A CONSPIRACY OF DUCKS (for Dan Rather)

"If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it must be a duck."
~ Dan Rather

The entanglements of the Spider Woman

led me here to tell you of too many things,

but hear me now and keep all a secret:

Only half of what Soutenang spoke

of yesterday is Wormwood true:

Tomorrow it will all be a lie.

The company we keep must shift

from year to year, day to day, hour by hour ...

Shush, my sweet, silence! Everything and nothing

we say can ever be heard or listened to, or, known.

This is the shady place, dark and in smoke

where the paranoids go pop to meet on the street

of the most disowned, dark and unfavored muses.

Networked societies throughout history and herstory,

powered in the puppeteer's mechanized iron arms

are frightening to the uninitiated anxiety angels

of change ... Trust me. And trust me alone!

I like it on top that way ...

Damn you! We've been discovered!

Who talked! Who!

If not for my dragon visage they would not run.

I did not kill the three headless women they speak

of in the shadows of the dying afternoons ...

Now I need a new cave to breathe my fire from!

Fore they will chase me down and kill the truth ...

I weep for them. They do not know what they do.

II

These crystalline stones in the center of the Earth

contain values within values leading to absolute nowhere.

These mountains will tell you nothing, my final secret,

without the keys forged in the four corners of my mind

and if I squint my leaden cold eyes tight enough,

the Sarcosuchus of my dreams held in the sarcophagus

will once again share a dream with the Eddie Allen Poe

ravens tweeking in the deep dark wounds of our dreams ...

These ravens speak just as we do, just as all of the birds

of the world understand in accordance to our mutual

misunderstanding, just as I keep my watch stuck on eleven

to remind me how real the hour is, the day is, near or far:

Your heartbeat will tell me the rest and the black helicopter

is just a fairy tale, a whiff of helicopter blade, echoing

in your circuitous canyons and endless energy fields

of mere rumors repeated, for sales purposes, only to be

maximized in the marketplaces for my profit,

and my profit alone.

III

I saw three ghosts

through the window

and they were posing

as three nude females

as if it were part

of the same damn plan.

I saw them again

in the fanatic swirl

of teenage faces,

happy and light

and forbidden.

Finally, they appeared

as blue topped, short-cropped,

senior citizens who could give

a damn about your generation,

who were around long enough

to catch the last sweet scent

of the wild white roses, caught,

tight in the controlled gardens,

imprisoned, elect, in enlightenment

and mutual decay.

IV

Despite fundamental needs of fear

and the aquamarine teardrop

of your sad eyes,

when my MIB sunglasses

fell into my tortilla soup

my personal cosmic rodeo clown

was kicked out of the bucket

by the Bull, and the cartoon cowboy,

listening to Jefferson Airplane,

fell down the hill with laughter,

because, see, the movies

don't show you their eyes

behind cool black shades

to keep you believing

in the narcolepsy of suspense

about inhuman Blackhawk riders

who quite literally actually really

need to feed and fight and feel and pee

like children, too.

And that Spider? It shudders

to our mutual Sarcosuchus,

running to underground homes

to atomize quick harvests of love,

just as the secret government agent,

quietly, soulfully, somewhere in some

movie theater near you is weeping,

sentimental, quite literally sorry

as he or she watches the slow motion

action of the sequence about the birth

of baby ducks in the spring

Happy Halloween, Philistine: An American Classic Horror Story from the Turn of This New Century

phil·is·tine

/ˈfiləˌstēn/

noun

1.a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts,

 or who has no understanding of them:

"I am a complete philistine when it comes to paintings"

adjective

1.hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts:"a philistine government"

     

The opening of the century came and went and it appeared the winds of change had conspired against the entire continent. If you haven't already forgotten and moved on to the consoling video stream of the virtual presidency, where President Martin Sheen says all the things we always wished our presidents would say, there was that drab Wednesday in American history, Dec. 13, 2000, when there was a very real, certainly material, corrosively visceral version of what we like to call convergence: When the Supreme Court cast its votes for Dubya, and all were spared the trouble of deciding for democracy. Then convergent metamedia, now pouring through the anticipated cataclysm of the future like a bad - but well publicized - rendered-in-3D dream, amped up the volume and the Twin Towers came tumbling down.

The whole constipated poop shoot of the dog-eared promise of the New World jammed into the screw-tight orifice of the next century and instilled an overwhelming dreadgeist of collective disappointment and paranoia. Every human soul within earshot of any report or anguished groan over what the U.S. Supreme Court had failed to do: that is, be Supreme, and all voters, counted and uncounted, felt that gong of doom from the very bowels of hell. But with uncanny prescience, that act only served as a foreshadowing event, for in George W. Bush America had hired its international executioner. 

"It Can't Happen Here," apparently, can. That much was obvious. Spreading like a contagion of fire across the networked landscape of the globe via talk shows, television news updates and e-mail flame war preventing even the most modest real estate developer's home page to upload in a slow a sludge ball of bad bandwidth as grief overdosed every pedestrian on Main Street, the deep truth always expected, but never fully understood, pierced the broken heart and fogged the mind's eye of anyone able to read, think, love, hate and vote. 

But McDaniel was more interested in the solar flares causing freakish storms, suggesting, at least to him, that there might be some relationship between the chaos on earth and the blaze of heaven. Certainly, between the failures of democracy and the maximized 13-year-pulse of solar storm cycles, the each new turn took on a new tragi-cosmic character. 

"The mysteries of mankind are revealing themselves, by wearing a circus animals collection of mythic costumes, in a wide variety shapes, sizes and colors," he says, imitating his artistic hero with an English accent, William Blake. 

"Goplacia," a verb-like state taken from Thomas More’s classic, Utopia, "became my name," he was often want to say when he was most destitute, transitory and, strangely, happy. He returned to Massachusetts, again, to get (yet another) divorce, but also stick his read right back into the storm.

A terrible beauty was born. 

He took a job editing the night-shift in Salem, the weird hours shifting him into the furies as the foliage blazed into the post-Sept. 11 fall. Ranting to Web sites on the side, sending e-mail like lightning bolts to fight his own "War on Terror, feeling the vibe of the Salem hangman on Halloween, the following message was sent to one of his co-conspirators:

To: Rod Amis
Self-Published
Equal Opportunity
Webzine Editor
A.k.a The Fleet of the Damned
G21.net

From: William Blake in Cyberspace

"O lend me an ear while I call you a fool.
You were kissed by a witch one night in the wool."
- Jethro Tull, from "Witches Promise"

You scum-sucking dishwasher, you wise-ass carpenter (a worthy trade for a fisher of men, but hey, if the world was perfect, what would we complain about?), you hard-boiled cynic, you Oreo cookie brother with a heart of gold, oh so soft in the middle (I see you, though I’ve never met you), you perennial river-of-a-webzine dreamer, whatever the fuck you are today, I do take offense! You hurt and frustrated me in ways I’m barely able to explain.

