My Own Private Elbaho

Going down periscope
to chase away the snakes
I dream of an island
where the beautiful
muses wake
a sunny volcanic
island where the blood
is washed from stones
a cloud-buffed skies
are imaginary tomes
for paupers, princes
kings and queens of old,
a place I'll now call
my private Elbaho

She dreams of green
magic mountains
where Solznenitzen
once growled
about peanuts,
salt shakers,
peppers, pie and tea
she's a sweet muse
who seldom comes
to me, her hurt,
mere words,
mere soundless
bytes of sea,
mere thought,
faceless as
facelessness
can be; of mad hills,
winter thrills,
billed to gravity,
who hides like spring
a secret Persiphone ...

The flowers on her
her breasts fuel
perfect company
as mourning mad
mountains, sunless
SAD disease ...
Buried in silence
beneath baddass
endless snows
she lives now happy
in her private Elbaho

~ Douglas McDaniel
Iowa City, Iowa

Gunpowder Green

Too long on
the Oolong Tea Blues
The unattended
catrographer girl
was given free espresso
and a kitten and a smile
Set to loose,  upon the world,
but all I got was a foot
to the floor

The empty bowl is set
in the ever endless void
as you called me a paranoid
while madman Americans
sharpen their stones
in a desert land
of hot burning bones

(Chorus)
Enemies of the coffee state
you get no refills, no coffee, mate
Jasmine, mango, Peach
and Darjeeling, you give me gas
with yer gunpowder green

Hey you there, I not
so shallow man,
nor a wind made thing
easy blown away
Your line in the sand
can't salt the melting pot
since love is a verb
in the terror land

(Chorus)
Enemies of the coffee state
you get no refills, no coffee, mate
Jasmine, mango, Peach
and Darjeeling, you give me gas
with yer gunpowder green

(Bridge)
Save a bit of tobacco for me
save a bit, for that baby meat
give your complaints
to the NIMBY puleeeeeze
You gotta buy a drink
if you want to pray
at his seat
and his post-speech analysis
is poison to me

Reach for thy hand
of the mapmaker real boy
we've gone on too long
to do dump yer Oolong tea
dump it with Mel Gibson
in the Irish breakfast sea
save a bit of tobacco for me

(Chorus)
Enemies of the coffee state
you get no refills, no coffee, mate
Jasmine, mango, Peach
and Darjeeling, you give me gas
with yer gunpowder green
gunpowder green

Enemies of the coffee state
you get no refills, no free coffee, mate
Jasmine, mango, Peach
and Darjeeling, you give me gas
with yer gunpowder green

Cave Creek Road
I found the creek
beneath Cave Creek Road
then I washed away
the seeds I'd sowed
found the creek again
running low below ground
found the Cave Creek
waterfall and I, paralyzed,
listened to the sound

Old sun, familiar sun
water clear as mud
checked my Farmer's Almanac
for tornadoes this year
Never met a woman
until the moon came out
because you silly fellow
are quite a phony telephony
who missed the waterfall
for all the water you had

Found the creek
beneath Cave Creek Road
Found the crystal waters
you are named after
Under Cave Creek Road

Now I'm a hermit, Hermes,
swinging at your swords
tried to spike in high truths
but lost the turtles
swimming from your shores

Loaded up unearthly emotions
due to radical notions
of those poor old poets
slaughtered by your Desert Storm
so I formed harsh opinions
in this ill electric wind

Found the creek
beneath Cave Creek Road
The first name came after
lost the crystal waters
below Cave Creek Road

Cave Creek, Cave Creek
Cave Creek Road
Unloaded ma' load
beneath Cave Creek Road
Cave Creek, Cave Creek
Cave Creek Road

~ Phoenix, Arizona

ENGINE IN CONTENTION

Sheriff Joe came down the hill
Said I'd burned my dollar bill
So I can't get gas
to cross the great water

I can't go far
with an engine in contention
can't go far
with an engine in contention

Feeling bored
with the whine of my engine
spinning those wheels
across that desert
for miles and miles
miles and miles
miles and miles
miles and miles

Dirt on the dash
got a bunch of scratches
dirt on the dash
got a bunch of scratches
just might explode
before it ups and crashes

Tweeter my missives
toward Big Bad Obama
Tweeter your missiles
toward Osama
Hey you Bono
got a magic circus
a box of words

Can't get far
with an engine
in contention
We won't go far
with an engine
in contention

Tough Love

You tell me at the morning bell
that life is just a living hell
I wake up thinking
isn't that swell

My Cherios crunch to loud
you say, my breath is bad
now go away, my tongue is rough
as I run away to a safer
place where the sun isn't so gray

Tough love is a two way street
gotta get something better to eat
Tough love is a two way street
Gotta find a smile where can I find it
Tough love is a two way street
Starving me for your touch
well, I don't mind it
Tough love is a two way street
I roam

Coming home you are nice again
I say honey can I have some sin
then we do it all over again
Your agony babe is the sea I swim
Lovin' you is a double-edged sword
Not even Shakespeare man
could find the right words

Cause
Tough love is a two way street
gotta get something better to eat
Tough love is a two way street
Gotta find a smile where I can find it
Tough love is a two way street
Starving me for your touch
well, I don't mind it
Tough love is a two way street
I roam

Motor mouth, motor mouth
is a weird adjustment
I give you my crazy
I give you my judgment
My motor mouth, motor mouth
is my truth for tougher men
Motor mouth, motor mouth
shakes you brakes you as you run away
Tough love is the street I roam today

Late at night is make-up sex night
We do it again by you damned daylight
ain't no way outta this circle I find
aint no way to just be kind Sam

You pull in the shades to warn
me of fight, I'm Joan of Arc
love and death's eternal delight
Maybe some flowers would
be allright

Cause
Tough love is a two way street
Learn to live with a pocket of change
Tough love is a two way street
Gotta find a smile wherever you don't it
Tough love is a two way street
Hoping for your touch
is what keeps me going
Tough love is a two way street
I roam

Tough love, babe
Tough love tough love
tough love is the two-way street
I roam

~ Douglas McDaniel
Copyright Mythville MetaMedia

An On the Road Memoir
of Where It All Started
in Ouray, Colorado ...

