i am always adding new content to this website, usually at the bottom, so feel free to check back periodically, and i will keep adding stuff as i want this to be the longest one page website in history, where you keep scrolling and scrolling and never get to the bottom
"Aversa's theatre of the mind and absurdist website contains the largest collection of bullshit I have ever seen, and he gives new meaning to the term 'un-reliable narrator'. The only thing that this website reveals is that Marty Why Ruin a Good Story with the Truth Aversa, who claims to be "friendly towards both retards and non-retards alike", is fairly proficient at creating animated GIFs, and you can see this for yourself if you can get the god-damned site to load as there is so much crap on here. After reading some of his nonsensical run-on sentences on this website, it became clear to me that he has a difficult time distinguishing reality from fantasy, and I will be happy to write a review of this so-called CD that will be coming out soon for 3 years now, but it will be a miracle if this CD ever sees the light of day".
- Mr. Real, Famous Art Critic, Art Collector & Arch-Nemesis.
Editor's Note: Mr. Real reacts to the news that aversa has just released his music CD: "4 years in the making, untold dollars spent in vain, but hey, i give him props for letting me post a review of it on this ersatz website, he must not want to sell any of them. I am now writing an exhaustive critique of this in all likelihood 'hollow' Hollow Town CD. Aversa said he will upload my CD review, near the bottom of this site, once I have completed it. It may take me a little bit, as I can only listen to the CD in small doses, it hurts my ears, listening to the sound of fingernails rubbed on a blackboard has nothing on this painful endeavor. Please check back real soon."
Chapter 1
I am Outstanding
How i got this crazy accolade that came with a plastic, faux wood-grain plaque, i'll never know. i had to be the worst paperboy ever. I think that they just needed a body from "downda line"(See Heynabonics) to fill the slot that week for The Scranton Times / The Sunday Times Outstanding Carrier Salutation. I always wondered how they had assessed that I was 'Outstanding', maybe they had really meant that I was outstandingly abominable as a paperboy and they were making an inside joke. "let's make this guinea dumbo think that he is a great paperboy, when he really sucks, we know it, but he may not know it", but i think that they were just scrambling to find someone to write about, to fill out the page. I basically had about 30 customers, and if I ever delivered the papers non-stop from beginning to end, it probably would have taken me 45 minutes or less to complete the route. but because I started delivering late as it was, (school was over at 3pm, then I'd binge on candy bought at JOHNNY'S Store and daydream for 2 hours and then start the papers at 5pm) and because some of the customers' homes bordered on woods, half way through the route I would drop the undelivered papers in the bushes and go bb gun hunting or exploring in the forest, for an hour or more sometimes, and then customers would be calling my parents' home wondering where the damn paper was, it was past 7pm at that point. this happened regularly. and i would oftentimes just outright miss a house or 2, as i was pretty much in my own world most of the time, and these customers would also be calling, looking for the paper.
and if the suits at the paper ever polled my 30 customers, maybe half of them would have a tepid, blase opinion about my delivery skills, the other 13 would give me maybe 2 stars out of 10, and 2 customers in particular would have 2 thumbs way down. the first customer was actually an old married couple, in their 70's, they tipped me a dime or whatever monthly, i didn't care about that because, as you will see below, the entire amount i collected from a customer was basically all tip money to me. but all of a sudden during the summer of '75, i was not able to obtain the monthly bill money from them, and they owed me for 2 months, $2.35 x 2, big bucks back then, and i was a tad impatient. so i had had enough of their dodging me and pretending like they were not home everytime i rang the doorbell. maybe it was that depression-era mentality that caused them to not want to pay me and part with that precious $4.70, so one saturday afternoon, i stood on their front porch, knowing that they were home, and rang their doorbell for a good half-hour straight, it was pretty crazy. i guess they got the message, so the old lady, now wearing the meanest wrinkled face i have ever seen, threw the door wide open and started in on me, and these are her exact words (my memory is average to good, but this one is indelibly etched), "you can take this newspaper, you and your entire family, and wipe your god-damn asses with it, you misers and penny-pinchers, here's your god-damned money ", and she threw the bills at me. so that was the end of that customer, no more paper to be delivered there. and the other customer, same thing, he was an old bachelor, but he only owed me for 1 month, i was real insistent and impatient with him, and he pulled this laying low on a saturday bullshit and pretended he wasn't home also. he wasn't sleeping, cuz i could hear noises going on inside, and i was not having any of it, but i only stood there about 15 minutes as opposed to 30 minutes and held his doorbell in. it was a strange but efficient doorbell to press, maybe it was mis-wired, but i didn't need to keep pumping it, i just needed to hold it in and the chimes kept chiming, for 15 minutes straight. he also freaked out and whipped open the door, threw the money at me, cursing and what not, but he didn't quit the paper, he stayed on as a customer. so i guess i maybe would not have gotten this silly award if the paper brass polled my customers, but on the other hand they still may have chosen me anyway.
and unbeknownst to the people who gave me this award, my money management skills left alot to be desired also, but this was none of their gawd damm business anyway. once a month the district manager would come to my home to collect the 'bill', and 99% of the time I didn't have enough to pay the bill, and my mother would have to dip into her purse to make up the difference, awfully gracious of her.
How could this be? How could I not have enough money to pay the bill? all things being equal (and they rarely ever are), the money I collected from each customer monthly, plus the tips, should have more than covered the bill, and whatever was left over would be my earnings. I came up short mostly because I spent almost immediately what I collected from the customers, on reese's cups and soda mostly, and chocolate milk at JOHNNY'S Store, I spent so much that I never had enough to pay my bill. and maybe this was part of the reason why i missed some customers homes on a regular basis: i was enjoyably high on sugar, because my normal, daily gluttonous routine was such that before i would start delivering the papers, i would buy and consume one 12oz container of orange drink, one 12oz container of chocolate milk, and 3 packs of reese's cups, with 2 cups per pack. this ate up a lot of funds, but what else is money for anyway. and that is why i didn't care if customers left a big tip or not, because i considered all of the $2.35 i collected off each customer monthly as tip money, even though a large portion of that $2.35 should have been earmarked for paying the bill.
and also when the carnival came to town once a year, I would go there and spend more money on games, rides, food, stuff like that, and especially I was addicted to the ' wheel ', one of those contraptions where this guy spun the wheel that had numbers on it, like domino numbers, and if the pointer landed on the number on which you had placed money, you won. but, the black hole that it was for me, I never won much, lost mostly. but the point is, if I ran out of money at the carnival, usually while i was playing the wheel, and if it wasn't too late at night, but it usually was, I would go collect the monthly newspaper bill money from the customers who had not paid me yet that month. then i would have more cash and head back to the carnival and spend all that also. and by the eighth grade i was already drinking boone's farm and colt 45 in the woods with my friends, and if i needed some quick cash for some more beverage or tiparillo cigars, i would hit up a customer or 2.( this one customer, who was in her jammies, asked me one time, at 8:30pm, why I was collecting so late-- I just bullshitted her basically.
on average, if the bill that the route manager came to collect from me monthly was $24, my mother would have to put in a third maybe, so it cost my parents $8 per month for 3 years for me to have a paper route. looking back it was not really a bad deal for them, as most of my friends got 'allowances', which my parents would have none of. so let's say my 'allowance' was $2.00 per week (the $8.00 that my parents contributed to my paper route bill), it was a far cry from the $5.00 or $10.00 that some school mates received weekly from their parents. and maybe because these chums didn't have to work for their bread and thus were taught no work ethic, they ended up as pimps and drug dealers possibly. but regarding the dough that my parents contributed to my monthly bill, i think that once in a while they had to pay the whole amount, especially around the 4th of july, because i would spend all of the money i collected from customers on the purchase of fire crackers, bottle rockets and 4 oz. rockets that me and my friends did delinquent things with, like shoot at people's homes late at night using the rockets. one time, me and one of my friends had it out for another 2-faced friend of ours, and this 2-faced kid (who we mistakenly called 'Cyclops', we should have called him 'Janus' or 'Cerberus') had a younger brother, maybe 7 years old. so, under the ruse of camping out one night in my back yard, at 3am we snuck over to the house of the 2-faced kid and his family, and put a pack of fire crackers on the bedroom window ledge of the younger brother, and connected the fuse to a cigarette timer, a simple but ingenious device. this cigarette timer gave us a good 10 minutes to scram and get back to my yard, so we lit the cigarette, ran back to my yard, settled into our sleeping bags, and waited. when the cigarette burned down to the filter 10 minutes later, it ignited the firecrackers, all hell broke lose and we laughed our proverbial asses off. it was so still and quiet at 3:10am, that those popping sounds could be heard for miles possibly. we later found out that this little kid was scared out of his wits and it was real pandemonium for that family at such an early hour. but the most bizarre part was (and this is how dense i was at the time, not that i am less dense now), the mother of the scared-out-of-his-wits little boy called my friend's mother and my mother that morning and told them what we had done, with no evidence or anything. but they all knew we did it, and they knew that we knew that they knew that we did it, and of course we just denied it while our noses grew and grew, but there wasn't much sleeping outside for the rest of the summer. (see the section below, my delinquency quotient) but anyway, in the month of july, between buying candy and soda at the tooth-rotting store, and fireworks, i was flat broke when mr. costello came calling for the monthly paper bill, and my mother paid the bill out of her stash in her wallet.
another time, my father gave me this little money canteen that I could clip on my belt, miners used to put calcium carbide lantern fuel in it or something, but i remember the first time I clipped it to my belt and went collecting the money from the customers. in my delusional state, I thought, " I am real organized now, and determined to not pre-spend the bill money, i have the bills on this side of the canteen, the coins on that side, and i will have enough to pay the bill to the newspaper when the nazi district manager mr. costello comes collecting." well that lasted about a day or two, I stopped using the money canteen and went back to my old ways, just stuffing money in my jeans pockets or wherever and spending it like there was no tomorrow, but of course tomorrow came and I did not have enough to pay the bill etc.
calcium carbide container money canteen
also, i have cousins who live in upstate new york, and every summer or so they would come down and stay for a week and play with me and my younger brothers, and somehow I got them to help me with the papers, i think that I made it appear fun, because i don't think I ever paid them anything (cheap bastard that I was) nor did I buy them any candy nor soda at the store. i remember a couple of instances, it could have been with them, or with one of my younger brothers, or all of them, there was this one customer on my route whose home was at the end of this long yard, I hated that house because of the long uphill walk one had after dropping the paper off. so I invented a game to see who was the fastest runner to the home, I would time whoever I enlisted that day, I would give them the paper and say, "GO!", and they would take off running as i counted out loud, "1 mississippi, 2 mississippi . . .", and they dropped the paper off and hustled back to beat some arbitrary record that I had concocted, and of course there was no prize nor anything if they had beaten the phantom record.
I had enough of this paper route business, so after 3 years i was relieved when a young girl from the neighborhood expressed interest in having a paper route, I was more than happy to pass it on to her. and by that time, 9th grade, I was getting jobs unloading and washing tractor trailers and heavy equipment, and the pay was much better, and nobody came to collect money from me, money which I didn't have anyway but,hey, some people were better at managing a paper route and money than I was, it worked for them as a job, for me it was torture, but it did provide me with spending money.
THE AFTERMATH
and then there was the "busting" at school upon the publication of my above accolade, which involves a whole drama with my mother. so when the suits at the newspaper gave my parents a ringy dingy to let them know that I had been duly chosen that week to be the outstanding carrier, unfortunately I was not home at the time, and my mother fielded that crucial phone call. the woman or man from the newspaper most likely asked my mother some questions, pertaining to my interests, hobbies, and the like. the conversation may have gone something like this:
Newspaper Employee:So Mrs. Aversa, where does Marty go to school, and is he involved in any extracurricular activities?
Mrs. Aversa: He attends Scranton Preparatory School, the Cavaliers you know, (hear 'The Scranton Prep Fagala Song') Note: I am not endorsing the ideas expressed in this song nor homophobia, I am just relating what I heard when I was in high school. kids in my hometown would sing this to me when i got off the public COLTS bus on my way home from school, ballbusters all. and if these ballbusters were in a particularly foul and bullying mood, they would sing an encore and follow the Fagala Song with the'Marty Farty Song'. and just to clarify further, most likely i was bullied and my balls were busted because, from what i was told, i was a terror to the little kids that lived in my neighborhood, maybe it was just karmic payback. i do remember one instance when i coaxed a 3 or 4 year old girl from the neighborhood to eat a teaspoon of dirt, told her it was 'delicious', and after she spit it out she went screaming and crying all the way home---i think her family hates me to this day.(and fyi, COLTS stands for Carries Old Ladies To Scranton, and not County of Lackawanna Transit System, as some might suspect.)
and for the sake of the male students who attend Scranton Prep, the heterosexual ones anyway, i think that the school hierarchy should re-name the mascot, maybe they should call themselves the Scranton Prep Bulldogs, or Scranton Prep Stallions. below is my actual Prep license plate memorabile circa 1976, and my edited version that i will use to make a new mascot proposal with, being i am an alumnas and have a say in the matter, to the school hierarchy.
Original Scranton Prep License Plate, circa 1976
My New Proposed Scranton Prep Mascot and License Plate, circa 2010
Mrs. Aversa(cont'd):and he is on the wresting team and he belongs to the ski club.
I was on the wresting team for about 2 days, couldn't hack it, plus dudes' balls were in my face half the time, and i think that one time my hand inadvertently rubbed up against the ballsack of some grappler as i tried unsuccessfully to pin him down, and that was one time too many. but if some dude wants other dude's balls in his face, more power to him, whatever makes him happy. but i will give my mother the benefit of the doubt on this one because the person who called from the newspaper to declare my outstandingness and ask these boilerplate questions may have called during the 2 days that I was on the wresting team, and my mother would have thus told him or her the truth. I WAS ON THE WRESTING TEAM! , for 2 days anyway. and if I had already quit the team and my mother knew this, and still told the person on the phone that I was on the wrestling team, then that is a whole other story. My above plaque reads "March 12, 1977" so I would need to do some research, but I doubt that wrestling season and the first 2 days of practice began 1/3 of the way through the spring semester, it most likely began in the beginning of the semester, say, in january. whatever. (today, march 31, 2010, i just googled 'high school wrestling season', and i found an article on wikipedia about USA high school scholastic, greco-roman style wrestling, and it read that the season begins in october or november and goes til february or march. so if this is true of the 1976-1977 Scranton Prep wrestling season, then it would have been about 6 months from the date i had quit the team, after the first 2 days of practice in october or november, until i got this crummy award in march 1977, which would mean that my mother reeeeaaaly stretched things a tad by saying in march that i was on the wrestling team. what are ya gonna do, hyperbole makes the world go round)
regarding the ski club: i had heard in school that there was a ski trip to elk mountain, so i decided to go in order to attempt to fit in with this new crowd, because basically I was an insecure 9th grader with braces, a bad complexion and who had little or no friends at this new school in another town. (and i wish someone back then would have grabbed me by the shoulders, would have shaken me and said, "look son, you got a bad haircut, you wear glasses with coke bottle lenses, you got zits and blackeads all over your face and you got braces: there ain't no fitting in for you.") anyway, i just wanted to put myself out there, take risks so to speak, mingle with this new crowd, maybe make a friend or 2 on the trip (didn't happen). so, I definitely do not remember joining any club, it was just a one shot deal, I was just gonna go on one of these outings and see what the hell skiing was like. the skiing part was fun, but the overall trip was a waste of time really for me, as I could have been back in my home town sleigh riding and taking swigs from a stolen whiskey bottle with my boyhood friends in the woods. ok experience though, and i sometimes like to try new things just for the hell of it, but the main point is, my mother told the person on the phone that i was in the ski club, her second half-truth or even non-truth.
Newspaper Employee: So Mrs. Aversa, does Marty have any personal hobbies, and if so, can you tell me what they are?
Mrs. Aversa: As an "athlete" (quotations mine), he plays baseball, football and basketball. (all true, playing team sports while growing up was fun for me) He also has tropical fish as pets (true), builds model cars (sad but true) and he collects coins! (absolutely not true, and my mother's third and most glaring non-truth that would have severe repercussions at school)
the emotional scars that I still carry, stem from those few words that my mother uttered: 'he collects coins', and she might as well have added, "he collects butterflies and ladies' lingerie also". i do not think that there is anything wrong with collecting coins, butterflies or ladies' lingerie, to each their own, but it's just that my mother spoke the wrong words at the wrong time in my life. if i was in the 6th grade and i got this award, no one in my 6th grade class would give a shit most likely, as one classmate collected all kinds of tiny fire trucks, and another had a real neat collection of jigsaw puzzles, so that when he completed a puzzle, his father flipped it over and taped the back so that it could be framed. but announcing to the world while i was in the 9th grade that i collected coins didn't help me look cool in the least, and while i was at it i should have also just put a piece of masking tape in the middle of my glasses on the bridge and carried a slide-rule in my hip pocket and a penholder in my dress shirt pocket, 9th grade girls really like that stuff.
the only coins that I liked were not antiques that you could collect, you know, like doubloons or pieces of eight or whatever, the coins that I hoarded and loved were the ones you could plop down on the wheel of fortune thing at the carnival or spend on reese's peanut butter cups. the longest time I had a coin in my possession was the one time I had just collected coins from a customer, and I didn't make it to JOHNNY'S STORE in time before closing to spend these coins. if the store was still open, those coins would have only been in my possession for 10 minutes or less. so I just went home, coins in pocket, and decided to spend them the next day. So the coins stayed with me overnight, and if the by-laws of the coin collecting club contained a stipulation that if one has in his or her possession any type of coins for at least 24 hours before it can be called 'coin collecting', then yes, i was a coin collector, and my mother would have been correct in telling the newsperson that i was indeed a coin collector, but there was no coin collecting club nor by-laws of any kind, as far as i was aware at the time, and as far as my mother was aware of at the time, unless she really knew of such a club and such by-laws.
in fact, and this was before I had a paper route and I was a few years younger, but one of my older brothers did collect coins, he had them neatly laid out in these blue cardboard folders with holes in them, the holes were the size of the coins, and there were 18th century silver dollars, silver dimes, wheat pennies, buffalo head nickels, silver half-dollars etc, and I 'collected' his collection of coins, every once in a while i would swipe a half-dollar, as i needed money for soda and reese's cups. he had a bunch of these folders, and he had moved out and was onto other things by his freshman year of college anyway, so he didn't notice as these coin folders were jammed in a drawer in some closet. so maybe my mother was right, i DID collect coins, in this definition of a coin collector: a coin collector is someone whose sibling lays out silver coins in blue coin folders, and who cashes in these sibling's coins, who steals them and spends them at their face value, not their market value, so that a silver half-dollar would buy 50 cents worth of candy, tastycakes, pixie sticks and other sundries, instead of selling the coin at the coin dealer store for $5.00 or whatever it was worth at the time.
