Debt Rattle February 10 2022

Giuseppe Arcimboldo Four elements – Water 1566

I love this series…

The detail, the subjects, the relevance, and the mood………..

You can tell the kids graduated from the same WEF school for leadership. Last month Trudeau makes a speech about making the lives of the unvaxxed unbearable. Macron makes the same speech the next day. Today Ardern sends in her Gestapo to violently remove peaceful protesters. Will we see the same thing in Ottawa tomorrow?

If you want to know what these lunatics will do next just call Klaus, 1-800-555-DAVOS

“Modern Monetary Theory, the buzziest economic idea in decades, got a pandemic tryout of sorts. Now inflation is testing its limits.” – NY Times

What? Just printing money caused mass inflation? And probably a currency collapse? When did this begin? Quick, tell Keen!

“How M.M.T. Won the Fiscal Policy Debate,” in early 2021” –Bloomberg

Suuuure, pal. Tiny ideas for tiny owners. There’s no inflation! …Until suddenly there is.

It gets better. Not being complete fools – only “99% effective” fools – they say, “[They] can just print [money], as long as its economy has the ability to churn out the needed goods and services.”

Great. Totally True! Except that is Soviet Socialism that has failed everywhere it’s been tried. You know, you’d think an “Economist”, studying the history of “economies” might notice that. NOPE.

“In the M.M.T. view of the world, “How will you pay for it?” is a vapid policy question” Just print money!

This falls dead on their core weakness: they think the MAP is the Territory. That is, their MIND, mental representation, is the same as the Thing itself. In this case, MONEY, the accounting unit, is equal to the objects it’s measuring, like wheat and oil and time. That is, it fits right into EGO. What I THINK is reality. So I THINK, or cause to be printed, accounting chits, and oil and ice cream appear! Magic!

So you know what happens next, right? “Ms. Kelton, and the movement she has come to represent, now seem anxious to control the narrative. The pandemic spending wasn’t entirely consistent with M.M.T principles” That is to say, “This Socialism is not REAL Socialism.” Just like all 300 other times before. But if –I– were King/Tyrant/God/Emperor, I’D do it right and it would work, by gum! The problem is, you were all stupid and I’m smart!

“Can we blame ‘MMT’ for the run-up in inflation? …Of course not.” Absolutely! When has printing $10 Trillion/year ever caused inflation before? That’s ridiculous!

And has that inflation ever toppled the government, leading to mass-death, starvation and war? Who cares? I’m illiterate and won’t look! Let’s find out!!!

Okay, real point: why is this allowed to be placed in the world’s top fakest newspaper? A day after NPR promotes the All-control, never-audited, create-at-will, mass-inflation Fed Coin? We were following what is suddenly censored and banned from being said, but also what is suddenly allowed and promoted to be said. Which is this and why?

Oh wait, they no sooner printed that then this: ““Sorry everyone, debunking MMT is now sexist. If you do not endorse a non-theory that would bring catastrophic inflation, then you must hate women…”

Some days you can’t keep up. “Is This What Winning Looks Like?” –NYTimes is the title. Indeed. If you don’t hate women, you have to murder a million children in poverty. Your move. Binary America. Red or Blue. One bad idea or its opposite extreme bad ideas, both fabricated with no evidence and presented in fake press releases by me.

Blue America:
“In Matt Taibi’s 2019 book Hate Inc. he showed how before the media was used to “manufacture consent”. Now it is being used to manufacture discontent and divide “silo” people into different camps, because hate sells, and divisive media gets more clicks.”

If only. These guys are not stupid, whatever I may say about them. They’re just mental. Somewhere along the line, in every company and structure, somebody said, “Hey, this thing is happening…due to us.” And in every case, they didn’t mind a bit. It didn’t disturb them, they liked it and carried on. Also with investors, lawsuits, with Congressmen, judges. Even when it made LESS money, as conservative, more standard media went straight up in readers and stock price. Now that’s a ‘silo’ but it shows there are a lot of options. Substack is selling well, as is The Epoch Times, a bunch of foreigners. IN PRINT. On PAPER. The only thing they had to do to win and “Hate, Inc” had to do to fail was STOP LYING. They couldn’t do it, and now CNN, BuzzFeed, HuffPo and the rest are bankrupting. They’re 7th sons and daughters from Brooklyn and Yale, who made all their fortunes in VC and Wall St and MIC, they’ve probably never SEEN a human not lie with every waking breath before. Ever. Anywhere they’ve ever been.