Something about the old noon mining age lunch alarm always creeped me out in Ouray, Colorado. When the town siren went off, it hit a pitch much more inclined toward tornado sirens and pre-bombing wails. That it should be a town gong to celebrating the 19th century ore boom, with its mining boss mentality, scorched-earth policies, to tell us it's noon, that means lunch, was certainly appropriate for the hard-boiled sort of a place ...

Sure, it fit the mood. They work damn hard in these mountain towns just to survive. Those who work, that is, who actually live there. But to get thrown out of heaven, which occurs from time to time, when you play the migrant journalist game ... no need to get too Milton about right, right, since each new chapter begins with a getting thrown down from the sky ...

To do what? Reign over hell? Lucky you.

So when the boss comes in on a cold morning and says, Mac, we got to let you go, the office for the 100-year-old, old as baseball old "Newspaper That Refused to Die," did. At least in spirit. Which was fortunate, I'd run out of things to say. After the election, I felt, without a stable Republic to actually muse on, and the common opponent and fuel for fodder, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, out of the picture, it was if all of the fun circus animals had deserted me. With Obama elected, and the nation in ruins, one can only be sit back and be stunned. At least, that was the way it was starting to look for that southwestern Colorado mountain town. Especially after the first storm moved in ...

So now there are those who didn't vote for Obama who are calling him the anti-Christ .. our some such other sewercide economics cult crap ... As if what occurred while Bush was around (and he still is president), didn't bring enough Taurean bullshit to begin with! Or, as Neil Young might sing, "I don't feel like a devil but I am to them," so anyone who voted for supported him becomes the enemy, again, the children of Satan again then, too, I suppose. The godless American. The ugly fascism rising just in time for a four-score breakout of fringe hate groups, homegrown terrorists, in Mythville. Coming out of the woods, they are, yes ... still binding us by the old Mason Dixon line ... again ...

We can't just all get along. The world needs lines to cross, to invade. Better some invisible monkey-bat dragon-breath with a beard bird far from these shores, than, hells bells, our feudal neighbors in gated communities holding back slums... We need wars, we being the capitalist state, to keep this kind of thing from happening. Old as the crusades. Hate to be a crank about it, really, it's just that the familiar ironies won't work anymore. They just don't sound right. The blame game sounds tinny. All humor is lost. Needs reinventing. The responsibility should be shed evenly. Sadly, though we are hope despite the times, yes, the agitprop REM still ringing true ... but trying to come up with something light and sunny then, well, fuck you too ...

So we come down from the mountains of Blue state Colorado, making Arizona just a little more blue, too. The music as we cross the desert in our 1992 Ford Exploder, a $300 bitch of a buy from a derelict quote friend in the Telluride high-country, a world of troubles onto itself, in full need of an exorcism and a new transmission, the car, not Telluride, that is, the big old green beast taking us across the great expanse,the big wide sky, well noticed after living in canyons and between fourteeners for so long, in the early afternoon shadows, the daylight-muted snows ... the great expanse, through Ship Rock, New Mexico, down the old route 666 ... people ask how it's going, fuck if I know, but it seemed the right thing to do ... to hurl back down to the past, to the burbs of the North Valley of Phoenix, to where everything is comfortable as the bolted down cement, where the meat locker of convenience feeds all, and there's gas, gas, gas, for everyone. New roads, big highways clashing with steal and snaky moans. Why change anything? Who could feel so Blue? Heck, the funniest thing I've seen was the guy, who had the good (fortune?) of working for AIG, having trouble with his brand new custom Mustang, big yellow police attractor, so out of sync with its tech ... couldn't get it out of the parking lot. I thought gee, being on the Governor's ski team was cool ... When the morning begins, you can hear the hum. It vibrates in the heart. ... startles me awake.

You were born in a cross-fire hurricane, but you can manage that. But if you go into a modern-day community casino, god have mercy on you. You are not the heathen, so the devil be your firend, my friends, because you are in the Riverside, Iowa casino, and you are about to not die. In fact, you are not even here to make a movie for HBo, and you might as well be in Vegas, loathing, for all you know. Disorientation is everything in a casino. I mean, it’s almost as bad as the mall.

Because malls rarely pay you back. They just take and take and take. But casinos don’t. They give you hope. Rather than creature comfort, and believe my tastes, the music is never as cool in the mall.


No sports betting, because that’s all you really trust. In football, you trust. And coffee, and smokes, nine dollars a pack here. Unlike in many places in Vegas, the alcohol is not free when you gamble. But you only have one cigareete, and you are writing in frantic pirate text now, and the effect of having a cig hanging from your lip is so Hunter S. Thomppson you don’t want to let go of that.

Tou are definitely not making a movie for HBO here in Riverside, Iowa. So you stay in the middle, to keep from getting dizzy and you set your cell phone on maximum, in case you need a rescue. You stay in the center of the place, to keep from spinning out of orbit, but out of orbit is where you really need to go. To talk to the marketing manager: You are definitely not here to make a movie for HBO.

It’s a pretty standard units because all casinos are standard units. The Corvette is available for the big winner, and so on …

But you are not here to make a movie about the future birthplace of Captain Kirk, who isn’t real, no anymore than anything else in the false world. You are not here to make a movie for HBO. Riverside has suffered enough.

