light rain this morning and the power went out for 20 minutes. Don’t forget your appointment with Doctor Hiccup the shrink at 11. Take the Vespa. 

Great breakfast girls, I better get cracking, 

Henry showers, dresses, then Summer Wynd oils and braids his waist-length salt and pepper hair. 

In shorts, a tank-top, and rubber slippers he walks outside and cranks up the scooter, driving a short distance to Hiccup’s office which is in a single level 60s style mall.

Parking on the sidewalk, he gets off the scooter and walks a cement slab and stone walkway lined with fountains full of large orange and blue Koi.

Inside the clinic, he sits on a hard plastic chair, one of many in welded rows, eyeballing the other patients, an unfriendly lot haunted by elaborate neuroses— building imaginary walls between themselves and the world. 

A sexy blond medical clerk wearing blue slacks and a white medical coat looks at Henry saying, 

Mr. Lucowski, I have some forms for you to fill out. 

Henry walks to a long counter and she hands him a clipboard with paperwork on it and a pen saying, 

fill out the paperwork Henry, 

he looks it over and says, 

why should I? I'm a regular patient, Hiccup's a shrink, not a brain surgeon, 

just sign it, then.

He signs the paper giving the clipboard back to the clerk. Being a prick about it he says, 

I'm mentally ill, you're a professional, deal with it, 

why not go with the flow Henry instead of making a big deal all the time?

He blows her a kiss, holding his hand up to his mouth effeminately. She likes it and says,  

Go to hell Henry.  

Sitting in the hard plastic chair again, he picks up a copy of Popular Mechanics, reading an article on solar-powered panels, thinking about putting a few on the roof of the tribe's bungalow to heat hot water. The only problem is he's all thumbs, if the girls can't do it fuck it, plumbers make as much a shrinks, more even.

after waiting an hour, the medical clerk says, 

Henry Lucowski, Doctor Hiccup will see you.

He walks the antiseptic-smelling hallway to Hiccup's office, going inside and sitting on the modern leather sofa in front of the shrink's large desk. As Hiccup packs his pipe with Cavendish tobacco Henry says, 

Doc, if you light that pipe I'm going to puke all over your office.

Hiccup sets the pipe in a wooden tray and says, 

Yes, OK, Mr. Lucowski your wife called me this morning,  she was concerned about a paranoid episode you had earlier. Can you tell me something about it? 

I woke up at 4 AM, thinking the world was ending.

Henry, your addiction to alcohol and drugs is exasperating your bipolar condition, causing paranoid episodes. Have you considered going to AA? 

Jesus—Christ no, there's no way I gonna sit in a room of AAs and listen to their sanctimonious rants. Sobriety's for winners, whinners  I mean. 

Watch your language. 

What? Winners, whinners, Freudian slips? Penis envy?

Henry, there’s more to it than meets the eye, AA’s a place to go for group therapy, there're daily meetings at the Anchors Away Club, think about it. I’m going to give you a script for Lithium, it will help center you.

Save it Doc, psychotropic dopes for dopes. 

Henry stands, turns, and walks out of Hiccup’s office, feeling more frustrated than when he came in. On the way out he tells the medical clerk to send him the bill, leaving through the front door. 

Driving his Vespa down Mainstreet, he stops and parks in front of Captain Willys, going in for a drink. 

It’s dark inside, late afternoon, the regular drunks are at the bar and scattered in booths. Henry sits at the bar, ordering a boilermaker. 

The bartender, a toothless older woman with drab-colored dreadlocks, a smoker with a deeply lined face sets down a beer and a shot on the bar, saying in a raspy voice,

how's it hangin there?  

Here? At the moment I couldn't tell you which way is up, I'm lost in the woods. The witchy barkeep cackles.

Henry drops the shot of whiskey in the mug, watching it sink and bubble. Then taking a deep pull of the mix, going somewhere else, barfly style, staring at his drink, peaceful-like. 

After his third boilermaker, he places a few crumpled bills on the bartop, remembering to tip the witchy barkeep, then drives his Vespa home. 

Back home in the bungalow, he sits at the kitchen table, Summer Wynd is rolling a joint. She lights it, taking a toke, passing it to Henry, he takes a healthy pull, holding the smoke in and blowing it, then coughing, Lucia says,

bless you, baby, let's order Chinese and watch TV in the living room. 

The paper bags full of woked food are delivered twenty minutes later. 

The tribe watches Mr. Ed and Bonanza reruns, eating Chinese from oyster pails with chopsticks—  washing it down with saki. 

By 9 PM   M*A*S*H  is on, Henry's fading and he says, 

Life's a blur ain't it, just a friggin myth, a puzzle the gods throw in our face.