P.S. Blue America? Closing hospitals for the unvaxxed? They ALREADY closed all the Red America hospitals.ALL OF THEM. Those are the rural hospitals. And took the money and jobs from them to the cities. With the talent and brains and the resiliency from them. Then took 30,000 deaths a year to them to decades, and now have swapped Purdue Pharma for 2x Chinese Fentanyl. Every minute. Every day. For decades.

Family farms: outlawed. Inheritance? Illegal. Competition? Eliminated with subsidies TO the monopolies, TO the cities. Spectrum Amazon, Tesla. Media attacks on all small towns since Melloncamp. Racist stupid hicks, grinding them in person to steal their talent, drive anyone worth using up into the city’s PMC class of subordinates. Market rigging for 40 years, crushing food prices. On and on, every day, forever.

Oh and in the cities too. Biden is finding black people – only – and handing out crack pipes to them –only– but never white people, while continuing to arrest all black drug users on the “Crime Bill” he loves. There are Asians to keep out of college by the color of their skin, Native Americans to kill, but generally the rural has been strip-mined and consumed in the cities, that are largely financialized and produce nothing but high (home) prices.

Etc. You’ve heard it all before.

One note: traders I follow say “market” (that is, like 7 remaining Dow/SP components) are going UP. Markets often end (or only end) in blowoffs like when Cisco was projected to sell another billion routers in 1999 (to Mars and Saturn, I guess?). Inflation can make this happen. I thought we just had a blowoff, just saying it, right now I am looking for where the continuing (fake) liquidity is coming from, I think China.

They would need a Zeus for any electric cars to work, that is, “Magic”, a “God in the Machine”, because they have no other power sources available. Not even for electric, which is the easiest. But they’re PMC’s: rainbows and skittles and unicorns, not no never any math. Look at Germany. Apparently now the worst engineers on planet earth, living in the dark and cold.

There is a litmus-test in Modern Monetary Theory beyond which new money should not be printed, so that’s all well and good. The problem is, printing money is kind of like eating your favorite brand of potato chips. You start by resolving to eat just a handful, but before you know it, you’ve gone and eaten the whole dang bag!

Hello Old Friend

“UnitedHealthcare
It’s not too late to get a flu shot
Flu season is far from over and anyone can get the flu, even if you’re healthy
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it’s likely that flu viruses and the virus that causes COVID-19 may both be spreading1. A flu shot is covered at no cost to you.”

It’s officially over. The collision is behind us. I wonder what lies ahead?

Keep Your Eyes on the Road

I don’t think Ottawa police want anything to do with a buncha ornery truckers who drive de facto tanks for a living.

I think the truckers know this.

What most of the North American left looks like when say idiotic shit like tRuCkerS aRe nAzi pEtIT bOurGeOiS aNtiVAXxeRz pic.twitter.com/JWHq67X0zh

— Fiorella Isabel (@Fiorella_im) February 10, 2022

deflationista, YOU have a messaging problem.

two years of seeing communities and families ripped apart, and you’re still not tired of being a shill for the most corrupt corporations and governments of the planet.

you should be ashamed of yourself.

gold is a relic. it’s production is environmentally destructive.

we do need a way of restraining human greed, but ripping apart mountains and fouling waterways does not seem like the best way to do so.

no, it’s not rich. those are your owners.

Kelowna judge sides with mother in fight with ex-husband over child’s vaccination.

B.C. man ordered not to discuss or share social media posts about COVID-19 vaccine with 11-year-old son
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vaccine-social-media-court-1.6345167

F.S.

Good article on protest, also check out 6min embedded video.

