LAST LAUGH CLV

At my desk in Port Aransas just back from xeroxing a 30 copies of LL #CLV I learned I had omitted one page in the manuscript draft, or call it a double-spaced page or half a page. In Aransas Pass with our mother, and Mike after our father's passing, I had been too distracted, trying to put together CLIV. I doubt I have ever left out a whole double-spaced page in a chapter of Last Laugh before.

Up in my room with a couple of CDs Madrea had made for me, or out on the deck the room opens onto, at the table there that is crumbling off balance in the elements, I had been scribbling and drinking. Medicine and I drove over to the island and ran him on the beach and got whatever mail and my better of two poor electric typewriters, and I went to using the dinning room table downstairs for the electricity to type the draft I do before the manuscript draft. I typed in the afternoons, with classical music off NPR or Madrea's CD's (some classical, and Janis Joplin and rock selections)(we like the sixties or acid stuff, but new stuff I like GARBAGE, and ENIGMA). 0penly I drank two Guinness Stouts, after having firstly a few ounces of rum secretly. I began as well in that week to ignore the morning paper and type a few lines with the expresso. It is often understood caffeine and also alcohol can allow writers to focus but my mother and siblings have considered my alcoholism. B.E. they considered alcoholic. He would not have agreed, that either of us are, they never told him he maybe was, Lyla said he "definitely was." Either way, too I was faintly bleary from a few antihistamines and decongestants, agitated from a couple of northers blowing in cedar or ragweed. It had been my error having let Lyla hear my remark that I could barely remember Xmas dinner. Xmas I had come into slight asthma and Kelly gave me pot and I gobbled pills including some shitty asthma pills and truly was drunk and stoned that day, just to relax nerves like any fiend and Lyla was to never forget I had had "a blackout" for the xmas dinner.

Post B.E.'s wake, I was of some use hangtng out, also I got my little garden on through, carrots, cabbage, turnips, and I rounded up LL #CLIV, tn about a week. One day Lyla inquired how many beers had I had - by then I sat drousy looktng at the news - I raised two fingers, and the followtng day maybe I was drousier but she waylaid me. It was late afternoon, I'd come on down from resting upstairs, dutiful Mike sat at the kitchen bar thumbing in this old hardcover book about medicines. Lyla was saying how many ttmes has she told me to never mix these drugs with alcohol. My patience went and I told her she has never before known anyone 60 years old who looks fortyftve. You only think you look so young, she said. Said I, I've seen people shoot heroin and smoke pot and get drunk and keep partying like everybody else! Mike continued thumbing in the old hardcover trying to figure something, I suppose, like should my parttcular combinations by the book kill me. I said, madness here, madness there, madness everywhere, It cracks and growls, roars and howls, like noises in a swound! What did you say? said Lyla, who is hard of hearing. Mike, thumbing in old hardcover, said, Bill is quoting something.

There are more acceptable reasons than family mythical for the black one to drink less. If I am over one ninety I get fat butt and tits and a double chin, and right now the walking around weight is 200. When I heal my sciatica I will return to some running and sprinting. When Madrea was here we with Steve and Jim stopped for beer in this nice open air bar that Steve's son Gabe tended, and a local Ki Guutherie combo, who are good, were playing. Rarely am I very drunk but I had earlier drunk a bottle of wine so came to be. The assoctation with drinking and dancing , if the music is good, came over me. Alone I was dancing, and between numbers returned to our table and fell into my daughter's lap. Nearly soon as I flopped on over into my own chair the music struck back up. Like this, I dance fine, dance easier than walking. But Lyla was fixing dinner for us and dusk we left, Jim with me and Madrea, as I would take him home. In the parking lot Kit Gutherie waved goodby and I went blank on his name, said: yeah! Getting Jim the few blocks to the Brundrett house I got lost, and quickly needing to make this turn I bent clear over one stop sign. Fortunately we were not witnessed. I got Jim to his home, never have got his comment on the event. Madrea dtd not care to drive the truck at night and I did pull in my head, this is difficult, got on and off the ferry alright and got us back safely to Lyla's in Aransas, repentant. Lyla never knew anything. I was not bleary on antihistamines that time.

