News is Entertainment and Entertainment is Work

Rasta Pumpgun

I choose the chocolate bar blistering in its silver on the black dash. My revolution is found only in the billfolds of uniformed stoats lurking in the pretzel hampers of tragic burgermeisters.

“President Fox greeted this reporter in the rotunda of the capitol building in the Districto Federal. He sat in an ancient sella curalis, clad in pajama bottoms and holding what can only be described as a ‘doll,’ whom he introduced as his son ‘Flambango.’ The doll was made out of old VW parts, hollowed out cucumbers filled with wood putty and buttons and had an upside-down pentagram carved into what passed for its head.”

Apparently several times a year there are hiring fairs in the US for Fancypants Q. Featherbottom’s School for Sissies in Paris and Bizimungu Prep in Nairogeria etc. Bone up now for an icy tomb later.

I tried to combine those two terms, poetry and optometry. It was a waste of time.

(This not incidentally is word-for-word copy from a page dedicated to the island of Kastellorizo, on a Greek website. Pure head-baked poetry of mistranslated sun-stroke.)

***

I’ll try to call you when it’s done if I’m not sick with the existential sickness of existentialism.

The other one was mine and this one is his and it was all an attempt to de-being-ify a terrible poet encountered in the crawl space above a cat-chicken restaurant called a literary journal.

Good things may develop along sensible lines. I am no longer bulletproof or not bulletproof. Now, I am part of the Boxer Rebellion. Perhaps my request for “a tiled room with a drain in the middle for my ‘work'” freaked them out.

I’m international soap-on-a-rope in lean-tos in the withering heat. So stupefied by macroeconomics can’t make good come out. Instead, enclose an ode based on a patent my high school friend filed. Apparently, he invented our genes.

There are frequently always some ideas.

May your glove always be packed with spiders as a paper cone at a county fair is packed with sugared nuts.

The best food I had was at a pupusa stand in the boonies. Cactus, horseradish, crab shell, armadillo meat, horsehair and salt on a sesame seed bun.

I may call you later today and you may not answer and / or you may make nonsense come from out in your yak-hole for me to hang up on for you to come right on back at you, Managua. But asi es la vida. Will find out if I’ve got the cover — think not but at least 9 columns and they are threatening to send me to Mexico those bug-gobbling motherfuckers. I’ll paste President Vicente Fox in his pie-smeared rictus. “Tell ’em Bush sent ya!”

Hey, I think I just wrote my “nut-graf”.

Meat-Whistle Turnip in a Yokohama Sandblaster: How Yorgi and Blynar Cornered the Market on a Broken TV Antennae He Wore As a Hat. Put It On His Head Like a Hat. Ha Ha. That’s Totally Crazy.

Anus editor of science magazine lives in a dank subterranean chamber with hundreds of chattering anuses. Geographically, yes. (Cool-maker in thought-box go bye-bye.) Tomorrow, 60 pages on Dr. Phloborblius K. Bonerman, super-genius.

We’re looking for a dirt-cheap, super-charming, 14th century mansion with 21st century amenities, an interior courtyard and Atget photographs out of every one of the 23 French windows.

The reason for imagining periodically is to conceive a context for it: a newsmagazine for imaginary beings and non-existent objects. This would require a new kind of journalism, one in which there are no actualities. Or some. In which facts are accidental and subject to punishing tariffs at the border. Or none.

Plan Puebla Panama is a pneumatic tube from Caracas to Chichicastenengo that shoots hot nuts at the back of a cast iron floating holding tank with a ding and a clack. The nut shells shuffle down into the ballast tank and the crew of Chinese pirates ahrgs its way to Greenwich, CT for a junior prom in red crepe paper and a half-rack of Tylenol-flavoured push-pops and pale green melon rinds devoured greedily at dawn over the Palisades.

From Chalatenengo to Titicaca the peasants will latch their Kool-Aid stained mouths onto the slurry shunts and social engineering will break out like a cracked latch on lap dance slacks. The nuts are dark and polished and for sale in arcades and in the shadowy colonnades of the Kaisersgedaechtniskirche, where the blackness buzzes with flies and smells like rotten eggplants full of neglected incidents and piles of forgotten jeans.

The signs rise up like drug-induced erections and the pot-holes are filled with skull powders.

In other words, that’s history for you.

Well the Bosto-Quintuplians of course called and yakked at me. In other words, from the Corkblossom Quarterly and the University of Hanoi people I have heard nothing yet. I am leveraging my Snausage into some lady’s snapdragon. And I’m going public.