He says the convoy also has the means to continue their operation indefinitely. Since GoFundMe cancelled their initial fundraiser, they are aiming to raise $16 million US on Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo and are more than halfway there. 
Unless there’s an internal collapse of the organization, Amarasingam worries it will end in violence.
“Either there are mass arrests and violence on the streets or violence on the streets results in mass arrests and potentially military intervention.”

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/convoy-protesters-police-tactical-knowledge-1.6345854?__vfz=medium%3Dsharebar

Arnold pimping electric cars for the Chosen Few

Electric cars are as big a hoax as the Plandemic.

“They’ have telegraphed through numerous articles that the next Covid is Climate.

Another hustle for the Masses to blindly follow like Masks & Social Distancing.

Can’t wait to see a Libtard driving an electric ultra luxury car with their double mask on and their spouse sitting in the back seat ‘social distancing’.

hahahaha!

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

We don’t have a ‘climate problem’ we have a Consumption Problem.

You can parse it many ways but the Satanic Blood Drinking Oligarchs pencil it out like this:

• Kill off 95% of ‘humanity’, doesn’t really matter how, just get the job done

• Crank up AI automation to do a lot of the tasks formerly done by ‘the Sheeple’

• Salvage what they can from the ruins with slave labor, burn the rest to the ground.

• Build palaces, yes palaces not mansions, for the Crème de la Crème of Elites

• Turn most of the continental landmasses into nature/game preserves for said Elites, just like days of yore!

• CO2 levels plummet over time due directly to far lower consumption.

• Slave labor salvage operations yielded centuries of resources

• Future products designed without ‘planned obsolescence’ that last enormous lengths of time

Example: a stainless steel wheelbarrow lasts thousands of years. Bronze door latches with sealed ball bearings last centuries, the list is endless of products designed to last instead of prematurely fail. I own and use stainless steel shovels and garden forks, except for re-handling, they will last countless centuries unless you lend them to the neighbors :>)

• Think of the New Earth as Chernobyl decades after the accident, the wolfs and creatures moved back in without people to disrupt them and the Earth heals itself after millennia of human abuse and greed and mismanagement.

Homeland Security Warns Ottawa-Style Anti-Vax Convoy Could Wreck Super Bowl Sunday

no comment necessary.

Putin sure knows how to treat Royalty

Western politicians are so stupendously brain damaged, Old White Joe must be the Head Cheerleader

Joe Biden kills the economy by signing pork-laden “Covid Relief” bill

https://i.imgflip.com/51dgto.jpg

(digital distraction)

“If they let it fade away now, they have gotten away with random acts of tyranny and can apply them again at will. Normalization if they stop now; prosecution if they push it.”

Nothing will be normalized into a stable tyranny platform, just as we won’t return to anything like business as usual although we’ll pretend so for as long as we can delude ourselves.

Here’s a picture of a child riding a reindeer:

Maybe if we collapse our global scam of homo uber alles, her children may have a chance to still ride reindeer.

We bemoan and decry so much being taken from us after we’ve taken almost everything from every life form on the planet… and not being content with that, had to make a few of our own in order to sell vaccine and corporate compliance.

We’re.not.going.back. Where we’re going seems determined to require war and even worse as entry and exit points.

But it could be worse. It could be a big-ass comet heading our way. Or a century or three of the sun experiencing major heartburn. Or maybe the some ancient god we’ve forgotten about is returning to get its share:

SHow Me

We now return to you to your usual programming:

We Want Everything (because we don’t know or face up to what we need)

It is a truism among truckers that if their feet are on the ground, they aren’t making any money. Left unsaid is that if truckers have their feet on the ground, ain’t nobody getting nothing, either.

Is there any group more powerful than truck drivers right now?

You can fake a lot of jobs in the professional sectors, but ya gotta be able to actually drive a truck to be a truck driver.

When Billy Joe Ray Bob decides to drive his rig, fully loaded, back to his little slice of heaven- two acres with a single wide on it-and park it under the shade tree next to his house, ain’t nobody getting what’s in his trailer.

