Officer LaDoux

Having a police badge had given me the privilege to call up people I didn’t know. All I had had to do was tell them, either when I reached them by voice or by leaving a message tucked away on their telephone answering system which may or may not have notified them instantaneously of my calling them, that I had had a wish to speak. Whether I had placed a telephone call to the proprietor of a saloon or an atavistic candy store filled with bonbons, or to a suspected chimney burglar, it made no difference at all to me. Over the years I rose in rank, retired, and spent afternoons working as a landscape laborer, raking the lawns of neighbors as a hired hand. My pension was never spent, never exhausted, and when the catarrh hit me I was as much surprised as anyone. The denouement was quick. In just weeks I was chewing on food as though it were ashes and gravel. Several rifles with painted white stocks fired their bullets high at an angle to commemorate me. At the outskirts of the funeral service was a man I had once warned decades prior and a woman together, standing arm and arm, who had telephoned the station and been connected to me in a panic once, with thin but empty smiles on their faces now.

Melodramatic Stroboscopic Picture Show In Words: A Love Affair

She had always been unhappy. And it couldn’t be helped. He loved her. And it couldn’t be helped. She fought with him that he didn’t really love her. And it couldn’t be helped. He fought back with her that he really did. And it couldn’t be helped. For ages she told him that they needed to take a break. And it couldn’t be helped. And for ages he resisted her saying that they needed take a break. And it couldn’t be helped. To try to spice things up between them, she brought an old sex book she had owned to his bed. And it couldn’t be helped. He tried to ignore the oily stains that had been on the book’s cover. And it couldn’t be helped.

She told him all her problems she had with life the next day on the phone for half an hour. It couldn’t be helped. Unable to speak a single word himself, he listened to her problems and felt exasperated listening. It couldn’t be helped. The next day after that, she did it again, filling him with her problems. It couldn’t be helped. He felt beside himself, listening again. It couldn’t be helped. She felt that they were finally at a new beginning, that she was opening up to him again. It couldn’t be helped. He told her that they needed to take a break. It couldn’t be helped. She broke down and sobbed. It couldn’t be helped. He listened to her sobbing for an hour on the phone. It couldn’t be helped.

The next day, he sought to recant their taking a break. It couldn’t be helped. She denied his request that they not take a break. It couldn’t be helped. She skipped his birthday when it came. It couldn’t be helped. He felt pain. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him text messages indicating that she was inclined to let the whole thing go. It couldn’t be helped. He panicked and missed her terribly. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him a picture of her wearing his locket. It couldn’t be helped. He felt love seeing her wearing the locket, the same one which he wore, too. It couldn’t be helped. She messaged him a picture of her engagement ring, now carefully placed in a little house of sticks and bark and stone he had once built for it for her. It couldn’t be helped.

He felt love for her, holding onto hope from that sweet picture. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him more texts telling him she couldn’t talk. It couldn’t be helped. He felt despair. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him text messages that she felt relieved and had discovered a new, happy social life. It couldn’t be helped. He felt deeper and deeper loneliness, missing her. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him messages that said she would let him him know when she could talk to him. It couldn’t be helped. He respected her request for space. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him more messages telling him to let it be. It couldn’t be helped. He sent her messages that told her he loved and missed her. It couldn’t be helped.

She sent him messages indicating that she had no intention of returning to their relationship the way it was. It couldn’t be helped. He felt some hope, that indeed they could change the way their relationship had been. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him texts that she wanted their relationship to be over. It couldn’t be helped. He sent her messages that indicated he was lonely and missed her. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him texts that said she was worried about him but would not help him. It couldn’t be helped. He arranged with her to pick up his belongings at her house. It couldn’t be helped. She agreed and told him she did not want to see him and to be gone with his belongings by the afternoon. It couldn’t be helped.