I’m centered and aware, in a Gnostic way, since gnosis is to know. Not think, or hope or believe, but I have faith, I know. I have no choice. I’m sure you feel the same. I can tell you also know the signs are everywhere, if we only care to see. Magic is a witches’ trick, say some, but magic is only what the uninitiated call it. Same for science and technology. Oh, how we fear what we do not understand!

Oh, how they burn their witches here in Salem, Massachusetts! Oh yes, it’s very dangerous, for that matter, we are at the very real front of the very real war. Now we have to wash our hands after getting their mail. Now they have closed a courthouse and a post office in Salem, just because someone sent a letter to both that stated, "You are contaminated with anthrax. Have a nice day."

The new face of terrorism: Communication breakdown with a wicked pumpkin smile. Happy Halloween, indeed.

I tremble over a letter to a loved one. Write on the envelopes, "Please wash your hands after opening," but even if it’s the end of the world, they need to know. O man, mon Amis, how you offend me. But I needed it. Always did. Always will. As William Blake wrote, "the artist and oppressor are One."

Since this is true, then let me move on, let me spin you a web-of-a-tale. Get yourself a beer and spread the peanut butter thick. It’s a fine and fitting time for the harvester of souls, of Halloween, a fine time of year to go "boo."

Sure, I scare people. That’s actually the best of what I do. And I do it to myself, self-same, it’s true. This is a season of bounty for me, but it’s a lunatic’s boon, especially in late October, living so close to Salem, on a hill home near the mouth of the Ipswich River. Close to Salem, where it’s been overly reported: They burn their witches here. Not much has changed since 1692.

O God, how I need a cigarette. Get the jump on Osama. Get the jump on regret.

Let me light up. There. Let me not forget. Let me blow smoke out in a shaman’s prayer. Allow me please, a muse Amis, let me summon every electronic energy bolt of fire and brimstone (We both know: The Baphomet computer is the philosopher’s stone), first wrote in old-tech script from my poison dirty pen (found so serendipitously on the ground in the harvest time of fall). Allow me to go "boo" to you, as well as those who are not so faint of heart, anyone capable of hearing a strange a mystical tale that, detail to detail, is absolutely true … in this season of moon, it will keep its mojo moving, regardless of you.

~

We are on a romantic road and the digital dashboard indicator of a red-wine beaut’ of a 2000 Mercury Mountaineer sayeth, "96 miles to empty." The urban assault vehicle is here as a loan, a gift for just a day from the sister of my fellow traveler after her sibling departed for her wedding in Hawaii. I’m blissfully delighted at the arrival of such a pumpkin carriage. Totally surprised by the red-wine gleam and the company of a very, very tall blonde, who, of many other fine and sensual abilities, has translated Homer’s Odyssey in three different languages. She has come all of the way from the south side of Boston, about 40 miles, no less, to roam the harvest country with me at speeds both slow and fast. She has no idea what she is in for with me. Just another day in my current life in the fire leaf blazing morning glory of the North Shore. This is my romantic road. My quest, your open-heart attack arrest.

Obviously, loud tunes and gasoline gallons are required, since the maximum more of the foliage season is no time for being less; See it burn, matter turning to fire, turning to smoke, turning to cloud, the snow of winter, all to fall to the ground and begin again. The harvest time is a season to be full and wild and free. But don’t forget, in this botched and mortal coil-of-a-world, we must drive straight and thread the needle, and not for the time being leave all of my past control-freaked ladies alone. Or their ghosts. Ask not of golems. Just say no. Let the very particles of the sun charge the protective gothic gargoyles on my window sill, let the sun at dusk speak of lies and the friendly spirits, dragons, and sacred music. Let the gargoyles shiver in the very overwrought undulations of the sun, and the sun behind the sun. Even if the earth’s very vibrations shake, there is enough time to spend with a good, fair-haired witch, one free enough to brave my romantic road, a twisted, snaking string of a magical web of back roads heading to Route 101/West in New Hampshire, may oui! We are heading to where each and every license plate states, "Live free or die!" Ask not or reason why.

We are chasing ghosts of lost love. Or, at least, I am. Free wheeling nature souls, coyotes and jaguars, purring kittens behind the trees, sorcerers, sea devils, and that Beast that has returned. Nor the microbes we can’t see. That which was once gone, indeed! So bring your skull and Templar crossbones flag. This is no time to run. Bring your cross of silver as a talisman. Have courage, cowardly lion. Let your titanium heart roar. Fear nothing, nothing at all, son. Every day the devil doesn’t get us, well, that’s his mistake! Fear nothing and nothingness will run.

Fear not loss. Fear not the cops. Or the courts. Or loss, nor terror. Breathe free the air, not the fear and error in the poisoned wind. All that is folly now (you know this, of course). Fret not about state dependent on north/south routes, of woodsy back roads, swamps and thickets, thorny paths and even thornier people. Just drive Route 101, which begins (depending, sayeth Dylan, Bob, on your point of view-uuuu) on the far east end near Portsmouth, New Hampsheer, where great whalers once trimmed their sails and oars. Take a westerly route. But remember, old man, to the very end of the road toward the sun, and, into the night, we are really quite alone.

We take 133 West out of Ipswich, where the Anglican churches and Christian Science bookstores co-mingle with the remnants of the great Ipswich River seaport of long ago. It’s already past noon and the flock of cars are forming into an endless line of foliage-gaping lookiloos. As we skulk a threaded needle through this mechanic’s parade, the CD player sounds off the mood, the Tragically Hip, it is, sangin’, "The constellations reveal themselves one star at a time."

I take notes because I feel as if I’m on a portentous road (in fact, as it turned out, me and my companion would be forever shaken by its portents). But, O, how I lose time and miss out on all of the beauty with my eye on blank paper (and your’s on this screen), my heart firing the very Promethean fire of Zeus through my pen warmed up in hell. Such a sense of loss and anxiety and a premonition that the very scythe of death is making a big all comeback this year: I guess that’s what fall in New England is all about.

