photo of me out of focus

Back at the time I knew I would remember standing there looking at Toronto. The Sun wasn’t yet down but it was getting there. That is when everything is pretty. But cars and highways are utilitarian. The beauty goes inside to hide.
Oh yeah, I set out for what?
I was an anarchist and wow what a story that tells. The other day I read how individualistic anarchy was not a philosophy much, it was a literary invention, convention? The point struck me easily.
In the past I had learned and said that the problem with anarchy was that it led to isolation. I did something right because I am not completely isolated and am married and all that is wrong with me is technical.
Let us not lie and try any at all for any fictions.
Errands destroy my poetic voice. I couldn’t get the bill paid on what I created. I have to pay for my name to exist for me to use my name in the web world I have to pay servers and registrars, and they get confused. I get confused.
Technically out of focus is a confusion of the light.
Making myself into a wise man I would read the Bible and say then “Saint John was all about light.” So then some priest will say all of it is all about understanding the will of God as being light. Light as being the understanding of what we are supposed to do when we are supposed to do it.
All the time back then I wanted to make movies and I had a camera and I shot documentaries of course. Shooting pictures or talking on the phone takes more time than you think.
Now a talk on the telephone is like what an in person visit used to be.

This is at the North Carolina Museum of Art.  There are some good works owned by the NC Citizens.

I got angry with a guy who was digging in the scraggle at the end of Pleasant Dr. here in Carrboro.  I’ve been wanting to do things and I can’t go far so the end of the street is attractive land.  I’d want to put a store at the top of the hill.  I thought some lighting on the trail down to the parking lot of the Estes back apartments would be a called for good thing.

The last time I’d cared anything about any of it to find out about any of it the reason told for no lights was that the city (town) didn’t own it.  Then I thought the apartments owned it and weren’t pushed to put any lighting there, so it didn’t happen.  Then I talked to some girls, pretty girls, who said the anarchists who don’t have a leader but have regular meetings own the land.

I called on the phone once and got a message machine and left a message.  Nobody called back.

So I saw this guy digging over there and walked over while buttoning my shirt all up and struggling to do it since I have pain and it hurts to walk far, 50, 75 yards is far.  Walked past the McQuires Christmas elf and the pin oak that has survived.  Arrived then at the end of Pleasant Dr. where the man in blue muted cloths was digging with a maddox what really didn’t make lots of sence.

The handle on the maddox was very old gray and was so that ungloved hands would get hurt quickly with much use.  Looked like it had been laying against an outside wall for a good while.  He had barbershop cut hair of medium length gray.  His face was long and wider around the eyes with a revealed forehead.

My curiosity has been up with all these ideas swirling as I walk more and more.

I want my drivers license back bad.  The surgeon doesn’t want me to drive my wife says.

So I had made it down to the end of the street and asked him, “How you doing? You own this land here?”

He looked up finally as I stood at the edge of the 15 foot that is the circle of our personal space.  Even in the urban crush we are aware and look at and out for whatever is in that circle.  So you start from there.

“I live just over here.” Pointing with the back turn nod of my old head and as I am open handed with nothing in black sweats and a gray gentleman’s shirt as my wife knows to dress me as much as a gentleman as possible for the old and knarled of hands.  I stand.

“I don’t feel like answering your questions.” He said in his crabby snarly way there.  So I moved a bit few two and a half feet forward and said, “Why not?  I just live right over here on this street?” and I meant it see, for we are obviously to me neighbors and in my world you want to know and get along with your neighbors who are typically okay and open to talk with when outside in sight in public.

I am not sure exactly what I said before I said, “Well I’ll keep my eye on you.”  and started to leave off.

He said “You better watch it friend.”

“I’m Not, your friend you short little son of a bitch!
He said, “I feel threatened, and I know what to do when I feel threatened.” and ran off by me with the maddox and handle there as I made sure to be in the strike distance then to be myself and of my ground and not afraid, but moved on as he went into then the front door of the second of the two buildings of a compound as the last then there at the end of Pleasant Dr.

I can’t run or walk but so fast and was worried and embarrassed that I couldn’t move quicker and had nothing so that if he wasn’t going for the phone to the police and was going for a gun I was going to be in range for longer than I wanted.