He was stunned to find every stitch and scrap, from his tube of face moisturizer that had been in his drawer in the bathroom, to his running shoes in the closet, had been already neatly bagged and boxed in the little, dark room he had worked in down her basement when he got there. It couldn’t be helped. She weeks before had removed from her sight any sign and any remnant ever associated with him from her house. It couldn’t be helped. After packing all his belongings into his car, he bought and lay dozens of roses for her in her house—in hallways, in the kitchen, on the staircase, upon her bed, and wrote her short love notes telling her he would do anything to be with her again, and drove away. It couldn’t be helped.

After therapy and work, she came home and changed out of her work clothes to go out with her date for dinner. It couldn’t be helped. After he had left, he had turned back to see her in person and to beg her to speak with him. It couldn’t be helped. Having left the front and the back doors of her house flung open, she shouted down the staircase from her bedroom that she would be right there. It couldn’t be helped. He’d rapped on the back glass door, just open enough, and called out to her. It couldn’t be helped. She came downstairs and when she saw him, she screamed and screamed and screamed. It couldn’t be helped. He followed her outside where she was screaming and screaming to her car. It couldn’t be helped.

She screamed and screamed for him to leave her alone. It couldn’t be helped. He begged her on his knees, “Please! Please! Please!” It couldn’t be helped. Her date appeared behind him in the driveway and claimed the police were on their way. It couldn’t be helped. While he believed this was not true, he also didn’t care if it had been. It couldn’t be helped. She ran to her date’s car waiting for her on the street. It couldn’t be helped. Afterwards, he struggled and fought for her for weeks. It couldn’t be helped. She held her ground against him. It couldn’t be helped. He sneaked into his friend’s house nearby who had plenty of guns and put a bullet through his beautiful head. It couldn’t be helped.

Brushing Teeth With Crest or Colgate

In a similar vein, telling people about your own plans to vote can encourage others to do the same.

There’s a science to getting people to vote

If enough money is put behind an advertising campaign to buy Crest toothpaste, there will be a tendency for people to buy Crest toothpaste over other brands of toothpaste. If enough money is put behind an advertising campaign to buy Colgate toothpaste, there will be a tendency for people to buy Colgate toothpaste over other brands of toothpaste. If there are huge advertising campaigns with spending budgets in the 100’s of millions of dollars to buy either Crest or Colgate toothpaste, it does not mean, in the end, that the slim margin of people who buy one or the other brand are buying a better brand of toothpaste.

What is means is that people who buy toothpaste have bought into the trope of advertising campaigns as being truthful: that such campaigns represent truthful states of reality which are represented by the products they offer.

From some of the well-known advertising classics, that would mean such things as:

—Mountain Dew will make you white river rafting with twenty-something year olds

—Cars will hook you up with long-legged, voiceless and sexy women; or turn you into one

—Norelco electric razors are so fun that shaving will feel as though you are sledding on cartoon snow with Snoopy

—Using drugs to give men erections will make couples feel a) monogamous; b) in love while walking around the pastoral circumference of Lake Geneva; heterosexual

Within the matter of purchasing toothpaste, there is the underlying presumption that “brushing your teeth is good for you.” Within this assumption, there is the counter-implication that “not brushing your teeth is bad for you.” So, one underlying advertising assumption is to advertise products that are to be perceived by people as “self-caring” vs. the bane of “self-neglect.”

Drinking sweet fizzy soda, driving a hot car, having a baby-smooth cheek, and a stiff cock for men—all of these are cast as desirable, human norms. All of these go into the shopping cart of both “having” and “living the good life.”

Imagine buying a product sold to you that did absolutely nothing at all, however. You brush your teeth with a paste that is just a clear gel. This gel, whether it is sold by Crest or Colgate, makes for either manufacturer of toothpaste huge profits, millions upon millions of dollars. In fact, all the millions of dollars in advertising put into steering the public that “brushing their teeth is good for them,” is easily and only worth it because this plowback returns to the manufacturers, the stakeholders in the corporation, and that corporation’s shareholders, as a steady if not predictable path of increasing margins of profit over time. So, a public concern, i.e., to have healthy teeth and gums, which is valid, is exploited in this scenario of bogus toothpaste sales solely for the good of private, corporate gain.

