Positively Maple Street

Serve the servants - oh no.
That legendary divorce is such a bore.

As my bones grew, they did hurt.
They hurt really bad.
I tried hard to have a father,
but instead I had a Dad.

I just want you to know that I,
don't hate you anymore.
There is nothing I could say,
That I haven't thought before.

 -Nirvana "Serve the Servants"

I was born in the summer of 1967, the "Summer of Love". I was born into the Southern California American Dream, all avocado & shag - a Brady Bunch mash-up, dysfunctional & prosperous & blonde.

In a couple of years Charlie & Sadie Mae Glutz & the rest of the Family will creep through houses just like mine and carve up human beings. Liberate a famous fetus & spread horror through the sunny-green neighborhoods from West Hollywood to West Orange... The first deadly blows for freaky-peace-love sunshine were scrawled out in Sharon Tate & her friend's blood - "Rise" "Helter Skelter" & carved into Leno LaBianca's stomach "Pig"...

Blow after blow to the American Dream followed.

There were two American Dreams- the Post-War American Dream that gave birth to the neighborhood I grew up in, the hard-work, emotionally detached American Dream - squeezed out of the GI Bill and a country that built things & went to church on Sundays, it was the pot roast & new car American Dream.

And the "New" American Dream conjured by bored kids who had too much free time & never struggled for a fucking thing, the sandalwood & pot smoke American Dream. Aquarian, blissed-out, stoned & dancing in the parks ...Stabbed to death in Altamont Pass, Eviscerated in the Hollywood Hills, & left to rot in the hollow eyes of dirty footed street kids who sucked cocks on the Lower Eastside for a nickle balloon of junk or panhandled on Haight Street... a flower in their hair.

The funeral for both American Dreams came in the Senate Hearing rooms, as the best & the brightest of my grandfathers generation exposed themselves as dirty tricksters who had as much regard for the Constitution and the law as their pot smoking, draft card burning children.

& we toddled as it all fell apart.

In front of the Magnavox, as choppers flew bleeding kids out of jungle LZ's & the President fell to a cacophonous chorus of denials & admissions & static filled tapes- wrapped in fat ties & wide lapels & horn-rim glasses, just like the ones my father wore.

The 50's curriculum, taught by our suit wearing 50's teachers was old & phony & somewhere in the back of our mushy Snak-Pak brains, we'd already seen the truth. The President was a criminal, our Uncles, Fathers, Brothers were hung out to dry & die in a jungle & then shunned & ignored... Head-bands were hung up, jungle fatigues left in an old trunk & VW's abandoned.

Abby Hoffman was on the lam. Patty Hearst sprayed bullets & the Panthers were shot dead or jailed.

Nixon retreated after slipping the noose.

Colson, Hunt & G Gordon Liddy did easier time than Huey Newton.

Jerry Rubin surfaced in the Man's fat tie & sold em all out.

Dead as shit.

It was all dead as shit, and us kids were absorbing it all.

What can you tell me about the American Dream when we've seen it unravel?

My generations fathers packed up en-mass and moved to tiny apartments, or other families houses, leaving us kids with our confused mothers, our "step" families & teachers talking about "checks and balances"... Balance... an obscure concept when the world wobbles on it's axis, and the only truth is that everything we are being told, about our government, about our families, about our world is being shredded, obliterated and left in bloody heap on green shag carpet.

& we'd sit in our synagogue and watch grainy films of human beings being bull-dozed into pits. "You can NEVER forget this children, what happened to us". Everywhere we looked the world seemed fucked. We never forgot. All the massacres we were witness to. The emotional massacres of imploding families, the political massacres, Napalmed children, skin & bones Jews, flower children turned into barefoot junkies.

On this the 30th anniversary of the day Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon down, people are still feigning shock at Wikileaks bullshit, and ineffective Presidents, and Democrats & Republicans all doing a huge self-serving circle-jerk.

The Emperor has no clothes, the Wizard is a little fat guy behind a curtain, insert your conspiracy theory here.

The new hippies have a bumper sticker on their Subaru's that says "Think Globally, Act Locally"... Right next the one that says "Hope".

I say "Travel Globally, Act Like A Fucking Human". The thing about the rest of the world, especially the "third world", is you find people there who never think past tomorrow. America is an abstract. Their own leaders are abstracts... in front of them are their children, their neighborhood, their villages, their pots - full or empty...

We have all this TIME.

Time to fret over abstractions and theories. Time to dissect your life and the times in which you live it. Time to spin stupid blogs about the American Dream, a thing, like a puff of smoke, that never really existed, a figment of propaganda and salesmanship... Too much time.

Charles Manson was busted this week with a cell phone in his jail cell. He was calling and texting. California to New Jersey... I wonder what Charlie has to say in a text... "Prison sux"...

Mark David Chapman still rots, like Charlie in prison... I wonder if he has a cell phone.

My kids are healthy & happy at opposite ends of I-5.

I have a few bucks in the bank, and my life is an adventure.

The frozen Great Plains sparkle under a blanket of crystalline snow each morning and I retrace the tracks of the Lewis and Clark every day through the land of the Mandan & Arikara... This, the land of the first American Dreamers is giving way to bobbing oil pumping rigs.

The Great White Buffalo, which once came forth out of the Black Hills and gave life to all of The People, has returned - dressed as oil-men in filthy coveralls, spreading cash over the Plains like piles of steaming dung.

The rest is white noise. Fodder for the rear-view mirror.

I'm not the child, I'm the father & my dreams are my own.