When I got in my house which is the third on his side and the second on my side of the street I called the police and told them my address and that I had had words with one of the neighbors and had my gun and wanted them to come over.

It took them about 15 12 minutes at least to come as I collected my needed things which were a phone and an ink pen and a pad of paper and a tape recorder like machine that is a sound recorder.   They had asked me to leave the pistol inside.

“Yes of course.”

Three cops showed up and one was a younger guy near oval small headed with stubs of hair and a short long haired woman who looked 15 pounds overweight and confused as  the younger came up and then in the un marked car hanging back was the older cop who later had to take over when all was gone on too long for my tastes and judgements.

I’m 61 now, and not some jerk ass kid.  Really truly if this guy was going to call the cops on me I was not going to just sit and wait for them to maybe show up, but call myself and say I was ready to talk about this.

It is good to be above and I was on my porch looking down on two of them.  They had been alerted that I could be armed and my pistol was just inside the door, though still in the holster flap down.

“Mind if if give you a body search?”

Well actually I sort of did but said, “Sure okay, and this officer whose name I don’t have gave me a body search pat down in my clothes that are all pliant and don’t hide much well like jeans and a jacket might.  I don’t even have a belt on.  So I am patted down while the girl, watches.  Girl Officer.  This girl isn’t more than there.

“What is the problem?”  – Did this get said?

Well I told them I wanted them to come over and put on this show to satisfy this guy who was obviously a high strung touchy sort who if they felt threatened was creating this sort of interaction and I felt might eventually or in the past be the sort to hurt people.

“I’d like to be able to walk down that way and will maybe have to carry my pistol.”  Oh no you know that got a rise out of them.

“We don’t want you to do that.”

“I can do that legally if I want and show it.”

Now the taller old man is in on it and he is all sort of agast.  Some time back I’d got to feeling that we ought to be able to have legal any weapons same as the cops can have, as if it is legal to have the same as they get like now they can get assault and sniper and body armor weapons and protections civilians aren’t supposed to be able to have like even the knife they can get that will full slide out a blade faster than a switch blade thought about.  Cops can get knives to fight with you can’t.

Did you know that.

“Yeah, but it is true some people get all excited if they see a gun.”

Low and behold the younger asks, “Do you have a carry permit?”  And I said well then .”Yeah I ought to get one, but they cost 300 bucks.”

The face is acknowledging then yes that is an expense.  “I guess I ought to get some pepper spray.”  Which we can all agree is a better idea for constant carry.

“I got that for my wife.”

So then that is some of the story, longer than I wanted of my interaction with the neighbor at the end of Pleasant Drive, next to the little shack neat house of micro living space there for sale no one ought to want with such a neighbor.

Lots of people live around here.  This is a real dense neighborhood.  They need lights down the trail.

Earlier I had said that that little bit of scraggly woods between the back of the apartment complex and the dead ended street was part of what would keep us sane.  Too much concrete is bad for your mind.  Well that that is ugly flat with no story etched in as detail.  In Gramercy Park of NYC there is a building that has basrelief designs eyelevel for you to look at as you walk by.  The architect knew what he was doing.  The building is undistinguished, but then friendly for no other reason but that to be of that spirit there.

It is now just God and Man in competition.  So I see it.

I told my wife that back in tribal times days something like that I could raise up my tribe and go and kill him and take his land.