If the American Republic actually worked as a democracy, if there actually were anything approximating a democracy, many candidates for president would be available for the voting public, not just Crest and Colgate on the shelf. The other candidates that are? Knock off generic, or small market niche, or cave-dwellers brands, scarcely important.

In the upcoming election, one brand of gel might well be made up of confetti, minced cassette tapes, and arsenic. The other brand might well be made up of pulverized iron, minced brassieres, and gunpowder. Neither is good for you. Should either win, that person representing that party, the stakeholders in that party, and the sycophantic shareholders in that party’s system will all win. They will all profit big time. One, or the other.

While the belief that “brushing you teeth” is one that rings of truth, “voting is a civic duty” is a misleading falsehood. It is, like brushing your teeth drummed into people since early childhood, hard to get over, hard to get past, hard to overcome, hard to disbelieve.

Don’t vote. Don’t vote anymore than you would buy a tube of toothpaste whose use was not just pointless, but bad for you, and bad for everyone you know, and everyone you don’t know. Don’t buy Crest or Colgate, especially this time you think about shopping for toothpaste.

Americans, just say, “No.”

Daniel Silvacek Thurgood

The idea of making false statement had never been new to me. I had, long ago in the past, made false statements aplenty. I had lied to counsel about the serfs I had beaten, I had lied to my children about their mother’s indelicacies, I had lied to the pontiff about my faith. Such were the customs, and such were the times. Such time and such customs had relied upon those lying to lie as an expected matter of due and common course. If teleology had demanded it, I could do no better, and indeed, did not. Later on, in the face of justices, judges, juries, in the common court of daily posts, such ways of being, such presentations of self in everyday life were deemed anathema if not wholly illegal. Subjects were placed in psychological prisons, pensions were revoked, and all but the deafest sycophants became deserters. In this fallen time, in which most of us living north of the Earth’s equator presently live, there is an impetus—however—to eke away somewhere, somewhere else, where one can exist and rejoice in being less than half of nothing. To that end, I had tied both of my laces, fastening tightly beneath their crisscrossing the two tongues of my leather boots and headed alone thither.

Joy Riders, Unite!

For the most part, we should plan for life on Mars the same way we might plan for life after a nuclear apocalypse. That is, we can expect to live in underground burrows, like rabbits or prairie dogs.

http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2016/oct/09/who-wants-a-one-way-ticket-to-mars-2016/

There must be gold, oil, diamonds, copper, and lithium to even think of something so incredibly dumb. Something must be driving the itch to go there. Something must be messing with the balls of the big boys hoping to get enough lucre up to go. And, except for totally fouling the nest of this place Earth [once] called home, it is no surprise that some wonky South African punk, a generation removed from the Apartheid oscilloscope, is hungry for it.

Sort of like moving out of one shitted up chicken coop into maybe another one? For instance, just imagine anybody going family camping around the ruins of Chernobyl. No takers. But if you’ve got minerals and a way to make money (and, hell, all the externalities blowing upon the vacuous emptiness of space, who cares?!), guess we’ve got a wagon train and folks lookin’ for a new 40 acres and a mule.

Just leave all the tar, and chemicals, and waste, and unsolved nuclear pollution, and post-industrial indestructible indissolvable human debris behind for a new little place to…befoul? No, that c’aint be it! And it ain’t some kind of wanderlust. As for the science angle? Nope. It’s just death, like here. So why, Santa Claus, why? Well, li’l Wendy, iz just anotha opportunity to be lookin’ fer them free raw materials before th’other fella gits ’em first, yee-haw! Ride’m, girl! Ride’m, cowboy! Into the solar system!

Terry Hernshaw

Most of my colleagues had urged me on. They had had belief in me. Others who knew me intimately had sometimes said, upon parting, “You’re a great person, but I felt I was deceived.” That was a silly thing to have said, since I myself could not have known. The great Titanic sank. Machu Picchu is an empty ruin. The Twin Towers have fallen. Busily builders build, climbers climb, workers work, farmers farm. Canoe. Kayak. Row. A, B, C. Alpha, beta, gamma. Blessed by the great guru, I had become at peace with myself. For a minute if not for a day. My spirit I would cast across the lake as rose petals had blown in the wind. My sparkle is eternal, my shine radiant, my mother home.