Just cuz it seems like such a great escape: “… and you’re walking across the water with ease, not even thinking about where the rocks just under the surface are.” And, because I’ll never finish it and, really, it’s not a story meant to be finished… here’s some ethereal jive about memory, airwaves, nostalgia, and magic glowing tubes:

MEMORADIO

begun 4-19-21

“Turn it on,” says Sheila. “It works. Original tubes and everything. We just had the guy clean it out with dielectric fluid or something. Even the wiring. The power cord is new, but even that is older than me, I bet.”
It is, and the radio, while not quite as old as Charly, is as old as his earliest radio memory. RCA Victor began manufacturing the 96T3 radio in 1938. July 9, 1938, is the night the Count Basie band played the Chatterbox in Pittsburh, PA, a date Charly knows because the internet apparently knows everything, and sells CDs of that night recorded by the radio station. He’s sure it’s the exact same broadcast because the announcer makes a little faux pas announcing If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight, announcing the name followed with, ‘Keep it up, boys!’ He remembers because Uncle Larry hollered, “Keep it up?! I’ll need more than one hour tonight, baby!” Everyone laughed, especially when little Charly hollered, “Tonight, baby!”, becoming the instant center of attention among an audience of very happy, inebriated, and highly appreciative adults.
As the couples danced slow to the love song, Charly had asked his Grandma Bunny what was so funny.
“Never you mind, Charly. It’s not for little boys to know.”
This made the moment unforgettable: to experience the wonder of adult fun, to be the center of it, but not allowed to know what it was. The next song was fast, and everyone danced, his Mom and aunts taking turns including him in the fun. It was the best fun he’d ever remembered having at that age. He remembered the breathless thrill of it all and the sour alcohol on their breath and the cigarette smoke swirling above them as they danced in the white sand of Grandpa Hack’s backyard. He also remembers it being the first time he became aware that women were… pretty, and he’d liked the way they smelled and he’d liked it when their skirts twirled so high he saw their underwear. It had been a big night for little Charly.
Charly remembers this the way Boomers remember seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Like his son, George, who first heard The Beatles when he was six years old, Charly was also only six years old when his parents and some in-laws got really wild that cool summer night in a tiny town in southern Florida. It is his first recollection of jazz and grownup acting wild.
The radio before him now is the same model of radio they listened to in 1938 in a town named Naples on the Gulf of Mexico. This is something else the internet taught him about his past he wouldn’t have remembered just from being there. Vintage RCA Victor 96T3, restored and working, sold out. A child of the Radio Age, he knows that the atmosphere must have been just right that night for them to pick up such a strong and clear signal from the Chatterbox nightclub in Pittsburgh, PA. A thousand miles as the crow flies.
With its front like a small temple of mahogany and a row of plastic push buttons bearing the names of major Western Region radio stations like KWJ, KXL, KGW, KOIN, this radio had originally been sold in some store west of the Mississippi, not the Deep South… and Naples, FL is so Deep South it’s practically underwater. The radio Charly is looking at today is not the identical radio from his childhood. It cannot be. But it looks exactly the same, has all its original components, even the capacitor.
It had actually been kind of strange for his cracker parents to be dancing to jazz in Naples 1938, but Uncle Larry had worked the winter tourist season in St. Peterburg, rubbing shoulders with Manhattan sybarites and Chicago heavyweights: he was, as they were just starting to say at the time, hep. To Charly, it was like music from another planet. Mongo or Mars. At that age, Planet Mongo had seemed more real to him than Mars, even when, a few months later, the CBS radio network had broadcast nationwide Orson Welles’ infamous radio version of H.G. Well’s sci-fi classic, The War of the Worlds where Mars invades earth.