They just came and murdered Fred Hampton. Nelson Mandela they put in jail for a long time and then they let him out. He had a “Party”. He was allowed a wife and a life somehow. For some reason they didn’t murder him like they did Fred Hampton.
Fred said that the System was strong enough to withstand his loss. There were people who got these primitive video cameras and shot him talking. Video Freeks? I think that is what they called themselves. I’ve looked at the tape and read the Wikipedia story about Fred Hampton.
But the Black Panther Party, and it’s “System”, wasn’t strong enough to withstand the loss of Fred Hampton.
Chicago hasn’t been able to withstand losing Fred Hampton.
(Those early video cameras were difficult as hell to operate and getting on all this time to have saved the images and been able to transfer it onto youtube, is something i applaud as a feat.)
I’ve never met a person with so much charisma myself. The man was what they talk about. He got up one day and started feeding children before they went to school. This was on the South Side of Chicago in 1968, 1969, when he was murdered in a drugged sleep. Cops came in and shot the guard and machine gunned the place killing Fred Hampton in his sleep.
A traitor had been paid to put barbituates in the food. That guy committed suicide like a Judas story.
The story now is that J. Edgar Hoover told Chicago to kill him and they did. That was Mayor Daley and Hanrahan the way I remember it. Guys from Kenwood went and looked around the apartment where Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered and said all the bullet holes in the walls went the wrong direction.
My Uncle and Mother had decided I could go to school on the South Side with them and I got to go North from Greensboro to Chicago and go to school. Out of that came two scholarships. Even going to school in Chicago was a scholarship. You could call it a scholarship within the family.
High school in Greensboro, North Carolina was hard to take. I’d gotten thrown out of class for saying to the FBI history teacher VietNam was second to the war in the Philippines when American troops shot and tortured Filipinos in 1899. I’d been thrown out of school for three days. I went and moved rugs around in a fast money rug sales scheme. “Some people will say these rugs aren’t real Persian rugs after we are gone.”
Greensboro was where lots of Civil Rights actions had happened.
It is a big old fine old suburbs town these days. It is a good place for white people with money who fly around.
I had a friend there whose brother had gone to the war. He was all fucked up. The brother and him really and I drifted away because my friend was mean.
We get mean.
They had a nice house. The mom kept things nice. His dad had a club foot. He was a trumpet player. They had a basement band. So many things happen so fast when you are in high school. Somehow you find people nearby and hangout and watch TV and you are smarter than anybody.
In two years I don’t think I saw his father twice. His mother I hardly ever saw either. The house was a great house though really. There were all these great houses all over the place back when I was growing up. There were enough rooms in them. Now houses and apartments never have enough rooms in them.
Mom didn’t mind chasing us with a broom to get us to go to church. There are lots of things moments not remembered by any of my interior. The photographs I took, or have seen remind me of girls and cars. Drugs were important then and so we were after pot and peragoric and LSD and I wanted to take movies.
In Chicago I have to say my Uncle was a hero for being in the church that was anti war. One of the priests, these being Episcopalians called us in the US the New Nazis, because of Grant Park riots and the Viet Nam war.
I did LSD there in Chicago and wanted to tell my Uncle what I was thinking about and he was horrified and told me to go to bed and sleep it off. I watched Bob Dylan’s hair go out off that poster all over and was disappointed.
He is still mad about me smoking pot but never mentions the LSD?
My mother died a few months ago and he came for the memorial internment service and said he almost sent me away for smoking pot. 47 years ago and I don’t feel sorry about things. He writes a blog about worries about how they prayed. I can’t seem to be nice enough.
Grant park was where I was in a discussion circle with Fred Hampton doing all that corny chanting and talking about how there was a cause and we were the people and we had the power.
I was sorry I’d missed the riot.
There was nobody like him ever. Not that I’ve met. Maybe near Nelson Mandela you can feel his spirit and energy and goodness and spirit. Some people leap off the screen like they say. Some people get photographed in the first place because of how they are.
At least in South Africa they didn’t just shoot Nelson Mandela like they did Fred Hampton.
Then Governors and Senators all say that they invented Head Start. Every University level Sociologist I ever talked to knows who Fred Hampton was. They all say he was the one.
I hear that J. Edgar Hoover heard about Fred Hampton, and determined he was an existential threat to “The System” and had him murdered.
The Black Panthers really couldn’t do without him. They became crude and stupid and are gone dead in gun fights and prison. The murders mattered. Staying alive was too hard and is really a lot harder for non conformist than it looks. Being Black or Mexican in the US is illegal. Smoking and selling pot is illegal and they arrest you and put you in jail for it if you are Black or Mexican.
60 thousand have been killed in the Drug War the past 5 years gone. For most of us that is a statistic and really it is coward killing being done considering there would be more honor fighting the governments.
But I am wrong and lying because a lot of that is deaths from mobster to GI of Mexico. Mexican Police and Mexican army guys are killing the cartel guys who are well armed and live there in Mexico and kill people nearby.
The hippies went into coke. Coke is the worst thing that happened to my generation.
The literature said it wasn’t addictive.
If it hadn’t been for the top guys getting into coke, things would be different in this country.
But I don’t understand how Kanye West goes off singing rapping and all these people have heroes like Martin Luther King who had Charisma like my hero Fred Hampton and he got assassinated too. Martin Luther King was about to give up on non violence last I heard.
Crack is the underground drug they use to help them keep up and go on rapping, isn’t it?
Crack makes people mean doesn’t it? Sure did seem so. The art coming along is ugly.
Before crack it was reported in the papers when a cash carrying cab driver in NYC was shot. After crack they had to give up listing all the crack cash motivated murders is what my cab driver from NYC friend told me.
Last time I was in Chicago I didn’t want to be on the South Side.
I don’t understand how Kanye West in particular has never sung about Fred Hampton. Nor really do I understand even why Barack Obama hasn’t ever mentioned Fred Hampton, when I think about it.
It just shows that murder works for the system that is dominate and in power better than you want to believe.

