Rosenbush Café

Warning: I do not make New Year’s Resolutions so expect profanity and adult themes in this post and throughout the year whenever the eXisTenTiaLNihLisT has control of the keyboard, which today he has.

Want my observation of the past ten years? No, well then you should be on another blog because I am going to give it to you unadorned and truthfully:

The first decade of the 21st Century was like one prolonged orgasm of nine years followed a year-long instance of blue balls. The world’s balls climbed back into her womb like a planetary transsexual.

No. I am not going to explain the previous sentence because like any good metaphor it must be examined and accepted or rejected by individual intellects.

Ya get it; ya don’t. If there is any NY’s “Devolution” for 2010 it is to continue being intentionally vague when I know I feel exculpated of all explanations. I believe in individuals thinking, dare I remind, autonomously?

And no it has nothing to do with automobiles, but nice guess….WTF? Here we go again. As a moderately successful psychic mousetrap cleaner I can sense when I write something that somewhere, someone with think something and it will be somewhat wrong. For the rest of you non-interventionist anarchists out there express joy in understanding rather than Googling “WTF?” It means “What….The…Fuck?” See, I saved you from giving Google a hit, although I used their name twice.

WTF?

I know of at least one person on this planet who does understand and she will no doubt laugh aloud when she reads it even though I shared it with her last night, out of context, because it had only left my mind minutes earlier to be jotted down onto a Mead Memo Notebook.

While many people spent last night infusing their souls and bodies with alcohol, drugs, sex and merriment, I took the opposite route by staying home, surrounded by cats, and enjoying a telephone conversation with a dear friend. We discussed myriad topics which warmed our hearts and spirits as the temperatures dropped and a light rain descended on West Ala.

It was my best New Year’s Eve ever because it was about enjoying another’s company; laughing and sharing positivity. We toasted to one another’s health and well being over the telephone: a glass of wine at one end and the other, the last jigger’s worth of cognac. By midnight, I was sitting in a pair of torn pajamas, which I had promised to throw away, but the good ones sat in the hamper, on my bed writing my final post of 2009 which went up with two minutes to spare.

Then the first decade of the 21st Century ended. No fanfare. No end of the world esthetics, not a dollop of histrionics that the human (choke) race (choke again) might finally leave the Planet Earth for the darkness of mass graves as the global trannie aborts the 3/4 useless fuck-sticks, child molesters, rapists, telemarketers, politicians, spouse abusers, haters, gender-biased flat-topped Misanthropes, who are too so brain damaged as to not realize they are Misanthropic, and a wide array of mean-spirited, low intelligent quotas religious fanatics nestled in their cock holes throughout the entire surface of the world.

There are good people, certainly, but how often are they on the cover of magazines, prominently honored for doing such good deeds as saving lives or not being pricks? Not many. The magazines display rich actors and singers who I frankly do not hate, but in all honesty, if these self-inflated and high-minded people choke on their own saliva I would not feel bad. I would never wish death on them but I would deny them dying either.

My dearest friend is marvelous: She Makes Art Speak; I have never met anyone like her in my life. Chances are she hasn’t met too many people like me, either. That is where the goodness comes into our briefest of existence in the solar system. Time is too short to manifest destinies in negativity. Who needs more hateful cretins whose only problem is themselves, rather than the hordes of others they despise?

My friend has been an inspiration to me and even saved my life – literally – and her artistry will soon be known and shared by more people than my blog because I wish it so.

So, I wish it. This is the mark of natural selection that so many of you misinterpreted with Darwin. Most of us are always evolving and societal alterations in the fabric of reality and the space time continuum have much to say about what we will be in 1,000 years.

You don’t believe in evolution? Here’s a thought. In my father’s era, he was born in 1915, most men were decidedly shorter than today’s NBA players. He was 5-8, my mother, 5-7 and I was just under 5-10. If you were near 7 feet tall do you know what you were called?

An entry in the Guinness Book of World Records, a segment of Ripley’s Believe or Not. A freak. Even language evolves. A freak in the sixties and seventies was a long-haired, pot smoking, acid taking, Viet Nam protester.

How about that?

Evolution in animals and insects is obvious if you just look at the innumerable species here today and gone tomorrow. Do you realize a giraffe evolved to have a longer neck to reach the best leaves that are higher in the tree than the ones their parents feasted upon?

There are butterflies and moths that rather than accept they are lovely to watch fluttering by have evolved to have designed patterns on their wings to fool birds into thinking: “WTF? That’s an owl, not going to trifle with that mother” so they can continue fluttering beautiful across your front yard.