My friend Rodney the dauntless gossip contrtbuted to the Olive family mythical. Post B.E.'s passing he dropped by the Aransas house and gave Lyla a rose. He is making good brew and I have been giving him my Guinness bottles. I was not there and he gave Mike two bottles of ale. He dutifully told Lyla he cannot get along with Bill. I had not raised voice at Rodney for two years or so, not going to the Men's club or Rodney's house, then a couple of months back he was gtving me some beer and getting my bottles at the Brundrett house and I engaged him in conversation and he called the Palestinians "cowards." He answered me that these kids throwing rocks at tanks are only doing so because "their parents put them up to it." Dear Reader, he is this ignorant, whether he also wishes for me to raise voice. Believe me or not no matter. This complex of U.S. citizenry is a matter rising more in the very near future. Rodney is gleeful and I told him he is brain washed. In this personal context of his that he does not get along with Bill he said to Lyla he has never seen anybody drink a beer as fast as Bill does. He is a native or Port Aransas and liar. Lyla said, yes, well, we all worried about Bill's being an alcoholic, but at least he does give you his bottles.

I have written by sound and feel. Jack Kerouac...was never the first but he crafted it very well in career. His THE SUBTERRANEANS I read several times, maybe firstly at age 18. I turned conscious, there, of styles in prose, took up also with Hemingway and Henry Miller, read the TROPIC books in 1960 in San Miguel de Allende when they still were banned in the U.S., I repeat. In a year or two I caught on it really is not that easy as in CAPRICORN to get laid (when one is in the shock of raw youth and less selective, amazing), but I was romantic and crazy and bestial and went on. On paper, within the first novel (GROW BEAT, stolen, rewritten, both carbon copy and the other lost an incarnation ago), before I quite learned to type, before quite the age of twenty, I had seen how to emote, in some clarity, before finishing getting all the words down for the book. I am a disturbed person and the first thing to do is slap it onto a page, grab the rhythm and nuances, let the mere words select themselves. Good words select themselves. This of the talent peaked in the TEXAS GANG novel I completed in the sevenites and printed 2000 coptes of in 1978. The pattern has been to scribble, get the feel, then type double-spaced, thirdly type into manuscrtpt. Naturally I have come to more consciousness of what I do. When I had the TG book printed in 1978 I could not then yet answer people as to how I did it. People would ask if this is off Vietnam experience and I would say naw I've never killed anyone this life, this is just drug inspired. I was encouraged by literate individuals to edit TG no more, but already truly I had known that much. TALES FROM THE TEXAS GANG is genetics of emotion, spirit inherent, regardless my nice parents, middle class upbringing in the twentieth century...hell, I never liked the twentieth century, and I saw the larger part of it....Were I blungeoned in the forehead and let civilised editors get at the TG book, the copies of the original 2000, or reproduciton of the original with the typos corrected, would be worth much, much more money.

By now on the other stuff sometimes I'll do a rare fourth draft. If for any reason I am having to retype stuff, lost manuscripts or maybe putting a piece online, I tend to get hung up and rework parts, and I do not care to much do this, because the act of editing peaks, the editing can go down hill the editor gone blind, like repeating a word long enough the mind blanks, it loses context, feel, naturally. Funny, without meditation, drugs or something, civilised men get stupid, got no rhythm.

These years I just about could wax like a professor. What Blackoltve writes is facile for audio. While a TALES FROM THE TEXAS GANG I could not in older age write. It has been done. I am fascinated with non-fiction.

An editor who is supremely gifted or sophisticated might work with me post Ann Vliet. Vliet who taught the novel at SWT before reading TG and read TG before we met, and too who is another who offered that TG cannot be edited, thus got my trust to carve some LL into a novel, fled the Mexican Mafia, or did so in her mind, deserted me, vanished.

Ah, anyway. Someday I'll win. I have a daughter. I'm not even middle-aged. Here, Dear Reader, I give you THE LOST EXCERPT.

