Belltown Messenger - Grant's Broiler

As I write this, the New York Times reports that the U.S. is torturing (innocent) people to death in Afghanistan while in the Senate Robert Byrd eloquently, desperately begs Bill Frist to retain the minority's power of filibuster - and if you leave our cocoon of like-mindedness, you find half a nation, speaking through their bumperstickers, their car-magnet madness, their cars themselves, is down with this savagery- and fortuitously, weirdly, Hollywood Space-Hackjob III comes out, and is by all reports even good, stunningly political and strangely prophetic, ('This is how democracy dies...to thunderous applause') having I'm told, been written in pencil in 1969....I had a strangely retro-60s actual trip last week (I'm turning into Rick Steves with these travel diaries, I'm sorry, but I didn't go anywhere for ten years and soaked up the Seattleness until it was time to go and go) down the 101 to Los Angeles for my brother's college graduation, everything between Florence, OR and S.F. entirely new to me. It's no forested coast like that between Kalaloch and La Push, as I'd imagined: the ancient redwoods survive in small named-and-plaqued groves, a museum of wilderness, (you walk among the trees as if the sky were a hangar whose ceiling suspends sleeping whales to the ground) and Maxxam is still cutting them down, dirty kids in and out of Arcata like flotsam bravely 'sit' in them, I can't think of a higher calling. Listening to Camper Van Beethoven as I did driving S.F. to L.A. in the miraculous fall of 1989 with my whole late youth and the oblivious 90s ahead, the great new CVB record titled 'New Roman Times' and about explicitly that, and reading Curtis White's 'The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think For Themselves', a dull title for what is a wild, revolutionary book that unleashes in me a liberated mentality that veers dangerously close to goofy (CVB chanting, 'We would fight for hippie chicks, we would die for hippie chicks, we might stop and skate a bit, but we would die...') reined in by White's intellectual rigor and honest heart, growing my hair because my friend Dave gets hassle from the enemy for his long hair and beard and if we're gonna forget Ted Nugent and pick shirts and skins I know what team I'm on--- While demonstrating how imaginative works steer the very nation into its possible selves and the phony Spielbergs et al are softening us up for fascism, the imaginative center of the culture having long since gone from lit to movies and music, validating what I've often been made to feel was my age-inappropriate continuing interest in the widest definition of 'punk', not because I am a musical person but because of its continual transformative power, all of this nearly shouted to my high school friend in a bar off Union Square in S.F. (tenured, wed, childed and housed in Davis, CA which in my mind still always triggers the cover of the Butthole Surfers EP Cream Corn From The Socket of Davis), and his considerable (polite) unbelief.

Meanwhile the mad proponents of Big Dig West (I know, with all this gathering darkness it's hard to do anything but herd goats on Tattooine, or whatever) want to have whatever residents remain after five years of 24-hour construction (the trucks backing up alone!) pay for their own forced removal from the neighborhood. The Weekly continues to ignore the viaduct issue while spinning lies about the monorail (What's the connection here? Is it me?) with the inexplicable desire to see us vote on it a fifth time, or would six be enough? I wonder what the stats on alcohol consumption are doing these days, because everybody seems to be getting drunker than I've seen in years, not least the Iraqi vets I've been running into, kind and deluded, acknowledging the WMD lie but saying it was all worthwhile for Iraqi democracy. There's only about a quarter million more of them to come, with their missing limbs and psychoses and violent denial. Remember the drug habits, the climate of murder brought back from Vietnam? Here's another helping. And isn't there a sense of rushing toward a terrible chaos held off by a worse order while we hunker down anonymous on our forest planet awaiting the one who will bring down this empire?

End notes: Density is good, so shut up. Listen to the Kings of Leon, Aha Shake Heartbreak, because fun is necessary and as Jim Morrison said 'I don't know about you but I'm gonna get my kicks before this whole shithouse goes up in flames' which my high school friend said was nihilistic but I think is one of the least nihilistic things ever said. Also come to the opening party for the Cascadia Film Collective studios on Capitol Hill, at 1410 14th Avenue (next to Piecora's) where my posse will this summer make our H.P. Lovecraft-inspired feature Cthulhu, on Friday June 10 at 7 PM. Cursed with the urge to versify? I'm here to help: belltownpoet@hugohouse.org.