Thanks to my friend, I have evolved into a better writer, although anyone who does not believe it hasn’t read this essay far enough to get pissed at the evolutionary riff. She has provided me with something that was lacking, that I knew not was needed: support.

Nothing more profound than supporting someone and in turn I support her. That is why I believe she will succeed faster and sooner than I and I am cool with that surmise. I am into myriad projects this year, none of them creative, but each of them will, if I SUCCEED, transcend the daily morbid routine of business survival and by extension provide me artistic bent with additional fuel for thought that will cost not a cent.

Our conversations were enlightened, humorous, devoid of sadness or acrimony. What makes the relationship we have forged so unique is that we are not in competition, something that fucks up more people’s lives and opportunities, and we do not castigate the other on our crafts.

What we have learned was the importance of trust and our egos have never circumvented our desires to success in the creative fields we are both fortunate enough to have been born. I know, you are thinking (and it is good that you are because whether or not you agree, for fuck’s sake, think, do not accept everything on face value or just because someone told you it was true) So, Henry was born to write?”

Yes. He was. Even as a child my imagination became my only friend and my tongue became a weapon because I was a, as I was reminded so often, “A skinny Jewish homo!”

Well, I am not gay, but I could have been or could be and why would YOU give a fuck if I was? You wouldn’t, but boy I went to school with plenty of white trash that had far too much idle time. Rather than befriend, they belittled. Instead of support, they undermined. I learned that repartee was helpful, albeit dangerous. I once got jumped by two “Jew hating redneck white trash” on the school grounds in the 6th Grade. I could have let them have their way but, as I was later told by observers, that I fought like a girl, well good for me and good for girls because I kicked, clawed, scratched and soon teachers were pulling me off both boys. I called the instigator, Kirby Sides, and yes that is his real name, by initials that will soon provide black humor for those inclined to accept it. Do I care if he is alive and somehow reads about what happened in 1966?

Not one fucking bit do I care and if I saw him today and knew it was him he would be as transparent as a wind.

If I learned anything from my father it was that not everyone will like or love you and rather than worrying or feeling sad or crying time could better spent with people who do care.

I bring up Kirby to illustrate a couple of key points that will become worthy of a laugh at his expense: his father was a Baptist Minister working at the Veteran’s Hospital, who my father knew and secondly the schoolyard fight because I was called an “N-J.” For those of you going through your Keirsey Temperament Sorter, no it did not mean Idealists with intuition and feeling and since I do not subscribe to vulgar stereotypical racist epithets or soubriquet you will once again need to think about the era, and what you have already learned about me, to realize it was a slur on two different races, one of them not even involved in the bullying. After that I called him a BTNB. The shit was on and with the help of another little bigoted minor league shit-stain, Bleuitt Thomas, who later when to Southern Miss when I did and was still a homophobic, racist waste of carbon-based material, jumped me.

Later, in the principal’s office I was confronted by a school-board sent “therapist” and since the word is composed of The Rapist, I enjoy today the perverse symmetry and symbolism that it was like being a sex crime victim because rather than there ever being a discussion of two bigger lads jumping on a smaller one, in view of a female teacher who did not stop the fight but ran into the office to get a “man,” I became the aggressor because they chose that terminology, and because I called him a BTNB.

I didn’t mention the teacher, Mrs. Nomberg, was Jewish and sided with the other boys! Who did I piss off in a past life for this I still wonder? Not really. I do not give a fuck anymore and neither should you, but it is an interesting piece of trivial that yes Jews do not always like other Jews and she will forever be an early revelation that even Jews did not support other Jews during darker days of our recent history.

My parents had to leave their jobs to come in and the other two boy’s parents could not be located! So here we are. Two bullies, one victim with his parents, a principal, therapist and the teacher. Early into the meeting, which lasted an hour, I was irritated that no adults –except my dad, who winked at me at one point – knew what the anagram meant. They should have. It was on television in commercials but somehow they overlooked it or were truly, deeply emotionally and educational incompetent.

Finally, dad told me to tell them what it stood for. Truth spoken here because the accuracy was a splendid comeuppance: BTNB: Birmingham Trust National Bank.

I was no longer bullied by these two embarrassed mentally deformed (I first wrote cretin until I realized it was a disservice to people afflicted with authentic cretinism or mental retardation because these boys were just bigots and bullies) because as is always the case the revelation got out and everyone in the school knew it by the next day. I had a schoolmate who was a stutterer who confided in me that after this event he was no longer bullied by them either so it was more valuable than I could have dreamed.
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