"Bix also pointed out the email letters, mostly women for some reason, just saying hello, passing through, I love Texas and so on. I advised we should grant recognitton to each, at least say we apprectate it. Be they old as we or older, that women are sensible to us is good. Bix sent these several women and one or two men hellos. I thought he ought to tell each one Dr. Steve is not in the Texas Gang, but Bix felt we should not confuse people with this issue right now.
Dick Wilson had said to Dr. Steve maybe chicken bones start cuiting up a dog's stomach by time a dog is twenty years old, is how I thought maybe Wilson was toying with Dr. Steve, and too Wilson was praising the Texas Gang novel, had read it a few times.
Jackson Jones: My guess is Dr. Steve had answered his note with a blistering condemnation of you because he feels you have ravaged him unfairly in Last Laugh without a rebuttal forum.
I had Bix turn to Dr. Steve's chamber and I started to skim around but the task was great then there was this of Mahatma Gandhi had virgins give him enemas so I gave it up.
Next day at my parent's I took call from Bix: Bill, it is worse than we thought.
Dick Wilson who lives in Austin had already answered. Wilson explained he had thought Dr. Steve is Backolive. Meantime his buddy of ENIGMA in California wanted to see a TG book.
In my horror, and I listen poorly over a telephone, I did not learn what, of Dr. Steve, Wilson had even read, to think this is Blackolive. Dick Wilson said something about trying to now raise kids, and he wants them aloof of the current mob politics. The characteristic, now, Blackolive and Dr. Steve have alike...is irreverence....
I took this in. Presently Bix and I said goodby. Promptly I called back, requesting Bix email Jones to have him instantly put quotaiton marks around EAOH PARAGRAPH of Dr. Steve's I have made use of in Last Laugh.
By next day I had seen the humor. Still wanted the inserted quote marks certainly. But I was back at the value of writing the ENIGMA guy and I forwarded him my only copy of TALES FROM THE TEXAS GANG.

"There is one crime against humanity in this last decade of the millenium that exceeds all others in its magnitude, cruelty and portent. It is the US-forced sanctions against the twenty million people of Iraq...If the UN participates in such genocidal sanctions backed by the threat of military violence -- and if the people of the world fail to prevent such conduct -- the violence, terror and human misery of the new millennium will exceed anything we have known."

Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General

When at the cabin and able to get DEMOCRACY NOW off the Albuquerque NPR, I heard Ramsey Clark, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, and lesser known names on U.S. inhumanity. Ramsey Clark can be emotional and dramatic about U.S. acitvity, but the above is succint, of depth. This heads a 1999 piece on the sanctions of Iraq that Jackson found on the web and gave me past Friday when he and his mother and sister had driven into Aransas for a quick visit with Lyla, Mike, me.

The web aritcle shows some weird statistics. The Gulf War bombings destroyed 3000 schools, according to this information, yet construction materials were blockaded. A1so wheelbarrows , water pumps, agricultural supplies, heart and lung machines, books and pencils, were, or still are... bockaded.

U.S. officialdom is absurdly cruel. Insane, does not serve practicality or theory. If any bureaucracy is, the U.S. brand sounds more twisted than anything in Europe or China. The use of cluster bombs on civilians. The latest bombing were mainly supposed to get the Taliban in their caves or wherever they hid, but uncounted thousands of unexploded cluster bombs now wait on the Afghan land.

Jackson and I managed a little talk because when I got there he accompanied me on the hour dog walk. He says he does not care about his removal of Dr. Steve from the site. He has been through a bit with wife Vicki, who had been taking chemotherapy for hepatitus-C. Smoking, he says he needs exersize. He has been slow in getting typos in EMERYVILLE I had scribbled down and sent, off the printout he had sent me. He said that, somehow, the printed EMERYVILLE he had sent me to correct, does not have the same number of lines as his own printed copy. In order for him to run through my scribblings and get these errors, but, it is difftcult for me to grasp much of this. In Lousiana he learns as he goes while I in texas learn very little. Thus he gave me a copy of his copy of EMERYVILLE. I'll send this copy of mine he had ortginally sent, for him to run through my scrtbblings and get these errors, whoo. He gave me a copy of his copy with the different lines, also copy of TWO TALES OF SODOMY, shorter stuff which possibly he had managed to stratghten out already. Too I have now sent the smoking remedy, ten pushups before any cigarette strictly.

In ever our small time to confer we did not get to this matter Bix has been raising, the website front page. Jackson lastly had used something off the TG novel for front page, whtch I had not seen, as I have not driven over to Fulton to Bix's these recent weekends.

Bix and I wish Jackson to use his gifis in these labors. Lastly Bix and I were on the telephone he is riled about U.S. administration's unreality being fed by the clamoring ignorant citizenry, or activity symbtotic. Bix desires something declaraitve on front page of TexasGang.com that grabs eyeballs. Bix has been feeling an expanding intolerance for the government's gibbering madness, and his old mother has been watching C-SPAN, too. I said to Bix maybe he could put together something electric enough. My LLs of recent are only taking in the thing piecemeal. I am patiently awaiting greater strangeness. Wait till cyber terrorism, I said. We ought to get all of TG.com onto disks right now.