You were born in a cross-fire hurricane, but you can manage that. But if you go into a modern-day community casino, god have mercy on you. You are not the heathen, so the devil be your firend, my friends, because you are in the Riverside, Iowa casino, and you are about to not die. In fact, you are not even here to make a movie for HBo, and you might as well be in Vegas, loathing, for all you know. Disorientation is everything in a casino. I mean, it’s almost as bad as the mall.

Because malls rarely pay you back. They just take and take and take. But casinos don’t. They give you hope. Rather than creature comfort, and believe my tastes, the music is never as cool in the mall.


No sports betting, because that’s all you really trust. In football, you trust. And coffee, and smokes, nine dollars a pack here. Unlike in many places in Vegas, the alcohol is not free when you gamble. But you only have one cigareete, and you are writing in frantic pirate text now, and the effect of having a cig hanging from your lip is so Hunter S. Thomppson you don’t want to let go of that.

Tou are definitely not making a movie for HBO here in Riverside, Iowa. So you stay in the middle, to keep from getting dizzy and you set your cell phone on maximum, in case you need a rescue. You stay in the center of the place, to keep from spinning out of orbit, but out of orbit is where you really need to go. To talk to the marketing manager: You are definitely not here to make a movie for HBO.

It’s a pretty standard units because all casinos are standard units. The Corvette is available for the big winner, and so on …

But you are not here to make a movie about the future birthplace of Captain Kirk, who isn’t real, no anymore than anything else in the false world. You are not here to make a movie for HBO. Riverside has suffered enough.

Dog Star Blues

Tough to run, but not too tough
Tough to walk on the morning tufts
of grass in your fields of earth

Your fields of earth are enough
They are enough

Stragglers will be left behind
in the alleys of deceit
and wild animal violence
driven like the tides

Getting a feel for the sun
in the dog park

Life in the dog park
alive in the dog park,
life making me a doggie
dinner, a life made of bad girls
running with me, jumping
into pools of water

But I don't recall seeing you
and I don't recall being seen
and I don't recall when I was me

You never knew me,
the me you never knew,
but knew you well enough
to say, trust me me, say
just go ... I'll say, I told you so

~
Mt. Pleasant, Iowa

J Jaimie O. at the Presby Church in Sharon, Iowa, circ. 2006

Last Water
In America

By Douglas McDaniel

Symmetry comes to mind, but it’s hardly late enough in the hour to consider it fully, completely. More like, it’s this: Listening to a long sad aphorism by Mark Twain, thus misquoted, misre-engineered: The hardest thing in life, the thing that really wears me out, the rub, as they say (some call it entropy), is having to spend most of your life trying to convince completely ignorant, stupid, ill-mannered, superstitious or otherwise plain retarded people that there’s such a thing as being smart.

Not to get too prideful on the subject. To think too much of your own education is no humble way to go on living. In fact, information can really get in the way. Too much information, poison. If you have too many beeping crickets in your head, if you haven’t gone completely Luddite (and therefore mad), then you are simply pushing the envelope on what the mind can actually contain. If you are like one of those poor folks who are suckerfish for data, well, my condolences. And if you wield it all like a sword, using the word (lowercase, though solemnly used) like a shield instead of a sword, well, I’d just have to regretfully inform you that your apologies are not accepted.

On that opposite side of that coin, sometimes yes you just need the fucking noise. Say you are camped along the mad boulevard of St. Charles, outside of Chicago … and it’s a Saturday morning and the motors are roaring in front of you, camped at the Starbucks, sucking down your caffeine, getting your first cig with coffee for the day. A glorious morning, with motors a roarin’. Down America’s snaky trail they go: The rented cars, the newly bought golden bows, all funded by the cash for cars program, making the whole roadway look like a new car lot running like blood from the old century into the new; the cattle trucks, the dump trucks, the pickups carrying horses to their polo games, the motorcycles, the morons and their motors, there they all go … in camper cans and brightly colored vehicles designed in the late 20th century and made to all look like aerodynamic Clorox bottles, the Porches for the Plutocrats, the Lincoln Continentals for the Republicans, the Democrats, seeking prestige, in their Priusi (hybrids of dinos, still, sucking the vampire blood from the earth, but only half as often), the independents in their silvery gleaming galaxies of wheels, the Redcoats in their redcoats, the Blues in their bluesmobiles, sex and death and terror and awe struck to the bottom of the gully in front of the Starbucks, down the red brick canyon, carting coal or gasoline or what the fuck else, corn oil and hydrogen and eternal air in the morning’s last pure light. Lawyers dressed as gangsta bikers. Gangsta bikers dressed as lawyers. All of the dogs and cats and homos and lesbians in their convertibles, their hair glaze getting Beatled down by the sun and blazing classic rock radio, their stereos boom boxing their personal music, their power, their Powaqua, piped in by satellites now right into their husks, into their chests, and the latter, their long blonde hair flying wild and evil in the breeze … a wind, tainted by the St. Charles River, on this day overflowing and reeking of kerosene … Fuck! … if you are downwind today it will make you effing dizzy …

And there you are in front of Starbucks, with your notebooks and designer coffee, your pack of smokes, American Spirits, expensive as a vote in these Chicago gangland parts, with the strange wise guy in a T-shirt staring down at you from his second-floor window right across the street, above the pizza parlor. There you are, with your pride, your conceit. O, you have so much information flowing in your head, faster, faster, faster … alchalides and ketones and raging hormones, from sex denied from living in the burbs for just one week, for living among the so-called (as Tom Wolfe put it), the “Masters of the Universe.” Little do you know that, even as you think all of these wonderful beautiful mind thoughts, he is plotting against you: the Dr. Cyclops, master of all the fatherlands you can currently survey.