Hillary Clinton got over 400 thousand dollars for a speech somewhere. I’ve been watching how the politicians do things seriously for a long time. I’ve given some speeches.
I like to give them with the rocket launchings. All of that is a fun time for everybody.
Focused fireworks the rockets are. My friends would build them and we would launch them together in Thompkins Square Park. I miss my friends. I went broke and changed vices and got sick and here I am.
Maybe we will reconnect on facebook and they will want me to paste and copy and cut and other things I don’t do.
Awe nah, I don’t mean it like that all the time it don’t turn out like that all the time.

I’m re-reading Ben Franklin’s autobiography. He describes and names people. It isn’t fiction. “We were friends for life.” He says stuff like that a few couple of times.
He was pro print more money.
As a printer I can see how he would be.

Anyway to get to some meat in this speech which is not done so much to make me personally rich, but to inspire my comrades, followers, friends and family.
(Family?, yeah right.)
Okay all right you got your troubles I got mine.

Making money is an important thing for me and the rest of us to do. I figured out how to make it from insurance. Making it from insurance is humanistic and helpful all around. I’ve written in the past about my admiration for triple A and said I wanted us to be like them. They have done well and do well and so I’m not walking around trying to reinvent the wheel.
We can make a dollar based on the shared equity of the whole life policies we will all own as part of being Transcendians.

Later after the speech I will answer questions.
I’ll be asking for volunteers who work for insurance companies to make one for us too.
I’ll be saying: “Insurance agents in the house?”

So this is the meat of this speech. If I go on, which I can, I’m a professional, I’ve done 45 minutes without a script, you will get confused. Some of you will get confused.
But the point is that a Transcendian dollar based on the lives of its citizens will have an inherent worth easily understood and added up. it will be finite and infinite as the spirit of man.
It is further Humanistic.
A Bitcoin is not humanistic, nor is silver or gold. All that money is finite.

For now the work of Transcendians really is to make the money from insurance on and for Transcendians.
My sister told me it was too hard.
The rewards for working in insurance seem to be great for her as an underwriter but she works for another company and has worked for about 5 and wants to retire ad I’m a poet bad mouthed at turns by my mother.

“He better watch asking for money for his schemes.” My mother is quoted back around in the dysfunctional way.
It had been my rule not to ask her for any money for any of my schemes.
I’d been impressed with family businesses and tried to create money making schemes.

Here on this site there is a store for one of them. That is the Xtree project which is a poster for Xmas. Just a simple thing is all that is. I remembered thinking of it after registering my screen play with WGA up on the EAst Side of the City one day when soon Christmas was coming and we lived in a small apartment and my girl was all excited for things like a child like that.
She wanted decorations. I threw blinking lights under the table. It was cheery enough.
So when I was losing my strength and my job I worked at making the Xtree cling poster till it is made and you can buy it.
Advertising has been problem.

This isn’t insurance.
We all know real businesses and countries have insurance.
Did the Dutch invent capitalism as we know it? It isn’t all bad. They uphold their humanistic values but don’t practice with arms enough. They are always fighting back the ocean. Things aren’t looking too good on that score for lands people.
I used to fly around with Ben Overhaugh who got up the money to learn to fly pulling cars out of canals in Amsterdam.
WE need insurance.
There are lots of things to use it for.

For the network of Transcendian offices on all the international airports with passports for dangerous and wonderful places we will attract citizens with the best all around deal as a company country and work of art for everybody.