***

Performance art is one of those areas whose enjoyment is completely dependent on the practitioner lacking awareness.

I unpack and find small pieces of paper.

Paper #1: “The ocean is full of candles and bleached by voltage.”

Paper #2: “Dick Bodyfelt”

“A Topic moved or copied into another Topic automatically becomes a Sub-Topic of that Topic.”

I emailed the office miniature and asked her if it were kosher for some sailor I picked up in an abandoned tuna factory to stay the night at the Corporate Habitation Unit (CHU). Of the five or six times I’ve stayed there, there has only been one night when someone else has been there. A child pornographer, I mean Swiss Mathematician.

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Oh, man — “Segway.” Jesus. Joe, tell them your know how to “rite” like “kreyzee” “cuhz” “U” “A” “D” “baughme.” And explain to them that you do not want to have to jump up with them merely because you have been slamming and jamming on their old ladies’ funks. Instead perhaps you could all go out and catch some jumpies. Word to the mother. Man, I’d love to see Joe’s script for a 30 minute teen show set in an SF club. I imagine there would be robots.

“-Mentor and certify Black Belts/Green Belts, coaching them in the proper use of Six Sigma tools and to effectively manage projects.”

San Francisco has become a flame-blackened Lord of the Flies type scenario with formerly flush Internet weenies painting themselves blue as Picts and charging up Market Streets smashing windows and skewering babies.

I don’t need to tell you that The Hillbilly is not just unpleasant. He is genuinely stupid and truly mean. Every waking hour, everything he does, is based on a soul-crushing fear of his inner worthlessness.

I think this will negatively impact our upside potential.

I think this will negatively impact our upside pup tentacle.

I think this will regularly impact our upside pup tentacle.

I think this swell regurgitation impact our upside pup tentacle.

I stink this foul regurgitation imp pop tower topside pup tentacle.

The thing this foul regurgitation imp dropped into our pup-tent tickles.

Because I have sinned vilely and frequently in my youth, I am going to be in town on Wednesday instead of Thursday, and leave Saturday night at 6 pm.

We both know you hung your boney ass out the study window and fired — boom SPATCH! — against the fence.

A little perspective: Outside all is charred branches and the wailing of the damned. That’s the current hype anyway. Tomorrow it will be the “radical paradigm shift of ass-tailing.”

Outside my window, here in the Northwest, mushrooms are sprouting in the toad yard. On Broadway the bookstore’s windows are filling with spider cracks from the Frankenstein crowds inside brandishing scythes and pitch torches, screaming for Powerpuff Girls activity books, books on Harriet Tubman, the latest Lindsay Davis mystery novel and the paperback release of Everett Fox’s new translation of the Septuagint. The building throbs like oxen and bows outward as the readers divide and divide, joints tearing out like tight pants.

Outside in the rain some guy with a petition and a poncho is thinking, “Man it’s freezing cold.” He’ll give it one more hour, then he’s going down to Saigon Kitchen for some hot noodle soup.

With the possible exception of some mysterious missive Mr. Queneau is said to be crafting, I, agreeing with Mr. S. Pants, am abandoning the discussion. Perhaps, when the Spirit takes me, I’ll start one on Hans the Night Janitor.

It’s time to haul out the big guns. Call Brian, tell him you want a JOB on this commission and to start kicking fuckerpantses in the shitholes with his prickmonkey and yellin’ at them that they should hire you. Otherwise it’s just fuckthermos from here to Plaid Shirt Town in Pseudo-Tenderness County. So you will show up hell-bent for bootstrap monkey larva, circumambulation vitae in hand? Will you propose VP Fun status for yourself? Perhaps too much solo thinking. (Feedback.)

It’s hard to grow sausages in your own mind.

Made with real liver.

I am allowing myself the momentary effulgence of dreamtime before permanent nightfall: Something that looks like it will probably be produced by American Intellectuals, Inc., but it will be circular, obscure, and rife with political infighting.

Go in there in the “appropriate” suit and act like fucking Ghengis K. Juggernaut. It’s Camus suicide equation for the cultural set.