Folder for Losers
there was also this other cache of coins that i really loved to collect, and i have the catholic church to thank for this cache. these coins were initially bound for the collection basket at any one of the sunday masses. the church was kind enough to give every member of my family, all 10 of us (2 parents, 8 kids) our own boxes of empty envelopes that were to be filled with cash and dropped into the collection basket every sunday. up until a point when i was in the 8th grade i really loathed going to sunday mass, but then all of a sudden, and everyone lauded my choice to start going to mass regularly, i began 'attending' the sunday morning, 9:30 mass. my siblings either went to the later mass at 11am, or went to a sunday evening mass in another town, which i encouraged, or didn't go at all if they were old enough to not be swayed by my parents' admonitions, in which case they would have reached the 'i don't give a flying fuck about going to the money-grubbing mind control mithras sun worshipping pagan cult ceremonies anymore' phase. the reason for all of this new-found piety on my part? so, my parents prepared all of our envelopes in the morning, let's say they put 25 cents in each child's envelope, and dollar bills into their envelopes, and sealed them up and just laid them out on the table, my mother usually prepared these or had one of my older sisters do it. and whomever happened to be going to an early mass, and if the envelopes were prepared in time, would take the stack en masse and drop them into the collection basket, that is if he or she made it to mass. what a damn mother load was there, and the catholic church was rich enough i concluded, they would not miss this $3 or $4 from the aversa family. and JOHNNY'S store was open on sunday mornings also, so as i headed on foot in the general direction of the church at about 9:20, no one could see my detour, nor see me rip into the envelopes and put the bounty into my pockets and enter the sacristy of Johnny's store. and of course i had to be real careful and make sure i destroyed the torn, now empty envelopes, and burning was the preferred method. this idea of taking the envelopes, skipping mass and spending the money on candy at the store instead, did not originate with me, as i had faintly remembered, when i was very young, maybe 5 or 6 years old, a story circulating about one of my second or third cousins who lived far away in another state. apparently he had done what i was now doing, but he just left the crumpled, empty envelopes in his pants pocket and his mother found them. ya, dude, gotta be real careful about that shit, but i forgot about this episode, and then one day when i was 14, i remembered that story and resurrected the tradition.
i guess i committed 2 mortal 'sins' in one fell swoop: i ditched mass, and diverted the funds from the catholic church to me. i don't think that it was technically stealing though. it would be stealing if i grabbed a handful of full envelopes from the church basket at mass, now that would be stealing, so maybe it was one 'mortal' sin and one' venial' sin. but the farcical element enters in also, because it didn't matter if i had committed 2 mortal sins or a 1000 mortal or 10,000 venial sins, i could just be absolved of these sins by going to confession the following week and performing my penance, which was for me at the time a farce also. and this overall relative concept of 'sin' in general cracks me up, ya got mortal sins, ya got venial sins (and i would like someone to explain to me the difference between the 2), ya got councils and august bodies determining what is a sin and what is not, and that could change over time also. i think it used to be a sin for women to go to church with their heads not covered up with some ridiculous hat or other, but now it's OK for them to do that, but i could be wrong. and did this same company that used to sell indulgences, telephone 'God', or whatever their relative concept of a 'higher power' is, and find out from Him or Her what is a sin and what isn't? i gotta do some etymological research on this word 'sin' and see who the hell first used it.
but here's how things maybe would have gone down with the priest in the confessional booth:
(i wait in line for about a half hour, along with the rest of the hushed crowd, then it's my turn, i enter the confessional booth. i get situated, it's real dark in there, the priest slides open the door between his face and my face, i could smell the cheap wine on his breath)
Me: Bless me Father, for I have sinned, it has been 7 years since my last confession. I accuse my self of these sins. (this part cracks me up also, I stand as both the accused and the accuser, I could make up whatever crap I wanted to make up, which i used to do all of the time.)
Priest: Proceed my son, what sins would you like to confess?
Me: Father, I took the money, destined for the Sunday Mass collection basket, and kept it for myself, as I was supposed to take the envelopes, all 10 of my family members' envelopes, to Mass and give them to y'all, but instead I ditched Mass, took the money out of the envelopes, hung out at Martha's Store and spent it on babyruth bars, sim-sims, punks, reese's cups and chocolate milk. (so as not to reveal to the priest what neighborhood i lived in, and thereby possibly giving away my identity, i would have told him the name of a corner store in another part of town. and this also means that i would have lied to the priest in the confessional booth, thereby possibly piling another sin on top of my mountain of sins.)
Priest: Is that all my son?
Me: Yes, Father . . . .Oh, i just forgot, one time I took the Lord's name in vane, and another time I learned about the facts of life by masturbating to and splooging all over a picture of Blair from 'The Facts of Life', while i had a small carrot stuck up my ass. (www.lisawhelchel.com)
Priest: Bless you my Son, and i will have you know that semen also does flow in our Semenary, and that rectums are stimulated in our Rectories, so by the power vested in me from on High, I hereby absolve you of your sins, and for your penance, say 100 Our Fathers, 100 Hail Marys, 100 Glory Be's, and 100 Apostles Creeds. Go and sin no more.
right. so i would sit in a pew for a few minutes, pretend to say some prayers or other, and then get my ass out of there. other people might be there for an hour or more, as they were praying when i arrived at the church and still praying when i got out of the confessional booth, they must have confessed some bad shit to the priest. overall, what a great cosmology this was, i felt so clean after going to confession. but maybe there was some natural law that meted out its own justice, i don't know. so regarding these sunday morning church envelopes, i didn't want to raise suspicion, i did this occasionally, maybe once a month or so. "HIS HOBBIES INCLUDE COIN COLLECTING . . . . . .", indeed.
so, a'couple'a two, tree days (See Heynabonics) had passed since the newspaper addition in which I appeared rolled off the presses, so when i went to school on monday (the article appeared on saturday), the ribbing started. i think that the coin collecting part was the straw that broke the camels back, the building model cars part didn't help neither, but the coin collecting part pushed the bully meter way into the red, and i remember this tall, 10th grade chap with acne, mike something or other, who started in at 8:30 am and didn't let up til closing bell, it's i good thing i only ran into him in the halls only 2 or 5 times. but of course others knew about it, so i just put on this fake, teeth-full-of-braces smile and laughed along with the rest of the crowd. dudes i didn't even know made comments, i think a guy on the wrestling team took umbrage with the wrestling team line. and, most embarrassingly, this way hot girl in my home room, who was untouchable to me, made her very first remarks to me, after 7 months of being in the same home room together, and her very first words to me were not, "do'ya wanna ball tonight?", no, they were, simply and most cuttingly, "hi marty, i saw your picture in the paper, nice". that was it. I hope that she was so busy being hot that she didn't have time to read the article under my picture and name, but I doubt it.
POSTSCRIPT: I got no satisfaction nor logical explanation when I asked my mother about what she had told the newspaper person, it was just brushed off, and then I forgot about it, but scars still remain.
(EDITOR'S NOTE- Mr. Real the Art Critic responds: "Aversa's timeline is all wrong. If he is claiming that he was in grade school up until 1976 when he entered high school, then this fictitious episode with the priest in the confessional booth would have happened in the spring of 1976 or earlier. So, there is no way that he would have even known, unless he could see 3 years into the future when the first episode of 'The Facts of Life' aired in 1979, that there was even a TV character named 'Blair'." )
Joke of the Week
A Priest and a Rabbi are walking down a street, and they come across a schoolyard where a 10-year old boy is playing.
Priest: Man, I'd really like to screw that little boy.
Rabbi: Out of what?
Joke of the Week Runners-up
This guy from . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .(fill in country) walks into a bar with a big pile of steaming dog shit in his hands and says to the bartender, "Hey, look what I almost just stepped in".
Why did the Siamese twins travel to England? So the other one could drive.
This guy visits his doctor for his annual checkup, and the doctor says, "I need stool, urine and
semen samples." The guy replied, "I'm in a real hurry doc, can I just leave you my underwear?"
Trivia Question of the Week
What is the most annoying Meg Ryan romantic comedy?
a) Kate & Leopold
b) You've Got Mail
c) When Harry met Sally
d) City of Angels
featuring that god-awful song 'iris' by the go go dolls
e) Addicted to Love
f) All of the Above
answer coming soon!
these sites have some good gags, fake poop, vomit and other fun stuff
25 years after the fact, i am sitting down, mouth agape after reading this idiotic essay. so i was in this 'radical', write-letters-to the-editor-phase as a college junior, i think i just wanted to appear as some kind of humorist or man of letters and see my name in the main paper in scranton, 'the times'. i wrote one about a proposed local casino, one about trickle-down economics, and this one, the cream of the crop. it makes no sense whatsoever, i even spelled the word 'gist' wrong. i guess the main point i was trying to make, if there is any point, is that i was against defense spending at the time. i will try now to break down my logic, or lack thereof, in this letter, and condense my main points:
a) i was at a us navy air show
b) at this air show there was a c5-a jumbo transport
c) i was in awe of the size of this a aircraft
d) the pentagon has 50 more of these on order
e) i cannot understand this, all they need is one, to put on display at other air shows
item 'e' is where the whole thing fell apart. my 'jist' was that i was against defense spending, but i had no reason nor argument as to why this was so. i don't know why i needed to 'avoid' the plane's 'numerical designation', as it reads at the end of paragraph 1, what a waste of words, as the numerical designation was simply 'C-5A'. how i would 'get to technical' by writing that 'This Plane is called the C-5A', i have no idea. and how, in paragraph 2, the 'awesomeness' (is that even a word?) is 'mutlipled by the fact' that 50 more of these were being built is a muddled sentence to say the least. did i mean that, if you took the cubic yards of the volume of the inside of one of these planes, and multiplied that by 50, then that would be one large amount of cubic yards, an 'awesome' amount of cubic yards? or that would be really awe inspiring if you had 50 of these planes all in one place, a huge amount of cubic yards would be represented there. and if i was trying to be funny, it is far from being funny, i am not laughing at all after reading it. this synopsis may be funnier than the actual letter, though i cannot be sure. maybe the navy did need 50 of these planes, how did i know, maybe they were carting troops all over the gawd-damn place with their black ops and all, and needed such behemoths to cover the globe, and they could maybe fit 1000 of those little guys in there, pack 'em in like sardines, save us a alot of money on fuel costs by being more efficient. instead of making 4 trips in the C-1A, or whatever, carrying 250 grunts, they could make just one trip with the C-5A. maybe they were thinking green at the time, way ahead of the current green' craze.
In 1990, my friend Dave and I composed an avant-garde type thing, he made this fuzzy sound with the bass and put it on top
of a drum track. I then sang some Japanese syllables and chants over the top of it. It is OK, just a rough sketch of
sounds. I don't really enjoy the collaborative process, it is not for me, but Dave and I did produce some rudimentary ideas way back when in my
songwriting past. And then when I moved to Boulder in 1991, I met this Chinese woman at my new job, Sian, pronounced like
the Wyoming city Cheyenne, and we became friends, and we worked in the same department. She was from the city in China called, Xian,
pronounced "Shiii-aaann". Xian is the place where archeologists unearthed hundreds of human-sized terra cotta warriors, and there have
been many programs on television about that. Anyway, so I had this avant-garde-an-idea what-the-fuck-it-is-type song, and thought,
"hmm, I know that the Chinese and the Japanese have been at each other's throats, literally and figuratively, for trillions of
years, how about if record Sian's voice and throw that into the mix, juxtapose the 2 languages and call it 'Nippon Saga', like
as if the Nips and Chinks are going at it again, an original idea composed by me, a WOP and Polock". So I asked Sian if she
would come into work early one day, and I would bring some recording equipment to record her reading some Chinese book
or other, and I told her that I was going to use it in a song that I was writing, but I don't think she had any idea of what I planned
to do with it, which I embarrassingly found out later. Anyway, we met at about 7am in the lunch room one morning, and I recorded
her reading a Chinese fable, it was pretty cool, she told me it was the story of a mother bird who was conversing with her baby
bird, something like the mother bird was coaxing the baby bird to fly or something. So I recorded a few minutes of it and that
was that. I was too cheap at that time to even offer her anything in return, like buy her lunch or something. But knowing her,
she wouldn't take anything possibly anyway, but I didn't ask. I then took her recorded voice and mixed it into the song.
This first clip here is of Sian reading the fable.
Then I took this vocal recording and mixed it in with the existing 'Nippon Saga' tracks and came up with the finished product here.
Nippon Saga / featuring Dave Narros on bass, Sian on 'vocals' mp3
About a few months later, I brought the finished recording into work, as me and some of mine and Sian's other co-workers were also
songwriters and would often bring in original tunes for everyone to hear. We all worked in the finishing department of this computer parts factory,
a great environment where we had a nice stereo and freedom to play all kinds of music, and everyone would take turns either tuning in a
favorite radio station or play whatever CD they wanted to play. So I said one day, "Hey, check out this new tune, Sian is on it". Everyone stopped
what they were doing to listen closely to what was playing, and after about 20 seconds, Sian turned as red as a beet, and I think she even left the
room. She was totally freaked out, I hadn't anticipated that reaction, honestly I didn't know how she would react, I think I thought that she would be
slightly amused or in the least not even care what the hell it was. I may have been too out of it to think that she might react in this way. Everyone always
saw her as very calm, cool and collected, a very good and conscientious worker, and I totally embarrassed her in front of everyone. I blushed also, I felt very
uncomfortable. The rest of the day passed in awkward silence betwixt her and I, but as time passed we both kind of forgot about it. I think that a few months later
her husband, who was a cryogenic engineering Ph.D student at The University of Colorado, myself, Sian and their daughter all went to some dinner or other together.
LAW OF KARMA IN ACTION? (Or, what goes around may come around maybe, big time)
i am a big fan of insects and also of the speculation about and study of the so-called law of karma, and i present here a true story combining the two, insects and karma, as i had an encounter with an insect, and the aftermath of this meeting made me further speculate about karma and if it is a natural 'law' of some kind that sets parameters in the physical/mental/vibrational universe, or if it is bullshit as the amazing randi might have said, and that life and all manifestation are ruled by blind mechanical forces (big bang, primordial soup type of thing whereby consciousness is just an outgrowth of these materialistic, mechanical forces) or maybe its all of the above combined or none of the above.
anyway, while living in colorado in the early 1990's, i was working for a paving crew, the first job i landed when i moved to boulder, and on one summer day, i found myself spray painting freshly-hardened curbs in a new housing development, i had to mark the curbs every 50 feet or so, for the surveyor, i think, but anyway, i was marking the curb with spray paint, and i came across a big yellow-jacket type-wasp that was just laying low right on the curb, and she, or he, whatever the case may have been, was just sitting, all peaceful-like, but for some inexplicable reason, i just wanted to spray the insect's body just a bit, kind of like tag her/him slightly with day-glo orange, but because of my haste and of the imprecise nature of the paint can nozzle, when i held the button down a big swath of orange paint covered the whole insect, it was brutal to see, as it was trying to remove the paint from it's eyes and mouth, but to no avail, and no way it would have survived, so i stepped on it quickly, a mercy killing of sorts, i had to put it out of its misery
so after i stepped on the yellow-jacket, i felt that i had effed up and i was quite disturbed by what i had done, but i kept on working 'til quittin' time, and i eventually forgot about it
now at about this time i had been dating beatrice who lived about 30 miles away, we had a weekend relationship that worked out great for both of us, as she couldn't put up with me nor i with her 24/7/365, and we each had our own apartments, which is how it was back then, but i wanted to end the relationship because it wasn't enjoyable for me anymore
so, on the same day that i stepped on the wasp, i did my normal routine, went to the beer hall and smoked dope outside and got plastered like on any night of the week, and when i got home i decided to call beatrice to let her know that i wanted to end the relationship, and it didn't go down to well, she was pissed and crying, but i know how it is, i been dumped before and i would be pissed, but not crying, then relieved and filled with joy, but i was just dispensing to her what had been dispensed to me a few times before: a cold-turkey, clean-break termination of the affair
thus, many dynamics are now building:
1- i spray painted, stepped on and then terminated the tiny life an arthropod-type insect
2- then later that same day, i had an emotional phone conversation with my ex-girlfiend, a crazy and not normal day to say the least
so, next morning i show up at the jobsite, still rattled from the day and night before, and it was just me and ray, he was just my co-worker, but when the foreman left the job site, ray stepped up and took control like a foreman, as he was the blade and backhoe driver, so they usually call the shots relative to the laborers on the job site, that's what i was, a laborer. so ray was grading a dirt road with the blade, a long piece of equipment that had a steel blade hanging down in the middle that scraped dirt road surfaces, and he was grading the same dirt road job site near which i terminated the doomed insect's life on the day before. ray is scraping away so that the blacktop guys could come in and have a smooth and surveyed road surface on which to seal the deal, and i was just walking along ray, making sure that he didn't grade below the top of the stakes embedded in the road, as if the stake just appeared at the dirt surface, and if his blade just skimmed the top of the stake, i would let him know this, that he has hit a home run and he didn't need to scrape the road surface in that spot anymore, and the proper amount of blacktop could be poured later
now there was a whole strip of dirt road that ray had not scraped yet, it still needed to be packed down and compressed with this crazy, vibrating machine called the sheep's foot, and being i had sheep's foot driving experience, ray asked me to run the sheep's foot over this certain section of road
now the sheep's foot looks like a steam-roller that one would see at a black top paving convention, chris angel got run over by one of them and lived to tell the tale, except that the sheep's foot doesn't have 2 big smooth rollers, it had rollers that were pock marked by the oval, knobby protrusions that extended out, kind of like those wind-up music making little machines placed in jewelry boxes and the like, they sometimes appear in horror movies, and the drum on the music box is kind of like the sheep's foot wheels
SHEEP'S FOOT SHEEP'S FOOT
and another thing about the sheep's foot, it vibrates, so that as you drive slowly over the road surface to pack it down, the protrusions dig into the road surface as the drums vibrate, providing a packing effect, but the effect on the driver is crazy also, and after driving one, i would jump off and be buzzed and shaking for a half-hour or more, like with st. vitus' dance
i knew that i needed to drive slowly in the sheep's foot, that is the protocol, and ray knew that i knew that this is the protocol, but when ray was out of site, driving his blade, i would speed up the pace of the sheep's foot, and when i saw him coming, i would slow down so that he would think that i was going the proper, snail-like pace with this god-forsaken machine. for in some way i had taken matters into my own hands and concluded that i was packing dirt sufficiently and that the surface would pass the compression test the next day
problem was i didn't give ray enough credit regarding his perceptual skills, visual or otherwise, intuitive, or whatever, maybe he had a feeling i was being somewhat deceitful or maybe he just glanced at me down the road and, unbeknownst to me, he saw me slowing and speeding up.
ideas in ray's mind began to formulate, he had caught me and he was gonna call me on it, but he did it in a way that was like a big wasp bite on the face, harsh, violent, kind of like the way that i had terminated the yellow-jacket's life the previous day
ray approached me, pissed and screaming, maybe he had his anger issues, but i thought about it later, that 2 of the many possible ways in which he, or anyone, could have handled the situation, may have gone like this:
1- he could have said, "marty, listen. i'm no idiot, i saw you speeding up and slowing down, but in order for this surface to pass the compression test, it gotta be packed down tight, and i don't know why you are doing this, trying to fool me and also possibly delaying this job for another day or 2 because the surface doesn't pass muster, but why don't you go ahead and resume, and go very slow like needed, don't ever try to bullshit me again, and by the way, gotta smoke i can bum?"
