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.

Hip to-it-at Birth

 

Last weekend Henry bought a paperback copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s book, The Hell’s Angels, at a yard sale in his Key West neighborhood. As he hands 65 cents to his neighbor, an older woman, she says, 

I found the book in the garage, it looks horrifying, is it a Steven King novel? Henry chuckles saying,

yeah, Stephen King on acid.

What some call the outlaw saga began in the late forties in Southern California when numbers of stray, World War 2 veterans who championed sex, booze, and Harleys, banded together into antisocial groups with handles like, Devils Disciples, Satans Brigade, Banditos.

Bonafide card-carrying bikers, not weekend warriors, are spurred on by their desire to be part of the— emotionally aloof, unrepentant, maniacal, freak free, on the edge 1 percentile.

In 1965 Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation hired Hunter S. Thompson to write a story that morphed into a book about the Hells Angels motorcycle club in California. 

Hunter, who was just 28, researches the book the only way he knew how— throwing himself into the early biker scene and riding with the Hells Angels for a year on his BSA because he couldn't afford a Harley.

Everything, (I mean) every fucking thing, has been written about Hunter, so (I want) to pen an original sentence here.

The Hunter S. Thompson thunderclap was ignited by sparks of neuron to nerve messaging— a serotonin rush pounded out with measured doses of dopamine.

Hunter's lifeblood flowed from his ever-churning mind not his daily regimen of intoxicants. 

His legendary use of booze, dope, Dunhills, grapefruits, and fondness of pyrotechnics was an embellished myth, spawned at the Owl Farm— Hunter's home and sanctuary in the hills of Aspen.

L u m b e r i n g, on doMed  caps cinnamon GLUCOSE::''  & floWer buDS . . . ; '  ' ,'; Alice, most everyone is mad here. i t's A b ea u t i f ul ,   bE A U T  I FULL  mess, . ..';; 

Henry finishes reading The Hells Angels in forty minutes, it’s ll AM in Key West. He ventures out of his study to the kitchen where his Cuban wife and their lover Summer Wynd are finishing off a pot of coffee as they pass a joint around. Lucia tells Henry,

baby come to Dog Beach with us. 

Yeah, OK.

Leaving their dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, they walk out the back door of their bungalow stepping into the jungle as they call it, an inky and overgrown area with bamboo, banana trees, ragged palms, and strange unclassifiable creepy-crawly vines threatening to overtake their house.

Nude in a flash, they jump into a wooden hot tub that's spritzing water and making witchy hisses. Sitting knee to knee, feeling cozy as they play handsy, touchy-feely, find the weeny, nipple tug-a-lug, then having tantric sex— a Hindu teasing game where you can touch and titillate for an eternity, but you're not allowed to screw.

When the jungle festivities end, the girls change into their world-famous thong bikinis, wrapping up in frayed 2XL Oxford shirts, and throwing masses of girly junk into Lucia's large Gucci bag. Then, Summer Wynd oils and braids Henry's long hair Native Indian style. 

Outside, the tribe piles onto their Vespa scooter, Lucia drives as the others hold the Chis, Che y Mia, and their pet bird, Pedro the woodpecker follows airborne. 

Ten minutes later they're at Dog Beach, where they get off the scooter, park, and rent beach chairs and large umbrellas from Jimmy's Strandhaus at the entrance of the beach. 

After walking in the sand a short way they find an open spot that feels right, then positioning and planting the chairs and umbrellas in the sand. 

The girls take off their baggy Oxford shirts, showing off their class A thonged bodies, bending to brush sand off their legs, and spraying olive oil on one other— all the time knowingly posing for the turned-on gawkers eyeballing them from every angle. Finally settled, Lucia looks over at Henry saying,

baby, run across the street to Louie's and buy three plastic buckets of Rum Cocos, and be sure to ask for long straws.

He does as he’s told, walking a short distance to Louie’s Alley Bar, ordering buckets of Rum Cocos, rumored to have a hint of cocaine extract mixed in because they are blended with the Cuban soda Matera, not Coca Cola.

After making the drinks the bartender wraps the plastic buckets with Saran Wrap. 