***

Spam Flopsy writes things down off the top of her head and calls them “poems” and “novels,” although everyone outside of her circle of self-obsessed and self-satisfied friends and acquaintances, cut off from the rest of the world and from other times, calls them “rejections.” She is also an under-informed and slapdash book critic and reviewer for photocopied “magazines” with readerships in the teens who passes off her programmatic misapprehensions and pseudo-leftist clichés for critical thought. She is a preening posturer bent on assuming an attitude of victimhood in order to elude responsibility for her own actions and her place in history. Her ninety-million “books” (paper from the recycling bin stapled together and scrawled on with old lipsticks and pieces of charcoal barbeque briquettes) include the memoir “I Am Mistaken: My Belief That My Tiny Insular World Is the Universe and That I Am The Center of It.”

I made a Monkey and a Musketeer do things they were ashamed of later.

Perhaps next quarter ‘radical vaccinated polycarbon chain ass-relaxin” will be the new about-to-be-old wave of the future.

May giant hanks of deep fried “meat” be yours.

Let the sauce be neither renal nor colo-rectal.

Armadillos sleep in your hosiery.

What-Is-Real threatens to burst through What-You-See like a drunk grip passed out against the back of a flat during a performance of The Music Man.

I dream of the New Jerusalem, and work to block its construction by playing the planning board against the zoning commission. I await my rewards in heaven. Here on earth, I do what little I can, and make sure the circuit breaker pops when the surges come.

Why haven’t agreed [unintelligible] coalition on Iraq? Obviously from the Central Americans [unintelligible] on of the key things [unintelligible] problems for a long time, particularly in Costa Rica [unintelligible] expropriations [unintelligible]. Can you give me an any sense of what the U.S. is going to ask for [unintelligible]. Back on Chile, can you give us more [unintelligible] about whether you think there will be some time. And also, [unintelligible], as a practical matter [unintelligible] cool off [unintelligible]. I am clear on the commitment of the U.S. to trade. Are you going to be able to sign this agreement, without exceptions because [unintelligible]? Our good friends in the European Union that have over thirty, have tended to do them in a more [unintelligible] fashion [unintelligible] lifting sanctions to Iraq. We’ve had interagency discussions about the ability to move those processes forward and I’ve, frankly just assume that those issues will get taken care of as we move forward here. [unintelligible]

Let me know when you, Aargh the Pirate, are back from your tenure as bilge rat in the Moluccas.

“Sure I’m a musician, Broadway Sammy, but what I really want to do is dodge the buckshot of camel-raping statue-smashers through the ruins of Pasagardae.”

Among many other unjust things, I had such eructations with my email system(s) that I almost spontaneously evacuated my ass of 2.3 gallons of blood to the sound of a two-by-four cracking. Thank goodness for La C. S. P. and S.A. J.-H. They herded me into a corner at the end of a broken rake and kept me there until the sobbing subsided. Hopefully my rage, focused into a laser of hatred that could cut diamond, didn’t put Li’l Timmy Unmeaningness-Bavardage III off his (endlessly baragouin-filled) lunch.

New York preys on my mind like a brain beetle. I would love to move to New York and become Indispensable. At the very least we’re going to come out and stalk about proclaiming the Second Spanish Republic established again, in our pants.

By the way, have you been visiting people you know or just wandering around like a little muffler-clad ion, sobbing in the blue twilight?

He has a special room in the basement of his brownstone devoted to “paraphernalia” for the expiation of sins. Of particular note are the sinister and painful “cry boots” filled with cinnamon rolls and tacks.

He danced about in a clown costume singing “I’mba liddah cluwin” and babbled about Amos and Elijah then signed an autograph for Fano Kanini. Unfortunately he miswrote it, “To Fiona, Tom Cahill” instead of “Fano Kanini Enterprises, North Platte Nebraska.”

Don’t read Seferis and Cavafy in one night near flowers (one night near normal voices?): [‘aesthetic’ may be wrong, though it’s the word I meant]

Quarter-tone Ibiza rump waggle is pleasing.

The writing when written by the writing writers gets written and written in a written fashion.

When did you say Argh the Pirate was coming back from his tenure as bilge rat in the Moluccas?*

(*Turning and turning…)

I don’t think there’s any need to book a room. If I get a message back saying: Joe is creep, no Joe, then we will look for the Do-You-Got-Five-Dollars-For-Gas-For-My-Car-I-Godda-Get-To-Gilroy-Man-My-Fuckin-Cousin-Was-Subos’ta-Put-Gas-In-Man-Phew-Wait-Til-I-See-That-Mutherfuckr-Again-I’ll-Fuckin-Kick-His-Ass Motel in downtown Boiling. Until then, presume a nestling into the sneaky sheets of downtown Kangauterus Inn.