2- but, here is what really happened: he came running up to the sheep's foot, crazily cursing at me and revealing that i was trying to fool him, and i thought he had steam coming out his nose as i was bracing for him to hit me (ray was a big, strong dude), but i knew that he wouldn't do that, but he did everything short of that, calling me all kind of names, and i was stung hard, yes, i was rattled, and i lost my composure, mentally and internally and didn't know what to do, he had just stormed off, and i was un-stable and freaked out, slightly shaking, not used to that sort of thing, i'm really a wimp, a lover and not a fighter
so, i did the only thing i could think of, i just left the job site, as ray was way down the other end, so he couldn't see me leave, i just snuck out to this 2-lane country road and hitchhiked back into town, so he didn't know what happened to me. i guess i could have sucked it up and resumed my sheep's foot driving duties in the proper way, but i was way riled and needed to scoot out of there
(what happened at the job site later that day involved state police and dog search crews, corporate execs flying out to join the search etc., they thought i had fallen into a nearby river)
i got a ride into town, and the hippie that picked me up was cool, at one point i said, 'ya, i just quit my job', and he said something like, 'right on dude, you gotta do what you gotta do'--this was my confirmation that i had done the right thing, but there was at the time no right or wrong thing, it is just what went down, so for the rest of the day i just bummed around town, smoking dope with these college kids i knew, and finally at about 9pm, i called the supervisor to touch base i guess, telling her that i quit and i was sorry that i caused a ruckus, but i did not go into detail, she knew what had happened and briefly hinted that search crews had been out but that she was relieved that i was ok, and also said ok when i told her that i had quit, but it probably didn't matter, they maybe would have fired me anyway
so, i got another job soon after, a better one, and slowly this event almost drifted from my memory
the main point about all of this is karma speculation on my part, and i may conclude that possibly my killing of the wasp the day before precipitated the next day's events, maybe there was a cause and effect, i can't be sure nor prove it in any scientific way, not yet anyway. or maybe it was pure coincidence.
karma is a big subject, i can only speculate and observe my thoughts and actions in my life, and certain results may come about because of these thoughts and actions, and i further observe these results, it's a very empirical process for me. as a side note, another time (and i rarely get angry, at all, at anything or anyone, and i rarely get traffic tickets), but i was driving around in my car one day when i was in college, and this old lady was in front of me, going very slowly, and we were coming up on a green traffic light, and it started to turn yellow, and her and i both could have made it in time, but she didin't even attempt to go through it, she had all effin day, but anyway, i stopped behind her at the now red light, and layed on the horn, i was really angry, i even surprised myself at how angry i got. so anyway, we proceed through this light, she goes her way, i go mine, and 5 minutes later this cop stops me and gives me a ticket for going, like 35 in a 30 mph zone, unreal. but anyway, maybe there was cause and effect, maybe not. but there are many more things like that that have happened to me, maybe things like that happened to john lennon also, as he wrote that song about this topic, instant karma etc
so after a few weeks had passed, i got this better job in the computer parts factory, where i met the chinese woman sian, written about in the above story, and life was back to normal. but i still couldn't get out of the back of my mind the nature of how i left things with the paving company, how i left things with ray, and i would lay in bed at night, picturing in my mind what it must have looked like on the banks of that river, with bloodhounds and sheriff's deputies and the like stumbling down the banks, wading through reeds, looking for my floating, bloated body. but then a few more months had passed and i thought about it less and less.
then one day on my way home from work, i saw some guy sitting on a blanket in a front yard, selling some of his possessions, and there was this nice olivetti typewriter for sale, for about $3, so i bought it, and it sat on my bookshelf for a few months as i never used it. but one night, at about 1am ( i could rarely sleep normally) i jumped out of bed and decided to compose a letter, to be sent to the CEO of this very large, multi-million dollar, western paving company whose employ i had so abruptly left. so a couple of phone calls to directory assistance later, i had the mailing address in wyoming of the corporate HQ of this company, and somehow i remembered the name of the CEO from a picture hanging up in the local boulder office. I wish i photocopied this letter before i mailed it, but the jist of it was:
dear mr. rockefeller,
my name is martin aversa, and a few months ago i suddenly walked off of a job site in longmont while working for your company, you may remember this episode, and i just want to apologise for any inconvenience i may have caused you and any other employees of your company by my irrational actions. on the night before i walked off the job, i had broken up with my girlfriend and went to work the next day feeling out of sorts, and when my great co-worker ray corrected the way in which i was performing a certain duty, i over-reacted and just 'freaked out' i guess. ray acted professionally and is an asset to your company, and i also appreciate the compassion and understanding that my supervisor corrine showed the night of the incident when i called her at home to let her know i was OK. sorry again, i really enjoyed working for your company. sincerely, martin aversa
that is pretty much the letter, i remember what i had written.
so about a year later, at about 7:30 am on a nice summer morning, i was riding my bike to my job at the computer parts factory, and as i was crossing this boulevard, right there on the other side of the road was the very same female supervisor i had when i worked with the paving crew, she was overseeing this new job, prepping a parking lot for the paving crew, it was just her there and some other blade operator whom i didn't know. i couldn't avoid her, but i didn't want to anyway, i was gonna say hi. "corrine!" i yelled, and she came toward me, in a very sprightly mood. i asked her how everything was, she said 'great', and before i could ask anything else, she said, basically: "hey marty, we all saw the letter you wrote to the CEO in wyoming, that was really great, he sent a copy down here, and ray and i are very appreciative of the kind words you had for us also, it was great seeing you today, thanks for saying 'hello' "
that was it, it all seemed to seal the deal and clean things up, it had come full circle, no hard feelings on either end, that was a pretty good day overall.
i had a few song parodies played on the 'howard stern show', tunes i had submitted just for fun at first, and to see if they would play them. later on i would get pissed if i didn't hear submittals played, because i thought they were the greatest thing ever, but they really sucked if i listened back to them a few weeks later, and the show's producers knew what they were doing by rejecting them. here is a sampling from 2006 to 2008. i don't submit these things anymore, it is time consuming and i am busy editing this fakakta website and working on my own music. the return on my investment was about 10%, meaning that for every 10 songs i sent in (the investment), only 1 would get played on the air (the return), and each song would take 4 or 5 hours to make, after all was said and done and i had gotten it into an mp3 file that could be emailed in. and some of them took longer, especially if they weren't time sensitive and related to something that happened on the show on any particular day, as i would make a mix and play it in my car for a day or 2 to see if i got it right, if the mix was clear and balanced and if the vocals were acceptable.. i made about 70 songs that i submitted, and 7 or 8 were played, i think that's 10%. and there were 2 instances where some raccoon-eyed producer who works there on the show, and this could be pure coincidence that he happened to make the exact same song as me at the exact same time, but one time i sent in an 'i dream of jeannie' baba booey song, and a few days later his version was played. and another time i took stevie wonder's 'sir duke' and sang booey lyrics to it, and same thing, his version was played a few days later, and with the exact same wording and inflection as mine. maybe he didn't like the way i sang it, but these inane songs don't need great vocals anyway, whatever, welcome to the entertainment industry i guess.
Star Spangled Booey / Show version 1/24/07 (i consider this my magnum opus/mona lisa, my sistine chapel of dumb, stupid, idiotic song parodies) mp3
God Bless America Booey / Show Version 10/8/07 mp3
Baba Booey's Breath (reprise, first aired 10/06) - 5/20/08 mp3
Bonanza Booey / (humble beginnings, first song submitted) 10/6/06 mp3
Reject Samples
usually the ones that sucked the most and never made it on the air, were the ones that were time sensitive and related to something that happened on the show. so they were usually rush jobs as i scrambled to get them emailed in that night, so if on the next day's show howard referred to the previous days topic that warranted a song parody, the producers would already have some cued up that were related to this topic. One exception was Grunge Gay Papa above, as howard one day was talking about mark harris' gay papa thing and mentioned that it would be great if someone could take it and re-write it using another musical style, and then of course all of the busy bodies got hard to work and submitted tunes shortly thereafter. that one didn't come out too bad, but the majority of my rushed songs are horrible.
one time, howard was ragging on gary about this big ugly wart on his hand, so the monkey came into the studio to talk about it, and he said he was gonna get it burned off or something. so that night i made a song about it and emailed it in, and of course it never got played, it's really awful.
another time, howard was making fun of benjy, saying that benjy is a glutton, overweight, and basically has a pasty, sweaty complexion everytime he comes to work. so that night i threw something together, i don't think it's quite as bad as 'Baba Booey's Wart', but it still didn't pass muster, it's a little muddled.
this one i actually like a little, but it's a little rough around the edges and maybe it wasn't good enough for the show, or maybe too many people had used 'Eleanor Rigby' before, or maybe crazy fred is just off limits as a song parody subject, i don't know. the vocals aren't great either.
here are 2 rejected tunes about robin, overall they are not to bad, to me anyway, but the problem is in the karaoke tunes i purchased and used. the ideal karaoke tunes to use, i find, are ones that have zero singing on them, no backround vocals or anything. however once i had it in my mind that i was gonna make a parody using a certain song, i was going to do it, regardless of whether or not the karaoke backdrop had pre-existing vocals on it or not. cases in point below. i could not find a version of 'lost in love' by air supply that did not have backround vocals on it, so i had to incorporate the backround vocals into the lyrics, thus 'rejection' was written all over it before i completed it and emailed it in. you will hear that, out of no where, i weaved the words 'carry on' into the main theme. i should have just not wasted my time even recording this song.
this one is even worse, because the backround vocal is, "thing going on", as in "me and mrs. jones, we got a thing going on", so i didn't even adapt the lyrics to match this, i just created a different lyric and sang it over the top of those black chicks singing "thing going on", this is terrible
the very first thing that i submitted to the stern show was in 2005, when he was still at K-rock and it was a contest type situation, i think there were a few thousand entries. the contest was, that this friend of the show vinnie was attempting to write and record the lamest song, called 'restless, restless', something about him breaking up with this woman who was cheating on him or something, i cannot be sure. so someone got a copy of some rough outtakes and of course howard was all over it, and the contest ensued, whereby contestants were to take vinnie's lyrics and do whatever with them. the top 3 contestants went to the studio to play their versions live, and i think robert goulet won, and he recorded his with a full orchestra, i didn't stand a chance back then. at the time i did not have the recording gear that i have now, so my music was created all from samples, all of the instruments came from this program 'soundesign', and i just sang over the top of that arrangement. i gave the song a darker tone, the arrangement is not that bad.
First Holy Communion Day w/Holy Statues firmly in Hand
I think that i was average, as far as doing bad shit to others and their property was concerned, some kids were angels, some were real demons who i couldn't hold a candle to. these were the ones who would end up in some home or other, or maybe even in jail later if they didn't grow out of the childhood phase of committing vandalism in general. here is pretty much what i did:
SHOPLIFTING
Shoplifting was limited to the corner candy stores only, and this period only lasted from about 6th grade to 9th grade. there were 2 stores in particular that were the targets, Martha's and Mensche's, stores that were located in other hoods in town, and we never shoplifted from JOHNNY'S. My friends and i (it was usually a group function, it was more fun to shoplift as a group, we could devour the bounty together while re-living the event and laughing about it later) would go over the Martha's, she was an old lady with very bad eyesight, it was easy to just walk around the store while she was preoccupied with other customers. i personally had a penchant for eating 'tastycake' brand 'kandy kakes', and when i saw that she wasn't looking, i would stuff a pack or 2 down my pants, fairly easy to do. we never got caught there, and i doubt that she had any kind of inventory control where she might notice later that she came up short on 'kandy kake' sales.
Mensche's was a different story. Mrs. Mensch resembled elvira gulch in 'the wizard of oz', and she had a reputation of chasing kids and hitting them with her broom that she always had handy. part of the fun was being chased by her and her trusty broom, so we would purposely shoplift in a way whereby she noticed us doing it, but not until we were ready to bolt and had a clear line to the door. so we would walk in, case the joint as if we were browsing for things to buy, and she would keep one eye on us and one on whatever she was doing, such as cleaning, stocking shelves, keeping the books, or whatever. then, when the time was right, we would all grab something or other, stuff it down our pants so she noticed, and bolt for the door, with her fast behind, flailing broom in hand. she had some hip problem, so she could never catch up to us, and again we would go to our favorite hangout in the woods, eat up the goodies and do a play by play.
and i do not know if this is technically shoplifting, it was more akin to a vending machine heist, and this happened in september of my senior year in high school in 1979. one weekend my friend james and i went to visit his sister, who was a junior at a college in western pennsylvania. while we were there and hanging out at her apartment and partying with her circle of derelicts, we became friends with this dude who was a sophomore and lived in one of the dorms on campus. he said he had some good, kind bud back in his dorm room, so at around 1 am, me and james went with 'pete' to his dorm room and smoked dope from this crazy bong that he had created, which he called the 'Snowman'. this bong had a central glass reservoir and 4 tubes coming out of it. so he packed this oversized bong with the kind bud, lit it, and we would all simultaneously suck in the herb smoke through our own tubes, it was quite a communal thing. so anyway, we got really baked, and subsequently got the munchies, so pete said, "hey, i been thinking, there is this vending machine down in the dorm lobby, you guys wanna break into it?" me and james are like, "sure! let's do it." so at about 4 am, we go down to the lobby, no one is around, and we go look at this vending machine. it is one of those big machines, with about 30 different items in it, and each item was in a row, held in place by these large screws. so that when someone put money in the machine and pressed the button corresponding to the item that he or she wanted, the screw would turn, and the lead item would fall off the screw and land in the bottom of this holding pen. all that the person needed to do was push open this trap door to the holding pen and retrieve the item. it was nearly impossible for one to put a hand into this holding pen and reach up and grab items, the door had a blocking mechanism. our solution was straightforward and elegant in its mechanics: tip the entire 400 lb or so machine forward, onto its glass front, so that all of the items lined up in the screws would fall onto the front glass, and then it was just a simple matter of tipping the machine back up and retrieving the bounty from the holding pen. so we did just that, and the 3 of us tipped the machine down onto its front side (it was really heavy), and we could hear all of the chips, cupcakes, reese's cups, babyruths, whatchamacallits, p.b.max's, cheese doodles, cheese puffs, cheese'n crackers, doritos, tasty kakes, life savers, starbursts, brownies, chips'a hoy et al., fall onto the glass, it was a real mountain of goodies. however, we next had a "houston, we have a problem" type situation. once we tipped the machine back upright, so much shit had fallen down into the holding pen, that the trap door would not open. the reservoir was packed tight with sundries, and the door to it would not budge.we were not to be denied and had come too far at this point, so now it was just a matter of causing real damage to the machine. up to this point, we had not harmed the machine in any way, we had not broken anything, it would theoretically still work once we had concluded our antics and left the machine in its proper upright position. instinct took over however, and pete jammed a piece of wood that he got from somewhere into the trap door and pried like hell, with me and james adding extra force to the lever, and we just bent that trap door all out of shape, destroyed it basically while crushing some of the goodies, so that it came off of its mount and just fell apart. we quickly grabbed what we could, which amounted to a whole lot of stuff, and ran back up to pete's room, adrenaline pumping. we were still stoned and slightly paranoid, so just in case someone saw us, we put everything into a laundry bag and hid it in the ceiling, for about 20 minutes anyway. once we realized that no one saw us, on this plane of existence anyway, we took out the goodies and had a feast.
SETTING GRASS FIRES
this was fairly inoccuous, but there were various open fields around town, and in the summer when the weeds were dried out, the entire field could easily be lit up like a torch. the fun part was watching the fire trucks haul ass to the blaze. so we would light the fire, run to main street and sit on a wall, like we were just hanging out, and wave to the fire trucks as they zoomed down main street on their way to the field on fire.
RAIDING GARDENS
this activity was limited to about a 3 week period in august, when most garden produce such as tomatoes, cucumbers, and pole beans were ready for eating but were not harvested yet. and back then in the 1970's, almost everyone in the neighborhood had a backyard garden. so under the guise of 'sleeping out' in one or the other of my friends' back yards, at about 3am we would go a' raiding. simple enough process, just be real quiet and stealthy, sneak into garden and grab the almost ripe produce and sneak back out. we almost never got caught, as no one was up at that time guarding their precious gardens.
however there was one time were we got caught, and it involved a very large cherry tree. back in those days, the neighborhood was filled with the most awesome, mature fruit trees, the ones that the early italian immigrants planted when these neighborhoods were first populated. so by the time i was a kid in the 1970's, almost every yard had a bunch of fruit trees or other, such as cherry, apple, pear, plum, apricot, chinese chestnut etc, trees that are sadly no more. but anyway, this one old lady (who was also a customer on my paper route), had a great cherry tree in her back yard, and it was definitely not open to the public, as many of the trees about town were available for harvesting. all it took was asking the old italian owner, man or woman, if we could pick fruit off their trees, and usually there was so much fruit that they were happy to oblige us. but this old cherry tree lady was not approachable in the least, no one was allowed in her back yard, but no fence was gonna keep us out. so one night, about 11pm (we should have waited til a later time, but we were hungry), we crept up to her fence in the back yard, quietly hopped over, climbed the tree and started munching. all seemed to be going well, when all of a sudden a dark figure came at us from the direction of her house and started yelling, "hey, what are you doing up there?" "hello!, what do you think we're doing up here", but anyway, we bolted out of that tree and hopped right over the fence before she got close. we ran to the front porch of one of my friends, and about 20 minutes later, the old lady, again with no proof or anything, came stomping to the front porch where we were hanging out and started accusing us of stealing from her, and we just denied it, and good thing my friend's mother came outside, she did not like the old lady overall, and she just chased her away and told her to stuff it basically.
FUN WITH FIREWORKS
here is what one can do with these things:
M-80s (1/8th of a stick of dynamite, i think):
blow up people's mailboxes, and just cause mayhem in general by lighting them off on any neighborhood street, they were very loud
Bottle Rockets: shoot them at peoples homes at night from a distance, at their windows, doors, roofs, they wouldn't do any damage, just make popping sounds when they hit
4oz. Rockets: same thing as Bottle Rockets, but much bigger and could actuallly do damage and break windows, and you could be very far away and shoot them
FUN WITH EGGS, AEROSOL CANS and SNOWBALLS
we didn't limit ourselves to only egging people's cars and homes around Halloween, we did this all year round.
i had a friend who lived in another town, and when i visited him one time, he told me that he had a bad neighbor, and it was like the hatfields and the mccoys. his family hated the neighboring family, and vice-versa. the neighbor had a backyard brick fireplace, and i think they cooked food on this brick fire pit, so this one time, it was at night and they were done cooking and had gone in for the night, but the brick fireplace fire was still smoldering, with embers and the like. so me and my friend got the idea of blowing up this brick fireplace, so we snuck over and threw a new aerosol can into the fire and ran like hell back to his yard, only a minute or 2 later, BOOM! we had no idea that it would be so loud or cause that much damage, but i think it blew a hole in one side of the fireplace. no one ever suspected us, because generally vandalism happened all of the time in most neighborhoods, so it could have been anyone.
and with snowballs, this was a common wintertime activity, we would go to Main St. and find a narrow driveway to hide in, so cars driving up and down Main st. could not see us, all they would see, or hear really, was a thud if we managed to hit their door, side window or even windshield.
and around christmas time, people decorated their outdoor trees with those strings of lights that had really big bulbs, you don't see them much anymore, now the lights are those tiny icicle types. but with these strings of big-bulbed lights, we would each carry a screwdriver that could be wielded like a hammer, and one would just pop the bulbs using the handle end of the screwdrived, they made a great sound when popped. we would quickly pop a whole bunch of bulbs and get out of there.