I hate the CSA.

It was 16.80 when I looked at it and then since I made calls to Schawb and then got through and did it via Ameritrade the price of course went up.
It is all my fault. GE is going up too. That also is all my fault.
Graphene, Bucky Balls will make the greatest “ink” for 3 D printers and that is why GE ought to go up cause they bought it all up far as my studies showed. The Universities get teachers and students to do all this work and then sell it to big corporations, don’t they? They do.
I’ve not fully got my head wrapped around that.
When I was about 12 my Scout Master’s father, who was a stockbroker living in Elon College, NC gave me advice in a living room, his and that family’s living room. A perfectly light blue living room of 1965? Yeah about close enough.
Al Noah came from a rich family and his dad you know knew everything about money right.
So well then I paid attention and for lots of my life I was of course locked out of buying stocks and bonds.
What Mr. Noah said in fact was that you ought not buy any stocks unless you had 5,000.oo dollars, and could afford to lose it.
Personally I don’t think this was particularly great advice.
Sure enough you can’t win all the time with stock and bonds, but when my father died he left us all 2,5 hundred dollars that he made in about 5 years of investing in stocks and bonds as directed by his last boyfriend Pete.
I am sad over lots of things but impressed in consideration.
I don’t drink, can’t hardly stay awake and work at anything for more than 3 or 4 hours effectively anymore. Turning my head is dangerous cause of the possibility that my spinal cord will split from bad pressure. I take a pill everyday to keep me from uncontrollably twitching.
They, the Feds really won’t let me smoke pot or they will take from me all pain management which really would me lots of vomiting and twitching.
People with power have stocks and the fact is it is interesting, so in fact we decided we would buy a share of something as better than lottery ticket.
One we got.
I got us a share of Corning because they have Willow glass and gorilla glass. If they let it go to the Chinese and Russians and the Estonians and that bunch of industrial spies then I’m screwed for buying Corning.
All the greedy corporations are exposed in places they show people with every motive to steal how to do what is important to control for the company.
So Corning not being much different is cheap probably because it is obvious they have ossified attitudes and let it go.
Stupid stuff like shipping containers as done up made into storage and offices by mini mobile is 68 bucks a share. That is no invention much, though a little, since they made some triple cam lock mechanism for the containers.
Corning glass could be making engines out of glass if they wanted. Years ago they said so.
But enough: Ameritrade worked and I got us a share of something.
On our wall there is a scratch off gamblers ticket with a maximum pay off of 5 thousand dollars. It is in a frame. You can buy the work of conceptual art for 5 thousand dollars.

Okay. About the CSA monuments. I think I want to reward those who knock them over.

I admit I can get lonely and bored. The City was good since out your door was the destination. ’89,’90, ’91 I was living in Manhattan holding on by my fingertips since there was a producers lockout. The newspapers called it a strike and got away with that. The lesson wasn’t lost on me. People who live in the town read the Daily News and he Post because they will see pictures of people they know in those papers.
But I used to go out in the afternoons and would wander over to Live Shop Die and sit in a corner and drink and shoot the shit and drink beer. They had stuff from the 60s and 70s and really odd collectables. It is an area of antiques that is unique to an era.
There are photo strips from the photo booth I loved to be photographed in with Trixie and Liz. There is a strip of me wearing my motorcycle helmet from a visit back for The Guiding Light after I got run out of Wilmington for a pro Union labor article in Reel Carolina.
I’d joined the Union IATSE.
Some of that is a : “If you can’t beat them join ’em story.”
God one night it went all out and me and Liz stayed out all night. Liz was supposed to go home with Bob and Trixie because they were a threesome and I was supposed to go home to my apartment with Katharine, but we just stayed out drinking.
Like all that you don’t remember the dialogue and have to make it up. I know I was supposed to be home for my girl and she was supposed to be with her unit but we were uncaringly drunk, stoned and hopped up possibly it being the East Village for all gods sakes in 1990.
Why be there then if you couldn’t go all out?
I was old.
Fuck we were all old in the East Village of 1987 through 1995, making fools of ourselves even being there.
Reformed for awhile once some kids asked me how to get to he East Village while I was on 5th Ave lower down and I was just pointing saying go that way towards death with half assed drama and turning away.
There were bars on 14th past A and B that I knew nothing about that Liz took me into. I wish I had some idea what there was we were talking about.
At least I remember the way the bar was like some others you know. The Village Idiot on 2nd was something.
I’d been drug in there.
But there was then walking and really the night for doing this sort of living was just perfect. Balmy.
I took her home with me and we sat on the couch and she necked me some till I was hard and took a look at it. I’ve had that sort of thing happen about three times. There were the sisters from Caracas, then Kathy, and then Liz and not that sort of just look at it and take a little touch measure by hand. Done and all. A night to remember if you can. Wish I could remember more of it.
Katharine came out and give Liz some water in a glass.
That apartment on the corner of A and 11th second floor was a good apartment.
I could look out the window and see when Sixtus would roll up the store shield and go start drinking if I wanted and had the money. What if I was home waiting for a phone call? Yeah then the phone and then the phone machine were all you needed. One phone machine filled up with cockroaches.
Phones and phone machines were all we needed.
Anyway yeah I was getting twisted like tragic all and all considering what I was supposed to be and supposed to know how to be better but there were temptations and philosophies about what was right.
I told some girl she could call anytime. I hate that bitch now whenever I think of her.
Liz and I did have a good night though.
So unrepentant Liz was anyway, and Trixie complained one time in front of me about how she had to take care of Bob’s needs.