Bix's mother had that day of our conversation called him, about a guy on C-SPAN talking reality, the interesting facts. Bix's parents live in some town I forget in the Valley, having retired there some years ago. Bix was brought up in one of these sects who say everybody else is going to hell - Church of Christ if I am not incorrect - and it bothered him but he was good in sports and ignored it. Now, his old mom watches C-SPAN everyday, and he and she see life more similarly. Anyone watching C-SPAN with much patience can put much together. I in fact had seen this very C-SPAN guest this day - forget his name - but I had been involved in questioning my mother, who is half deaf and was looking at the Sunday Caller-Times, it was Sunday, and I was asking her am I irresponsible. I actually found out she does not think I am paritcularly irresponstble.... I should have put more attention on the C-SPAN guest. Someitmes in my preoccupations I do not understand why family members act toward me as they do. Anyway.

Since 9-11 , the media inflated one side in the polarity of public perception of W. Bush, the side that thinks he is an honest fellow. These people are infatuated that W. should be a "cowboy," shoot the bad guys. The side of the public the craven media has been ignoring have been simmering. Bix and I sense W is fragile, that he can snap. Thinking he is a cowboy, or in the adulation of many a cowboy, now he is starting to step away from his handlers, who keep covering best they can for him but the international community call him fool or maniac and the U.S. media is having to reflect this a little - finally after 9-11 some of the editorial cartoons again make sport of him. Interestingly, at this writing much of the bovine media do not yet observe W.s career has peaked, but that simmering side of the population whom they have ignored do see it. My friend Jack Saunders has fun writing that W. cannot chew a pretzel and watch television at the same time, but I question can a grown man hit his face on the floor very hard from sitting on a couch. My niece Jessica said he fell off the wagon, well, he fell from standing up. Whether 9-11 came from cells in Egypt, the Taliban were not friendly about the U.S. pipeline to cross Afghanistan to the Caspian Sea, and Bin Ladin has been a conventent figurehead, and now Afghanistan is occupied, but it is not controlled. Much collateral damage, ever more unfriendlies, pipelines will be sabotaged, then came Enron. What to do for the fragile ratings, be a war time prestdent forever. Before any deep thought on Bin Ladin or Afghanistan, smart bomb Iraq more, or maybe little Somalia. Whatever it takes, the U.S. can whip the world, economy do as it shall, drugs, wetbacks, Social Security. He11, the drugs keep it afloat.

"Dennie Halliday was in charge of the UN Oil-For-Food program, until he resigned in September 1998, because he saw what the sanctions were doing to the Iraqui people. He was asked about using the term 'genocide' to refer to the sanctions. In his reply he stated !...it is certainly a valid word in my view where you have a situation where we see thousands of deaths per month, a possible total of 1 million to 1.5 million over the last nine years. If that is not genocide, then I don't quite know what is."

When back from the cabin I saw the main media was through talking about the Iraqui children, and I could not here get Amie Goodman's DEMOCRACY NOW off NPR. But I carried on with it to my siblings at any point they tried to regard Clinton as less cold blooded as Saddam Hussein. This past year, my harrassed sister pretended to have known all along about the Iraqui children but said the difference between Clinton and Hussein is Hussein intentionally killed a bunch of innocent people but this was not Clinton's intention. I let it ride, got off her back. But how unthinking. What can it be happens to good minds. Lob a few more million dollar missles into old Baghdad for good politics. Limbaugh said why does he do it at ntght when he only geis a few janitors. One million per janitor. Children who starve mere collateral. It was New Year's of 2000 after the cabin I happened to be standing in the Aransas house switching about on the box and CNN was flashing all this hurrah in European capitol's streets, and somehow somebody snuck in old Baghdad. Old Baghdad was dark, deserted. What, wait, suddenly here is a bunch of Italtans, holding out plackards: STOP NATO GENOCIDE. In seconds, the camera jumped away. What an ambush. Did anyone get fired?

John Pilger on Washington's war crtmes

Who are the real terrorisis?
from a colunin by Pilger in the New Statesman.

[W]HEN the Taliban came to power in 1996, not only were they welcomed by Washington, their leaders were flown to Texas, then governed by George W. Bush, and entertained by execuitves of the Unocal oil company...

The Taliban [have now] duly moved to the top of the media's league table of demons, where the normal exemptions apply.

For example, Vladimir Putin's regime in Moscow, the killers of at least 20,000 people in Chechnya, is exempt. Last week, Putin was entertained by his new "close friend," George W. Bush, at Bush's Texas ranch.

Bush and (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair are permanently exempt-- even though more Iraqi children die every month, mostly as a result of the Anglo-American embargo, than the total number of dead in the Twin Towers, a truth that is not allowed to enter public consciousness.