Back at Dog Beach, Henry hands the girls their drinks, then, they poke the long straws into the Saran wrapped buckets, lipping the straws and sucking in deep gulps of the magnificent bubbly concoction. 

The Chihuahuas rev their tiny engines as they run V8 patterns in the sand. Pedro the woodpecker perches in a high palm, glassy-eyed, dreaming of long ocean flight as he watches seagulls fly. 

While the girls pass a joint back and forth, chatting, Henry amuses himself shadowboxing in the sand—  a dripping with goo flashback reminiscent of the beach scene ending of the film The Shawshank Redemption. 

Andy Dufresne the man who was wrongly imprisoned escapes the joint crawling through a river of shit and coming out clean wearing a dazzling white suit on the other end of a drainage pipe at Paradiso Beach in Acapulco—  Hollywood hoodoo at it's best.

As the sun sets Lucia's sitting in her beach chair 100 miles from Cuba, feeling light-years away as she wonders about her mother and which camp follower Fidel is fucking tonight. 

With nine buckets of Rum Cocos under their hoods collectively, the short Vespa ride back to the bungalow is shaky, but they make it home without hitting the pavement.

Sitting at the kitchen table, they dip chips into homemade clam dip as Summer Wynd orders Mexican food on the phone.

Henry goes to his study to write a bit on the LA newspaper columnist, Ollie Good.

Ollie Good was born on Chicago’s Gold Coast across the highway from Lake Michigan on July 3, 1951, at Sheraton Hospital. 

His earliest memory was the advent of consciousness as he opened his eyes in his mother's womb. This, nothing special— no trumpets blaring, rattling bones, or fanfare. Just, a dull metabolic existence where the biggest thrill was the occasional glucose rush. 

Eventually, late one night, a large hand holding forceps resembling two large spoons invades his mother’s uterus, clamping on his pliable skull. This, a lousy experience like being pinched when you didn't ask for it, accompanied by feelings of dread and loss.

Suddenly, he's plucked from the womb head first into worldly reality, blinded by artificial light, feeling culture shock and pain, unable to get his visuals straight, looking at a blurred and twisted world. 

Two years later, Ollie Good's a toddler living with his mother Cherry in a two-bedroom Lake Shore Drive apartment on Chicago's Northside. 

His old man Buddy's a good ole boy who spends most of his time on the road, selling lady's underwear to nickel and dime shops in small towns across the Midwest.

Cherry, a stay at home housewife, would take little Ollie for rides in his stroller on the lakefront every day, but one day something peculiar happened. 

After leaving their apartment building, they cross Lake Shore Drive on a pedestrian bridge leading to Lake Michigan. She pushes Ollie's stroller on the sidewalk to the beach, turning onto a cement walkway that runs out into the lake, rolling a short distance, and parking.

As she lights a cigarette she sees her girlfriend, Shelly, and they begin chatting, ignoring Ollie who frees himself from the stroller, walking to the edge of the concrete breakwater. 

Little Ollie stares into the lake, feeling pulled by something familiar, impulsively jumping in, gaging on the smell of dead fish, and bobbing up and down in the water like a cork. 

As the current pulls him down he loses his breath, lapsing into unconsiousness. 

While unconscious he sees amber light at the end of a cone-shaped tunnel, then seeing human-shaped shadows grouped above the clouds and hearing gentle voices urging him to come forward to the Upper Room. 

When he opens his eyes, he's lying face-up in the sand. The lifeguard who pulled him out of the drink is hovering over him, looking like a half-made up clown to little Ollie because his red suntanned face is smeared with zinc oxide.

As his mother's busy signing paperwork and chatting with the lakeshore beat cop, Ollie rolls over, stands, and runs at baby speed into Lake Michigan because he wants to go back to the afterlife. 

In a New York minute, his mum runs to him, sweeping him up and carrying him to his stroller where she straps him in.

Later, in winter, Cherry's pushing Ollie's stroller lakeside. Suddenly he screams as the frigid wind, known as The Hawk in Chicago, slaps him in the face.

The Hawks' mighty blow pummels any thoughts of the afterlife out of little Ollie.

Today, Ollie Good works as a contributing writer for the LA Free Press and teaches Transcendental Meditation and astral projection.