And he won’t pick up the phone today. He, who lured you into this state of placated freedom after a full week of endless horrors. He who knows much more than he lets on, some effing one-eyed grandmaster, He! So you thought you had one grand Peter Pan fantasy in yer head … lazy fucker you, without a so-called “pot to piss in,” as you have heard frequently during the week. Every time you heard it you looked into your Navajo-made sacred earn for your cig smoke ash. You with you shaman pretenses, your rael as blood pink sunglass lenses … He, with his plan, working against, and yet, despite his best efforts failing … because she is basic, gorgeous, a queen, true to her times as a bee in some mysterious hive, commanding the spirits of the earth, the underworlds and overworlds, her sex divine, her Joan of Arc in full arc, her animal magnetism, fully magnetized, all sharpened by the wickedly severe engine of grief.

O yeah, it’s real. The day you two arrived in this plastic castle fantasyland Dr. Cyclops was hatching his plot against this fairyland queen and long away from home Ulyesses, both barely unable to even gauge which way was north or south or east or west, save for the unfamiliar sunlight and the direction of the foul winds, blown up this north by the British Petroleum-launched war to re-take America, an undeclared war that now, not even the U.S. military quite gets yet … from the moment the divide and conquer game was on as you are carefully guided into his road raging castle on the hills of the Shire. The whole neighborhood is a military base in the meadows of the Plutocracy, homes for colonels retired but still having their use, for KGB queens, but hell, they aren’t near half as dangerous to this sacred soil as the real estate mavens in their pink Cadillacs and their busy blood for time-is-money ways and means, all meeting the endless ends, the service to the great digitized seas of that false god: The caches of electronified cash, the stolen formulas for beers, the Kentucky fried generals on their furloughs, watching it all go down in deep bunkers beneath their homes … O yeah, trust this, if nothing else: It is so fucking so!

~

Most definitely, a work currently in regress ... try to keep up at http://mythville.blogspot.com/

or for Print-On-Demand ... The Mythville Bookstore

This Just In

(verse)
Hey you Joe the Terrorist
your humvees out of gas
staring at goats in the desert
in a deadly atmosphere, aye

Men from the future
fly at your command
takin' stolen relics
from the smoking holy lands

(chorus)
This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got refused
This just in
This just in
Got refused,
got refused
Joe the Terrorist just got refused

(verse)
Staring at goats
is just a gas man
O Capricorn Stan
Make your gasoline stand

Turning trees
into smokes
across the Asias
The popular
rage rolls over
in real time fast

(chorus)
This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got refused
This just in
This just in
Got refused,
got refused,

(bridge)
Popps points torpedoes
Toward the tackle
Momma says Go ahead Joe
aims to kill
If wingnut words
won’t work.
or fucked up vote counts
bombs sure will

(Verse)

Like a rough beast
backbeat back at last
flinging flags
with snakes on the porch

This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist he got bad blues,
Read the oven in our eyes
for a penetratin’ view


(Fade)

This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got refused
This just in
This just in
Got refused,
got refused,
got refused …






Verse

Here comes coach
Riding his Humvee
Leaving cigs and smokes
and butts across the aching Asias
of bloody mountains and sand
You … just soar above the Holy lands
Feel the magic at your command

Chorus

Staring at goats
Is just a gas, Man
Staring at goats
O gasoline Stan

Staring at goats
Is plain fun, son
Staring goats
Better ‘n bigger
Badder Broadband

Verse

Coach points his torpedoes
Toward the tackle
Aims to kill in gridiron
Glories, braying to the mob

This just in from Fox News:
Coach Boehner, well, he got bad blues,
gonna put the oven in the eyes
for and you and you and you

Chorus

Staring at goats
Is just a gas, Man
Staring at goats
O gasoline Stan

Bridge

Like a rough beast backbeat back at last
the popular rage rolls in real time fast
flinging flags with snakes on the porch
of Democracy, livin' free while you die

... and all that know-nothing why

This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got refused


Finale
Staring at goats …
Brother gotta run

This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got refused

Got refused,
got refused,
got refused …

Joe the Terrorist just got refused



Join the Carnival Army

(verse)
Don’t get nervous, don’t get sad
This is the best damn daylight
We ever damn well had

Open your heart or you’ll go mad
The money time continuum
Is going nowhere fast

(chorus)
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

(verse)
Come back to me,
and I will be your brother
Call off your dogs, and I’ll call
Off my daughters

Bring this pit to peace
Live in this world, no other

(chorus)
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

(Bridge)

Glass floats on the beach, man,
Crystals in the sand
Get the light, gather it all
‘fore the Kracken lands

(verse)

Don’t be evil, don’t be sad,
This is the best damn daylight
A dead man ever did damn have

(chorus)
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other


Tough to run, but not too tough
Tough to walk on the morning tufts
of grass in your fields of earth

Your fields of earth are enough
They are enough

Stragglers will be left behind
in the alleys of deceit
and wild animal violence
driven like the tides

Getting a feel for the sun
in the dog park

Life in the dog park
alive in the dog park,
life making me a doggie
dinner, a life made of bad girls
running with me, jumping
into pools of water

But I don't recall seeing you
and I don't recall being seen
and I don't recall when I was me

You never knew me,
the me you never knew,
but knew you well enough
to say, trust me me, say
just go ... I'll say,
I told you so
Refugees

We run like
Refugees
Through the neighborhood


We are Bandits running
In Remote country,
One day short
Of a room,

Light is leaking
A little out of each day.
The sheltered share
Nothing,
not even room to rent,
We are stretched
Stretched in piles,
Beside the road.
.
Our hands are cold
And tires hot,
Numb to the labor
Of the road.

If all this roaming
Made sense
We would be laughing
now.

If all this roaming
Makes sense,
We’d find
A limit to pain.