When you take 113, heading toward Andover, you are enveloped in the careening psychedelia of the season. As I write this now, I feel winter is coming. You can see it in each and every leaf that blows across the windshield. Tiny white churches, Odd Fellows and Rotary halls, all perched alone in sharply cut acres in the woods, a vintage World War II mobile artillery machine (a convertible, maybe .50 calibre), pretty typical, all of it, in this land of God and Cannon; all of this set against a blazing backdrop of red, yellow and browning fire orange trees. Shit, will I be glad when all of this glorious instruction on the unmerciful passing of beauty is done!
That is when I can be calm again.

But, it’s time to be vigilant and wired and world weary, because once you pass the Andover reservoir (which may or may not have been poisoned by anthrax-anthrax terrorists on a fly-by), you better get ready. That’s because you have to get back on 133 again, the Andover to Haverhill east/west road, which is to say: The Freemason maze, a technological terror running through the Merrimack River Valley (the pre-colonial natives called it "Mer O Wac"). Haverhill to Andover, Andover to Haverhill, past CMGI and Lucent Technologies, past software firms in small offices intertwined with dentists and barbers’ and beauticians’ storefronts. A key word, that: front.

A false front, no doubt, no maybe, may oui. The demon’s path is a copper wire of roads where the aged architecture of civilization, old as this country, old as the Crusades (which is older even), is a foundation still apparent in the great four-story Masonic Hall overlooking the Merrimack in Haverhill, in the obelisk spires that decorate the bridge crossing the river, in the Andover freemason lodge at the opposite end, but still, just off the road, almost touching it, in the very Eye of Horus that decorates the haircutter’s salon downtown.

O yes, mon Amis, the medium is the message: the quiet, all-seeing eye, our trillion-dollar-sponsored benevolent and supposedly sane security, our Public Safety Committee, our ubiquitous protector, our worldly, eye-in-the-sky overlord. Ah, how we do choke on the fumes of this everpresent background static, this electromagnetic energy. Even at the gas station, where there is a freemason compass signifier sticker on the window next to the credit card signs, it’s easy for those who haven’t lost sight of history to see. At the gas station, the Mark of the Beast didn’t actually mean that freemasons here get cheaper gas. I asked. It just means they own the place, said the woman who takes your credit card but prefers the ease of dollar bills behind the glass, said the woman who is restricted from irrational and impossible me, overly rational you.

They own the place, indeed!

When you log on to the freemason commuter maze with your metallic key, left is right, up is down, and U.S. 495 goes west when the sign says south. Not much different, this disorienting ghost in the machine, than the sense of dislocation created in casinos and shopping malls. The magician’s trick, O man behind the curtain, is to disorder our hearts with disinformation intended to keep us from being still long enough to even know who we are, or, where we came from: nature. All of it forces us to be so dependent upon the big cement swamp of man that we will have nothing left to do but desire, nothing left to do but shop, nothing left to do but drive to our homes and businesses and back again for our very survival.

Thank this pseudo god for TV!

O, mon Amis, now here is a warning for all of this Promethean potpourri: Get out while you can. Be not of this world. And please, O please, wash your hands. Best to get out of there, out of Metheun, Andover, and especially out of Lawrence, where the satanic mills are a thing once gone that’s now returned. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. A magician’s techno dance and trick, I say, best to get out of there, lickity split. Use your Bible, or, just use your wit.

So take 495 south to go west, moving past Jack Kerouac’s bluesy Lowell train depot, perhaps even his soul, and then point it north on Route 3 into New Hampshire … O muse Amis … News flash: This just in: Some discordian trickster has thrown a bag of an unknown white powder at the Haverhill Beef outlet, lodged in the Freemason Lodge, and Hazmat is now testing the substance for anthrax. It’s air that I’m breathing, even as I write and speak my heart, so we will see, we will see. Oh, in this air age of the overlord, fear is thy food and thine enemy.

At Me Too (And Sarah Palin)

With Little Feat honky tonk rock'n'blues

playing in the background,

trying to remember to forget

to forward-up the human noise,

and I take off my shoes

since I can't think unless my feet are free

And now that I apparently have the attention of some,

I will follow the first rule of journoism one-o-one

and make my case about what is, yes, serious tissue

In my life, I have been no angel, 

but my mother raised me to be a gentleman,

open doors for women, say please and thank you,

and have chosen to run rather than to hit

more often than is recommended by my witch doctors

However, during the course

of a long and strange life

regarding matters of the heart,

where luck has not been my lady,

I have been laughed at for wearing braces

And my doggy got run over.

And I can see us driving out into the desert

where we buried him, and the radio playing,

"King of the Road."

There's more. 

Do I share it?

Do I dare it?

Do I dare to show my hairline?

My bare head scalped?

I'm hollow, man.

Here's the news about why I am so alone: 

My first girlfriend broke up with me on the phone

while I was lying in bed in the hospital sick to my stomach

from detached retina surgery,

dreaming of many all-seeing eyes

looking at me at once,

later saying I was damaged goods

Hah, prophetic. I'm so pathetic.

These seer women and their ways

In later years I have been cheated on,

beaten on, body shamed, stalked, 

had my identity stolen,

had my genitals played

with like sex was some joke

to play a game of chicken with;

Chased out of the house

with a crowbar, like Tiger,

had my eyes nearly scratched out,

my glasses ripped off my face ...

and the joke to my boss was,

"You should see the other guy"

I kept silent, and in sadness, sighed
could barely admit a girl could do this
to my bruised black blue sky

Oh man, when I was taught not to hit a woman,

well, turning the other cheek sometimes it means

also running away as fast as I could ...

and I was quick, dead-set to get away good,

pursued by a car crashing into my truck's rear bumper

all of the way to the police station,

only to hear a false claim

that I was doing something wrong there,

when in fact the person of interest

parked behind me, thus giving the police officer

a good clue about what was really going on

And so I kept moving on

Moving through each room

with an eye on the escape route
a clever McGyver on the run

Usually, no matter what, the cops just assume it's you,

poor you, pick-pocketed, belittled, flamed by e-mail

by strangers on social media you, lied about in a court setting you,

this trial of the blood rising, never ending you,

chased out of a karaoke bar for ordering water you,

in a female snap-dragon incident this summer you,

face-slapped, punched, and generally, more recently,

treated like I was the Trumpy Dumpfy true,

his crotch-grabbing

 know nothin' bout science

or boundaries self, whew ...