DINE'N DASH
this activity was reserved for high school days as opposed to grade school, because you needed a car that could take you to another town, to a restaurant you had not visited before. nor would visit again, as it was a 1 time, free meal-type deal. the first time i did it, i was a junior in high school and i picked james up in my family's plymouth duster, and we drove down the line to a city about 20 miles away, and found a nice little pizza joint. that sounded good to us, have a hearty stromboli and pizza meal, free of charge. we were forging new deliquent territory for ourselves, and even though we had not done this before and had no roadmap, how difficult could it be to eat a meal in a joint and run out the door without paying? so we cased the joint and the side streets and set it all up: where we would park the car, what table we would sit at etc. so we had a nice meal, drank our 5th soda each, and were about to conclude the 'dine' part of the night, and the adrenaline started to pump because we knew that the 'dash' part was soon to follow. no way were we going to chicken out and pay for this damn meal. well, it went off without a hitch, as we waited til the waitress was out'a sight and when no one could block our quick exit to the door. in about 30 seconds we were in the car and heading north, back up the line, bellies full, a great success, and it seemed to cement mine and james' friendship in some weird way, as if we had been in a war together.
but one time, about a year later, there were about 8 or 9 of us, we all drove in 2 cars, again to another city, and set it all up as usual. the cars were parked about a 1/4 mile away on a dark side street, and we binged on 4 or 5 trays of red and white pizza at this busy italian pizza establishment. again, the' dine' part was completed, and the 'dash' part seemingly went off without a hitch as we all made eye contact and simultaneously rushed out the door. but in the process of sprinting to the cars, one of our group, earl, who had ridden there in my car, fell down, but quickly got up and continued on to my car with the rest of my group. but when we got to my car, earl started freaking out, as we could see now that blood was everywhere, on his hands and arms, spurting out of one of the deepest, nastiest gashes i have ever seen in the palm of anyone's hand, he must have fallen on a piece of glass or something. well this really put a damper on things, and all was happening so fast, so we had to scramble to wrap the wound with something while at the same time jumping into the car and burning rubber to get the hell out of there, because the cook or the owner of the pizza joint could be hot on our trail. so instead of driving to the woods to drink some brews and savor our accomplishment, we drove to the emergency room, a buzzkill to say the least. i don't think that any of us dined and dashed after that, i know i didn't.
Studies in Energy: Chapter 1
many jobs ago, i was a floor manager in an italian ice factory, we made this guido 'luigi's italian ice', real nutty place, i worked the night shift, 10pm to 6am, and i had about 20 people under my command, mostly immigrants, brazilian women, puerto ricans etc., and there was another sector sent over by the temp service. this other sector consisted of dudes who were living at the salvation army half-way house, a real sketchy group of ex-cons, violent offenders and the like, and i had no problem with them, i made them my friends basically.
but there was this one guy, about 6'4", weight lifter, one front tooth, coke-bottle glasses and there was no making friends with him, he was a real loose cannon who just made parole. he was real quiet and could snap at any moment, i'll call him 'crazy bill'. anyway, i was nice to him and he seemed to not mind me. he also had real berserker eyes, and one eye was normal and looked straight forward at you if you were talking to him, and the other eye just went out to left field (this is a key component of this little vignette).
one time, i was running this big machine, where a conveyer belt fed thousands and thousands of frozen cups of italian ice per hour into the machine, and the machine automatically boxed them up. once the boxes exited the machine, 5 or 6 people waited at the end of this long table and put each box into larger boxes and taped them up, and this taping process had to be done real fast as my machine was sending the small boxes to them non-stop. so, i was overseeing this whole process.
well the loose cannon with the wayward eye happened to be on my crew this one night, and the conveyer feeding the cups into my machine was being repaired by some maintenance dudes for 5 or 10 minutes, so we had a little down time. part of my job was to feed these box 'flats' into the machine, and the machine opened the flats up to make a box so that the italian ice cups could enter the box, six at a time, and the box flats had to be very flat so that they laid in the feeder correctly and suction cups could pick them up easily. my boxes of flats some guy would bring to me, and i had them stacked near my machine where i could easily reach them while the machine was in operation.
during this 5 or 10 minute down time period, bill and the others were just mulling around, and bill decided to rest some and plant his crazy ass down on my boxes of flats, and other workers had done this before. from my experience it warped the boxes slightly, so that the suction cups in the machine would not grab them properly and everything would get mucked up, and i would have to shut the whole line down.
so i remember thinking at the time, "hmm, don't wanna provoke crazy bill or have any interaction with him other than the minimal needed just to get through the shift, but the warped flats are gonna cause real havoc, cuz if the suction cups cant pick up the flats, then i gotta shut the whole line down, maybe i better tell bill to not sit on the boxes of flats". so i did just that. "hey bill, sorry, but could you not sit on those boxes? it warps the flats, makes the machine go haywire, thanks, i appreciate it".
well he wasn't happy and just grunted and tensed up, but i didn't have time to think anymore about it because the line was back up and running, time to get back to business.
let me state here that my eyesight, not considering the near-sightedness i had since the 5th grade, is pretty good, no glaucoma, blurry vision, detached corneas or anything like that. in fact i am now using (2018) the same eyeglass prescription i had since my senior year of high school. after about 5 minutes had elapsed since i started the line back up, the machine was working fine, suction cups picking up flats nicely, workers taping up boxes dutifully, i forgot all about crazy bill and my interaction with him.
but then, all of a sudden, one of my eyes, couldn't tell if it was my right or left one, started to go out of focus, it was the 'craziest' thing, i couldn't see 20 feet in front of me, one eye was in focus, the other had a film over it and was blurry, i thought i was losing sight out of one eye. binocular vision had ceased to exist for me. i looked out over the plant floor while this was happening, away from the workers on my line, and i started to panic, because i couldn't focus at all on my machine or the flats, or anything. nothing had happened like this before nor since.
while i'm internally panicking, i happened to glance over at the workers on my line, and there was crazy bill, almost hiding in a corner, staring right at me, and what he was doing gives new meaning to the term 'malocchio' or evil eye, and he only had one good eye with which to 'project' his intense craziness with anyway. but yes, it made sense to me a little later. the transfer of his vibrational field to me, including his ocular infirmity? perhaps, but it was real clear that he was pissed that i asked him to not sit on the boxes, and he had been dwelling on it, staring at me for 5 minutes straight maybe, sending good vibes my way.
if he wants to tread the left-hand, or 'service to self' path, so be it, i thought, but i had the feeling that he wasn't disciplined enough to progress along the lines of advanced negative understandings, performing ritual magic and the like. he was no wolf in sheep's clothing. he wore his tormented heart on his sleeve and he was just an angry person who could, and maybe many people do this daily, project a beam of hatred, for lack of a better word, negativity or maliciousness, to anyone or anything.
and if he was projecting mental energy or 'thoughtforms' my way, whatever kind of energy it may have been or whatever one wants to call it (chi, ether, prana, orgone etc), this energy possibly acted like a carrier wave and transported his entire vibrational field to me, which would include his physical state and condition, and his berserker eye problem. maybe everything is just energy and we live in a sea of etheric energy or plenum that connects everyone and everything, and thoughts and emotions, themselves just energy, are carried like sine waves or thoughtforms through this medium. i don't know, i only have my experimentation and observations to go on
so part 2 of the equation is that i, theoretically, absorbed and mimicked his field, and manifested in my body his overall mental/physical condition. this has happened to me many times over the years--i sometimes go into someone's house and i 'pick up' his or her mental/physical state, i would mirror this and start to feel their physical infirmity or mental state, not sure why. maybe it is a way of helping them, maybe something gets transmuted on the process, not sure, that is not my intention when i go into these houses. or maybe they are helping me in some way, who can say. also when i eat food someone has cooked, i repeatedly have mainfested in my body their physical/mental/emotional state--so i have learned to surreptitiously 'bless' the food, meaning i just put my palms over the food and send chi into the food. i have had too many experiences at restaurants also, whereby if i do not do this, i would have crazy and violent dreams that night sometimes--so i learned my lesson energetically-speaking. so anyway, break-time came, i made a beeline to the woods behind the plant for some peace and quiet, put the maloccio blocking field around me (basically i visualized a white auric egg surrounding me) and the eye thing cleared up in a few minutes. also, using focused visualization i sent crazy bill nice peaceful thoughts and white light energy globes for good measure, so when we got back from break, he no longer was looking at me menacingly, all was good again in italian ice land.
HELLO LESBIANS!
I think that i lived in a bubble growing up, and it could also have been that lesbian women were closeted in the 60's and 70', but i had no concept of what a lesbian was, nor did i know any lesbian women, be they teenage or adult. even in high school, there were 1 or 2 boys who were rumored to be gay, to each their own, but never were there inklings that lesbianism was a reality in the world that i lived in. thus, this idea that 2 women could get it on never crossed my mind, and for all intents and purposes there were no such females in existence with such a sexual orientation.
so, i decided to go away to college, out to a school in central pennsylvania, and during my first semester in the fall of 1980, i made some cool friends in my dorm, and we started to hang out regularly and find our way around the local party circuit. one of our group heard about this party that these sophomore women were having in their apartment in town, so we decided to go, it was a friday night. pleasant enough party, we made some new female friends, played some drinking games, smoked some pot, and basically had a good time, jamming out to tunes and the like. then, one of the girls who lived in the apartment, said "hey, the girls who live in the apartment above us are all lesbians, and they usually have parties on friday nights, with no men in attendance, just chicks. and if you exit out of our kitchen window and jump out onto the fire escape, you can climb up the steps and look into their kitchen window, to see what is going on." so we're like, "no way!, this shit doesn't exist", but just the thought of it was titillating to me and my naive freshman friends, and we had to look into this matter. so we did just that. 4 of us climbed out the kitchen window and out onto the fire escape, adrenaline pumping, we had no idea what we would come across and observe. up and up we climbed, ever so slowly and quietly, and we finally made it to the platform off the kitchen window of the upstairs apartment. we all stood there, motionless, speechless, eyes wide open, as we looked into the kitchen window, and i will never forget that sight, it was beautiful. there were about 12 naked women, doing all kinds of crazy stuff: one was chasing another around the apartment, playing this cat and mouse game, some were making out in a corner, some were arranged in a great pile on the floor, with intertwined arms and legs, with pussy licking and tit sucking being the main activities there. it was a real eye-opener, and we were all kind of turned on, as none of us had ever considered that this happening was even a possibility in our narrow universes. we could have stayed there for an hour watching, playing with ourselves, but our outing to the soon to be outing was cut short by one of my friends, jeff, who was a real zany guy who didn't care what he said to anyone, he was very quick-witted and funny. so we're standing there, for about 10 minutes, taking it all in, and then all of a sudden, jeff bangs on the kitchen window and yells, really loudly, "Hey! You Want Some COCK in There?" and we're like, holy shit, let's get the fuck out'a here, so we scramble down the fire escape and back into the downstairs apartment, it was real bedlam, and my chest was really thumping at this point. our new female friends were like, "told you so".
but the bizarre part was (as if the whole situation wasn't bizarre, at the time anyway), and i had no intention of ruining anyone's party, and jeff kind of acted comedically and spontaneously, albeit slightly homophobically perhaps, but this was still 1980, and it was like we outed a whole bunch of college woman who were not yet ready to be outed. we could hear yelling and shouting going on upstairs, real pandemonium, and a few minutes later a train of teary-eyed young women made their way down the apartment stairs, past the lower apartment door which was open, so we could see them leave. we had broken up this frolic-filled, peaceful, idyllic, sapphic gathering, and there was both fright and anger in the eyes of these women as they exited the building. i made eye contact with one of them, i can still remember her face clearly, she was really scared and confused it seemed, and was really balling. what are ya gonna do, shit happens, but again i did not really want to break up their gathering, live and let live. life is one big fuckfest. chicks are fucking chicks, dudes are fucking dudes, chicks with dicks are fucking chicks with and without dicks, dudes are fucking chicks, gelded she-males are fucking dudes, dudes are fucking cantelope, watermelon, fake rubber pussies and blow up dolls. who really cares. well maybe the godhatesfags.com people do, but they are really off their rockers. our party kind of broke up then also, and we headed back to the dorm to hang out and do a play by play of the crazy night's events.
POSTSCRIPT: Fast forward to the present day, so a few years ago i was visiting a friend in Questa, New Mexico, a really beautiful part of the state, north of taos. d.h. lawrence had some land up there and started an artist colony or something, ram dass had some ashram there also, and there are a bunch of tibetan temples dotting the landscape as well. One morning i went for a walk in the woods, up this trail that led to an open meadow, and once i got to the meadow, i had a nice view of the area and of the colorado mountains up north. but off in the distance, i noticed these 2 domes of a church or something, laid side by side, and all i could see were the upper portions of the domes and what looked like nipples on top. and i remember thinking at the time, "man, they look like two god-damned giant breasts, facing up to the heavens!" so when i got back to my friend's house, i asked her about it and she said, yes!, some wealthy lesbian writer or psychologist has a compound there, a real lesbian stronghold, and there are great gatherings, my friend had heard, of lesbians that go there, for therapy, conventions, giant orgies or whatever. i thought wow, good for them, to have a nice place to go to to do their thing, they've really come out of the closet en masse, and i would sure like to look into their window to see what is going on. i tried to view this compound on google satellite maps, but i could not find it. i'll keep looking every once in a while.
Multiple Personalities
in much the same way that norman bates had 2 personalities inhabiting 1 body, he and his 'mother', i too have multiple personalites, and we all speak to one another and bicker generally, and the one that surfaces most often is Calvin Virgil, or Cal Virgil for short. 'Cal' because he likes that name for some reason, and 'Virgil' because he thinks that he either is a reincarnation of the roman poet Virgil, or in the very least he is, being half italian, a direct descendant of the poet and is carrying on the tradition of putting poetry to music. (Cal's music and poetry suck, to me anyway, and he already knows that i feel this way, and he thinks that this website sucks too, but he had no reservations about me writing about him and promoting some of his work on this site when i told him that i was thinking about doing this, as i constantly need more content). According to Cal, and i have my doubts about this, Virgil was supposedly the first person, in recorded history anyway, to write poetry and walk the countryside reciting it to the accompaniment of his stringed lyre. When i told Cal (and he wants me to drop the e.e.cummings thing when writing about him here and use capital letters for his name), but when i told him that he has no proof whatsoever that he a) is a reincarnation of Virgil, or b) is a descendant of Virgil, he got pissed off and said that i was closed minded, and that i am like every other skeptic and scientist who needs hard proof and data to accept something as being true. and then when i even questioned the veracity of Cal's statement that Virgil is the first person in recorded history to put poetry to music, he said that it must be true because he read it on wikipedia or some other inane website spewing mis-information.
just a little side note about multiple personalites, if you've ever seen the film me, myself and irene with jim carrey, the 2 personalities that take turns surfacing in this one body, have no awareness nor memory of the other personality, one takes over, does his antics, then the other takes over and has no idea why he is laying face down on a sidewalk etc, like a jeckyl and hyde thing. well, it's not entirely like that for me. Cal will take dominance, but i am still there, conversing with him, aware of what he does, and vice-versa. maybe hannah montana and miley cyrus are like this. one may also say that Cal Virgil is an alter-ego, but i'm not sure what that really means. sometimes i do not hear from him for days or weeks (thank god, as he can irritate me sometimes), but then he comes around and 'i' take a back seat, but i am present, observing and taking notes. there are rare times however where i really space out and am not aware of what Cal is up to, and i have to ask him if i missed anything while i was away. and overall, Cal and i disagree on about every topic, for instance he adores meg ryan romantic comedy films, and i loathe them etc. we share a vocabulary generally, but there are words that he knows and uses that i would never use, and vice-versa, the word 'behooves' is a good example, i hate that word and would never use it. he does, as in , "hey aversa, it behooves you to look in the mirror once in a while", shit like that he will say.
But anyway, Cal and i made a deal, that i would promote him and his work on my website (he is hit or miss with his creations), and that he would promote my work in his site, which he is building now. his website should be ready in a few years, and this is no joke because he is the biggest dreamer on the planet, he's got tons of ideas for this art project and that art project, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of sitting down and doing the hard work that it takes sometimes, for me anyway, to manifest something, he'd rather lay in front of the idiot box and watch COPS and Forensic Filesre-runs all day, everyday. to each their own i guess. Case in point (and i know that he will be reading this), he fashions himself a painter, in the style of the school of abstract expressionism or some crap like that. Jackson Pollack is his idol (Cal made me capitalize Pollack's name here also), with sub-idols named rothko and krasner or whomever. Since i've known Cal, he has painted 3 paintings, a self-portrait and 2 abstract things, they are very large and each took him about 2 years to make. (a 3 year-old could throw some paint on a canvas and come up with the same shit, but the self-portrait is not that bad) he thinks they are works of genius, and he has priced them in the of millions of dollars. needless to say, not 1 of them has sold, but he does have an admirer or 2, schmucks who have seen them on this site because i'm a nice guy. i told Cal that i would show them, here they are below. if you are interested in buying, you can email him, but he never checks his email anyway and he detests communicating with people, but for what it is worth, he can be reached at calvirgil@gmail.com. being i will get a cut of the profits from the sale of these paintings for showing them here (1/1000 of 1% he will give me, cheap muther-effer), i may check his email every so often, maybe not, hell may freeze over before anyone of these sell.
Young Girl Walking Through Field
by Cal Virgil, Oil on Canvas, 20' x 20' Price: $3,000,000
Young Girl Walking Through Field With a Daschund
by Cal Virgil, Oil on Canvas, 20' x 20' Price: $4,000,000
Self-Portrait: Earth Tones Period
by Cal Virgil, Acrylic, 10' x 9' Price: $10,000,000
close up pic of Cal's real teeth
" I am reminded of a cliché that Frankie (Lloyd Wright) repeated to my father before the latter's passing, that there is 'nothing new under the sun', but I must object and state that Virgil's unique post-modern/neo-convoluted dystopianism negates Lloyd Wright's idiocy in its anthropomorphic genesis and turns Pollock's and Krasner's organized chaos (latin. organalicarum chaoticum) into 'dis-organized order', an apt aphor-type-ism about Virgil's work that de Kooning once purportedly had whispered into the ear of Rothko's bastard son, and he may have also hinted that Virgil, though living and working in a zeitgeist-ignorant zone and having no awareness of the inferior work of his contemporaries, 'has changed modern art forever '."
-----Mr. Real, famous art critic, Perth Amboy, NJ, overheard speaking to UPSIDEDOWN Magazine's Hadji Archibald
Cal also just completed his first 'film', and i use the term loosely. i helped him with some aspects of it, so while he was 'performing', as he called it (all you can really see of him are his creepy fingers), i held the camera, and i also helped him edit it and upload it to youtube. all that i can say about it, or Cal in general, is that he has a benny hill-type sense of humor and likes to explore the perhaps more cruder and salacious aspects of life. it's not that i'm all high-brow and look down upon such contrivances (refer to my 'howard stern show' songs), but what Cal calls, when referring to his first youtube film, and i have no idea what he is talking about, 'a great, dreamy, psychologically cinematic look at the subversiveness of advertising and modern culture in general', i call a little T & A. he named it, aptly enough, Land O'Lakes Butter Fun Bags. judge for yourself.
the funny part to me is not the gag and the movie, but that fact that Cal thought he was avant garde about this, until he discovered that everyone and their mothers made some kind of land o'lakes movie and already had uploaded them years ago.