The killing of Iraqi infants, like the killing of Chechens, like the killing of Afghan civilians, is rated less morally abhorrent than the killing of Americans.

In mid January of 2002 I got into the middle of a program on C-SPAN with this Nick Gillespie guest, who runs a magazine called REASON. He looks like a reasonable guy. The January issue of REASON had carried an article advocating legalization of all drugs. But I had come into this of his saying Noam Chomsky and others who claim five thousand Iraqui kids are killed by the blockade per month are wrong. I did not catch just how many Iraqui kids he might suppose do die, because of the sanctions, nor anything about his information. He showed no air of politics.

Nick Gillespie sat with open countenance, unconflicted, likeable. The next startling thing he said, is NATO helps Mexico. That one is poor math unless the peasantry is not concerned. The throngs of wetbacks are mounting. Men, women carrying babies, walking and risking life through deserts. They tire and risk themselves seeking toil because they are bodily hungry, mounting, they are not coming through the bridges where they can be estimated by how many caught, the poorest are walking, numbers mounting. They walk fearfully in the ntghts. Sometimes it is property owners shoot them.

A man what advocates the practical legalization of all drugs may be schizoprenic even so.

The next day, lawyers on TV were arguing before one woman in hell who had killed her offspring, whether she is insane or a criminal. A11 folks on Earth know the killing of offspring is unnatural.

In today's civilization hypocrisy for money is accepted. This manifests daily. Powell tells a bunch of sexually active MTV teenagers condoms help prevent AIDS and one day later I see two different programs where Republican whores pretend to claim condoms do not help prevent spread of AIDS. Nobody blinks. Each instance had a debater from the other side, but who calmly steadfastly but spoke facts, and got interrupted, but stayed calm, in the game. We have this world where politicians get paid to be unreal.

Ah, fuckit, so what. Psychotic teenagers. Baby rapers, serial killers. Natural scheme of things. Maybe it's too late for Anarchism. I will keep my muscles up. I know from LSD if I need to run a few miles I surely can.

Upon the deck at the eroding table, which seldom any Olive but I make use of, I watch the U.S. trailer people in their vehicles, their old and new trucks and cars. AS with the average U.S. cittzen, when it is male and female the male drives. In a smaller vehicle went this young couple - up from Jacoby, from where drunk males had several times plowed straight into the brush, prompted Lyla to get up the petition, to have stop signs as well on North McCampbell. I have said, this has aggravated some among the trailer folk. This young man with his female had properly stopped at the Jacoby stop sign, and he turned right on N. McCampbell fairly easily, then, for some odd reason, at about where our fence and driveway meet, or at our mailbox, which is thick iron on a stout iron post - Mike got this done after we lost a couple of mailboxes in the night - the guy dug out. Being the city of Aransas Pass has had a heavy layer of gravel epread on the nicely paved road lately, our iron mailbox, and Lyla's car in carport near have this coating of rusty dust. Lyla, and Jesse and Pat, have been told that in a couple of months, a new pavement shall be done. Before we get this second pavement the trailer folk enjoy digging out more than ever. As a trailer type speeds he pulls this great cloud of rusty dust. At this moment I am sitting on our deck superior, Lyla has pulled her car up the driveway by our front door to hose down her car. Any kind of way any human looks at it, the humans in Aransas pass, and most of the known world, do not have much to go by.

The Dear Reader should know, though Mike Olive reads pulp - indeed, he and Lyla now discuss mystery/thriller hardbacks and authors from the Aransas Pass library - Mike Olive identifies with the science community, not to count headless chicken walking. He is into the galaxies these days of discovery and went to Seguin to be using that larger library, to be putting together a theory, and he would do the weekend with Kelly and Janus at the Medina River property. He left Wednesday and I came on over to be with Lyla.

Lyla bought 6 rose cuttings to plant in honor of her late husband and Thursday we planted them. These were "cheap roses," in they were not in pots, but had roots wrapped in some dark soil. Lyla had acquired plenty fish scraps from a friendly fish place. She wanted to shovel the first hole, to see how she did. I got the others, at the front fence of corner of Jacoby and N.McCampbell. It happens it is our back yard that is fenced, at the connecting streets, and the front yard and front door be the driveway part of the house. But six rose bushes just inside our fence. She placed in fish scraps, I swept dirt to cover the scraps, she placed the rose sprigs, which had no leaves, nothing, I swept dirt and she patted them down. The next day, Friday, these rose cuttings had begun to sprout.

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