But ladies (sorry for being so patronizing)

so asymmetrically politically incorrect,

all of us guys aren't like that

hideous example of our unfair sex

We just seem to be the most available targets right now

for your completely justified anger and disgust

Meanwhile, my heart is a hole, my body gone to rust

And if you for one moment think women

are incapable of the same kind of injustice

and two-way street violence that we men are, 

then may I finalize this rant

with the examples of Joan of Arc,

who I nonetheless admire,

Margaret Thatcher, no better than Hillary, see?

And the Chinese pirate Cheng I Sao,

who ruthlessly terrorized the entire nation of China

with such terrifying effectiveness and blood-thirsty cruelty,

the Chinese couldn't float a boat for a quarter-century

... You get the picture ...

I don't buy the scripture, sure,

but hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,

and you better not fool mother nature,

we've all been warned 

Not to mention numerous media characters

of evil spider women who plot all kinds of mayhem,

all very bad examples in our living rooms,

but who are loved nonetheless

Can I buy myself a broom for Christmas
so I can just sweep away this mess?

To the best of my recollection,

everything I have ever done was in self-defense
in this wild man's wilderness

But there is a sea-change now

and that's the lemonade in the making

of the current meadowlark's lemon

There is a more evolved species of male

who actually doesn't view each woman

they meet as a sex object, who listens

and is attentive and is more often than not

inspired by them ... So please pardon my fart

I am just a creature caught between two centuries

with no choice left but to create my achy breaky art

Not my choice. May we all move forward

and get right down to the fact that,

like all else in these Egregorian days,

the real monsters are pitting us against each other

so we burn our energies just this way,

so off they go, running their

 sick perverted greed-filled

hateful mass-murdering sex-traffic rackets

without notice or communal strength

to resist them ... Surely, this all could

 have been better said in a song
but I'm out of cigarettes for the nerves packets  

Please forgive me. Obviously, #Me Too,

I'm the PEE-T-S-Ed-City citizen poster child

of your sugar mountain

along the sweet and sour Hill Street blues

Bein' careful out there,

based on your pool cues

Sure, I've been a bastard

but my lovin' soul ain't alabaster

I'm a slow changing boy

into a man under the bad Master

with a sharp tongue, quick wit,

willing agent but I will run from it

since I'm weary of the fury,

your wanna have fun fits

your desire for nests and security

and your double-standard fists
as you check on my income
to see if my numbers fail to fi

Please, just dance with me once

I've grown old from this exile

and you don't even know

the half of it,

my rolling on the floor

like some settled-in textile
looking for the penthouse panty hose
dust bunnies in need
of Mona Lisa's lingering sad smile

Turn this song into a letter

let me seal it with a kiss

because I'm sure we can get along

and run into those Don Quixote dreams

riding that windmill Ferris wheel

at the bad circus of love

going home to share

the kind of equal rights bond

I'm always thinking of

Dak Prescott's Lament (For Duane Thomas)

“If the Super Bowl is the ultimate game, how come there is another one next year?” 

― Duane Thomas, former Dallas Cowboys running back, who took a vow of silence in 1971-'72 after calling General Manager Tex Schramm "sick, demented and dishonest," with much media uproar, then helped his team to win its first Super Bowl, and was promptly traded to the San Diego Chargers for basically nothing, and was out of football shortly thereafter. The statement above is what he said, softly, after the end of his silent vow in the locker room after Dallas beat the Miami Dolphins 24-3 in 1972. P.S. President Richard Nixon drew up a play for the Dolphins, a simplistic inside slant, which also got a lot of media attention that year. When the Dolphins actually ran it, the Doomsday Defense blew it up. Hunter S. Thompson wrote about this extensively, although he failed to make it to the actual game, apparently, for reasons fans of "The Duke" can easily guess.

I have two knees

and both are still intact

Jerry Jones will fire me unless

I fail to act

Getting tackled is inconvenient

it hurts with every impact

But I'm from Mississippi

and brothers still live in fear

Maybe I'll move on to another team

after my rookie contract year expires

Things is getting way too weird

to be anywhere around here

Yet there is a hero in me

all everyone can see

so after the bye week

I will consider and address

this fateful portico of the national complex

because only Dak Prescott knows

what Dak Prescott will do next
~

This poem is not the property

 of the National Football League

 and can be re-broadcast

 at any time in the form of a share.

 You don't need my express written permission,

 and I seriously doubt if anyone

 is going to turn it into a video

 to play with your friends

 at home,

 in prison,

 at the bar,

 or otherwise.

However,

if you do watch football

more than three hours

each week,

consult your physician

for fatigue,

anxiety,

suicidal thoughts,

or,

mysterious voices

in your heads

to buy a Ford truck,

drink excessively,

or to head-butt

your soon-to-be,

X-wife.

Please think

responsibly,

God bless

the NFL,

Amen,

women, too,

sorry,

because the lights are going off
since the party is over
since you can't even
tell it like it is,
and the Gipper is dead,
and Gifford lost his head,
and O.J. Simpson
keeps selling books
for every little thing
he says

~

And when I shook awake

from my Jerry Jones dream,
sucked out of his "glory hole,"

I heard a thousand screams,

of hanged men, 

in burning Mississippi. 

They were ghosts 

standing in a row 

at the forty-five yard line 

and they were calling to me, 

whispering, how long? How long? 

But then the whistle blew 

and into Roman warfare I flew 

wearing beautiful uniforms, 

one team grey, 

and another, 

battle-dressed in blue

Douglas McDaniel was a lifetime Dallas Cowboys fan since 1969. No more. Jerry Jones is simply evil more than good, and now I thank my brother, Scott, for making that call a long, long time ago.

P.P.S. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

###

Damn the Torpedoes (For Tom Petty)

On the day of the (enter current sad bloody state of affairs here),

I watched the morning news to the point I couldn't take it anymore,

then watched a little more, then returned to the thing I was doing

to forget (enter the previous day's sad bloody state of affairs here).

Then, having escaped by hiding, we went out for lunch, ate sushi.

O sure, there were two moments when I had to leave the restaurant

because I couldn't stop saying "fucking Jesus" out loud,

in need of my indoor voice, so I restored order by smoking violently.

Then we went shopping, buying things at the pawn shop we couldn't afford.

Must be the commandment of the current commandant Lord is, "Be grateful! Shop!

Be thankful I did not kill you yesterday. Be thankful for the traffic lights

still working. For the buses still running. Be grateful for my Machiavellian cunning."