Cal Virgil may be funnier than I thought, but probably not
Cal does something when he goes to stores like walmart and k-mart, but he said it will probably work better if he does it in some ritzy mall like 'short hills mall', where they've got stores like 'saks' and 'bergdorff' or whatever, with milionairesses walking around and shit. but anyway, i wouldn't do this because it can get these people riled up, i hate to see someone get excited or angry for no reason other then to satisfy someone's, namely Cal's, childish sense of humor. here is what he does, it's kind of stupid: he prowls around the store, looking for some well-dressed woman, with heels on and make-up and the like (not too many of those in wal-mart), he cases her out as she is shopping, then he simply goes up to her and asks her if she knows where he can find tupperware containers, or asks her, "do you guys carry the pocket fisherman?", or worse yet, "can you tell me where your restroom is?", as if she worked there. then she reacts in this way or that way etc. one lady almost freaked out on him one time, and many look annoyed and get very offended that he would think that they worked in such a store, driving beamers and all. he just does it for kicks, he's gotta be real empty inside.
also when he goes into a supermarket, or any store that has automatic doors, as he is going through the doors and they have just opened all of the way, and if someone is right behind him, he acts like they are non-automatic doors and holds the door open for the person behind him, while saying something like, 'oh, there you go', just to see their reaction. sometimes the person for whom he is 'holding' the door says "well, thanks!".
and also with automatic doors, he does this other thing. it only works with doors that open in and out, as some automatic doors, like the ones at our local wal-mart, open side to side like sliding glass doors. if Cal is approaching the automatic doors at our local supermarket, and at that instance someone has just come out of the 'out' door, and the door is still open, he goes through the already open 'out' door. i asked him why he does this, and the Delusional Dreamer (hows that for CAPS Cal) said that he is 'saving the planet'. when pressed further, he said that when the person coming out of the store stepped on the rubber mat or triggered the motion detector to engage the 'out' auto door, a certain amount of electricity was used to spark the motor that opens the door. that motor, though small, consumed such and such an amount of micro-megawatts, which were created most likely by coal or oil that was burned at some generating station. so if Cal stepped on the 'in' door's rubber mat and engaged that motor, it was a waste of energy because the 'out' door was already open, and he could just sneak in there. jesus harold christ, this guy thinks too much.
In Through the Out Door
another thing that he does, is that he always shops, as do i, at this one supermarket near our apartment, and they have this shopper's club, where you fill out this application and you get this card, and anytime you shop, they scan your card so you will get some savings if something is on sale. well, this is probably the only thing that Cal and i agree on, we ain't joining no club of any kind in any supermarket. but anyway, everytime he shops, and i can attest to this as they ask me this also, but when Cal is in the checkout line, the checkout person always asks, "do you have your club card?". i just say "no, i never joined", but Cal says, "sorry, i never joined, and i certainly wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have me as a member", that old groucho marx line. then Cal just sees their reaction and get's a kick out of it. usually he targets young high school or college girls to see the varying facial expressions that they have when he says this, sometimes they fake giggle nervously for a second or 2, or just ignore him. he told me that one time, this hip old lady laughed out loud, but this only happened once in maybe 100 checkouts.
another thing that he does, or used to do, that annoyed me to no end,was that when he used to smoke pot with friends, he would get super-talkative and not shut up, and he maybe didn't realize that he was making both of us look pompous, coming off as know it alls. i hope he doesn't smoke that stuff anymore, but to each their own i guess, he just needs to shut his trap some and let others speak.
another thing that he does occasionally, and this is really fukked up: if he is in a busy public restroom, like in a casino or something, and he is in one of the stalls for some reason, he makes loud grunting noises, as if he is trying to pinch out a dried-up loaf, just to mess with the other dudes in the bathroom. unbelievable.
another thing that he did one time, being he likes to fuck with people: he read in the paper one time that the PBS show 'antiques roadshow' was making a stop in scranton and he was gonna make an entrance. so he scoured the local salvation army shops a few weeks before this, looking for the schmaltziest painting he could find, and he struck gold. in the 1970's these paintings were all the rage, you could buy them at spencer's gifts i think, basically they showed, painted on black felt, a bunch of boozing and smoking dogs sitting around a card table playing poker, dumbest thing you ever saw. so Cal buys it for 2.00 or whatever. then, on roadshow day, he takes this painting to the event, giving the impression that he thinks it is worth a lot of money. the dude in the paintings section fell for it and thought Cal was serious in thinking that this piece of shit painting might be valuable, and he went into a mini-spiel about this 'pop art' and what not. Cal enjoyed this whole thing, he gets off on goofing on people
2 other things that he WANTED TO DO, but i completely shut him down on: NUMBER 1- this one would most likely land us in jail--he wanted to get a child car seat, and a life-like doll that would look like a 1 year old girl, and he would strap the doll in the car seat, then secure it in the rear seat in my car. then on a 90 degree day he would drive to the local Walmart and park in the middle of the parking lot, near a whole bunch of other cars. he would then shut the car off, with all of the windows rolled up, and he would play on the car stereo a looped pre-recorded sound of a baby moaning slightly. he would have to cover the doll's face a little with a blanket, just the mouth, so passersby could not see that the baby's mouth was not moving. then he would lock the doors and walk quickly to the vacant far end of the parking lot, with his video camera, so that he could film the hijinks. this is unbelievable, like a real twisted candid camera of sorts. if i allowed him to go through with this, chances are that the local cops/fire department folks would smash the window in, then once they saw that it was a hoax, they would run the plate and find out that the car was registered to me. not gonna happen Cal. NUMBER 2- many years ago my rather large extended family was having a 'family reunion', a big bash held at a picnic grove that we had rented, and maybe there would be 70 or so folks there: aunts, uncles, first, second, third cousins, tons of kids and so forth. and lots of activities usually occurred at these functions, such as softball games, potato sack races, a horseshoe tournament and all kind of games for the kiddies. so what Cal wanted to do was, he wanted to donate something for the party, and he offered to bring a 'pinata' for the kids, harmless enough idea, and it would be a novel event as things like that were never brought to these italian/polish functions. we had zero latino blood in us. great idea Calvin! the little ones would have a blast, taking turns beating the daylights out of that paper mache donkey, trying to get all of the candy to fall out. however, the day before the reunion, we wanted to take the newly purchased pinata to his workshop and do the following: he would first cut a round hole in the top of the donkey's back, just big enough for his fist to fit through, and he would empty out all of the candy. then he would get some liquid resin, with the consistency of peanut butter, and he would coat the inside of the donkey. when it dried, it would be as hard as a rock and form an impenetrable shell inside of the creature. then he would put the candy back in and seal up the hole. he would bring the altered pinata to the party, then when it was time for the kiddies to have at it, no matter how hard they tried to get to the candy by beating the living daylights out of that donkey, they would never succeed--even the adults would not be able to access the innards by opening up the creature with the bat. then Cal would just get a kick out of watching them all try in vain to bring matters to a conclusion. unbelievable, i of course did not let any of this happen.
GARLIC PROBLEMS--ok, i have this thing for garlic cloves: i carmelize them, bake them, saute them, put them in soups by the handful, i cannot eat enough of them. the only problem is, garlic really messes up with my digestion, severe bloating and the like ensues after i eat some. this tug of war goes on, i will not eat any garlic for a month or 2, then i will give in and cook a whole bunch, consume it then suffer the consequences. anyway, if i'm grocery shopping and walking by the fresh garlic section, Calvin is like that little pixie on my shoulder coaxing me to buy a whole bunch, which i usually do. but the weird part is, he cares little for the taste and texture of garlic--so why does he want me to cook and eat some garlic that he knows will most likely screw up my digestion? he has one reason and one reason alone: he likes the way my farts smell, he said there is nothing like garlic farts, unbelievable. if we are lying in bed and release a few, he will even create a dutch oven and make a tent with the covers in order to prolong his basking in the smell.
Cal also shared with me the following: he used to receive, and still does, apparently personal emails from these lawyers living in london or luxemburg, letting him know that he is due to receive 10 million dollars that some rich nigerian widow or other left him, so Cal decided to respond one time to the first email message below, from some london-based lawyer who must have gotten hold of Cal's name from his old yahoo email address, calvirgil@yahoo.com. the fact that he responded at all surprised me because Cal does not respond to anyone's emails. below is a record of this correspondence. Note: Cal get's really gross and twisted at times, and again, this may reflect his trailer park up-bringing and gutter mentality, and i think that part, or the main reason that he responded to this barrister in the first place is because he really thought that he could inherit or procure these millions of dollars, but he tells me that he never thought that for one instant, and that i should just look at his first response to see that he was toying with this lawyer from the start. right. i think that once the gullible Cal realized that it was a scam, he went to some really gross places, and one woman he met, he told me, read these emails and thought he was 'misongonjistic', as Cal said. (Cal aught to take the dictionary into the shitter once in a while, like i do, he most likely meant 'misogynistic'). read if you want to.
>-- hamza bello <hamza222_22@yahoo.com> wrote:
Dear Calvin Virgil ,
I am Barrister Hamza Bello, a legal Solicitor and I was the Personal Attorney and legal adviser to Mr.John Virgil, a national of your country, who used to work with Mobil oil Company. On the 21st of April 2002, my client, his wife and their three children were involved in a car accident along lome Express Road. All occupants of the vehicle unfortunately lost their lives. Since then I have made several enquiries to your embassy to locate any of my clients extended relatives, this has also proved unsuccessful. After these several unsuccessful attempts, I decided to trace his relatives over the Internet, to locate any member of his family but of no avail, hence I contacted you. I have contacted you to assist in repatriating the money and property left behind by my client before they get impounded by the security company were my clientdeposited this consignment(two trunk boxes).Particularly, the security company where the deceased had a deposited this consignment valued at about Twenty Million United States Dollars ($U.S20.000,000) has issued me a notice to provide the next of kin or have the consignment confiscated/impounded within the next ten official working days. since I have been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for over one years now, I seek your consent to present you as the next of kin of the deceased since you are from the same country and bear the same last name, so that the proceeds of this consignment valued at Twenty Million United
States Dollars ($U.S 20,000,000) can be claimed by you and then you and me
can share the money.55% to me and 40% to you, while 5% should be for expenses or tax as your government may require, I have all necessary legal documents that can be used to back up this claim we are about to make.
Note: that this consignment was recorded as family treasures belonging to my late client and only you and i knows the content of the two boxes with the security company in Ghana, they also have there branches in Asia, london where i am and America and this consignment can be conveyed to any of this branches, but we can conclude all of this here in London.. All I require is your honest cooperation to enableus see this deal through. I guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law. Please get in touch with me by my email to enable us discuss further
Best Regards,
Barr: Hamza Bello.
My Dearest and most sincerist Mr.Hamza bello, You cannot believe the excitement and surprise that I experienced upon waking up out of a stupor after a night of heroin-injecting and crack-whore banging and seeing now your illustrious and expertly concocted email and proposal. I am still completely wasted, so please forgive me if I sound retarded. You guys are a pure genius, not to mention a philanthropists for all of the fine work that you are going to do to make me and you very wealthly and beautifully rich and it is with utmost and eager pleasure that I opened and read your masterpiece of an email to me, letting me know that I am to be the most deserved and happy receipient of the many millions of dollars that you so generously have offered to me, and it is only by Supreme Good Fortune that our 2 disparate destinies have now crossed in this glorious manner, and you can rest assured that I am an very astute and dis-honest person who can help bring this Financial Matter to it's Perfect and Logical Cornucopious Conclusion. The Creator has indeed showd her Glorious Smile upon us in this matter, that we may benefit and reap rewards for not doing any work to achieve these beneficient Funds to our respective bank accounts that will be full to overflowing like a bread basket of millions. And to boot, My family may be glad finally to hear that I will now be a success in life, after spending many trying and difficult years in abject squalor and destitution, at times busking for pennies with the Queen's image on them in the subways of London. Having barely graduated with the most useless of degrees in the college of Liberal Arts, I have eeeked and borrowed my way through life, almost penniless. Now, thanks to the gracious good fortunes of the bountious Universe, and of mankind such as yourself, I can rightfully lay claim to the abundance that is rightfully mine, albeit I am very sorry that Mr. John Virgil and his family have exited this plane of exisstence in such a horrific and deadly manner, a bloody car crash that squashed their bones and little bodies, especially the 3 toddler ones, but perhaps thay have given up their lives so that others may live, namely me and you through the good fortunes that may now befall us. He and I both being of the family name VIRGIL, he and I may possibly be related in spirits and bloodlines, all the way back to our great and famous ansestor,Virgil the roman poet (and you are very clever to pick me with such a last name). And, yes, i may have many nitemares about bodies flying,crashing burning, blood and guts everywhere, very bad images about my kin Mr. John Virgil and his lineages, my relatives, but yet i want to get millions that you are offering. So, the next step is, you let me know what to do so we can proceed with the proceedings. I will give you my bank account information so you can transfer my funds into my hands, the many millions. I already have $375.29 in my account, so I don't think that the addition of 20 million more Glorious dollars will raise to many eyebrows here in Winesburg,OH,
let me know how to proceed,
Respectfully and abundantly, and Sincerely,
Cal Virgil
Dear Cal
How are you , i am constrained to write you about the developement as regards to my previous proposal ,right now i have perfected the whole legal documents regarding the whole funds that is to say that i have been cleared by the united nations headquarters in Ghana where the funds are and also by the national drug enforcement agency all these are proofs showing that the funds are of no criminal origin and also that the inheritance is not drung money these are the stepps that delayed me once more in the project ,right now the funds are ready at the security company where it was deposited but will be delivered under diplomatic immunity in their London office where we will clear the funds and deposit straight to your safe account for onwards transfer to your country for future investment ,right now all i need from you now is for you to make an urgent travell arrangement to london where we will meet and claim the inheritance for the mutual benefit of all .your readiness to be in london as soon as possible will put me in a position to foward all the necessary documents and legal papers backing the funds to avoid being confiscated in the international community . your positive response to this mail will help us conclude this project in a very good speed ,
please write me on this particular email for safety of the project and for quick response to
hamza222_222@yahoo.com
hope to see you soon
kind regards
Barr: Hamza Bello
My Dearest barrister- I had many and disturbing dreams last night while sleeping that confused me to the utmost, and I am hoping that, like the old testiclement prophet Daniel did for king nebechudnezzar, you can interpret these crazy images for me, somehow I think that they are related to our previous correspondences
In one dream in particular, i saw many people working tirelessly in the pits of hell, with fire and brimstone all about them, but they were working nevertheless, digging trenches, lighting huge bonfires, and even the more scientific among them were concocting in fiery laboratories newer and more effective incendiary devices for use down there in Hades. And to reward them for their labors, Satan's minions doused them with cool and everflowing water to placate their parched throats and blistering skins.
Now there was a second group of eternally damned people, surrounded by fire and brimstone also, but they were sitting on their fat, hot, burning asses and not doing any work at all, they were just loafing around all day, hanging out at Satan's Bar & Grill drinking flaming shots of whiskey. Thusly, Satan's minions did not reward them with any cool water. In fact, Satan's minions rained more fire and brimstone upon their chrome-domes and shoulders.
Now what does this all mean?
The only thing that I can glean from this disturbing dream is that those who work hard get rewarded, and that those who do no work, receive nothing, but i hope that i am mistaken in all of this.
I am confused now. Will i actually receive these billions of dollars that I am soon to inherit from our transaction without having done any work? or will fate step in and derail your's and my noblest and godliest of intentions? please let me know your kindest and most sincerest soothsaying thoughts on all of this,
your's in legerdemain and deceit, calvin virgil
Dear Calvin,
Considering your positive responses and in my anticipation of a strong and solidcooperations from your side in this business, infact I am very much interested to know whether you will be capable to do this business with me in full confidences trusting that you will never lets me down now or in future, so if you are really serious and have the facilities for effectively communications,ability to set up a new bank accountunder short notice ,even an empty A/C without any money in it provided that the A/C can receive money is still ok.you should know that this opportunities can hardly come my way again in life so I have planned everything very well with an insider in the bank in ghana so be rest assured that everything will work out fine fine, i got your contact from the internet as I wrote some many emails ago in all good faith and confidence, but frankly speaking now from the bottom of my heart my fear now is the security of this money in your custody once transferred into your A/C because I don't know you before nor your capability and facilities to handle this large amount.What is your age and profession?
I really want to know more of youand I will want you to keep it very confidential at all times and also to be maintaining constant communications with me knowing that these businesses should take precidence over any other business for the mean time. Now I need the A/C information and your private tele nos as a need may arise either to call you in the day or night as occasion warrants. Please, send me your phone numbers, and bank account informations, as soon as possible.
Hamza Bello
My Dearest and most kindly generous yet procrastinating douchebag Mr. Bello- i have been eagerly waiting to hear from you, and you do not even reference my disturbing dream nor did you try to contact me for long time, so i just assume you are getting me my funds pronto, thus, and pay attention closely dipshit, I am going to need some running around money because I have quit work thinking that your funds would come through much more quickly mutherfukker, and you have taken long time to contact me after i send to you in good faith my faithful emails, wanting to help you over there and me over here to get millions, and now my bitch ex-wife is raking me over the coals for child support for my 10 kids. She is another story, in reality she just as easily could/should have been riding in the doomed auto car that my relative Mr. John Virgil and his offsprings and beautiful wife my sister in law were riding in, and no one would even find her burnt, overweight, squashed and charred body. I dont know what the women are like in your village, or whatever hell hole it is that you live in bello, you fucking moron, but the fat asses in your town cant nearly be as grotesque as the fattest ass of all, Penelope X. Virgil, my bloated and obsequious and manipulative ex-wife, who, like i wrote to you a few sentences ago, is taking me for all i got in this crazy mixed-up world.Thus,as a matter of correct principle, please send me a cashier s check in the amount of $100,000. The only problem is that I am totally destitute and I do not even have a mailing address (I sleep in a cardboard box you idiot), and I certainly do not have a phone neither. This uptight library here in Winesburg is nice enough to let me use their Commodore 64 to communicate with you all. But if my claiming my billions is in anyway jeperdized by my lack of address, go ahead and use the following address , to send me my rightful and well deserved cashiers check (in goodfaith you will send this to me, or else i will consult the witch doctor here in town to put a spell on your ass),
and all the postmen know me:
Calvin Virgil
Cardboard Box (with the Maytag logo on the side)
Behind the Shop'n Save Supermarket
Winesburg, Ohio USA
Sincerely,
Calvin Virgil
Dear Cal
I understood your predicaments and your situation ,I
have made plans to resolve everything i have
arranged with an investor to offset our bills ,which
is the problem to the transaction so that at the end
of the transaction he will be paid with interest
,right now what i want you to do is send to me your
telephone number so that the investor will discuss
with you on how to send the money ,but listen when
he sends the money to you all you have to do is to now
send the money to where ever i tell you so that
the inheritance will be released to us ,before sharing
ceremony. so please send your telephone number and
your real postal address .hope to see you soon
Mr. Bello
dear mr. bullshit barrister: are you an imbecile and a schmuck? or just acting like one? in my last email to you, i laid bare my predicaments, and though your reply to me references some fucking "sharing ceremony" or some other cockamamy scheme you've concocted to get me over there to that one-horse town you live in, i must once again demand that, and my needs have increased due to a lawsuit some crack whore is leveling against me, you now send me a cashier's check in the amount of 500 big ones, and that's not 500 dollars you jerk, but $500,000, a small percentage of that 20 millions you are writing that we can steal from my kin mr. john virgil's safety deposit box, and come to think of it i would like to deposit something in your carpet-munching wife's box with my tiny, and i must admit, 3-inch prick, maybe at the sharing ceremony you can share her with me, and her and i can go out to the barn and shag, isn't that what you rotten, crooked-toothed english call screwing? and who, the fuck, is this "investor" you write about?
listen real good scumbag, i'm only gonna say this one time. i aint sharing none of my billions with some thief who wants to "offset our bills", there is no need for him. please kindly tell him for me that i want him to eat shit and die. or better yet, please put some anti-freeze in his iced tea and have a toast with him (make sure he drinks it all down), or still better yet, please inject into his balls for me a burgeoning colony of flesh-eating bacteria, then you can just throw him back into the slimy thames where you scooped him up out of, the leech and parasite that he probably is, another blood-sucker who doesn't want to work for his daily bread, he just wants it handed to him, kind of like you. But me? i paid my dues faggot, i have earned all 20 millions of the bucks that are soon to come to me, i spent 19.4 ruinous years with the bitch and slut named penelope x. virgil, hand washing her dirty underwear, with skid marks and pussy juice stains on them while she was laid up with scurvy, obesity and the mange, and while the beached whale was laid up i even kept the train of twinkies, ding dongs and deep-fried lard rolling into her gullet, but why you may ask? cuz she sucked a mean dick, motherfucker, and hopefully your wife has 1/10th of the fellatiotory skills that my ex had, but i'll find out about that bye and bye. if you really understand my "predicaments" and situation sir, you should----, nay, i demand that you now send your wife over here to share some nights with me in my cardboard box where she can teach me some of that british bed artistry, and she can bring the cashier's check for half a mil with her, and if i am satisfied with all of these developments, then i will come over, we can get the 20 billion, and we can have some orgy of a sharing ceremony, you can even invite madonna and the queen over too, i heard that they like to shag a lot also, i can even see if that shape-shifting queen with the slit pupils really has blue blood, so consider this $500,000 an investment, you are investing in me. shall i now sum up the game plan for you? i will do it as if you are in the first grade, your idiocy astounds me. and i even insult first-graders by writing this, they have a better grasp of reality than you:
1) get the fuck rid of the "investor", tell him we don't need his services
2) get $500,000 some how, i dont give a fuck how you get it, just get it, mortgage your business and homes, even the ones in the slums of calcutta, borrow from your family, take out a $500,000 insurance policy on your wife, knock her off, and collect the insurance money . . . .but wait, i just had a brilliant idea: if you do that, she wont get to blow me, i dont want to deprive her of that, so here is what you do: take out a $500,000 insurance policy on your wife, then steal a newly-found dead homeless women from the morgue, and bring her to your house, and at the same time send your wife outta town for a while, then get a big vat of hydrocloric acid, kind of like what your friend dahmer did here, and parade as a chemist of some kind as if you were conducting legitimate experiments at your flat, then, put that corpse in the vat for a few minutes, just long enough to remove any identifying characteristics, and you will also need to pull out all of her rotten teeth, say that your "wife" did that to please you and gum you, then claim that your 'wife' accidentally fell into the vat and died, need i write more, dick? then finally and truimphantly, claim the damned insurance money, convert it to greenbacks, stuff it into your wife's huge fake breasts, and send her on over, i know this is gonna work, don't dissappoint bello. and if i am satisfied wholly and your wife brings the dough, i will, out of kindness and comeraderie, even send over to you a slut or 2 just to please you and do your sexual bidding, i am not totally selfish, i now consider you a true friend and associate in this glorious undertaking we are now to undertake. so please don't mistake my harsh words as me wanting to terminate our joint venture, it is just that you are a little slow bello, almost like a retard, and i consider our relationship much like that of laurel and hardy, or abbott and costello, or rowan and martin, where you are the idiot foil and buffoon, and i am the brains behind this whole operation. let me know how things develop there, in the mean time, i will figure out a way to have this crack-whore who is suing me conveniently bumped off, but if not, i am gonna need some of that dough to pay her off so she doesnt sue, i will write more soon.
calvin
Cal tells me that the barrister never wrote back after this.
