General

The Jack the Ripper murders that plagued late 19th century London were the work of the first modern serial killer. They have also been the subject of many a literary investigation and speculation, both fictional and otherwise. The basic ingredients of most succeeding serial killing sprees are present in the Jack the Ripper case; dead women, many of them prostitutes; a twisted killer who mutilates his victims; a police investigation that sputters and starts without an apparent understanding of the nature of the perpetrator; and the potential for so-called copycat crimes.

From the picture window of our family’s eighth floor apartment, at the intersection of 23rd Street and Avenue C, we have a view of the inhuman currents of the East River and the dehumanizing, vehicular currents of the FDR expressway. The tenor of the river is timeless while the FDR’s voice is mindlessly urgent…an addict on a dope run — evincing the urgency of an errand undertaken to relieve distress but trajectory hurtles towards annihilation.

We are in the mad-mad-mad world of delusions and Pokémon. Sure, that Fukushima premature, err, glow, solved by dental lead bib over the ovaries and testes (see photo directly below). Yep, the world has gone to Type Three Diabetes. Quoting that article on radioactive proof of our dumbdowning DNA. Is it HFCS that’s eating away at our noggin? Those 10,000 newly compounded chemicals produced each year chipping away at IQ?

Television night with Music and BEING. Apartment strewn with clothes, bottles, ash-trays over-flowing, cake and candy wrappers, coffee cups and cartons emptied of fast-food, junk-food, food-flavored processed food product.
Colorful slaughter on the big TV.  BEING and Music deep in the couch. Music sucked cigarettes, BEING his bong. They stared hard into the grim eye of The War.  I preferred not to.  See.
Cheesy crunchy chips, beef jerky, beer.  Enemy vehicles blown to bits. “Our” planes over The Enemy City.  Loud significant explosions.

Monthly visit to The City Haven for Adults, see Uncle Joe.
Former salesman, private detective, writer of detective novels, screenplays. Uncle Joe had money stashed. Or so I’d been told. Also told he’d gambled it away. Then again, who was paying for The Haven? Senescence ain’t cheap, unless you live it on the streets, potential guest cadaver of The Death Squad.
He’d been a newspaper columnist, numismatist, a player of horses. He never married, though, allegedly, women craved him, even in The Haven for Adults.

I’m used to feelings of rage and nausea whenever I open a “news” paper – which is something I usually do only once a week; and I only do it then because The Times’ Saturday edition has a good puzzles page, and it also provides the TV listings for the following week. I most certainly do not do it for what should be the main purpose of a newspaper – providing good information about the world around me.

I recently watched Joseph Losey’s film version of Bertolt Brecht’s play The Life of Galileo. First performed in 1943, and revised in 1955, Losey’s production was filmed in 1975. One of Brecht’s best-known dramas, The Life of Galileo addresses the oppressive nature of religion both in terms of its control of thought and its collusion with power in maintaining the status quo. It is as if within knowledge resides damnation, as if any human even has foreknowledge of such a fate should it exist.

The Coolman & Associates Human Resource Manager coordinated writers, designers, client accounts.  Killer for the company.  In eight AM out eight PM.
Sexy in her way.  Frantic.
Turned me on. Two years older than I was, then: she was twenty-six.  We eased into chummy, casual, quick to jest, but cautious. Wary of terms.
“Hell,” I said. “We spend our lives here. Who are you?”
“Good point,” she said. “Work, work, work. Love?”
“Love the town all night, let’s go!”

A couple weeks ago I went “home” to Maryland to help my father and siblings pack up the house he and my mother bought in 1959. I place the word home in quotation marks because I haven’t considered the place my home since 1977 when a woman friend and I bought a Greyhound ticket a couple days after Thanksgiving and headed west. The ticket took us as far as we could get for twenty-five dollars. That happened to be Mobile, Alabama, where we ate some catfish, drank some Dixie Beer, and stuck out our thumbs for California.

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.