Angel of Anxiety
Storms across America (obscene mix)


Sheriff Joe just robbed a bank
with martial law in Arizona
Kung Fu cougars roam the streets
Its martial law in Arizona
STORMS ACROSS AMERICA

She leans into the sea
keening a song
from the Madonna vagina
of the deep as hailstones
ring white pins honed from Hawaii
and a tide of low pressure
rounds up upon the shore
of the Forty-Fifth parallel,
a crowny curtin of thorns

Unknowing from the unquiet
slumbers of lost ships
still melting in icy currents
below the surface,
the seagulls scatter
and defecate upon her:

Rise, O rise, storms across America
Your plastic passions await you
as cars stream in from the Orient
and gas passes through your ports
of entry, pleased, as they are
from the total penetration
of the perfect plan

Star of India, our captains
catch colds in the bowlegged
polarities of warm seas
and freezing skies
The sun, well-timed,
is a clock-face ticking,
hidden from our view

America, may the tilted jet stream
blow a gale of goth up your nose
May the ocean rise and plaster
a new continent where truth,
chased in the wind, wakes
the ghost dancers from
the Pacific to the Atlantic
before the living dead
can get out of bed

Shipwrecked sailors
found lost at sea
discovered homes
in their own faces,
in bindles of woody words
crushed to hand-length bits

After forty days of fire,
forty days of rain,
the northwesterly El Nino
sheared shanks of wind
off the Oregon coast,
then brought a low blow
to slap the soiled temples
of the City of Angels

Driftwood is piled fore desire
against sandy beach stumps
and stop gaps, infinite and wise:
Infinity stopped here for a day,
a deluge for the dead,
so I could admire
our wood chips,
our broken bones

A winter-long windshear
plucked the breath
from my pressurized lungs,
turning my fire to water.
I floated some, then burst,
mounted a floating oar
then sank into an orb
of sand

The sun, beyond the grey wail,
shaped a man inside here,
inside this calamity of clams;
one-part plastic,
one-part fishhook,
a bonney redwood mast,
a skull & crossbones flying,
walking the plank on dry land
without an anchor, who cares?

Setting of these banalities
of life aside, let me perscribble:
Glass floats on the beach,
I've found, and the ebb-tide
of the avenues are a roar
of trucks in the rain

On tuesdays, Great Food
is closed in a seaside town;
and what a tree lacks,
the wind whispers;
and loving couples
strand tennis shoes
on the frosty morning shores
as missiles are clicked
into load in the underground
caverns of Iran

Also this: The electric truth sheds
the oil slick skin off the CIA
and sickened seagulls
reel in the ninety mile winds
and Pennsylvania miners
with black lung bibles
defuse the threat
with another tragic
mind blast

The sun goes up
and Mercury goes
into retrograde
as our satellite's
telescopic echo fades
and techno-pop
becomes the sea
in which we wade

The camera's eye
is just a catch
for this cuckoo cluck house,
our mourning latch
and what is least
is that which lasts
as buzzard gulls sift
through black morning trash
and I try to unlearn
this noisy cache
of highway moms
speeding by bullet blasts
and taxi driver Thanatoss plants
look like gods in camouflage pants

Glass floats on the beach,
it's endless, at last!
The end is coming near
and it's coming here fast
It's time to drink
from the pirate's flask
and toast a tune
to all of that glass,
to the sun, the sky,
the nuclear smash,
the currents, the past,
the pounding surf,
the manic search
for meaning and gas,
the molten glow,
the melting snow,
the rivers that run
through those who know ...

Glass floats on the beach,
the ebb is endless,
it's here, at last

Storms Across America

See the Madonna Disneyland
lean into the sea, casting a spell
of the deep as hailstones
ring white pins honed from Hawaii
and a tide of low pressure
rounds up upon the shore
of the Forty-Fifth parallel,
of the Forty Fifth Parallel
at the Forty Fifth parallel

And she sings ...

Rise, O rise, storms across America
Your plastic passions await you
as cars stream in from the Orient
and gas passes through your ports
of entry, pleased, as they are
from the total penetration
of the perfect plan

Star of India, our captains
catch colds in the bowlegged
polarities of warm seas
and freezing skies
The sun, well-timed,
is a clock-face ticking,
hidden from our view

America, may the tilted jet stream
blow a gale of goth up your nose
May the ocean rise and plaster
a new continent where truth
gets chased into the wind,
wakes the ghost dancers from
the Pacific to the Atlantic
before the living dead
can get out of bed

Shipwrecked sailors
found lost at sea
discovered homes
in their own faces,
in bindles of woody words
crushed to hand-length bits

After forty days of fire,
forty days of rain,
of the Forty-Fifth parallel,
of the Forty Fifth Paralell
at the Forty Fifth paralell
etc..



Glass Floats on the Beach

The sun goes up
and Mercury goes
into retrograde
as our satellite’s
telescopic echo fades
and techno-pop
becomes the sea
in which we wade
defuse the threat
with another tragic
mind blast

what a tree lacks,
the wind whispers;
and loving couples
strand tennis shoes
on the frosty morning shores
as missiles are clicked
into load in the underground
caverns of Iran

The camera’s eye
is just a catch
for this cuckoo cluck house,
our mourning latch
and what is least
is that which lasts
as buzzard gulls sift
through black morning trash
and I try to unlearn
this noisy cache
of highway moms
speeding by bullet blasts
and taxi driver Thanatoss plants
look like gods in camouflage pants

Glass floats on the beach,
it’s endless, at last!
The end is coming near
and it’s coming here fast
It’s time to drink
from the pirate’s flask
and toast a tune
to all of that glass,
to the sun, the sky,
the nuclear smash,
the currents, the past,
the pounding surf,
the manic search
for meaning and gas,
the molten glow,
the melting snow,
the rivers that run
through those who know ...