Cal then got a real taste for this kind of thing, and he ended up resonding to a few more of these proposals, and if you dare read below, you will see that of course no one ever wrote back to him, as he went straight to gross-out ville, maybe it's humorous, i don't know, he's apparently reached new heights, or lows, in his lewdness.
Dear Beloved in Christ,
Calvary greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I am EVANGELIST MARY JONES, a widow to Late DAVID JONES, I am 70years old,I am suffering from long time cancer of the breast. From all indications, my condition is serious and according to my doctor it is quite obvious that I may not survive the sickness,although as a christain,I believe God and I know that I will not die,I will leave to declare the glory of God.
My late husband and my only son died in plane crash in the adriatic sea .I am presently Leaving alone.Our Lord Jesus Christ is my comforter. My late husband was very wealthy, an industralist and international businessman. We have a lot of properties including Shares and houses.After the death of my husband,I made up my mind to travel abroad to live the rest of my life and continue to do the work of God as a missionary.I called our lawyer and I instructed him to sell all my husbands properties and shares to enable me raise some money to continue my mission.
The lawyer sold the Shares and some of the properties and I was able to raise the sum of $10.5M US(Ten Million Five Hundred Thousand US Dollars) The fund is in cash,for the safety of the fund till "am able to travel out.I packaged the fund in consignments and deposited it with a Security Company. Presently,all the documents concerning the consignments are with my lawyer.
Now that my sickness has gone to this stage, and I will undergo breast operation, I am scared and I want the fund to be used for the work of God all over the world. I have prayed concerning this donation and I told God to direct me to an honest Person who will receive this fund and utilise it for things that will glorify the name of God. After my prayers,I searched the christain site in the internet,I found your email address and I decided to contact you.
Please if in your heart you are geniunely and faithfully desired to use this fund for the propagation of God's work in any form whether for Charity, Ministry, Evangelical work,please send to me your,
FULL NAMES,
CONTACT ADDRESS,
TEL PHONE AND FAX NUMBER.
Once I recieve it,I will give it to my lawyer to make immediate arrangement with the security company on how the consignments that contained the fund will be delivered to you.
Send your reply of this mail to my private box below,
evangelistmaryjones@indiatimes.com
I await your urgent reply.
Thanks and God bless you.
Yours In-Christ,
EVANGELIST MARY JONES
my sweetest and soon to be one-titted and six feet under ms. evangelist mary jones:
with great excitement yet saddness i have come to open up my email inbox and now read, with many and sorrowfull yet joyful tears in my blood shot eyes and runny noses, your very touching and thoughtful email to humble me, a true kristian thru and thru, like you write, and i can tell you now unfortunately, that your husband david jones is maybe happy that he is now in Davy Jones' locker, away from you because maybe he made premonitions before he exited this world that soon you would have one breast lopped off, and really sister, what male humans being would want to cuddle with a scarred upper torso of a female evangelist such as yourself?
let me next write, if i understand your email message to me, that you first experienced the very gruesome and bloody deaths of your go-to fucking partner and the fruits of said fucking, namely your dead and crushed son also, you woke up one day, and BOOM, you watch the evening news and see all of the blood and twisted metal and propellers and airline food packages such
then you had to undergo such a gruesome breast-endectomy, and i think that you may have been better off being in the doomed plane too, but hay bitch, stop procrastinasting about this serious money matter and let's get to the main point of this operation: you getting millions of golden and sweet dollars into my hands so that i can carry on the lord's work on this god-forsaken planet, and i do have many and philanthropic ideas on what i want to do with my millions, but please stop beating around the bush sister, and i would like to praise and smell your bush also before you go feet first and belly up toward the funerary altar
just let me know how to proceed, i will furnish you with any info you want so that you can get me quickly my rightful millions
Calvin Virgil
calvirgil@yahoo.com
New Correspondence
Apostolic Greetings !!!,
God will grant you the willingness and interest to digest this humble narrations though it might be so surprise and strange to believe my story but i knew by the reason of the almighty you will humbly understood and accept to proceed with my proposal though we have not met or seen each other before.
My name is Mrs.Margaret Bambino a widow to Mr.Augustus Bambino who was a competent business man here in Abidjan Cote d'ivoire , we were married for many yrs without any child till his death in October 2005 after a brief illness. Due to the promise which i revered to him on the alter at the day of our church wedding i decided not to remarry or get a child outside my matrimonial home which is against the holy bible.
My happiness is that my late husband lived a life of a true & worthy Christian and he has this plan before his death which he pleaded with me to appropriate it to accomplishment. He took this decision with me to use this fund in building an orphanage in his name that will accommodate thousand's of children, and also to use part of this fund in helping the less fortunate and to spread the gospel of the lord to the remote places of the world.
He made this deposit of $(3.9Million)USD Three Million nine hundred thousand U.S. Dollars in a Finance Security Company here in Abidjan . Recently, my Doctor told me that i would not last for the next 5 months due to cancer & stroke illness.
Having known my condition i decided to seek for a competent and reliable God fearing person or church to entrust this fund to utilize this fund the way i narrated above as my late husband desired.
The Bible made us to understand that "Blessed is the hand that giveth". I took this decision because i don't have any child that will inherit this money and my late husband's relatives are not Christians and I don't want my late husband's efforts to be used by unbelievers.
I don't want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly way. This is why I am taking this decision. I am not afraid of death hence i know where i am going. I don't need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health hence the presence of my husband's relatives are around me always. i don't want them to know about this development.
As soon as i receive your reply i shall give you the relevant documents that will legalize you to have access over this fund. I will also issue you an affidavit that will proove you the present beneficiary of this fund in the Finance Security Company. I want you and the church to always pray for me because the lord is my shepherd.
My happiness is that i and my late husband lived a life of a worthy Christian. Whoever that Wants to serve the Lord must serve him in spirit and Truth.
Please always be prayerful all through your life and pray to God to forgive me my sins. Contact me on my private email bellow, any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing for another church or a God fearing person for this same purpose.
Please assure me that you will act accordingly as i stated herein. Hoping to receive your reply.
Your's Sister In Christ,
Mrs Margaret Bambino
my dear, god-damned sister in christ,yo, yo, yo, what up? . . . .
'"sister in christ is in da' house, YA!" . . . . no but really, when is your period? oh, please forgive me, i forgot that you may reek of ammonia, urea and moth-balls, and may be decrepit, and menopause may be long behind you, a distant memory, but ok, let's both take a deep breath, get our bearings, regroup, and ponder the possibilities of our liasons, be they financial, physical (as in, 'let's ball, sister' ), or otherwise, and hopefully with these sweet apostolic auspices smiling down on me and you, coitus between us may soon commence, even though you probably smell of formalehyde, i will still do you.
may i call you sweet maggie? i feel close to you already, i can even smell your fragrant, rancid and rotting pussy from my perch down her in Hades, but honestly Sister, i have been waiting my whole life for someone like you to come along to simultaneously suck my dick while giving me millions of ripe and glorious dollars at the same time
but you are also a god fearing dolt, why are you asking me to pray to your god to forgive you for your sins? i don't think you have ever sinned once, corpse, and you did the right thing by spreading your legs for the dead millionaire dude, and the final result is that i am gonna be rolling in dough pretty soon
'blessed is the hand that giveth" yes, but more blessed is your hand that giveth me a hand job, sweet maggie bambino, i do hope that we can soon hook up,
Calvin Virgil
calvirgil@yahoo.com
End of Cal Virgil's email correspondences
CAL VIRGILand i have this other debate going on, and it concerns roadkill. I sometimes keep a 35mm camera in my car, loaded with ilford black and white film, just in case i come across some interesting things, like old delapidated homesteads and barns, burnt out cars on the side of the road etc, stuff like that. one time i was traveling the back roads of iowa, and i came across a cattle farm. i got some nice close-ups of some bulls, cows, pigs also, but then i saw this dead cow, frozen stiff, right on the side of the road, and i thought it would make a good subject for a photo, it wasn't too gruesome, i was angling for the more artistic side of things, Cal seemed to like it too, here is the photo.
RIP
so then a cupala weeks later, i'm driving along a side street in west des moines and see a dead squirrel on the side of the road. so Cal is like, 'you took a photo of a dead cow, so i'm gonna take one of this dead squirrel', and i'm like 'no way', but Cal had a point in that if i can take a photo of a dead cow, how much different is it for him to take a picture of a dead squirrel that was hit by a car and is lying in a ditch? i gave in, but then i asked him, (and the debate still rages on) what is his reason for wanting to do this, and he said something like, he wants to show the circle of life, as death is a part of life, like summer and winter are 2 parts of the same circle, some crap like that. i think that he was using this philosophical jabberwocky to rationalize his penchant for the gruesome and tasteless. he can say to me that i like the gruesome and tasteless also because of my dead cow photo, and he may or may not have a point, but i disagree ultimately because of the next couple of photos he took which made me swoon and revealed, to me anyway (and maybe art appreciation is a subjective thing anyway) that these photos possess no artistic merit. the dead squirrel was fine, nice enough shots he took, showing the poor little thing all stiff and gray, but then he got out of hand. he next took photos of a dead raccoon with guts all over the place, a dead deer, a dead bat (which i thought was kind of cool). so, in my final analysis, because he wanted to take shots of every dead thing he came across, and because some involved entrails and the like, i see no beauty nor 'circle of life' themes in most of his shots, he just wants to titillate in a macabre way. he disagrees, and sticks by his mapplethorpe approach to subject matter, and equates a 'beautiful fisting shot' with a picture of a deer splattered all over the road. whatever. thusly, i will not post his photos on, nor defile this pure, one-page website, so if you want to see Cal fucking Virgil's real horror-show, black and white photos, click on the link below, it will take you to a very special place, beware of what you may find there. this nonsense spilled over into the video realm, one time he had to get shots of a daddy long legs spider munching on a moth, and worse of all he took some messed up, twisted footage of an oppossum that had been hit by a car but was still alive and whacked out, walking in circles, that footage makes me sick. i'll have that up there also in a few weeks.
Hello New York Stock Exchange! (More Studies in Energy)
one time, many jobs ago, i found myself working for an 'event designer' out of brooklyn, and it was a nutty, fun job that paid well. we basically set up rooms for art show openings, corporate meetings, broadway premiere after parties and the like. many skills were called upon, as one had to flower arrange, paint, sculp, sew large swaths of fabric etc. 2 examples of some of the gigs: one time, fed ex was having their yearly corporate meeting/party at the whitney museum on the upper east side. the company i worked for was hired to decorate the room. aside from having to design over the top flower arrangements for the tables, i also made these big topiaries. we bought these 4 foot long styrofoam replicas of 747 jets, small models of the kind of jets that fed ex uses, and i covered them completely with moss that we bought in crates, as i glued the moss right on there. then i hung the moss covered jets with wire from the ceiling, they looked cool. another job was: 'annie get your gun' premiered on broadway with bernadette peters starring, and the after party for cast and crew was to be held at tavern on the green, so we brought in an old covered wagon and decorated it with flowers, and the tables all had these sculptures on them, made up of more flowers, and toy guns, tiny wagon wheels and little wooden rifles. it was a pretty outlandish party, but that's what we were hired to do.
during one gig in particular, i was inspired to send out 'energy', much in the same way that i sent crazy bill, who is referenced in another vignette on this website, 'energy' to calm him down, but this new energy transmission was sent out in another fashion and in a very different setting. the back story is: the mattel corporation, which has a seat on the new york stock exchange, was slated to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the barbie doll, and because mattel has a seat on the exchange, they could make use of the opening bell antics, which get a lot of press daily, to promote this anniversary. so they hired a blond model and dressed her up to look like barbie, and then at 9:15 am, 'barbie', the ceo of mattel, the ceo of the exchange at that time, and some other big players, made their way up to the balcony of the exchange (and it is a really tiny balcony) where they ring the opening and closing bell, and got ready for the 9:30 am opening. then, at precisely 9:30 am, barbie presses the button that rings the bell, music starts playing from somewhere, confetti starts falling from somewhere, traders on the floor are howling and clapping, and balloons that were hidden in the corners of that balcony, suddenly appeared and floated upward, but they were tethered so they would not float up to the ceiling. and who released those balloons as he was crouched down in the corner of the balcony and looking up the dress of barbie? your's truly. at 8:15am, as my frozen fingers were trying to blow up the 100th balloon inside of a white utility van parked on the street outside of the exchange, i was ready to complain to my boss that i was so cold and miserable, but then she said, 'oh, by the way, you and daniel (a co-worker who was also her husband) are going to crouch down in the corners of the balcony during the opening bell and release these tethered balloons'. so i just kept my mouth shut and thought, "hmm, that's gonna be an interesting experience to say the least, to hang out on the balcony of the exchange during the opening bell, to prostrate myself on the temple altar of global capitalism during its daily, most exciting time, the start of a new trading day". so everything went off without a hitch, and yes, barbie's legs were right in my face and i could see up her dress, and the dress of some exchange woman, i think she was second in command or something.
but i digress, as this is not the main point of this story, sending energy is. so, back up 8 hours from the moment i released the balloons, to about 1am. at the workshop in brooklyn, we built out of plywood, a large semi-circular birthday cake, draped with white fabric that looked like icing, and with light fixtures hidden in the fabric, from which 3 feet tall plastic tubes made to resemble candles protruded. this 'cake' we were to attach to the balcony of the exchange, so that barbie looked like she was having a real party. at about 1am, we loaded the plywood cake and other artifacts into the van and headed to the exchange. one thing i noticed when we pulled up in front of the main door, was this soldier looking dude dressed in green, just hanging out on the opposite side of the street in a darkened doorway. he was wearing a hat like the one that russian leaders like breshnev used to wear, but this 'guard', for lack of a better term, looked real bad ass. the next morning when we returned, there was another dressed like him, wearing a short green jacket and matching pants, just hangin out in the same place, seemingly keeping on eye on things, but from another outfit maybe and not connected to the guards proper that were inside the exchange and who let us in after checking us out. anyway, so me, the owner of the company and her husband, carried the plywood cake and candles through the 1am security gauntlet and up to the balcony. it was my first time visiting the stock exchange, so here i was, standing on the balcony, taking it all in, looking out over a deserted and quiet trading floor, but the buzz from that's day's activities, every day's really, like a lingering ghost, was still palpable, there was this feeling in the air that was electric. but maybe i was just projecting and imagining it. anyway, it took us about 2 hours to complete our work, it was very tedious, getting everything to look right, as the plywood had to be securely fastened to the balcony railing, and wires had to be run from an outlet to the candles. so during these 2 hours, there were times where i found myself alone on the balcony, as kate and daniel were off doing other things or running out to the van for supplies. i think that they may have even needed to run back to brooklyn for something. at this point in my life, i had many previous experiences sending energy, both 'good' and 'bad' energy (relative terms, more on that later), it is just a tapping into the power of the mind, for me anyway, and seeing visible results or effects of this energy sending in the 'outer' world, which maybe is really part of the 'inner' world, hard to say for me what is inner and what is outer, or maybe the outer is a reflection or manifestation of the inner, or whatever. and maybe there is no difference between my night time sleeping dreams and my waking state, my waking state just another dream where i project thoughts onto the screen of awareness. so i thought, 'ok, here i am, looking out over the new york stock exchange floor at 2 in the morning with no one around, why not send energy out over the floor? below me was represented, in the trading stations, chairs, monitors, wires, equipment and the like, the epitome of bottom line, capitalist, free-market mentality, which to me is just another ephemeral paper tiger which i have nothing against, i was just observing it all, really sucking it in through every pore in my body. but why send energy? why not? maybe there is much stress here during the day, maybe fortunes are won and lost, maybe there is some unstable vibration here that could use an influx of certain frequencies that may, or may not, smooth things out a bit, calm the turmoil that may be lingering on the more subtle etheric planes. Cal Virgil calls me a delusional dreamer (touche Cal) for thinking that i would have some effect on this place, and he may be right, but i did it anyway, and i was not trying to save the world or anything, i was just experimenting some more with energy. so instead of sending the energy from my third eye, which i do in certain cirumstances (like when i sent crazy bill white light globes to calm him down), i sent it from the chest area, a rose color i projected, that's what felt right at the time. i did it for about 5 or 10 minutes, and if anything, i got a meditation in which i am very un-disciplined at anyway, the 10 minutes of slow deep breathing re-vitalized me because i probably had been working 18 hours straight, and would be back here at 7am. and what i have also done with much success, with this rose-colored light projected from the chest area, is this: if ever i had a disagreement or argument with another person, or if for whatever reason i felt bad vibes between me and someone else, i would sit quietly for a few minutes, do some deep slow breathing, then visualize this light flowing out of the center of my chest, like a geyser, and i picture it going to the person and flowing down their entire body from head to toe like honey, enveloping them like a cocoon. sometimes simultaneous to this i will think of the word 'love' over and over in my mind. and without fail, pretty much 100% of the time the person with whom i had conflicts of some kind with would call me, or write to me, or be super nice and kind the next time we met up. my experience many times over is that this rose-colored light can really have an effect in many situations. anyway, i heard daniel and kate coming up the back stairs to the balcony, so i pretended like i was just hanging out, tweaking the cloth icing and waiting for them to come back with more fabric or whatever. so once all 3 of us finished installing the cake and candles, at 4am we headed back to brooklyn to get some shut eye.