We have spent the day acting out Salem’s Lot II with apple dolls. Let me know what time you want to come up. Nothing clear, all murky. So remain perfectly still or the monkey-hammer mobster hamster monsters will get you.

I’m glad I increased your happiness momentarily to the edge of madness. And very much congratulations on being an official superstar of law. Now, employ others and leverage your B2T bleeding-edge baco-power. Perhaps you can “go public”. And by “go public” I mean pee, pantsless, on the Rax window during peak dining hours. Did you say you saw “The Hunted”? Or, as I call it, “Go Get Killie McDeathstab.” We just saw it — a bit rough in the beginning, but worth seeing. If you like neck-stabbing. And who doesn’t? As far as perishing goes, we soon shall.

***

My guts are feeling like they’re going to herniously rocket out the bottom of my pants each time I load the wheelbarrow with 80 pound rocks and try to keep them from careening down the drive into the street where fatal jollity would ensue. I never tire of hearing some 89-times-higher-income-than-average Egyptian or Jordanian babbling about how all his country’s/region’s problems are a result of the Hamburglar.

I think Wednesday is fine. I thought you would probably say things like, “No don’t try to dig through that NASA-grade ceramic with that brittle old maple leaf, try this ‘shovel,'” and, “Instead of using blood from your smashed wiggler, use this ‘concrete,'” etc.

I am a South American president who has instituted soon-to-be-unpopular ‘austerity measures.’

Jennifer Lopez has been seen engaging in analingus with John Goodman in a Trailways bus station bathroom in Escondido. I don’t think I told you of the box that lay upon the soiled mattress: “Men Who Crave Big Tits.”

What’s the news — if any — on Basel, the Scorpions and evangelical Protestantismo? I mean, they empty out utility drawers onto women and call it clothing. Unfortunately, they are not in on their own joke. A “biopic” starring Christine Ricci’s tender crotch meat as “Tatiana.” I think it contains a message that is relevant to us all.

Do you remember the phrase “Scheldahl jog index attachment for poly bag machines: saves labor, gives accurate controllable bag count”?

I saw a giant shoe carved out of wood. But I can’t remember where…

Listening to them. I feel… content. Like someone adjusted my unit in the subway. I know! Somewhere near normal voices. Complex. Shiny. Now I’m reading a report called, “Credit Ratings Agencies: Their Impact on Capital Flows to Developing Countries.”

Sometimes I think I’m the luckiest girl in the world!

***

It sounds a bit obvious, but it’s late and I need a root canal. People with Verdi opera box sets would punch themselves in the face if they heard it. I hate other people and am superior to them. (I feel a Greek tragedy coming on…) The main thing is this dark wonderment.

All the old story books have pictures of medieval blonds with swords in blousy, vested, belted and embroidered Swedish-looking folk costumes. Someone forgot to tell them that art now consists of walls of meat and rooms full of gravel and strobe lights.

It sounds dismal, though, for what its worth, the young women are gorgeous, venal and half-retarded. Also, it’s not fair to gays.

I accept your offer, but with one caveat: A year ago I accepted a three-week job at Hedonism III, where I am to be the featured DJ at Club Public Assfuck. Their joint was across the robot insect black glass lake from Kangaroo. Larry Ellison in his polished red wood with dolphin sculptures and tinted glass windows office shooting loosed badgers (or was it bats? I think badgers – I’ll check) with a crossbow.

Sure. Fun.

The mercury has eaten through your ganglia and you think-machine go brokey. My mother ‘n’ law is here watching Giselle while I nurse a daiquiri in the cycle barn. Later perhaps coffee. No. How you say? Ah, yes. Imminent. Or not. No, wait. On the verge. Kind of. I’m all like whatever. It’s not important of course. (I took words out and it got better.)

I have the din of the Vikings due to a splody toofie. In the meantime, keep me abreast of developments both at your factory and any others you know. I feel up for anything, including pounding randomly on a keyboard, yelling “paradigm” and cashing checks. Damn it. I get crazier with each passing day.

Thanks for your vote. The main thing is this dark wonderment. And that leads of course to the question, asked with acute embarrassing discomfort: What in the name of God could I possibly have been thinking?

Forensic anthropologists’ all-inclusive adult resort trip to 14 mass graves in Iraq: They’re going to back up the dump truck and offload a ton of gold staters. I remain covered in a brittle sheet of frozen rain.