Next, while you were sending me teasing text messages about the death of Tom Petty,

I was skipping down the dead dry creek bed, avoiding your arrival, living my carnival,

shape-shifting into one white shirt, then orange, then black, then into my escape hatch,

only to find, when I returned, your crime of indifference was much worse than mine for caring.

That was followed by getting on a bicycle for the first time in two years, shaking my fears,

and only occasionally breaking down into tears to see the airplanes fly by the dock of the moon,

to marvel at dialed-in people doing dialed-in things,

moving quicksilver as roadies for the Heartbreakers.

By the time I got home, I was Okay with (enter current sad state of bloody affairs here).

Even managed to do that one thing I promised myself to do: Listen to "Damn the Torpedoes."

Then went to bed, slept like a baby, waking to make all of the mad silly jokes I could

after that last dance with Mary Jane, one more time to kill the pain, caused by ...

(Enter yesterday's sad bloody state of affairs here)

Now that My Daze of Football Is Almost Over

Having calculated the potential time spent watching just NFL games this season, I have determined it would be far better to record the games and then play them when you sleep. You save about 20 hours of waking time each week that way. Oh sure, there will be some side effects. Such as having strange desires to buy a truck, drink lite beer until you are sick and head-butt your soon-to-be-X wife. But think of all the time, you guys out there, you will have to go out and look for a new one. Just trying to help.

And then I fade to memory ...

This wasn't hell, and it certainly wasn't war, either. But it is one of those weekends without football, and this may cause you ... dang, what do you call it? ... stress.

Let me recall some glory daze for you ... Hope there is enough beer in the house as you read this ...

Though militarism is a big part of the entire package, from the day we first lineup in a row, in Napoleonic battle formation, to the Sunday morning salute of your favorite NFL stars when they score wearing the beautiful, localized civil war uniforms, in the bright or dark colors of the cities and states they may or may not represent until the multi-million-dollar contract to serve runs out ... It was football practice for children, for young teen males of the species.

Pop Warner football practice. I was in the eighth grade, at a tender age. And if there is one person on Earth who I hope is experiencing a big fine from the commissioner of life right now, it's this football coach who, being some kind of Vince Lombardi wannabe freak, a winning-is-everything style commander, who was was yelling at me, his face in my face mask, about my unwillingness to be all of the middle linebacker he wanted me to be: That is, someone who would stick his head into the available daylight of the line, therefore, with any luck, crashing into the oncoming ball carrier, thus bringing any ball carrier down with tremendous might, and to any more good fortune, pain. Risking my neck, naturally, not his. Not the football coach's pain, a fellow player's hurt, a teammate.

I mean, I was more of a just-give-me-the-ball and I will run-with-great-fear-from-anyone-and-anything-trying-to-hurt-me-that-way-sort-of-a-player. It was just not nice to hit the solidified, rock-hard, ground-down and dirt -of-the-desert practice fields in the water-short state of Arizona.

No, I wanted to fly. Painlessly. Over the rock and dust and stupidity of mankind. Especially the bullying kind.

"Are you a pussy? Are you a pussy?," Mr. Whistle screamed into my face mask. This is what my parents were getting tonight in the glowing red and purple and orange duskiness of the southwestern sky for the Pop Warner fees they paid for me to experience this disgracing and dressing down by a crazed lunatic dad with a whistle. I remember his name now. Same as a famous Republican politician. Yeah, he needed a big fine from the commissioner of life. That's what I want now, with interest. And if I got the hear-ye, hear-ye of this type today of that dirty-bastard-with-a-whistle's scold, I would go South African dance style into that brilliance of the evening, a wildly moving ever lengthening shadow moving to the music of dream time, an emergent angel quite satisfied by news of the event.

I mean, there I was, my manhood being challenged by this asshole, and I'd barely even entered puberty to that point. Am I a pussy? What kind of question was that? He had no right to challenge my manhood. I was just a boy with beard growing each day that I was still quite uncomfortable with. I didn't even know what pussy was, for that matter. Some kind of cat thing, much less a word to inspire much motivation for the likes of me.

"Are you a pussy? Are you a pussy?" I can still see him, there, now, forty long years later. "Are you a pussy!"

What would I answer if I could stand in that spot, knowing what I do now today? After a knee surgery from playing in high school. The other creaking hurtfully on cold winter days. Numerous concussions suffered at an age barely conceiving of the the damage that might be the entropy of what I am as a half-century old man, limping around, clearly unable to fly? All for football, which I loved, back then. Not now.

What would I say? It would be this ...

"Well, coach, during the kickoff at the last game we played, there was a serious incident that occurred. Maybe you noticed. Maybe you didn't. In the case of the latter let me try to explain it to you. We kicked the ball to them, right, and then the two lines for the return and defense of that action began. Running as fast as they can, they collide. Usually, this occurs, as far as we have been told by medical science, without too much incident. But, to me, especially looking at it now under these here lights at Paradise Valley high school as we practice, this is definitely not the case.

So let me explain further and maybe we can come to some kind of agreement. What happened at this particular kickoff collision, there was a big clash, and a kid on the other side,  a child under the age of eighteen years old, started mooning and swooning and groaning like a wild, quite insane, dumb pig. Or, better yet, cow's confused "moo, moo." It was the sound of a young athlete whose brains had apparently been smashed in, and I believe the term might be familiar to you as this: He had received a concussive blow, and now he was running, crookedly, to the wrong sideline, confused and looking for someone to help him.

Do you remember? Can we ever forget? Well, tonight, being a pussy and all, I can. And so, for the better part of the night, as you ask me to stick my own head into the line, as your appointed middle linebacker trying to fulfill your Vince Lombardi dreams, as you live vicariously, through me, I must give this here scene all pause, for a little bit of time, my own motivations, lack of enthusiasm, and so on, to avoid having the same kind of thing happen to me.

Now, if you would like, I can just give you my helmet, and you can put it on, and you can stick your, or your child's own head into that hole to smash it into the oncoming ball carrier. Then we'll see how that goes. Okay?

In fact, here: Give me the ball. Don't just look at me like some kind of time-stooge. Give the ball. Give me the damn ball! Okay, here's my helmet (a trade that helps both teams, so to speak). Now I'll just walk to the other side of this here line drawn in the sand on the sun-punished ground at this north Phoenix high school. Next, I'll just have the center hike the ball to me. Then, you chase me around. Try and catch me. Since I run out of fear and you are old and slow; here, apparently, to fulfill some false notion of parental volunteerism, trying to live out your failed dream of being a college or, no (can it be?) NFL coach, you can just have the time of your life. You'd probably love smashing kids half your size, anyway.