Cal wants to be an R & B singer, and an animator
Cal and i were driving back to pennsylvania recently from new york city, and we were just perusing the FM stations using the 'seek' function on the car radio, and we alighted upon a station out of brooklyn, or queens, i couldn't tell, but it was some kind of rap/hip-hop/r&b type station, very urban, 106 point something in the radio dial i think. the DJs were very hard to understand, they spoke very fast and in a lingo that i had never heard before, but i liked them, one's name was 'big tigger', he was cool, and had a great delivery and vocal tone. the music was pretty wild, some singers i had heard before, like usher and mary j. blige, but there was this whole other slew of tunes that were played, written by artists i had never heard of before, it wasn't like gangsta rap or anything, it was more subtly sexual and smoother on the ears than most rap. in this one song, this guy was talking/singing about rolling blunts and drinking some wine and getting down with his woman, and the rhythm was slow with a big booming bass line, it had a very barry white feel to it. the word' fuck' was weaved into the lyrics here and there, but the station bleeped them out, silly of them. overall i liked the station and the tunes being played. Cal liked them too, and he then got an idea: wheras my approach to writing songs is an art for art's sake kind of thing, i wanna create new musical ideas (not sure if i'm succeeding, Cal says 'no') and i do not pay attention to pop radio and what the current trends in music are, they interfere somewhat with my 'process'. Cal on the other hand, is a whore, he just wants to get his music played on the radio no matter what. so after hearing this hip-hop station during our drive back from the city, he decided that he was gonna make his own hip-hop/r&b tune, that he was gonna join the likes of vanilla ice, eminem and justin timberlake, white dudes who he feels have had success making 'black' music, whatever that is. below is Cal's first hip-hop tune, he thinks it is great, and he envisions listening to the radio some day as big tigger introduces his song, 'My Babies'. this song is unbelievable, i think it is racist because he references every racial stereotype imaginable, and i'm surprised that he didn't crowbar into the verses words like 'watermelon', 'fried chicken' and 'collard greens'. and further, Cal is so out of it as far as what kind of drugs hip-hop culture is immersed in, that he makes a drug reference that only gay guys and club goers from the 1970's and 1980's might have heard of, amyl nitrate, that had the street names 'locker room', 'rush' and 'poppers'. one time when i was driving cab in scranton in 1989, i was taking this old queen to a gay bar, and he opened up this little bottle of clear liquid, and had me smell it, it was toxic and nauseating. he said that gay guys sniff this stuff like there was no tomorrow because it relaxes the anal muscles and makes anal penetration easier. whatever, i'm not makin' this shit up. anyway, Cal is so out of touch that he thinks that straight people still use this stuff. many most likely have never heard of it. click to listen, if you want to.
Cal just graduated from cartoon animation class 101, and here is his first production. of course because sex sells, he goes that route with the dialog, but he also got me thinking, if he can make this shit, i should be able to counter, but i will have to do some research on real animation programs and not this short cut bullshit he is using. a fifth grader could make these movies, but he could be on to something regarding the characters and situations, albeit the animation itself is a little crude. you may also notice that he paints himself as a brilliant protaganist always, and besmirches my family name also.
part 1
part 2 of this office banter
I just happened to be in San Francisco in 2004 on a trip to film a convention, and in my spare time, I would walk along Market Street and randomly and spontaneously interview homeless people. When I got home, I checked out the rough footage that I had and decided to piece together a short vignette. My goal is to return to San Francisco and bring along a film crew and expand upon the theme, and I want fill in the gaps and interview officials of city agencies who monitor the homeless situation. I also want to do the same thing in other cities eventually.
Fired again
this was a really a bizarre situation. sometime in the late 1990's, i found myself living in a small apartment just south of scranton. it was a more stagnant time of my life, i was having a hard time saving money and starting projects. good paying jobs were very hard to come by then, jobs in general were scarce because of a sluggish economy. however, i was not picky on the employment front, so i registered with 2 different temp agencies, to increase my chances of getting a job. without fail, a temp agency employee called me pronto and said that this clothing company was hiring order pickers for the second shift, but it was a shorter shift, like 5pm to 10pm, perfect hours for me, as i could go out to bars after work and stay out late, while sleeping in the next day, i always liked second shift.
so, the company name was HABAND! that is actually the company banner, with the effin exclamation point and everything, but i do not have the exact font, it is something like that. they have a huge warehouse and call center north of scranton somewhere, it might be the global headquarters. when i was a kid, the thick sunday paper often had these color advertisements or circulars inside, and i remember seeing HABAND! pullouts, outlining their brand of clothing, which is, honestly, the crappiest synthetic junk masquerading as clothing out there, the styles were geared for old people mostly, these polyester slacks and shirts, and it was a mail order type situation. one could buy, like 3 pairs of 'slacks' (i love that word) and 3 shirts for 9.99, or whatever. (i liked the company and job at first, but then they landed on my shit list, read on.)
so anyway, i took the 5pm to 10pm job, it was kind of enjoyable, co-workers were fun and we all hung out on break and smoked ciggies together. the job was easy, i was just given a stack of orders that were taken by the call center employees that day, and i had to fill the orders, which entailed traversing the cavernous warehouse and picking items from the thousands of boxes on the shelves and packing the items in a box and putting a label on it.
ok, i now have a job, cash flow is decent, i can pay bills etc. then, about 2 weeks later, the other temp agency with which i registered called me one day, and the employee said that this clothing company, HABAND! , was hiring order takers for their call center, for the 8am to 4pm shift. hmm, neurons fired quickly and, because i needed more dough and i always like having 2 jobs (fights boredom and increases cash flow), i told the temp agency woman that yes, i would take this job at HABAND! , and i could start immediately, the next day. i wasn't sure how it would all work, but i didn't think that i would breaking any laws by working the day shift in the call center, leaving the building for an hour, and coming back in at 5pm for the night shift in the warehouse.
well, i pulled it off easily, and the daytime call center supervisor and the nightime warehouse supervisor were like 2 ships in the night, and i made sure that the day supervisor did not see me come back in the building at 4:50pm, but she was usually gone for the day anyway. so, i would show up at 7:50 for the day shift, and sign this sheet at the front desk. then i would leave at the end of the shift, come back in at 4:50 and sign another sign-in sheet, and no one really knew anything. again, there were no laws that i was aware of, that stated that one could not work 13 hours in the same facility or for the same company, but maybe i was breaking some kind of statute, or company policy or something, but i didn't care. and though i was hiding something, i was not hurting anyone and i was filling a need, and everyone was making out: the company (as i am a fairly good and efficient worker, i think anyway), the temp agency (they were probably getting paid double what i was getting paid) and me, as cash was now flowing.
so things were going swimmingly for a few weeks, and i had over a grand spending money saved and i was beginning to like my life and apartment, although i was working really long days, but i didn't mind, as i get really bored and sometimes depressed when i have too much free time on my hands. i am actually more productive creatively when i have little time on my hands.
but then 2 things happened that changed everything, and they happened simultaneously. first off, the day shift job was like this: people from all over the country who were regular customers or who saw the sunday HABAND! circulars, called the 800 number and placed phone orders. i was one of maybe 30 people in the call center, it was really busy, they pumped out this shit like there was no tomorrow. i would get calls, and the women and men placing the orders would tell me item numbers and quantities, and all i had to do was enter this data into a computer, and get their payment and shipping info. if they were return customers, their info was already stored in the database, i just had to retreive it. fairly mindless and easy job, and i forgot to state that the call center had, as probably most call centers such as this one have, a team of phone monitors, who would randomly listen in on calls, so one had to be on one's best behavior and not pull any funny stuff while taking orders.
but then one day, i get a call from this old lady from rural tenessee or somewhere, and she was actually crying on the phone, and i'm like, 'what the HELL is this?'. always eager to help someone in need, generally, i had to get to the bottom of this one. so during my conversation with her, some facts became evident. she said, through her sobs, that she has been a loyal HABAND! customer for many years, and she was scared and worried, and baffled, as to why this fucking (my words) company would send her such a threatening letter. she said that the letter stated that because she had not ordered anything in a while, that HABAND! was going to drop her as a customer and cut her off. i wanted real facts and not her version, and i wanted to know exactly what she had in front of her, so i said, "ok, mrs. parton, read to me exactly what you have there."
so she read this letter, signed by the owner of the company, mr. HABAND! or whoever he was, duke is his name i think, duke HABAND! , and this letter was unreal, i could not believe my ears, and this woman WAS for real, she wasn't making this shit up, how could she, and why would she? she was in the database, i found her there, was a long-time customer, and she gets a threatening letter that she read to me, and the contents and tone were, if she was indeed reading the letter verbatim, and i believe she was, anger-tinged and manipulative. they were playing off her fears, inducing fears in her, and i did not like that. their protocol for drumming up business is just as shitty and creepy as the clothing that they make. so i said to her, knowing that my call might be monitored (it was), "mrs. parton, listen, no one on my watch is gonna terminate you as a customer, i am disappointed in this company, you are a great and loyal advocate of this fine HABAND! clothing, and you have spent much money in the past buying this clothing, so i am going to look into this matter and find the people responsible for sending this letter, and tell them that you are a good and loyal customer, and to not send you such letters anymore." she stopped crying, and i had re-assured her that she was not going to be terminated as a customer.
so, events are already set in motion, as the monitor probably was expecting me to say to the woman, "listen mrs. parton, you really need to place an order today, and duke HABAND! is correct, we sent you that letter, and i can speak on behalf of the duke, because we need to constantly weed out the slackers from our database and keep things up to date. please let me know what you want to order or else i'm gonna press this 'delete' button on my keyboard". but no, the monitor was already looking into this whole thing behind my back, and most likely had a recording of this conversation.
the second thing that happened: when i drink coffee, i like to sweeten it with either maple syrup or honey, as white sugar hurts my teeth. so i would usually carry around a bottle of maple syrup in my jacket pocket, and it can look like a pint of whiskey. so, HABAND! had a lunch room, and smoking was allowed in there at the time, so all of the caffeine and nicotine addicts such as myself got their fixes during the breaks, and the room was real smoky. so when lunch time came, i would make a beeline to this lunch room and buy a coffee with cream and no sugar in it from the vending machine, like i had been doing for a few weeks. i would then sit at a table, fire up a cigarette, and proceed to pull the pint of maple syrup from my pocket and add a small dollop to my coffee. i do remember thinking one time, that some crusty old dingbat is gonna see me do this and possibly think that i was adding whiskey to my coffee, but it was just a fleeting thought, and i didn't care anyway. but little did i know, some crusty soul saw me do this and concluded in his or her confused mind that i was drinking on the job, and he or she had to report this.
thus, the monitor was fast on my tail concerning the call with the woman from tenessee, and someone reported me to the company brass, that i was drinking on the job. things were set in motion already, there was no stopping it. so i finished both of my shifts that day ( the day i had the crazy conversation with the woman from tenessee). i came to work the next day as normal, and no sooner had i planted my ass down on my call center chair, when the supervisor and some security looking dude asked me to grab my coat and follow them. i knew the jig was up, but i really wasn't sure what they knew, nor where we were going. so they led me upstairs to this suite of offices, and the guard opened this big door, and in there was the inquisition. every higher up in the place was there, with some muscle for added security, maybe they thought i would freak out or something. so anyway, this one important looking woman was the chosen one, she was gonna lay it all out for me. first off, someone saw me adding 'liquor' to my coffee, which is a real no no. secondly, they found out that i was working from 8am to 4pm in the call center, and then from 5pm to 10pm in the warehouse, another no no (but they produced no company rule book that read one cannot work 13 hours in the same facility) and thirdly, my one call had been monitored and they could not have me work there anymore basically, if one added up all of these transgressions. but there was no arguing nor reasoning with them, nor was i given the opportunity to tell my side of the story, and they did not even want to hear that what i was putting in my coffee was maple syrup, and that i had the bottle in my car and i could produce it. no, wasn't gonna happen, they didn't even let me speak, i tried to verbalize something, but she cut me off, and this woman kept it short and sweet. my 2 jobs at fucking HABAND! were finished, and that i was to be immediately escorted from the building. they could only wish that they had an employee who was willing to work 13 hours in this crazy place that makes the shittiest clothing on the planet. i remember calling the temp agencies when i got home, to let them know what went down, but they really didn't care either, just move on was the advice given.
it was all very surreal and comical, par for the course for me, as my life in general is like that, and i wasn't bothered in the least, as i had some cash saved. and shortly thereafter, one of the same temp agencies that got me a job at the clothing company , got me a job at the italian ice factory referenced in an above story, which was even more crazily enjoyable, and better, because it was a mile from my apartment, they were gearing up for summer consumption and they even let me, with company approval, work 2 shifts back to back if i wanted, 16 hours straight, 5 days a week, and the second 8 hours of this double shift was time and a half! i was rolling in dough, my checks were like 700.00 net, as the hourly rate also was way better than fucking HABAND! 's hourly rate, and my rent was like 250.00 at the time also, so i had spare cash, a good amount.
so YES! DOWN WITH FUCKING HABAND! AND UP! AND UP! WITH 'MIA'! THE ITALIAN ICE FACTORY, A DIVISION! OF J and J SNACK FOODS!, MAKERS OF SUCH FINE PRODUCTS AS LUIGI'S ITALIAN ICE!
I LIKED WORKING AT MIA FOODS, THAT LASTED ABOUT 6 MONTHS UNTIL I GOT A CALL FROM AN INDONESIAN SHAMAN FRIEND AND WENT TRAVELING AROUND THE USA WITH HIM, MORE ON THAT LATER!
Traveling with the shaman
this was a really a memorable event, it may have been a dream, i cannot be sure, it seemed like a dream at the time. once we were working, meaning that the shaman, for lack of a better word, and i,(and i'll call him 'don juan', as in castaneda's and not byron's don juan) were seeing clients in evergreen, colorado, well they were really his clients, i was just organizing the whole thing. so we were working in the mountains, and staying with a friend in denver, in a more easterly suburb near colorado boulevard. this friend in denver had a very big, expensive house, in a newer development that had many other big expensive houses in it. her house was a few blocks in from the main drag, colorado boulevard, a very busy 4-lane road/highway.
well, when we first got to gail's house, she said we could have the run of the place, as she would be at work most of the time, leaving early in the morning and returning late at night, and she gave us our own key. the only thing we needed to watch out for was, that her dog, this little overweight, white, unfriendly mutt, (i think it may have been an annoying terrier of some kind, maybe a 'scottish terrier'), would try to sneak out the front door if we weren't careful, so we had to enter very stealthily and make sure that she was not in the foyer when we opened the front door. i asked our friend what would happen if the dog got out, and she said that 'muffy' would run far away and not come back, ever.
this dog was real schizoid, you couldn't even pet it, it wasn't the kind of dog where you could say, 'come here spot', and it would come running to get petted. not this dog. that guy felix or ceasar the dog whisperer would have his hands full with this mongrel. so, after a day or 2 of staying there, everything was going fine, and we were done working early one day and got home by 2pm. i was gonna take advantage of the nice fall weather and go for a hike in the nearby park. when we opened the front door slightly, the dog was not in the foyer, so we entered, with the door only about 1/4 open. but then, out of nowhere, this mutt comes flying past me and bolts out the door. we are like 'holy shit, we're fucked.' i didn't even have time to think, and i jumped off the porch, clearing 4 or 5 steps, and i was right on her tail, at first.
this dog was fast, and had no intention of being caught and returning to this home, and i could barely keep up, running at full speed but falling behind. the dog was much faster than i, and every few seconds she would increase her lead by a few yards. plus at the time i was smoking and out of shape, but i think i kept up a respectable pace. she was a real sprinter, like the wild dogs of africa, and it seems that she was trying to satisfy some deep craving that she must have had for true freedom, maybe during her daily life in the house she may have been chomping at the bit to sneak out that door.
she was nearing the end of the side street and made a hard left on this busier street that led right to the busiest street, colorado boulevard. and so many things are going through my mind, so quickly, as i'm running at full speed, not gaining on her, and she is heading right for this highway basically and is gonna get crushed by cars and what not. colorado boulevard was only 2 blocks away, and like an arrow the mutt was heading right for it, with me fast behind.
i wish i had video of this crazy situation or i wish i could access some astral record or whatever, i would love to view it from different angles. anyway, there was one more side street to cross before we hit colorado blvd, and i didn't notice it as it was more like an alley, but what happened next, and i don't know if angels or guiding presences exist or not, but some kind of aid was rendered, or maybe it was just luck or chance, but as we are heading straight for colorado boulevard, inexplicably the dog makes another hard left down this street/alley, again with me fast behind.
my perceptions and thought processes were firing at lightning speed, so as the dog is heading down this alley, i realize that it is a DEAD END, this alley led right into this square parking lot. there are homes ringing this square, and it was not even a culdesac, it was just a big square of asphalt with houses on 3 sides, with the alley entrance on the 4th side, and there were not even walkways between any of the houses where the dog could escape through. it was like a condo situation, where the units were all connected structurally. it was a sealed trap, and the street had fences on both sides also. this place was unreal, it is just what i needed to give me a chance to catch this rascal, there was nowhere for her to go except right back at me.
so the dog is about 75 feet ahead of me, and realizes at the same time as i that there was no way through or out of this dead end street, so she turned right around immediately and headed full steam right toward me. now when i was on my high school football team, i was a safety and cornerback, and though i saw little action in games because i was too slow, i still picked up valuable skills, one being that before a play began, i would crouch down with knees bent, body slightly leaning forward, while standing on my toes, so that if a play went this way or that, i could dart in any direction quickly. we called it 'shuffle, shuffle, backpedal', because those are the movements you would make as a cornerback before you took off and ran in the direction of the action. well, my cornerback instincts kicked in, and everything went into slow motion.
this much was evident: our friend's dog had escaped and she told us to watch out for that, the dog was on the run and had no intention of returning, and chances were very high that it would be hit by a car, especially as it was running frantically with me on its tail.
so i am now crouched down in a cornerback stance, and this dog is running back up this street, right toward me after realizing that she had run right into a dead end. she got closer to me, 30 feet, 25 feet, and when she was about 15 feet away (and again, this was happening very fast but strangely in slow motion, perceptually speaking) i can see her start to list to one side, i saw which way she was gonna try to go around me, but i didn't commit, for if i committed, like a good running back she may have changed tack and faked me out. so i stayed in my crouch position until she was right on me, for i knew that she would eventually have to go right or left without the possibility of changing sides, because SHE would then have committed, she would have to at that point.
i stayed put, she wasn't gonna fake me out, and all of my senses were in hyper-drive, i never was more aware in my life, and all that existed was me, this mutt and this dead-end street---talk about being in the present moment.
here she comes, one chance to do it, so BOOM! she picks a tack and tries to run around my right side, she went left from her perspective, and i just dove through the air, and it wasn't a fake dive, i was totally airborn, focusing right on that bloated belly of hers, and i caught her!
wow, the feeling i had was one of utter relief, elation, and most of all peace of mind descended because on my watch gail did not lose a 'trusty' companion and we would still have a friend here in colorado in whose home we would still be welcomed. if i didn't catch the dog and if she got away, it would have been a very dark day indeed, as i would have to wait all day for gail to come home so i could break the bad news to her, and i would then rather crawl in a hole somewhere and disappear than face gail.
so i hung on tight as the dog tried to squirm her way free from my clutches, snarling and writhing, but it wasn't gonna happen. that was the best walk i ever had, the few blocks back to the homestead with 'muffy' in my arms, as i am sweating and breathing deeply, very sweet breaths for sure.