***

We have lost the accoustic cheese boots (and the anal jammies). Here are all extant boot lines. And here is the reconstitution of the lost ‘bishop’ poem, perhaps a template for your boots. Pay particular attention to Joe’s “your smoking TV shoes and/Hard spun chocolate bonnet frighten the boiling dirt.”

“The Journal of the National Wrestling Federation”: a wad of Miami-based ex-spooks and throat-cutters. I probably won’t even go through with it. It’s just an idea. Though it is a “pleasant” one. Of course, if I do go through with it I will need a gun. A big one. And I’ll need to fire it. Indiscriminately. IN MY PANTS!

Loved you in Charlies Angeles: Full Throttle. I may have suggested that very thing. I am all like whatever. Think-box no workie. No never workie ginn. Someone with a comp-lit degree wearing a diaper pouring chocolate on a Bible and babbling about the war maybe?

I went to San Francisco. Now I talk to grave robbers. Tee-hee. I believe that file contains all the Bolo-sweepings. It has been well established that you cannot create a successful magazine without applying a thick layer of lip-smackin’ spreadsheets. To say otherwise is rank crazy talk. (Kneeling on sidewalk, chips set carefully to the side, hands cupped around mouth as though speaking to someone who is hard of hearing, yelling at pine cone:) “Trebek’s truck became airborne for about 40 feet.”

Computers are bad people. Only people are worse people than computers. I have made a vow never to make sense again. Should some flashfire expose it to more air, perhaps a corpse-flower garden would explode over the whole of Europe.

I sent Burbly McFroufrou a note at Girlypants Rep. My all-found-object hand-puppet version of the Trojan Women looks like it will finally become a reality. If I decided to do a doc on my gypsy friends or on my Salvadoran ones, would you be interested in camera-manhandling? Kamryn Mannheim? Cameron Diaz? I imagine your rock life will intersect your university life and, like matter and anti-matter, explode, ending all life. That would be sad. Perhaps both being and non-being would end, leaving only cheddar fries, which are delicious.

***

Can’t hack another adrenaline injection into my paper-thin stomach lining. I’m going to New York to shoot heroin. Dealt with the stereotype-correct apple doll lesbian green party slum lord. Showered for hours afterward. Please confirm that Woodrow did not carry it away for herring and cat-hookers. The Honolulu doo-hickey is still alive, but it’s important to remember that Hawai’ians are lazy, flap-jawed do-nothings. I’m sure the publisher is bent on wholesale renovation and, after stringing me along for two months, will hire some half-literate monkey in a man-smock to keep the thing at exactly the same junior high school level it’s been coasting on since day one.

(In my browser it WAS a picture of a 1977 issue of “High Society” magazine. Now, for some reason, it is a helicopter.)

You sicken me. I ate railroad ties encrusted with Cajun spices with S., Joe and S. The river lurked like a pantless deacon in the alder brake. Albumen. I genuinely like it.

In the interest of clarity I ought to have said: It was a momentary eructative bloviliation, excreated in dementia, exordiating a recrudescence of quietude. Oil-stained dungaree-wearers downloading hot log-rolling action? No — it just hunkers there malevolently, daring me to do something… naughty. No, there will be no magazine. And no pants that are unfilled with dipping sauce and/or foam. You’re a very sick man. And insane to boot. Try crushing Oxycontin and mixing it with Crystal Light in a Moroccan tea glass. As the sages used to do. Rinse, repeat. Looks like everything’s going to be all right.

One song was weedle-weedle-weedle what the fuck is that – Funhouse. Rock and roll’s about handjobs and baking pies? I’m glad to biographize your innards but it’s Jessica Alba I mean. Perhaps you are the Man-Alba. You totally wish. In the Rite Aid parking lot I was ashamed and terrified someone would hear. Congratulations. We will buy metallic puffy quilted jackets and walk upon the beach. I have heard the merbalungalungalunga singing each to each. Squeal. Wickawicka.

“Launch bark seldom seemed so tranquilizer freedom,” as the great poet once said in his universally reviled “Morpheme Tales.” I have to laugh. I’m going to mow the lawn every day and stop hoping for a pretty dolly. I may unearth one, but not if I’m playing house with every badger-in-a-hat that comes along, and it may take the head off, of course. Which is all a fancy way of saying: I got excited enough to cheat the switches on my vision of things as they really are. Energy, as has been proven by mathematics, is best applied to individual undertakings. At a point a thing stops being a ‘dream’ and starts being a sad velvet smoke hole in the market cutting out headlines with an Exacto knife. Time to be successful and normal. Perhaps I’ll fret over pre-schools and/or take seriously my organic newsletter for a small planet.