In this letter I am responding to the concepts and worries about College Humanities Education.
The Discussion apparently flowed from Sunday to Wednesday the 6th when I posted a letter in the morning.
It is real hard to find.

Russell Scott Day Carrbor, NC

The number of times I’ve seen similar essays in my adult life is high. I had terrible math and arithmetic teachers when growing up. Maybe I didn’t know my other teachers were inferior as well.
I do know I never heard the phrase: “A life of the mind.” in any of my classrooms.
Luckily both parents had Masters in English, or the Teaching of Teaching. Too bad they hated it all and I heard them and went to work out in the streets.
This is a badly written trend piece in my judgement.
Write it over.
Read one on the same subject from ten years ago in a student paper maybe.
Let’s talk some more about the anti-intellectualism of the American Southerner whose red faced insults have led us to the twin elites of ignorance and power in a system William James warned was “delicate”.

____________________________________________________________________

William James knew he was fortunate when he taught and wrote from his position at Harvard. He is regarded as the American philosopher credited with the creation of “Pragmatism”, as a real and distinct philosophy. France has Sartre` and Camus and the US had William James. William James is most noted for: Varieties of Religious Experience. His statement that Democracy is delicate is interpreted by me to refer to American Democracy, which is Presidential Electoral Democracy. The democracy of that sort is what Hitler was able to manipulate. It is accepted that Parliamentary Democracy is more robust. Still the damage to the quality of life wreaked upon the working classes of Britain by Margaret Thatcher show that power hijacked by philosophy can be forgetful of what the mission of government is.
William Godwin the anarchist points out that most simply government is there to defend and educate.
The strength of the United States was cemented for 25 years by skills given to the veterans by the GI Bill. The death of US goodness is cemented by Richard Nixon. What a simple word goodness is, but that is what the dream of the United States really was. Justice, hard work is rewarded. Free speech is legal. Work is legal. All that then when you recognize about all left is a tradition unexcelled anywhere of free speech.

An old friend of mine keeps changing their profile picture.
Now it is one of someone pointing a gun out of the cabin of a small airplane with an old shotgun there stood in the cockpit corner.
Maybe it has something to do with 9/11, that happened today.
On the old on I was on my knees nailing in tongue and grove oak flooring.

We were telephoned and told to listen to the radio.
NPR is based on the BBC.
I am grateful for the no screaming car commercials.
At a time like that.
At a time like that what they want us to do is look at each other.

I remember Fred’s face.
Fred has no story because Fred is just a name.
Dave, okay, it was DAve for real.
Why I was spending an important and surprising day with Dave is about who;
Thought what, about me, them, the job.
There went life.

Okay I don’t like it.
I don’t like what I remember.
There ought to be more incongruity.
It would be better if there was a further distance between good and bad.

One other guy like myself was on his knees working on the floor of an expensive elevator.
It is reported as likely that the airplane fly right into him from behind.