Charly remembers that one, too, and it was amazing, alright. But Planet Mongo, in the Flash Gordon Saturday morning matinees he saw in the tiny theater in the Olde Naples Building except when they took the train to Fort Meyers and saw it in a real bijou, Planet Mongo was real to six-year old Charly, he’d seen it with his own eyes, while Mars in The War of the Worlds was obviously just something from a big radio show. Learning in 6th grade there really was a planet called Mars, seeing it with his own eyes in the night sky, was embarrassing and almost erotically thrilling, like peeing the bed.
Discovering the CD of the Chatterbox Basie broadcast was magical enough for Charly. He doesn’t really expect this antique radio to channel tunes from hidden pockets of the radio ether any more than he expects it to receive signals from the ancient Martian civilizations that he’d once fervently believed in as an official sci-fi True Believer in the 40s and 50s, freaking out over bebop and all that progressive jazz (including a rarity by the Sauter-Finnegan Orchestra called Science Fiction, something the internet surely knows about too). Having been raised on the magic of radio at a time when science was still magic that glowed in the dark once the tubes warmed up, a drop-out Southern Baptist become a Free Thinker who read all the sci-fi books and magazines he could find in backwater Naples, the concepts of radio and magic are closely entwined in Charles Stutter Forthwain.
But he knows that time travel is impossible and if some planet out there is broadcasting, the signals are too faint to hear on earth. He remembers Starmaker tales where advanced galactic civilization used entire stars as radio transmitters. He also remembers being appalled by how cheesy the original TV Star Trek was, and how delighted he was at how perfect the original Star Wars movie was. So many things to remember at his age, including a mostly wonderful if impoverished childhood at a time when flying saucers had not yet been invented or discovered or imagined but Buck Rogers could be Superman what with his anti-0gravity flightbelt and his super-blaster ray guns.
He knows this radio will only play the pallid junk that passes for music these days, that the oldest oldies stations barely remember Elvis Presley much less Bing Crosby. He knows it’s a miracle the radio’s capacitor hasn’t exploded, long as this thing must have sat in somebody’s attic to be this well-preserved. Old capacitors that haven’t been powered up for too long tend to get excited and explode. Something about humidity over many years.
He knows the magic is a great-nephew and his fiancé who think enough of him to buy the thing at an estate sale and have an old-school electronics expert, The Analog Wizard, go over it. The most fun he can expect from this old AM radio is a bit of over-the-top Pentacostal music on weekends and maybe, if the tuner’s still tight, Venezuela in the early dawn hours like when he was a teenager and a wannabe ham radio enthusiast who made his own broadband receiver from a kit but never learned Morse code or any of that stuff, tapping Esperanto into the speckled night back when Science was still going to save us all, right after a few words from our sponsor. That alone is more magic than he could want.
But he knows it is a magic radio. He just does. He almost doesn’t want to know, the sensation of knowledge being like his first woody at age nine when Uncle Larry’s wife wasn’t as careful as she should’ve been with the bathroom door. A spooky tingle in the underwear of his imagination. But he knows.
Looking up in both wonder and smart-assery, he says with a terrible French accent, “ ‘It’s a transmitter. It’s a radio for speaking to God.’”
“Where’s that from, Uncachuck?”, says his great-nephew, Elliott.
“Indiana Jones. First one. You’ve seen the video.”