Glass floats on the beach,
the ebb is endless,
it’s here, at last


Ginsberg Rolls Over
(Katie Couric Scares the Shit Out of Me)

Saw a flower child
of a flower child
with a ring in her nose
house big as a cloud
Hanging from a cliff
like a prisoner in a noose
facing the wind,
rastling of the trash bin
behind the media megastore

Someday we all will be
forced to where some kind
ofr ridiculous head contraption
and now I can’t get to sleep anymore
and the country crooner
is a caged old bird now


CHorus:

And I think Orwell is right, always right
as Ginsberg rolls over
while the president goes on vacation
the world burns and seas swell
The world heard over your headset
is corporeal, corporal, and Operation
Wannabe Warlord is just a rush
for the kiddies in the suburbs
And those hay bales
in the hay barn won’t dry
mom and pop from American Gothic
have left their pitchforks to rust
and the country crooner
is a caged old bird now

CHorus:

And I think Orwell is right, alwaqys right
as Ginsberg rolls over
the president on vacation
the world burns and seas swell

CHorus:

And I think Orwell is right, alwaqys right
as Ginsberg rolls over
the president on vacation
the world burns and seas swell.

California Zephyr

Take the train. The mystery whistle
gives warning as a service
to each and hovel and burgh along the line.

Take the train. Shape your body
At a bad angle, to sleep with
One eye open,
a hand on your backpack:
Walk the aisle of the peaceful.
Tiptoe through the dead.

Take the train, but do not envy
The conductors in beautiful
blue caps, who tell tall tales
of DEA rousts, great rivers
frozen over,
whole cities rolling
alive into possibility.
Take the train, leave the attendant
regrets of lost love behind
with the voice of reason
that rules the iron-fisted
tracks of time, faith
and paper-thin legal fantasies
concerning the state
of our nation.

Take the train. Avoid the bad energy

of airports. Smoke in the smoking car.
Listen to long and endless movement
and look toward the Northern Lights.

Take the train, but just know
Charlie Vaughn, he’s just
a shape changer
in a checkered shirt.
The roust was real.

Take the train,
and he’ll confirm
The sun behind the sun.

Take the train, note the brown burned
empty water tank on its side,
feel the mystery rail move forward
again. The observation deck is a churchy
made-for-tv movie ... a transition space
of carpet and glass, frozen stiff,
the great white world,
grafting all tracks
within the context
of our mutual lost
and lonely selves.

Take. The. Train. The late
lifeline and link from Boston
to San Francisco, monk’s tea,
fuel-stained air, electricity humming
up ozone

from East to West.

Take the train,
But send it all back down the hill,
The anger, the fear, laments that fall
upon thine eyes.

Take the train, drilling through

a one-tracked meditation
on your soul’s cruelest capabilities.
Take the train, step off,
greasy, forbidden
and a little too real.


Hothouse Day

On a hothouse day
a solar storm on election day
electrifies a lake of fire
in the sky

The pattern: A tree,
maybe an off-ramp signage shadow,
with pecked And puckered knotty holes,
Where owls perch and eagles play.
I took that last quarter
To the phone booth ...

Oh, if not for so many lonely
And cynical Winnebegos
That drive, ceaselessly,
To bridge the great divide.

The real question isn’t
How to turn lead into gold,
But how to turn gold into soul.



LOOKOUT BURIAL MOUND

I was walking toward the stone circle
overlooking the city of the mind
Leaning over to pick up seven stones
a bone collector, a creature of desire

Both good and evil are in full supply
evil can be found there
in endless supply
great good comes there
at lookout burial mound
overlooking the city
glowing silver town

There on the hill of seven white stones
where the heart will never be found
its made of flesh and cannot ever
be collected, as these bones groan
and so these old bones need flesh
Both good and evil are in full supply
And evil is available
in endless suplly
and great good comes
in endless supply

Both good and evil are in full supply
And evil is available
in endless supply
and great good comes
in endless supply

Out there on the hill of seven quartz white stones
where the heart will never be found
for its is made of flesh and cannot ever
be collected
and so these old bones need flesh

This Just In

Hey you fallen conquerer
your humvees out of gas
hunting for goats
in a deadly atmosphere, aye

Men from the future
fly at your command
takin' stolen relics
from the smoking holy lands, aye

Staring at goats
is just a gas man
staring at goats
you make your gasoline stand

Cigs and smokes
across the Asias
while the popular
rage moves
in real time fast

(bridge)

Like a rough beast
backbeat back at last
flinging flags
with snakes on the porch

This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got the blues

Finale

This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got refused
This just in
This just in
Got refused,
got refused,
got refused …

Joe the Terrorist just got refused



Join the Carnival Army

(verse)
Don’t get nervous, don’t get sad
This is the best damn daylight
We ever damn well had

Open your heart or you’ll go mad
The money time continuum
Is going nowhere fast

(chorus)
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

(verse)
Come back to me,
and I will be your brother
Call off your dogs, and I’ll call
Off my daughters

Bring this pit to peace
Live in this world, no other

(chorus)
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

(Bridge)

Glass floats on the beach, man,
Crystals in the sand
Get the light, gather it all
‘fore the Kracken lands

(verse)

Don’t be evil, don’t be sad,
This is the best damn daylight
A dead man ever did damn have

(chorus)
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

Bards of Mythville | Phoenix, AZ | Alternative / alt-country / post-punk topical techno poesy | Music, Lyrics, Songs, and Videos | ReverbNation

Bards of Mythville | Phoenix, AZ | Alternative / alt-country / post-punk topical techno poesy | Music, Lyrics, Songs, and Videos | ReverbNation


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23 Roads to Mythville
An apocalyptic journey across America and meditation on the imposition of order in space, both cyber and dirt real. By experiential author Douglas McDaniel, who explores the mysteries of American networked life. Read more






Ipswich at War
A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, poet and essayist Douglas McDaniel moved to Ipswich, on the North Shore of Massachusetts. A collection of poems from that period of fear and anxiety, as well as the polemic essay, "Media Arts and War."
Read more







Glasnost Lost
As an act of defiance after the botched election of 2000, experiential author launched himself into a journey into the underworld of American life, or, what he calls: The Science of Descent. Read more







