/dev/null

We better kill’em all and kill’em fast — before the Russians or the Chinese or someone catches up to us.  Wow, just like the old days of the Space Race and Arms Race.  The thrill of victory, the agony of dead meat!

Straight from “MBS-in-hand” churned copy for Coolman & Associates Advertising and Image Management (AIM).  Cool AIM.
Agency days bleak indeed. Frantic. Hive of urgency and tension. Get Word to public. Word was product. Word and image. Factory of words images.  Word-image-product proposal better be damn good or say “good-bye” to the
account. Ready. AIM. Fire(d).
Didn’t mingle. All those stressed designers and copywriters stiffening in cubicles, dreaming words and patterns.

Happy Veterans Day.  Support Our Troops! (no matter what they do, or who they’re sent to kill, even if it’s YOU).
 

University Mental Hygiene Clinic. Peace soft prints. Water-colors.  Comfort plants. Celebrity and Fitness magazines. Difficult rising from the waiting-room chair: drunk, drunk. Tired.
The affable Shrink plump, welcoming.
Talk released words to chill, conditioned air.
“And what makes me me in my head?” I blurted. “I’ve seen things that, you know, I want them to be mine.”
“And if they’ll be yours?” asked The Shrink.

The University. Master’s degree in Business Strategies (MBS): “abstract advertising,” “imaginative marketing,”  “creative propaganda.”   Selling stuff.
The poet, Alterkocher, taught poetry, great poetry, The Masters, to hacks like me. He also taught Undergraduates  majoring in “liberal arts” —  for these, he had hope.  Young, not corrupted, possibly real scribblers among them to follow —  him.

Hard steely club music, hate chords. Music of the Angry Young. Construction work for Father. Roofing. Music, and his burly brother, Brother. Rough. Shaved heads. End-of-day paint-splatter, roof dreck, tar.
Music, goateed, smoked cigarette, cigarette, cigarette.

Love. Love. Love.
The Bakery Girl and big soft man-child BEING.
Morning The Bakery; sweet muffins, coffee.
Said she “Wouldn’t mind, you know, were he to ask…”
BEING left his bong, showered, combed. Destination bakery.
“Wanna go eat and maybe a movie?” asked BEING.
She said, “Sure.”
Soon in the apartment regularly BEING and The Bakery Girl, companions.
Not stun-drop beautiful, not Magazine. Hip-Heavy, soft, like BEING.  Harem girl allure.  Love in BEING’s room. The Bakery Girl partial to men and women. BEING her first man in a year.

Cakes don’t change.  Plastic wrappers. “Real” cream filling.  BEING. His television, milk and pastries. Adolescent twenty-seven. Soda, smoke, snacks.  Like ten years gone had never been.
Passive, floating, shuffled by Time. Sixteen. New body shapes new clothing. Tunes. His room. Door locked. Illicit herb burned in a dirty-water bong.  Loitering at the Mall, buying, driving, posing. Movies, pizza, boon companions.
“Won’t last forever,” Guidance Counselor warned.
Aptitude test discovered aptitude.
College: “Media studies.”

Twenty-nine is no longer young.  Not old, two-thirds life ahead—possibly. But alas, beyond the market age bracket of the eighteen-to-twenty-fours. Let them pass. We are huge, despite unmarketable advanced degrees, dollars blown on our ‘afraid to work with our hands.’
Look at me. There. In the mirror. Cleansed and dapper. Green-and-yellow Topiary Techniques t-shirt; blue jeans; green-and-black sneakers. Ready to go. Ready to go. Ready to go.
BEING already in the kitchen, sipping coffee he’d picked up at the corner bakery. Sticky buns, muffins and The City News.

Awakened midnight nobody home. Alone against the music of the Angry Young. Kid outside screamed poems into a mike. Squat amp dragged behind him on a wagon. Surrounding friends clapped stomped cacophony. Launched his dithyrambs against The City.
Cannonades of sing-song bass.
Josh razed Jericho with song.
“Turn off the noise and tune in The Voice of The Nation.”
That ad from somewhere I remember. Subway maybe.
I turned on the stereo. Fight noise with noise. Lonely like I’ve never. Unbearable rip. Inside. Alone me in the midnight.