After a minute, Elliott asks Charly if he wants to turn it on.

“You’ve heard it work, already, right?”

“Uh-huh. Super-cool.”

“Then if you don’t mind, I want to do it alone. The first time. I mean… I don’t know how you did it, you two, but this is more than just a classic radio from my childhood in perfect shape.”
“Which: the radio or your childhood?” Viendi, Elliott’s girlfriend, is a card and the brains of the duo.
“Both, I suppose. I can’t go back and check on it to make sure my tenth birthday is still there, but if I could, I’m sure it would be everything I remembered… only more. Perspective. Changes things. 1938 looks to me now…. Like the lost & found in an old Goodwill store. Never know what will show up there.”
He turns silent and suddenly very serious.
“But it’s all there. Has to be. I was there, after all. All the time. Never stepped out even once except a few dreams, maybe. The human mind…”
He shrugs. Tells them with full sincerity it’s the best gift he remembers getting since Xmas 1941, a terrible time to have Xmas, just 14 days after Pearl Harbor, but all the more intense for that reason. He had even got French-kissed by his older cousin, Laraine, under the mistletoe. The world had suddenly caught on fire but with a nice glow around Xmas.
They leave.
He looks at the radio, closes his eyes, remembers the original, looks at the radio, closes his eyes… and falls asleep. He does that a lot of late. He no longer rides the bus, a funny old pleasure of his, because he tends to fall asleep and miss his stop. He doesn’t mind paying the money for uber-lyft, and it’s so convenient and easy on old bones, but he misses the flicker of light through downtown bus windows and the weird anonymous vibe as the seats fill up, the sense of being no one among anyone anywhere but especially home, that is, Chicago, where they’d moved when he was 16 and where he’d lived until retiring, *shudder*, in Florida, in St. Petersberg, in fact. How he’d grown so old, and fat, and silly, and… what was I thinking about?… all this is something he understands, having done it himself after all, but hardly knows. Memory grows far too great to hold in the head of one man who doubts he as many years left as fingers on one hand. If that. He understands and is fairly content with it all, but not knowing, this bothers him. He doesn’t think he has Alzheimers and doesn’t much fear it, having a gun in the drawer and the courage to use it before he lost all of himself to the wind. He actually has a marvelous memory, bordering on eidetic in some respects, particularly music and math, but this only fine-lines how little of his life he can remember, remembering just enough of it to feel how the horizon of his life is so far behind it’s about to appear in front before long. He’ll be crawling up the old birth canal to a new reality and maybe even live to tell about it in a new life. He has almost no fear of the afterlife although he feels no surety that Jesus saves or there’s a better place, per se. Life is Disneyland, and he assumes that if any part of the ride should be safe, it’s the end. Sign says, You must be this small (crawling height) to get off. Be ye like unto a little child, said Jesus. He remembers Deacon Cheleane saying that when Charly was maybe 8 or 9, and feeling slightly confused since everything else was taught was about growing up and becoming a man. Dying, other than the lousy physical pain of it, doesn’t bother him. But he wishes he remembered more. The time to do it was now, while he had the time, all day for the rest of his life if he liked. If there is a heaven, he doesn’t want to arrive a stranger to himself.
He awakes two hours later to the dumb grind of the air conditioner fighting hard mid-afternoon sun. Takes a bath, something he can still do which, he reminds himself, means he’s not that old or that fat if he can still haul himself out of the tub. He just feels old. Really, he might go another 20 years if he took care of himself, what with modern medicine and all. But it really doesn’t look like any fun since Marj died. He’d rather look back than forward, let death catch up with him when it’s had enough.