Godz, Cars & Cannon
Experiential author Douglas McDaniel launches drives into the networked thickets of American life, looking for signs of myth and romance in the age of automotive machines.
Read more







Many Moons the Mythville: The Collected Road Poems
Poetry written during a 10-year span of criss-crossing America in a roving-eye view of the turn-of-the-century landscape of Mythville, or, as the author puts it: "It's all a bunch of Mythville." With work from four separate books by Arizona-based author and poet Douglas McDaniel, the bard-inspired voices of Milton, Blake and Yeats, as well as the saturnine streak of early beat poesy, ring through this collection of poems and essays. From the southwestern deserts to the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, "Many Moons to Mythville" is a foot-to-the-floor blast through the mythical roads of American life.
Read more







Human Search Engine

The journey continues as the quest for myth in an age of information overload leads to online life as an editor for Access Internet Magazine. A story about all human search engines as they chase the ghost in the machine.
Read more






William Blake in Cyberspace

Experiential author Douglas McDaniel takes on the visionary art and poetry of William Blake, comparing an otherworldly worldview to that revolutionary, romantic era to our own wild, wired, mythic world.
Read more








The Kachina's Son

Poems about the Four Corners area written while author Douglas McDaniel was living in Telluride, Colorado.
Read more








The Road to Mythville
A collection of poems on the new millennium in America, drawing from decade of bouncing across the country as a journalist and Kerouac-style poet, from the Southwestern deserts to the shores of New England and back again.
Read more

It’s after Christmas, a Tuesday, and Depoe Bay is a roiling sea as gray whales bound about in the distance, mostly behind behemoth waves driven by an oncoming winter storm.
Along the seawall people are everywhere in their jackets and other warming gear, with cameras or binoculars, hypnotized as the waves pound away. The stormy sea sends great white splashes into the air that generate applause.
It’s as if Depoe Bay were a vast stage without actors – or very shy performers, if you count the gray whales off in the distance – and the churning of the water is part of an amazingly on-schedule performance (considering this is the holiday Whale Watch Week rush).
During the week, many of the same people had been shopping during the busiest day of the holiday season. That night, maybe as they luxuriated in a local hotel room with waves from big winds pounding out-side their big picture windows, the watched anniversary shows on last year’s tsunami disaster in the Indian ocean. Now they are enthralled with waves powered by a storm way out by Hawaii heading this way, coming fast as 30 to 40 mph wind gusts whip away, and the power of the water is the attraction.
The whales? They are hidden behind, zooming in and out of a white-washed curtain out there ... riding high ... riding low ... .
Mark Spaulding, who has come from Vancouver, Wash., to see this, instead points his fancy camcorder down into the Depoe Bay spouting horn. Others stand closely nearby, hoping to catch a bit of the spray. There is no logic to the way the waves break, no apparent system, no pattern, no order, no way to predict which wave will be the one to send the water shooting through the spout and into the air. Finally, we have a hit. Spray goes into the air, onto the sidewalk, onto vehicles parked along the seawall.
He exclaims. “I got one!” That is, his camera did, his highly sensitive lens doused by the salty sea of the Pacific.
Meanwhile, in the “Whale Watching Spoken Here” interpretive center, a woman is toting two restless grandchildren onto the second deck of the building perched on the southern end of the seawall. The picture windows for the room in-the-round are steamy from the day’s crowds. One of the boys climbs onto a for-pay viewmaster. “I want a quarter!” the boy shouts. But the grandmother says, “Why, there’s nothing to see out there. If there was anything to see, we could do it.” Then, she says, “Did your mother ever tell you about the time we saw a whale go right under the boat in Mexico?”
Actually, the whales are going right under her nose again.
At precisely that same time, one deck below in the interpretive center, there is, in fact, something to see out there. A whole room of people lean into the window with their binoculars as Morris Grover, lead interpretive ranger for the Oregon State Park service’s whale watch center, keeps people in the room posted. “There’s one going by the buoy,” he shouts. With swells of 20 feet or more, it has been a hard day to see whales, he said. On this day, he only sees six or seven. The next day, with calmer seas with only 12-foot swells, he will see 20 whales. But on this day the payoffs are few and far between as the giant curtain of waves steals the show.
“Well, there’s one of the 1,800 whales out there,” he says to the crowd.
Leaning toward the sea is a natural tendency. When you go to the beach on a sunny day in say, Florida or Southern California, we are all children at heart: We want to go in.
But this kind of sea is different. We are drawn to the sea, but in cases such as these, with it crashing and roiling and churning, to try to get close is unwise.
There are signs all over. Such as the sign at the Rocky Creek outlook off of Highway 101, just south of Depoe Bay, which states: “Warning. Area beyond this point subject to high dangerous waves. Even though ocean appears calm large waves may sweep over rocks at any time. Do not go beyond this sign.”
So, just as people are poking their cameras into the Depoe Bay spouting horns a few miles away, people who can (probably) read have crossed the line. Rocky Creek is peculiar in this way. Its access to a very close look at the sea is easier, due to the erosion of where a fence should be. Three men are past the warning sign. The sea doesn’t appear to be calm. Indeed, high dangerous waves are apparent. Just beneath their noses. High dangerous waves are almost at eye level for anyone daring enough to scramble down just a few feet of rain-slick black rock. The tide is coming in. They are getting a face full.
Such is also the case at Cape Perpetua, just south of Yachats. There is a huge spouting horn at a place called the Devil’s Churn. This should be a clue. Well-built stairs in the trail lead down to where the spouting horn sends white-water blasts into the air.
A young couple goes down and disappears around the bend to where the very front edge of the horn should be.
The tide is coming in.
Next time they are seen, at the top of the Cape Perpetua trail, they are soaking wet. They get into their car, head north up Highway 101, to zoom up and down, maybe happy, maybe shivering, in and out of a series of coastal areas with blue signs indicating tsunami danger zones.