Jump Here!

Now this old piece of lie, so the story goes, so the story went, it went something like this. She’d walk there and he’d walk there and then they’d get to this point on the concourse or the causeway or what have you, and as they were approaching, and this was years back, mind you, he’d go to her: “How many days would you remember me if I jumped off right here?” And she’d go something like 58 days, or a week, or 29 hours, or some such reply. And it was all in good, suicidal fun, you see. It wasn’t expected of him to jump for anything. After all, the one that had been on the brinks, the one that had been in the bin, wasn’t him. The one that loved life, why, everybody you had talked to always knew it was him. Her? Well, enough said there. There was enough medical documentation in the files to keep the Easter Bunny happy till Christmas. Of course nobody’d suspected that he’d had such a deep down mordant sense of humor that went quite that deep. But when you look at the crack in the cement, and you come to realize that through freezing and thawing, through freezing and thawing, expanding and contracting the way water does year after year, season after season, it does things to a story-teller’s own mind. See, they’ve got a mind like no other. What they think is funny, like D. B. Cooper with the made-up middle initial like that, is not as funny as it is to other people to whom story-telling is not an art but just a thing to pass the time with, you know, make a marriage go on with destroying each other in a few years. For most people, stories are just like going to the movies. They’re just entertainment. But to other people, why, they are as earnest as coyote’s eyes glowing in the dark. They’ve got a special kind of intelligence, not like IQ-wise, but another kind a lot more seeing and a lot more important than that. They can see themselves in the hunt of things, just way the coyote slipping past the last cool air of dawn most certainly smells if it cannot exactly see its own natural destiny whilst in the midst of being that very destiny. So, too, is the earnestness of the story-teller. And the way it goes, she had said forty-four days. “I will remember you,” she had said, “forty-four days after you jump.” So it got to thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and when it was forty-four, that was pretty much the end of it.

Swing that hammer, John

“It’s really refreshing to be in a group with people who aren’t completely out of their minds,” he said, according to court documents.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/john-hinckleys-return-to-normalcy-has-been-years-in-making/2016/07/30/fb761c9c-5655-11e6-b652-315ae5d4d4dd_story.html

This is pretty amazing. Ya ever been to a fish market where the big fat frozen fish eye on ice is staring you sideways in the face? So is this: so this guy goes to a place called “Retro Daddio”? I mean, talk about red flag city galore! “Hi! I’m your avuncular uncle of yesteryear coming to pay you a visit and a little pat on the knee.” And what’s that taped up on the wall, but a nice pic of hot young Jodi F. who inspired it all coz the dude lookin’ outta the corner of his eye can’t go on the Internet to do it.

He’s like stuck in the past, i.e, “retro,” you dig, and is makin’ a good impression on the proprietor, naturally. Otherwise all bets are off and the bells that ring when he opens the second hand goods store, they’re not ringing to St. Peter’s. I betcha if she’s got ‘em, ya gonna catch him lookin’ at ole Jodi there sideways glance eye-wise on the security cameras keeping all the customers street legal, coz tape and posters, they ain’t against the law to look at.

Now you just figure if he’d be going to visit Momma if 35 years ago he’d been a black guy who’d shot a president. Snowball’s chance in hell [entailments of “white” fully intended] he’d be outta prison a day, if for a lifetime.

It’s just crazy, man, crazy!

You Got What You Deserve

1     Dicks

Finally, I thought, I’m gonna get fucked.

Sometimes it’s really easy. Sometimes it takes like forever.

All sorts of shit gets in the way a lot. They’ve got girlfriends or they’ve got boyfriends or both of them or they’ve got political hang-ups against fucking or they’ve got std’s or they’re on some frickin religious holiday they don’t believe in.

But all around, I’m pretty patient. When I spot a random piece of guy I like, I expect it to put out over time, if that’s what it takes. And I understand the rules, the social-political ones that could really fuck someone over if I did the wrong thing. And that’s why I waited.