He shaves in the bathtub like that old imaginary poet, John Shade, but has never noticed until now that the wet shaving foam dripping from his face spread over the hair on his chest like a slo-mo avalanche, a Santa beard he’d been growing all his life but could only see now when he’d also grown fat enough to play Santa without a belly pillow and his hairy chest stayed defiantly above water even when he laid back. It puts a smile on his face, and when he’s dried off and dressed, he takes a deep breath, offers something between a prayer and a shrug, turns the radio knob.
Soft light comes through the radio dial but not from the tubes: these are made of metal with black paint that smells funny when they get hot. He waits awhile and sniffs. Ozone with a faint whiff of cat wizz. Original components, alright.
He turns the volume up enough to hear a bit of whine, static, and ghost of a voice in Spanish. The hairs on the back of his neck go up like a cat whizzing on an electric fence. Hypnotized, himself some kind of antennae to the past tuned by the long-forgotten sound of ancient radio static, the leftover shock waves of the Big Bang, he knows, outer space whispering into his ear between commercials, he turns the tuning knob, keeping the volume low enough to hear between the airwaves, then stops.
1948, Chicago Uptown area, Winnemac Avenue. He’s 16 years old and bought his first personal radio, A 1936 DeWalt 618 with a hypnotic red radio dial knob shaped like some kind of nautical compass of the future. Bought for $16 at a pawnshop, $8 of it from his Dad, $8 of it money he’d earned himself. The glass tubes glowed through rounded rectangular slots in the back and smelled like ozone, no cat whizz.
In 1948, there was still ample magic in the ether. Listening for signals from another planet wasn’t too far-fetched for a 16-year old at that time. Percival Lowell’s Martian canals were still popular beliefs back then, and Is There Life on Mars? was a standard topic for the strange new crowd of kids Charly was growing into, these young teenagers wo came of age during or just after WWII. Charly had made friends with a gang of upper-crusters at Amundsen High. They liked his Florida accent, thought it was cool that he was a True Believer. He was a decent-looking kid with a good sense of humor, and by senior year, he was officially a Cool Kid, knew Parker from Gillespie, Monk from Miles, Heinlein from Azimov, Kenton from Sauter-Finnigan.
But it was all blowing away as fast as it had arrived, those intoxicating fumes of fantastic futurism. His idol, Isaac Azimov, once said that the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945 made science fiction respectable. Science magic go boom, something like that; anyway, it caught people’s attention and they began taking it seriously, and that was the beginning of the end.
He got drafted in 1950 just in time catch some of the Korean Conflict but did so safely bunkered down at base doing artillery calculation. He calibrated shelling ranges and things like radar telemetry by day and read sci-fi and general science books at night. He wasn’t much for drinking, having seen what it did to his Aunt Velma, and hookers weren’t for him, so he spent a lot of time reading and listening to the radio when he could get power to charge its batteries.
Radio in Korea in 1950 was mostly wilderness with rogue signals from everywhere but Korea except for the propaganda frequencies. Seoul City Sue fascinated him because of her Korean-influenced Arkansas accent. Also, most of what she said made sense. Plus, she played music from home.
But mostly he twiddled the dial in the wee hours to hear Russian comrade music and music from places like Istanbul or Cairo, not that he could really tell the difference. On a good night, the ether breathed with him, it felt. Cold clear in Korean winter and he catches hot jazz (Sidney Bechet) from someplace sounding very South Pacific, probably the Philippines. Rarely, very rare, he’d catch American music and English from San Francisco. Good stuff but mostly an excuse to turn the dial, slowly, when the radio conditions booted a signal out of range, tuning blindly like a safecracker.
But it was changed when he got home. Movies and television were grinding out silly rocketship sci-fi for kindergarteners when they weren’t making moralistic atomic bomb scare movies, and that Sense of Wonder was fading even as sci-fi sales ‘took off’ (a jet age metaphor). His high school buddies were busy becoming the early beatnik types, and the new final frontiers weren’t space and extraterrestrial civilizations but philosophy and avant-garde politics. He got a degree in electronics and was soon making very god money running a tv repair shop coupled with a tv sales shop run by a partner. The tubes glowed awhile longer but by 1970 the world was transistorized and the magic was fading fast. We’d gone to the moon and found out how boring a desolate planetary satellite can be, and taken took pictures of Mars and Venus up close that showed no canals, no water, no ancient civilizations. The Age of Wonder closed and outer space soon gave way to inner space as computers took the place of rockets in kids’ imaginations.
Now, 89 years old, wonder is so alive in him it’s replaced by the certain knowledge of magic even if these tubes don’t glow and give off tainted ozone. A touch of animal sacrifice, almost. No, cyborg sacrifice. ‘Eye of robot, pee of cat, this is where the magic’s at,’ he whispers to himself as he gently, oh so gently, turns the knob to the… to the left, of course. ‘Because when you’re my age, magic is all that’s left.’
The Spanish clarifies. Donday one sunny Californicity ee speaka Spanish, the radio says, or something like that. It surprises him to realize he’s disappointed that it doesn’t play the Basie broadcast, surprised because he knows it isn’t like that. The magic isn’t out there or even in there in the tubes. It’s in him.
He hears, he feels, he smells, he remembers the wetbacks in the orchards. Singing Mexican music as they plucked oranges and lemons with ridiculous speed, tiny flocks of them mobbing tree after tree like sparrows. His Dad was a fieldman and he’s sitting in his lap on a tractor eating a biscuit with honey. It’s hot but shady, cool citrus, Mexicans chattering, he looks at his Dad straight into enormous nostrils. He’s small, very small, 2-3 years old. The world is huge but very close. He rides in his Daddy’s lap like a lap dog in an emperor’s robe.
A song starts from the radio, some awful quasi-gangsta Mexican rap. His childhood shuts off. He shuts the radio off. He goes to bed but his brain won’t shut off. He gets up, puts a kettle of tea on the burner, steeps a cup of Irish breakfast tea with orange and lemon peel, and puts the CD of Basie from 1938 in the player.