Because I can tell you one thing: People like you scare the shit out of me. That's motivation enough. And before you completely ruin my passion for the game, maybe I can ease this harsh meme about the kid last week who lost his mind, who had to go to the hospital, in fact, due to his concussion. This will be done by my running away from you. Out of fear. Because, quite frankly, I find getting tackled quite inconvenient. If you do stick your head in that hole, well, good luck to you, then you will butt heads with your own son, who you have made center.

Meanwhile, I will be weaving, duking, moving fast around you, running by, not through people. Eyes one way, body, the other, quick at the cut. More like the cavalry rider, I suppose, in a military battle, as opposed to sick pawns in the drama of the bread-and-circuses commandos of life like you!

~

My earliest memory in life exists on film, a wall image projected in the 1960s in the family home, as a family movie, and I was a kind of crazed child actor, both a musician and an athlete, as a tyke dancing around, a spinning dervish, a handful, for sure.

Well, I can't remember the actual so good. It's the concussions, maybe. But when I was very tiny, I used to run around the house with an Easter egg thingy that made music like an organ grinder. I apparently could walk at a very early age. Hyper as hell. Must have driven my parents nuts with this organ grinder Easter egg thingy. So I'd dance like I needed special drugs to stay sad, crash into chairs and tables and walls, turning the egg, shaped like a football.

How did I know about football? Must have been on black-and-white television, most certainly. Apparently, as my mother told me, I was in a shopping basket at the grocery store. A little tyke, still, obviously. I saw this big African-American man. I blurted out, "Look, mommy! Football player." She was pretty embarassed about that. But this was in the north part of the city in Arizona. He probably was a football player. Such intolerant sunshine states barely tolerbrate a minority who isn't in a sporting uniform ... in the service of the military-sports-capitalist-commando-complex.

I'm quite sure I showed no interest in the game while we lived in the desert suburb built north of Phoenix in an area known as Deer Valley from 1960 to about 1968 or '69. I played baseball in little league, but I had no idea what I was doing out there. The whole idea of someone throwing a round rock in my direction terrified me, quite frankly. I used my dad's old four-fingered glove, which was flat as a pancake. My dad had used it in the 1940s. It was some relic. The other kids had five-fingered gloves. So my parents weren't too knowledgeable about athletics, either. No, we were a family of readers, math-wise marching band geeks, we McDaniels were.

But I must have had some special gifts, being able to walk early and all. I remember putting on catcher stuff in little league practice once. Then, I climbed up this fence at Shady Glenn Elementary School, out there on the edges of the desert in this neighborhood in north Phoenix, where there was nothing built north of our home, and got some laughs from the coaches when I climbed the backstop fence and acted like a monkey fool.

Then, during a game, one of my first, I was put out in center field and someone hit a ball in the air to me. I caught it with that frayed four-fingered pancake mitt. People started clapping and yelling. I had no idea why. Such things are considered a small miracle at those pre-T-ball ages. Usually outfielders were disinclined kids afraid of ground balls. When the game was over my parents were overjoyed at my heroism, but still I had no clue. They said I'd made an "out." I'm quite sure my first thought was, oh, that doesn't sound good. But they said, no, it was amazing. They were so proud.

As far as I can remember this was the first time I'd achieved anything in my life. It felt like a sunshine smile inside to be recognized like that.

~

It was a dream and I was late, walking across a barren urban landscape in my football uniform. My helmet was on ... Polo palace ... offensive line as a chain gang, pushing and pulling. A few people watched in lawn chairs. The skill players had no uniforms, and only seemed to be there as stars on the move played to a small audience of people in folding chairs ... They artfully acted out the old ritual and dance of the game like it was some kind of museum piece on a post-apocalyptic set. The skyline of Phoenix was broken, like a ruin, with a lot of cleared-out space around, looking like London a few years after the Blitz ...

~

Then, we moved to Dallas. It was the late 1960s. We lived in this much bigger house in North Dallas and this neighbor had something called a "Cowboy Antenna" on his roof and those people were the envy of the cul-de-sac. We still knew nobody in the area and when a family member came to visit us we were driving in the car and they asked us if we were going to become Dallas Cowboys' fans. We all said together, "No way!." Coming from Phoenix, which had no professional team, we were drowned into incredulity at what became of people who had become sports fanatics. The obsession was strange.

But then we got a free Dallas Cowboy sticker with the star as a gas station giveaway. My mother gave it to me. Then, we went to the gas station again and they gave us a Dallas Cowboys drinking glass. My mother gave it to me. From that point, it was all over. The glass had the old-school Cowboys image of the 'poke riding a horse on one side, the silver Lone Star. I drank, and it was as if I'd become enchanted. At that point in my life, the only other thing that really moved me was the song "Help!," by the Beatles. We listened to their music at my next door neighbor's house. We'd listen to the Beatles, and then, Led Zeppelin's first album, which, to me at first listen, sounded like a bad car crash. But still music had made much more sense to me.

Now, my parents were obviously quite concerned with me from the day I was born, since I was a breach birth. I couldn't do much as a little tyke but play in the dirt, catch lizards and put them in coffee cans or dance around like a damn fool with a musical Easter egg. Apparently, they were amazed I'd be able to read or speak much so I had some kind of learning disabilities that appeared to be a mystery to everyone. To reverse this frustrating problem to my parents who, on my dad's side, was a brainy computer engineer, and my mom, a wannabe librarian, they bought me books if I showed interest in anything: Dinosaurs, World War II, whatever ... I kept this fascination and stirring I felt at the first notes of "Help!" quite secret. I was quite sure my quite arch-conservative parents from deep south Texas wouldn't be buying me any books about those guys. Once, when we were waiting for my dad to come out of work at the General Electric plant in Phoenix we heard over the radio that one of the band members, John Lennon, had said they were bigger than Jesus or something like that. Nope, I was pretty sure to keep quiet about all of that music stuff. It seemed to get my dad all riled about when we watched the Ed Sullivan Show and saw all of these hippies playing crazy music. Yeah, at I was at least smart enough to stay mum in that category. Didn't want to get slapped for it.

But when I showed an interest in football, my mom started buying me all of these books about football. Indeed, I was reading about it well before I was actually playing it with the kids out on our front lawn in the cul-de-sac in north Dallas ... Heroic stories about the stars of the game like Gale Sayers, Jim Brown, Johnny Unitas and Jim "Night Train" Lane. So that's how I learned how to read.