Mr. Real, Famous Art Critic
mr. real may say that i live most or even all of the time in a fantasy world, and that i have a hard time determining what is real and what is illusion. i think that he is totally mistaken, and it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. i first became aware of mr. real when i was watching a documentary about this yellow dinosaur who started this crating business, and he was ruining the items that customers were leaving for him to crate. for instance, some lady brought him an expensive ming dynasty vase for him to crate, and before crating it, prickle, the name of the dinosaur, painted a funny face on it. when the lady came to pick up the item, she started to freak out when she saw the damaged vase, and other angry customers were there also, wanting explanations about the crappy service that this yellow dinosaur was providing. anyway, the reason i put that quote by mr.real at the top of this website is because he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, so if he says this this website is all bullshit, than it must be just the opposite because he has no idea what he is talking about. case in point: so when the angry mob of customers gathered at the front door of the dinosaur's business, mr. real comes dashing into the scene, and after he takes a look at the funny faces that the dinosaur painted on the vases, he proclaims the altered vases as 'works of genius' and 'magnificent', so he is really the bullshit artist. (and the fact that he likes fucking Cal Virgil's awful paintings drives my point further home) see for yourself, here is a brief clip of the documentary.
More studies in energy
don juan has a pretty good grasp of energy and he knows how to wield it judiciously. he never shows off, and he considers his 'siddhis' a by-product of his channeling of the 'infinite', as he calls it. he will only put on a small show to prove a point or to reveal some small aspect of energy to people, he never does it to titillate or show off. in his culture he is usually considered a 'spiritisto' or medicine man, though he dispenses no medicine. one time he was giving a lecture in a home to about 30 people, and there was this darkened hallway that he started walking down. he stopped a few feet in and held up his right hand so that there was just a dark backround behind it, and he just moved his hand in a figure 8 pattern, and there were these neon blue light trails coming off of his fingertips, the people in attendance were amazed, but he was just showing them that this is the same energy that he uses when placing his hands on clients who come to him for chi and energy, and that they could have such an energy flow if they wanted, with proper training and discipline. another time we hung a 3' by 3' piece of cardboard from the ceiling of this home we were in, using 2 pieces of string, so that the cardboard was just like a hanging sign. again, using his pronounced energy flow in his hands, he started to move his hand toward the hanging cardboard, and when his hand was about a foot from the cardboard, it started to move away from his hand, as if being pushed by some invisible force, and when he moved his hand back, the sign came back to its normal hanging position. onlookers were excited to see this, but don juan was only showing them what is possible regarding energy, he doesn't get too excited by that stuff. the first time i met him, he asked me to lie down, if i wanted to experience his energy, on my stomach. he then proceeded to place his hand on my t-shirt, directly over each of my kidneys, for about 2 minutes on each kidney. for the next day or 2, i never urinated so profusely in all my life, very long and satisfying pisses to say the least, my kidneys were stimulated in some way. another time he and i were up in the mountains in indonesia, visiting a friend of his. after we had a nice dog and rice dinner, we were all sitting around drinking rum and beer, and the friend of his had a son, about 25 years old, and the son's girlfriend was there also, eating and drinking with us, and she must have said something to don juan, about how subtle energy does not exist or that magic is fake or whatever. but he had some dynamic going on with her, i think that he thought that she was a very close-minded person and not open to the possibility that there may be more things in 'heaven & earth' than are dreamt of in her philosophies, but she was about 23 years old, if that has any bearing on anything. but anyway, don juan felt compelled to pull out a siddhi from his siddhi bag of tricks, so he asked the girl to pick up an onion from a bowl of onions that were on the table and hand it to him. she grabbed one and handed it to him, and he blew on it, going 'swoosh', making some kind of sound like that, over the top of the onion, and then it opened up in his palm, as if someone had cut it in 5 or 6 diagonal cuts, it looked like a flower. the girl was amazed, more freaked out than anything, but in a pleasant way, and she couldn't stop talking about what he had done, and she kept asking him how he did that, but he never really answered her directly. that was a crazy day, i ended up drinking so much rum and beer, that i threw up outside late at night, all of the dog and rice that i had eaten that day. (soon i will write all about that, eating dog in indonesia) so don juan did a few more things like this when i was with him in indonesia in 1996, and i had known him for about 5 years at that point. i've known him for about 20 years now, so there are many more observations about his energy work that i have documented and catalogued, just as part of an empirical approach to studying chi or energy with him. i will organize it and write it out some time, and he basically has shown me some techniques to better 'channel the infinite', and the techniques are really nothing more than focusing and bringing the mind to one point, quieting the mind really, very zen-like. he is familiar with and thinks highly of practices such as TM, yoga, tai chi, chi gong, and the like, but he is not a fanatic about any particular modality. his overall vibe is like the tao of pooh, he just lets it all happen, he likes to emulate flowing water, but he does think that individual effort is required for one to learn more about energy, not only intellectually but also experientially, if that is what one wants to do. and though he now has a relatively un-impeded energy flow through his body which he can maintain with little discipline, he told me that there were times in his life where he would go up into the mountains with his teacher and fast and meditate for weeks at a time, year after year, so he put his time in it seems.
(EDITOR'S NOTE- Mr. Real the Art Critic responds: "Aversa is dooped again, or he is in on the shenanigans. The Asian Charlatan he claims to hang out with obviously did the following: a) he suggested to the assembled schmucks that if they looked at his hand with a black backround behind it, they would see light coming off his fingertips. This powerful suggestion led them to believe that they were actually seeing this light, especially if he was jerking his hand to and fro in some crazy figure-8 pattern. b) regarding the hanging cardboard, the Charlatan previously had placed, probably with Aversa's assistance, small magnets in the cardboard, and he had magnets concealed in his shirt cuffs, and when he moved his hand toward the cardboard, the north side of the magnet in his shirt cuff that was facing the cardboard repelled the north facing magnet in the cardboard, thus the cardboard moved, as if by the 'power' in his hands. c) the Charlatan had his friend beforehand cut an onion diagonally into a flower shape, but left enough skin on it so that it would not fall apart. then when the young victim handed him a real, un-cut onion, the Charlatan performed a sleight of hand and substituted the cut onion with the un-cut one, possibly by using misdirection of some kind, and then when he blew on the cut onion, he squeezed it also so that the skin would rupture and reveal the flowered onion.." )
Whisky a No-No
9th grade was a pretty whacky year for me, looking back, maybe for many people it is. i went to that new high school in another town, and didn t know anyone there, so that was stressful. but i did make 1 friend in my freshman year, i even went to his house one time to hang out, my father dropped me off there and picked me up a few hours later.
and academically speaking, i started off with a bang, getting 90s on tests after the first few weeks of school, as i actually took books home in the beginning and studied. but then if i was to chart my 4-year performance at scranton prep on a graph, it would resemble a black diamond ski trail, whereby the top is level and way up there, but then it drops sharply and keeps going down, so by may of 1980, at the tail end of my senior year, my average was like a 78.5, and my final rank was 151 out of 176. so this was a stressful freshman year, as my parents saw my grades drop radically, and after each report card period, i was either 'grounded' for an hour or 2, or some possession was taken away, like a stereo or something. and one time in october of my first semester i had a breakdown and told my mother it was too difficult of a curriculum, and i wanted to drop out, but she said stick it out for a few more months, and i did that. it then all evened out and i stayed there til the end. and also, being i lack commonsense generally, in april, 1 month or so before my freshman year ended, the scranton prep maintenance crew poured a new sidewalk near the front entrance, and as my luck would have it, i came across it right after it was poured, and no one was around. so i did what i felt was the right thing to do, i wrote my name in the cement near the edge, but it would have been noticable by anyone, i am such a loser (but i usually created the circumstances for my troubles through my idiocy). a few days later, my parents get a call, and naturally i got in trouble for defacing school property and what not, and this only added to my freshman year misery. and looking back also, if Cal Virgil surfaced more profoundly in my consciousness and had introduced himself earlier to me, i would have written his name and i would then have not gotten into trouble. i had inklings though that he was in there, as there was always this 'battle' going on, i was very indecisive and changing my mind constantly about things.
but i was also torn inside regarding even attending scranton prep, (and this could have been the real reason for my breakdown ), because my childhood friends, who lived near me in my hometown and who i d known my whole life, went to another high school, so it was a little weird, as i really couldn t bond with them or truly be a part of their gang at this point, as they were always referencing and joking about things that had happened in school, and i was really the odd man out. but i still hung out with them in the evenings and on weekends, and we started to party and drink a lot at this time also.
but the whole point is this: drinking with my home town friends and the culmination of my troubled freshman year in high school collided in a very messy way. so, school-wise, i was nervous about my final exams at the end of my freshman year, as i studied little leading up to them, and i was way behind in knowing the material, especially in latin class, math, english, history and physics, basically all subjects. i think that some of the crazy dreams that i had later on in life, where i am naked and running through the halls of my high school, and finals are starting and i had not studied nor taken a book home for months, may stem from this period at the end of my freshman year. i just had this knot in my stomach related to academia in general, and the upcoming finals in particular, i couldn't shake it.
and at this time also, my friends and i were drinking a lot: we would usually put a buck or 2 each in a kitty and ask a 16 or 17 year old (that seemed to be the legal drinking age in my area that the time, even 14 year-olds were known to get served in beer take-out stores and beer distributors) to get us a case of beer, and then we would go into the woods and have a party. we were also lifting bottles of liquor from our parents cabinets and drinking that also on weekends.
so, on the friday before finals were to begin the following week, i basically cleared out my locker and stuffed in my book bag all of the books i had not opened in weeks, old quizzes and tests from the year, disorganized study materials and what not, it was real chaos and i had a pit in my stomach about all of this and about school in general. if i was to at least pass these upcoming finals that were looming on a dreadful horizon, i had to hunker down and study on this last weekend before finals began (didn t happen), and i had to get organized and catch up on things.
i got home from school, and threw my bloated, opened book bag on the floor on the far side of my bed, and changed out of my loathsome suit and tie and into my friday-night jeans and t-shirt party clothes. i called 2 of my friends, boomer and l.b., and it just so happened that boomer lifted a 5th of whisky from his parents liquor cabinet, and so he, l.b. and i made plans to meet up at one of our favorite party spots in the nearby woods, at 7pm, so we could knock down this 5th of crown royal, or whatever it was.
in the meantime, one of my neighbors, sandy, was graduating from high school, and there was a big party in her yard, so i made my way over there to grab some chow at about 6pm, and i even had a whisky sour or 2 with my meal (whisky and orange juice basically), while mingling with some of my neighbors, with my brothers and sisters and their friends, and my parents and their friends also.(my mother may have even seen me with a whisky sour, this was no big deal in that era, and this saved my ass later as you will discover.)
so at around 6:50pm, i slunk away from the party and met up with boomer and l.b. in the woods, and it was quite a sickening bonding experience. i honestly do not think that any of us had consumed such strong alcohol in such a large amount, and in such a short amount of time, before this, and there was a sense of peer pressure in the air, because i found the whisky quite repulsive but couldn t resist nor refuse to take giant gulps when it was my turn. so we each took turns swigging from this full, new bottle of rot-gut alcohol, and i think we were all pretty even consumption-wise, and when the bottle was empty, we had each consumed 1/3 of the bottle, which was a very large amount of whisky for anyone to drink, let alone a scrawny 140 pounder with braces such as myself.
the rest of that night is indelibly etched in my memory, i remember where we went, what we did, how i felt. we were really whacked out, and we made our way down to the town park, and while walking through alleys and back streets, we were picking up trash cans and just smashing them on the ground. but we really didn t do any damage to any property or anything, we just threw a couple of trash cans around.
so by around 9pm i think, my head was starting to spin and i was feeling sick, boomer was too i believe, and he went home, or somewhere, maybe to another friend s house. me and l.b went to my house for some chow, and luckily no one was home, my entire family was still at the graduation party. l.b. and i stumbled through finding some grub in the fridge, and he had it more together than i, as he seemed normal and was trying to help me assemble a sandwich, and i had never been that drunk before.
i think that he then left and went home, so i just made my way up to my bedroom and found my bed, and this was my introduction to bed spins , it was unreal, like tripping. i was conscious but in this kind of pleasant state of semi-mind, that is until i started to feel very sick. and there was no stopping this sickness, it was coming and fast, and i did not even have the wherewithal to get up and vomit out the bedroom window, which i easily could have done. i barely turned on my side when the river of gook started to spout out like a geyser. and where did these gallons of puke land? right in my open, disorganized, chaos-filled 9th grade book bag.
the extent of the book bag damage was revealed to every member of my family the next day, but they already knew what had happened at around 10 or 11pm the night of the accident. so after i puked in the book bag, and all over the floor around it for that matter, one of my sisters came home from the party, and i have to ask her, but i am not sure how she knew that i was home, i think that her olfactory nerves revealed to her a whisky-tinged puke scent emanating from one of the upstairs bedrooms, and i just remember her helping me to clean myself up, but it was hopeless, and a mess. and soon my mother came home, and she was on the scene also and oversaw the cleanup, but i was still completely wasted and useless as far as any cleanup went.
but overall my parents went easy on me, because, by a stroke of good luck, that dang graduation party provided the ruse, as i just said that i had a few whisky sours at the graduation party (right) and that fact , in addition to some food or other that did not agree with me from the buffet table, made me sick that night. it worked, and only my sister who found me in my room that night knew the real drinking truth, as i told her later.
but this whole episode was par for the course for me, and my book bag, which contained all of my books and study materials for the finals that were on their sickening way, became a metaphor for my first year at scranton prep, as the year was troubling for me, confusing, stressful, i was insecure and mentally nauseous most of the time, so why not puke all over my end-of-the-school-year study materials? and why couldn't i have placed my book bag on the other side of the bed when i came home from school, or logically near my desk? and why did i turn on my right side as opposed to my left side when the puke started to flow? i may never know these answers, maybe certain things happen as if by cosmic design. like a big cosmic joke, it unfolded perfectly really.
after i woke up the next morning sick as hell, i carried the book bag outside to the back porch and surveyed the damage. it was really horrible. these physics and english notebooks, which contained my study notes for their respective finals, were soaked right through, so i had to take each page out and lay them on the deck railing to dry, while flicking off specks of baloney and potato salad, and the smell was awful. my history book, which contained chapters that i needed to read, was coated on its edges and covers with vomit, the book smelled like sour, rancid seagrams. basically every book and notebook had some vomit on them, some worse than others.
well, i made it through finals and barely passed for the year, but i was relieved that i did not fail any subject, as summer school would have been big bummer if i had to go there.
and whisky? just the sight and smell of it to this day makes me sick, the sight and smell of it takes me right back to that time in the woods with the late boomer and late l.b, friends for all time.
Dr. Laura: Patriot, Homophobe
one time, Cal heard on the howard stern show a few years ago that Dr. Laura Schlessinger put out on the market a talking action figure of herself, and Cal said (i was watching COPS at the time) that howard played a few clips of the sounds that the speaker in the doll actually spews out, namely the voice of Dr. Laura admonishing listeners about infidelity, child rearing and a whole host of other topics. anyway, Cal promptly purchased the doll online, and after pressing it's belly button a couple of times to activate the speaker and after listening to Dr. Laura's recorded voice, he decided to use these clips and make a movie about her. the film is Ok, the sound editing and visuals are decent enough, but of course he goes the sex route, placing the doll in compromising positions with a military MP dude. i personally have nothing against Dr. Laura, and i have never even heard her radio show. Cal is more active in the howard stern army than i, and if howard does not like Dr. Laura, than Cal won't either. Cal came across 2 interesting websites about her (see below), there may be more, so it looks like that his point with all of this (if there is any point) is that she may be a homophobic hypocrite, who may profess to be a patriot of some kind, or whatever.
Cal Virgil likes to rummage around my parents attic, likes to look for this or that, and i do not, as the extreme dust makes my snots black for a day or 2 after i have ventured up there. (and Cal refers to them as your parents when addressing me, for he says that he is from another planet and that he infiltrated my body-mind-spirit-totality complex (as he puts it, what a freak), when I was 3 years old, on the traumatic day that i dropped out of pre-school, more on this later). anyway, so while he was up there in my parents attic looking through the accumulated material effluvia collected by 2 parents and 8 children over a 47 year time span (we purchased the house in 1964), he came across, (according to him, and I have my doubts about all of this) his Pet Rock that he received for Christmas in 1975, as i would never have asked santa claus for this, he must have.
so, he has decided to sell it, and he asked me if I could help him do it, and I am doing this here because he said he will give me 51% of what he gets for it. this whole thing is a scam i think, and instead of writing normally about our conversation related to this matter, and so you can see what an average conversation may be like between me and this extra-terrestrial, i will just lay out what went down, in movie script format:
INT. CAL'S/MARTY'S ART STUDIO-MIDNIGHT
It s about 11:57 pm, a few hours after Cal Virgil has returned home from visiting Marty s parents, where he found in their attic his Pet Rock which he has not seen since 1977. (He kept it on his dresser for 2 years after receiving it in 1975) It s a dark and stormy night, freezing rain is pelting the windows of their remote mountain apartment. Camera fades in to Cal as he is taking multiple photos of his Pet Rock that he has taken home. The dopey look on Cal s face changes to astonishment as Marty surfaces and questions Cal about this and interrupts Cal s picture taking.
Marty
What are you doing?
Cal
I wanna' sell this Baby, I ve had it for 36 years, and it s time we parted ways as I need to raise some quick cash. Can you sell it for me on your website? I ll give you 2% of the sale price.
Marty
Wha wha what? You think someone is gonna buy that? It looks like a 1-month old rice ball from the local deli. First of all, the original box, instruction manual and easter egg basket-type polyester straw that formed the bed for this dumb, insensible blob are missing, so how can you even say that this is the same rock that was the original Pet Rock? Maybe it was a door stop in our Aversa household that originally came from our garden. If you had the original box, then maybe THAT would be worth something, but this? No way. And secondly, if I do decide to post it on my website, then I want at least 51% of the sale price. We go halves on it, and the extra 1% is to help cover the fee that I pay yearly to the company that hosts my website.
Cal
HEY, be nice. Don t you know that all matter has consciousness, and that what you call an insensible blob has much more of a stable vibration than you, with your neuroses and fickle demeanor? Her rock-beingness gives love constantly and asks nothing in return, unlike you. And anyone who was not disco-dancing and high during the coke-addled 70 s would know that this is the real McCoy, I do not need Her original basinet/carrier to make this legitimate and to make this sale DAMMIT!
Cal is getting visibly upset, and has an annoyed look on his face, but he shakes it off and continues taking pictures.
Marty
Whataver, so what you are saying is that no one will recognize this as the 'real McCoy',
just agree to give me 51%, and I ll upload your pictures and post this. This is a complete farce, but hey, if someone falls for your scam, more power to em.
Cal
GOOD! I ll give you your 51%, hah!
Fade out as Cal gives his Pet Rock a bubblebath and dries Her off in preparation for bedtime.
Cal Virgil writes: If you are interested in buying my Pet Rock, please email me at calvirgil@gmail.com and make me an offer, thank you.
SHEEP'S FOOT 