It sounds great, as always, but no mnemonic flood of memories results. The magic isn’t entirely in him. Something about that radio. Not necessarily something supernatural or metaphysical, although one can always hope, maybe just the effect of that glowing dial, the smell of those old tubes, the sound of background static coming through an old superheterodyne AM radio’s crude components like the sound of a bathtub running in the apartment upstairs.
He wants to try the radio again but feels too tired to deal with that much mysterious mystery. He falls asleep in the chair, his brain tuning the dream dial but mostly just getting static…
Next morning, he’s made coffee and had a cup before remembering the radio. He eats a microwave Jimmy Dean sausage biscuit, remarking to himself how some mornings frozen phony food tastes really good. He feels very good.

“It’s time to re-mem-ber!” he shouts softly at the ceiling fan working the last of cool morning air around. He pulls a chair next to the table he has the old radio on, an antique cushioned stool-on-rollers, chrome and dark green Naugahyde.
He turns it on but turns the sound off. He bows his head and thinks something lime a prayer. He remembers how his wife would open the Bible and pick a scripture at random, seeking wheel-of-fortune inspiration and answers in holy writ.
Closing his eyes, he turns the volume knob up while turning the tuning knob, moving away from Little Mexico before it triggers more memories, seeking safe harbor in soft gray static before trying another radio station. The static soothes him. It’s like soft sonic wool gently scratching his ear drums. For a man freshly awake and energized, he hypnotizes with surprising ease, and several minutes go by before he realizes he’s been somewhere else or at least not quite all there.
The memories hit like a rogue wave when you turn your back at the beach, knocking him down, dragging him out in the undertow, an incomprehensible collage of recollections swirling in his head where he can vaguely sense himself peering down, like someone in a glass bottom boat, seeing through himself to the coral reef of a life’s memories.
Turn the knob. It speaks business advice with an end-is-near riff, touting gold as an investment hedge. He’s maybe 10 years old and his mother is discouraging a door-to-door salesman from trying to sell her some life insurance. He hears what he didn’t hear at ten years old, the salesman’s innuendo that if she doesn’t life insurance, maybe she wants a little romantic action. He also hears that she is tempted, but not much. She slams the door in his face.
He quickly turns the radio off. Memory is a dangerous gift, he thinks.
But highly addictive, and he spends most of the day tuning in and out, coming in and out of mnemonic reverie like coming out from under anesthesia, only this anesthesia makes you remember and feel, not forget and go numb. Being this aware of what’s in your head is almost like being unconscious. Something like driving 77 miles before remembering that you’re driving. Meanwhile, the windshield rushes the world by, keeping your eyes full but your mind blank.
You snap out of it and realize you’ve driven from 7 years old to 7 & ½. You’d think a person would have better things to do than nearly drown in their memories over and over but at his age there wasn’t much else he could still do, and he’d worked an entire lifetime for those memories. If it should prove there is no afterlife, if he never got to review his life the way the NDE survivors said they do with some god-like personage in the viewing booth with them, then he wants to do some of that now while he is still alive.
(and so forth until the tubes blow out)

Now cheer up, says I in a way that might get me assaulted in a bar. (No one likes being told to cheer up. Pisses ’em off. We’re perverse that way.) Everyone’s lost, the world is on fire, some next to you has it worse than you and needs cheering up. Who know, maybe you’ll get laid? Me, if I’m up to it come next Xmas, I’m ask my favorite Canadian if they want a string of red 5-gallon plastic gas tanks strung with Xmas lights to plug in next December.

Delivered by this guy dressed as Santa: Carnivalito!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Organ of Happiness

Hey def: everyone hates you, nobody likes you, worms taste bad, and you don’t care. I have to like that even if it’s kinda icky. Here’s something for you to sing from the city walls at all us deluded sots:

Zombies!