But I still wasn't very good in sports. I hated baseball. Hitting was always an awkward experience and I'm pretty sure I didn't start hitting the ball until well into my teens. Once my parents bought me these black plastic cleats and when I was out there on the field my feet would bake and I couldn't figure out what was going on beneath that hot Texas sun. God, how I hated little league well into, say, the fourth grade. In fact, I pretty much hated any social activity I was drafted into by my parents. I hated wearing my Cub Scouts' uniform to school. I would strike out on purpose. But I did start to show some knack for games, imaginary play and playing the saxophone, which I lugged to school each day: hated that, too, of course. To this day I believe I was destined to become a musician, but that never really happened. A wasted life, most assuredly, I was being led astray by an athletics mad world! My most prized possession was a small box transistor radio where I would listen to FM music late at night, quite secretly, of course.

~

I came along in my football uniform, and continued across wide urban fields, like old wrecked Detroit, to find a small, but colosseum-like structure, where the stairs led into the core of the Earth, with multiple layers connected by twirling stairwells. At each level, two things were evident. The first was an incredible number of beautiful women leading crowds to two things, healthy food and strip club venues ... simulations for Ford truck driving commercials ... intravenous beer commercial substitutes ... People constantly telling me I'm late ... A song, anthem really, intended as a tune to cure football madness ... This wasn't a game on. It was some kind of mass therapy session.

~

However, when I think about it, I had an incredible winning percentage, in football, lifetime. The first teams I played for were fifth- and sixth-grade teams in Dallas: at F.P. Callet Elementary School, on the north side of town. I had learned to play football with the neighborhood kids on the cul-de-sac we lived on, and I had become a huge Dallas Cowboys fan, even keeping a scrap book of photographs for the team's 1970 and '71 Super Bowl seasons, and learning more by playing a dice-oriented strategy football game featuring teams for previous years produced (sponsored) by Sports Illustrated. I would play these games for hours with my brother, my friends, and when they weren't obsessed enough I'd create whole leagues, keeping statistics of my own, by myself. In addition there were cool strategy games featuring card overlays back then, with little devices to create variables once produced by dice, to offer more spontaneity. So by the time I was eleven or twelve years old, I was a regular Tom Landry, mastermind innovator football coach for the Cowboys, in my own mind.

But I had to really work to make my second great achievement in life occur. That is, to get noticed enough to stay off the bench. Since we were new in town, having moved to Dallas from Phoenix in the late 1960s, I didn't have many friends or peer support despite looking great in football pads. Nobody knew who I was, and I had difficulty speaking. Shy. Not showing much interest in classes, and during this age of confusion in Dallas, with schools moving African-American teachers into classes, and my fellow students showing a parental fondness for their parents' extreme right-wing values, being abusive to the teacher of my beloved music classes, who were black, and feeling of extreme confusion about the whole deal, embarrassed for the whole scene, how ugly it was becoming, how I wished the kids would stop being so mean to my music teachers, who were really knowledgeable about the topic, seemed to me, and me being so polite, as I was being so raised by my parents. I hated my classmates, who were, if I understood anything at all, being raised to become lifetime bigots ... Anyhow, no great achievements in life were going to occur at F.P. Callet by 1970 under these social conditions, and if not for the coming of the Three Dog Night hit, "Joy to the World," coming on my little transistor radio, I might have become someone who had no hope at all, as opposed to someone who would probably need special drugs to say sad ...

Okay, where was I? Oh yeah, great achievements ... We would play football all day on the curved grass lawns of out on the neighborhood cul-de-sac, using the equally arched sidewalks leading to our big brown-bricked houses, for goal line markers. And, consequently, as we landed on them to score, somewhat ambivalent to pain. Which is necessary in life, in general, I've found. Anyhow, I was learning to catch and throw and block and tackle and all, at an age when injuries other than scraped knees from scoring were rare, and by the time I was in the fifth grade I was one of the best players on the block, being damned fast as a runner, a peculiar commodity, that, in terms of pre-teen life male values, on my block. I ran out of fear, of course, getting tackled being inconvenient. And from reading my books about Calvin Hill and Gale Sayers and Jim Brown, figured out if I stepped one way, looking that way, too, then going the other, tacklers would tend to fall flat on their faces, and I would thus be saved ...

But when I joined the fifth-grade team, the coaches were in no way planning on giving this nerdy, shy, quiet kid the ball. Since I was bigger than other kids my age, and I had been given football pads bought at Sears that had a neck pad to prevent backlashes, was being bred as a young offensive lineman and defensive tackle. This was fine with me, since I loved Bob Lilly, the future Hall of Famer, No. 74, for the Cowboys. However, I wasn't named to the first team at first, even though I was first chair as a saxophonist, and the dichotomy of these two worlds seemed pretty as above, not so below to me. Finally, I went home and wept about it to my mother and she responded with a strange story about my dad. She said it was okay for men to cry. In fact, she had been surprised to find my dad crying when she came into the room while he was watching the funeral ceremony after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Thinking about it now, I could see why that was a marked moment for my mother. My dad, coming from deep south Texas, was arch-conservative and used to take me around our north Dallas and Phoenix neighborhoods as tykes to do door-to-door campaigning for Barry Goldwater (who we called "Goldwahwee," apparently, as kids, my brother and I).

Next, being consoled about this strange political fable, my mother bought me yet another football book. It was written by Bud Wilkinson, the big winning football coach for Oklahoma, and featured detailed instructions, with diagrams, for every football action imaginable, including how to kill a guy by tackling low.

Suitably informed, I can remember the practice ... a bright sunny day in Dallas. We were doing tackling drills and I correctly, Bud Wilkinson style, picked up a kid much larger than I, throwing him to the ground, flattened and weeping. I can remember laying there. On my back. Quite satisfied. And I was looking up at the heavenly sun, the coach looked down on me, a silhouette with a whistle. He was smiling, obviously amazed. "Who are you?", he said. I said my name. He pulled me up. From that point, for the rest of my organized life of playing football, I was a starter.

That F.P. Callet team, during the two seaons I played there, only lost one game, an across-town match in west Dallas in the rain. They had a big tall and fast kid who couldn't be caught. So I faced loss only once in Texas: a career 20-and-one record as a Texan. Then, as a freshman at Chaparral High School, our team went 8-1-1. We went 6-4 as I moved on as a sophomore/junior squad ... (for now I will skip until later my junior and senior years for the big juicy part to come later) ... (The, you know, "dazed and confused" as an KISS and Aerosmith fan part of the late 1970s) ... in college, as a member of a flag football team for an ad hoc group of students built from an apartment-dorm complex of athletes, a team called the Dark Shadow Bears we only lost the championship game to an ROTC team who (we were all convinced) had glued his flags on and ran up and down the field, impervious to us. The cheaters! It was like some bad out-take from "Animal House," that game.