This guy, as soon as I saw him, I registered him downstairs in my little blond sandwich shop, thinking: He doesn’t belong here. This guy’s bony face and untamed bush of gray hair belonged somewhere else, but not in school. Even with his khakis and baggy sweater on, he had the wrong look for an English teacher. He had the big cock look. Teachers don’t have that. They don’t because they don’t have big cocks. They have puny cocks, puny cocks with a lot of hair mostly. They want to have big cocks, so they work in places that most girls don’t know the difference. Most teachers wouldn’t survive anywhere else. Anywhere else and the breath of the person you’re talking next to tells you how big his dick is.

Whenever I talk to a guy, I get up just close enough to catch his breath to tell how big his dick is. Or not. Most girls in high school just don’t know about that. And, being high school girls, they hardly know the difference in cocks anyway. So for puny-dicked male high school teachers, the set up is perfect. Christ! Any one of them who brings up in class themes of incestuous sex in Hamlet or an old guy humping a young chick in Chaucer seems to girls like it’s Mick Jagger whipping it out for his own daughter. Eew! Don’t say that! That’s nasty! You mean Nick Carraway is really thinking like that about his own cousin, Mr. Bigdick?  That’s nasty, Mr. Bigdick, that’s nasty! Sure, even though Daisy is the guy’s second cousin once removed and there’s like zero blood between them, girls get totally grossed out by Nick having the hots for Gatsby’s slutty Daisy and the double or treble ambivalence this causes Nick as narrator slash participant; hence the stifling vocabulary with the mid-western twang.

But, truth be told, they love it, girls love it, really, inside their pants. And they love it mostly because of the erroneous fantasy that Gatsby isn’t clean. Girls who go eew!, the same kind who go down on every guy they can but hardly ever swallow the cum, the first to fuck and the last to have abortions, they love The Great Gatsby because it is dirty, because they think it’s nasty, because they’re getting off on their perverted fantasies of Nick wanting to fuck his cousin Daisy. In high school, basically, any girl who’s more than vaguely aware that her pussy is more than just of fissure for urination, what they want is to feel the breath of any puny-dicked teacher who’ll even say the word “sex” to them. And, as a sort of a whore of the English department, not literally, just an after school flirt mostly, what I learned mostly from high school was that being a high school teacher was mostly all about puny-cocked guys trying to impress the daylights out of hardly experienced girls. And how are the girls to find out or not?

The bravest of teachers, the most brazen, who’ll slip a semi-avuncular arm around the pint-sized waist of a boppy girl coming back next year for a flattering college recummendation, he’ll still say to himself and his small dick, “No pair of tits is worth my pension.” How do I know this? I just know. It’s a sense of smell. It’s all from learning to catch a guy’s breath up close. It tells you everything. And they’re all just chicken-shit to show their little high school dicks to girls that hardly even know the difference really, even the whoriest of them. And make it sound like it’s an ethics thing, that they can’t. It’s all bluff. And the teachers all know it. But not this guy, no way. He had a wad in his pants. I caught his breath. I could tell. He was Mr. Bigdick…

Available now in paperback and ebook.

Match me if you can . . .

On sale now!

Kindle:

http://www.amazon.com/Match-Egbert-Starr-ebook/dp/B01E98WP88

Paperback:

http://www.amazon.com/Match-Egbert-Starr/dp/1942839030

Letters & Stories . . .

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Dear Izabelle:

To the extent that you “don’t like talking about yourself,” I love talking about myself. I’m a born egomaniac. Fortunately, I’ve learned to curb my voracious appetite to take over and subdue an entire dinner table with my tales and wanton arrogance, with an attentive ear. But, alas, most people would, in the end, prefer to hear my ridiculous yarns and bombast over the grayed-out tales of their own lackluster lives. You don’t seem like you’re much of a talker at all, really. I can understand that, with your looks and intelligence a sure bet every time. Me, I just went berserk, long ago and far away, with making myself smart. Sure, it got me into some interesting spots in Budapest & Saint Petersburg & Prague, but it never got me home. That was just dumb luck.

Egbert

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