What’s the news on evangelical hootenannies down south? Bushmen. Scorpions. But, being slender and pretty, I can get away with murder. I’ll send out my kit out today to “Bambi Wulf.” Or maybe to “Tinkerbell Puma” or to “Wilma Grizzlybear.” It is the real antidote to the cancer of franchising. I don’t care if anyone else is on board.

If she calls back tell her I am not interested in her terrible little Springfield Shopper and to only hire me if she wants it to feature “hot girl-on-girl action,” dada poems and vituperative, chain-rattling looney-tunes about how The Gargoyle is bent on polluting our ice cream rainbows with honey-flavored crepuscules of raiment, ably assisted by the Assistant Director of Public Works for the county of Maui and that only investor-ratings by larval aliens will de-probiscisize the Natal if every citizen is pounding back the feral pig ratio 18:3.

***

Not sure if this is a modernist building whose construction makes classical references, or a pastiche, like the facade of an Ethan Allen furniture store. You be the judge. I think bounds sounds better than bonds and carries bonds in a way bonds can’t carry bounds. Also, I pluralized when I should have desanguinated…and variants thereof and appended thereto the person of the person is so and so or whatever. I rest my case. Because the mortal coil is the only place where Life can exist, I choose the new math. I love to fondle Cycladics, though. I think you know what I’m getting at. Here’s a poem I wrote about a Praxiteles sculpture of Hanson in the Louvre:

A citizen of the world and yet, paradoxically perenially American, I remain, your friend. How do I get myself an office in Paris, approving tones to the rest of the staff? Columbia as the next step in the interview process everything I had ever seen, read or heard about the place for a Latin American analyst position out of Miami for the radio to be entitled, “The Diary of an American I am laying the groundwork for the master plan.” At one in the meantime, in London I received a note from the Mouff’, saw Les Portes du cimitiére by Chagall into these things? Paris was the reward for the trip. Jewish Museum, the Winged Victory of Samothrace at the lead analyst at the Ackerman Group that they wanted Louvre, Derain at the It was like L.A. in the sense that Luxembourg on my shoes. “Monster.” Out in hipper than thou bars in the Bastille, shopped for food point I had the mud of Buchenwald and the chalk of the Pompidou. It did not feel foreign at all. They also have someone in a cafe in r. de l’Abee de l’Eppe found out I to hire me for $500 to write a country report on a poet (whatever) and promptly broadcasted it was true in living color. I am planning a series of pieces. We walked in the Luxembourg Gardens, ate at cafes, hung Yes, we want to live there. It felt like home. Jesus.

Very well, then: If every shazbot had a qord in it that subsequently provided the title of the next (ie, “dots” in “Spank” turns to the title “Dot” and Sensual/Bodies) and the last provided that of the first, then, well… that would sure be something, wouldn’t it? Circular. Telephonic. Also, this is the best of modernism. If the project is up to snuff they’ll fly me to Miami where I’ll ride speed boats with hit men. Sorry, I should have said: Dirty enough to justify the bottle brush. That’s not quite right either. Dirty. Bottle brush. — You get the picture.

***

I understand you are looking for a decrepit, embittered, cynical writer, preferably surly, socially inept and soiled, whose contempt of the public is exceded only by his disgust for his own profession, and are willing to pay him the kind of wages that would make San Jose in 1999 look like Appalachia in 1932. Voila! C’est moi. If Pittsburg is the kind of place where a man with so much squandered potential can fritter away his last few self-medicating months foisting outright lies on a credulous public before he bounces, pantless, off the corner of Wiener World into a lunchtime crowd of po-faced secretaries and stolid burgers, I’m your man.

Ha ha ha. I am funny.

No, seriously, I’m slender, pretty and have my whole life ahead of me. The coming years will be a sun-lit parade of joys experienced and lessons learned. Why not experience and learn them in Pittsburgh? In between my scrupulous and principled drive to inform the upright and optimistic inhabitants of a great land’s most lovely city (Paris on the Allegheny), I can launch my drive to remove the terminal “h” from the city’s name and enjoy the resulting day named in my honor. I think I have finally found a place to call home, and you have found a writer to call “Curt.”

You may start loving me today.

***

I am going all out to squash hope.