~

At the bottom of the staircase, the game is on. And I'm terribly late for my date, all dressed up in my uniform, and the two-minute warning is on ... and it still looks like there are all kinds of barriers to the underground field. From the concourse view of the dream, the whole stadium seemed to be underground.

~

I think, in fact, I'm pretty sure, special drugs were needed for me to become a loser in sports ... But for all that in college stuff, I need to add this. Far as I can recall, I got two "A" grades as a student at the University of Arizona. One was for my first poetry writing course. The second, for a late flag football class that I took as a senior because I forgot all about that P.E. requirement before graduating. I broke my left arm in that damned class, which never did heal right. Just before that, on that day in Tucson, across the common ground from Wildcat stadium, I had demonstrated a special skill: The ability to, as a blitzing defensive back, rush the quarterback and intercept the ball just as he was releasing the pass. I had been practicing that one in the back yard for many, many years successfully, but never in "official" play. But on that day, I did it and scored! About fifteen minutes later, I went high in the air again, feeling the juice, and crashed down on my arms, feeling stunned, queasy and sick from the shock. Broke my arm. I never went back to that class, too busy as a young man with two stories to write every day for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, or a period where I was an intern at the Tucson Citizen paper, to go back, with the classload of a senior, to tell the P.E. teacher what had happened. But when I found out I wasn't going to be able to graduate without being able to reconcile that issue, I went back to the flag football coach, reminded him of my great interception play ... Great Accomplishment in Sports Life No. 3 ... and he said, remembering: "Obviously, you get an 'A'."

So ended my organized football career. Enter, the age of the pencil and pen. And for thirty years as a journalist, in the places I worked, I couldn't sneak up on anybody if I was walking down the wall behind them since the surgery I had for my knee as a senior included a metal staple that over the years began to click with each step ... The left wrist injury I incurred my senior season of P.E. at the University of Arizona didn't heal right, and worse, happened when I was doing a stint as an intern at the Tucson Citizen during which I typed for a couple of months with a cast on my left arm. And so, to this day, I have a unique way of typing with one full right hand, and one finger on the left hand ... I try to remember all of the concussions I've had, but I have trouble with the count ... the best thing I do is write poetry, if only because I'm able to empty my head and pour it all out ... stream of consciousness type stuff ... about such things as, say, the horrors of trying to take in, from 2,500 miles away, as broadcast over the airwaves, the toxic commercialism of an event for a major sport ...

~

Now I'm watching the 48th Super Bowl on television, Denver Broncos versus the Seattle Seahawks, and I'm watching commercials and fast cuts to this and surreal that, the maudlin, militaristic pre-game ceremony and there's one of forty or so faces for the game's eventual winner, Seattle's star defensive back Richard Sherman. He's all pumped up for "The National Anthem," swaying this way and that, and to the "rocket's read glare"," sung by some Wagnerian opera singer, and all I can think about is that "rough beast" from the W.B. Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming." The last I'd seen his face, he was screaming at the world with post-game madness about how so-and-so had dissed him on the last play of the NFC Championship game. In a moment of pure emotion, he was so animal wild the FOX sports interviewer lady holding the microphone seemed to be forced backwards by the bad breath of this supposedly happy man. No, he wasn't going to Disneyland, or, thanking the good lord and his teammates and of course the fans of his team, known as the 12th Man for being so loud at around 107 decibels during each home game, with the single-eyed hawk on the helmet. He was still caught up in the ecstasy of his violent craft. Right then, I knew, he would become a national icon for these fearful times on social media.

For that moment, he was the image of the NFL, which had stamped its fascistic logo on the face of the world for the Super Bowl now.

During th pre-game hype section of the game, a four-hour stretch, FOX News leading pulpit bully, known as Poppa Bear, Bill O'Reilly, had been give the rare opportunity to interview U.S. President Barack Obama. O'Reilly launched into him, pestering him about Obamacare, the assassination of the U.S. Ambassador in Libya in 2013. It wasn't an interview as much as an attempted mugging of the so-called leader of the free world, and it seemed to be a super-weird thing to put on the air for pre-game hoopla of a football game. But Obama was cool, collected, obviously well-prepared to act like and adult before this angry old man trying to play gotcha, when did you know this, when did you know that type stuff, like some pre-programmed angry bot rehearsed by FOX News main man Roger Ailes, who had just had an unauthorized book written about him titled "The Loudest Man in the Room." All the president had to do was find the right moment, matching this invective of rude, talk-over the answer questioning, typical for FOXNews broadcasts for Poppa Bear, to outclass the media star goon squad dude for the limitations of its right-wing propaganda pipeline, led by a man, Ailes, who was at one point in his lifetime, was inspired by the Nazi film director for Adolph Hitler, Leni Reifenstahl.

And then, after that half-hour or so of televised disconnect, of all-out cognitive dissonance, we are brought back to the big game to come ... there's commercial for a new "Captain America" movie ... salutes to the troops wired together to solemn interviews with players, mom, apple pie, the usual ... the usual Orwellian display for nation that has obviously lost its collective mind.

Though this has been one of the worst winters the country has ever experienced, the ice storm of the century has been called off for the day, with the temperature in the 50s at game time, leading one FOXsports announcer to say, "The NFL has given a stiff arm to mother nature."

~

A new Radioshack is on the Blitzkrieg of the teevee now, and the over-the-counter culture is propagandized as cognitive dissonance of the times ... And now we are back ... amused to death ... my eyes are bleeding and then there's a pass ... and then Denver seems zombified at the lower altitudes, as 1984 is beamed into our homes and the ghosts of the Super Bowls past crawl out of the turf and we are all underground now, dead as drunk daisies ... It's 15-0, Seattle with 12 minutes left in the second quarter ... and what's supposed to be the greatest game ever played, as they all are, is a wash: Twenty-two skiddoo by the time Denver quarterback Peyton Manning is intercepted for a teedee ... More from Jeep Cherokee and then later, Bob Dylan has his own commercial too, for Chrysler, selling out, it seems (or is he giving us a message for the rebellion to come), singing from deep inside the matrix to the backing track for his song, "I Used to Care, But Things Have Changed" ... the money-bound creative directive covering the Earth remains ... the extra point is, is ... good!