Official website of writer Joey Robert Parks

To Bidi, Or Not to Bidi:
What Was the Question?

By Douglas McDaniel
Mythville.com

He quit smoking right after the war. One day he was tooling around, heading toward a casino on the other side of the Colorado River at Lake Havasu, Arizona, and he came to a dock and the dock led to a loading ramp onto a ferry that would carry him to his dicey destination. But then he remembered, shit, he didn`t have any cigarrettes. He thought about turning around. As a thoughtful guy, heading back down the ramp, he started to do some math. He calculated, probably as he was also thinking about the money he needed for gambling, that if he stopped smoking for 10 years he would have saved himself about $40,000. With that, he turned around. He never smoked again. However, he still gambles.

To bidi, or not to bidi? That is the question.

For a little more than eight years, I have been smoking a little Indian cigarette called a bidi. In many respects it has changed my life, not all for the better, mind you. After all, setting fire to one's lungs defies logic and contradicts the proclivity of human nature toward longevity (i.e., smoking too much of anything of any kind will eventually kill participants, willing or unwilling, myself included). I was not really a smoker before I started inhaling them. Some kind of existential dilemma, however, induced by a knock-down drag-out divorce, as well as the untethering from the old modes of behavior that such an event implies, led me to an era of unmonitored experimentation. Whatever the case, the pleasing aura of the smoke and its surprising effects made my life a lot more interesting.

What are bidis? Well, they are basically peasant cigarettes from India. A eucalyptus leaf wrapped around tobacco.

Various brands are available. Multi-flavored Darshan-brand bidis are dominating the market these days. Small Shivsagar Bidis are shaped like a hand-rolled cigarette, reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart's only accoutrement.

A larger version by Sher Bidis are longer and fatter than an ordinary cigarette and much more powerful, quite capable of making even an initiated smoker sick to his stomach. Indeed, when first smoked, a bidi can have a profound effect on the senses.

It's not the shape nor the smell but the almost narcotic sensation brought on by the leaf. A kick in the head, basically. Perhaps that is the reason why some smoke shops in the United States had trouble keeping up with the demand for the little buggers when they hit a trendy flashpoint two or so years ago.

I have always thought of this peasant's solace as a type of marijuana substitute since the two share many characteristics, except for the THC, which is too bad. Hell, it could be hay wrapped in a maple leaf, for all it matters. It's the skanky, sweet- smelling smoke from the eucalyptus tree that delivers a powerful feeling. For a hyper, overemotional sort like myself, it really takes me down a notch. Its slight, twisted body, too small to hold like an ordinary cigarette, needs to be held between your thumb and index finger. To enable you to take in the bidi's last offering, you can unravel the little threads at its base like a roach clip. Just one of several reasons why this organic device resonates with thoughts toward its illegal associate.

Sound kinda scary? Well, don't get too excited. They are novelty smokes in the truest sense, like cloves or quirky cigarillos. And though they will probably always remain a cult item, bidis have changed my life.

I tried them for the first time in a bar called the Fly Me to the Moon Saloon in Telluride, Colorado. Located in the dank basement of an old mining town building, the Moon is one of the more sultry nightspots in all of the Colorado Rockies' ski towns. One reason is because of Deejay Harry, a bleach blonde rastafarian who could turn"Trash Disco" Thursday nights into orgies of sampling at 100 beats per minute. The voodoo king of trance music, a kind of local celebrity, would induce his crowd into aerobic states of glee, turning the Yups into rhythm-possessed Yorubans.

The stage set, the mood was conveniently in place for the two young men. As they began to unwrap and pull slow drags of their strawberry scented Kailas Bidis, perhaps the most popular brand at the time, I watched as an amazing situation developed for the pair. Several women were immediately drawn, as if some animal magnetism were at work. The women ventured toward the illicit aroma and the increasingly enigmatic, though otherwise unremarkable, men. Obviously questioning, and soon requesting to sample the wares of the two young rich hipsters, nicknamed locally as"trustafarians" because they were most likely living at that elevations with the support of a trust fund. It wasn't long after that these strangers were dancing in a swirling rhythm of the young, the beautiful and over-exercised.

The next night I awoke savoring the previous night's indelible image. I was determined to conduct my own experiment with the little wonders.

Not that I have ever had any trouble meeting people, but the temptation to have an instant "in" with total strangers was too great to resist further investigation. I began to question whether it was the cigarettes or something about the combination of the mood in the bar, maybe the vibe in the room, that was intoxicating enough to bring such good fortune on these men. Curious if I would fare equally, I located the town's cigar shop (which has since closed), walked in, and stocked up on ammunition.

That night, I smoked bidis in bars from one end of town to the other, a stretch of about a half-mile. And yes, perhaps I did smoke a little too violently, but the results were amazing. I continued to move from one bar to another, wary of my initial findings and impressions, just as much as any good John Lilly of the West might try (remember"Altered States"?). Sure enough, everywhere I went people were asking"What is that?" ,"Where did you get it?" and, of course,"Can I try one?"

When I returned to my home at the time in Phoenix, Arizona, I was assured that I was carrying some kind of socializing magnet in my shirt pocket. The results were much the same in the urbane confines of mall-dressed Scottsdale. It was my experience that people, especially women, would invariably stop to inquire and eventually ask for one. Even if they didn't smoke! A couple of hours into a night I would reach for one only to discover that I was left with an empty pack, being able to account for less than half of them myself. They were the ultimate first line."They are Kailas Bidis," I would say with a certain jaded, half-closed right eyelid squint. As I said it, blowing out smoke to accent my exotic qualities, I'd add, enigmatically,"They are from Indjeeaaaaa."

Now fast forward: A year had passed since I first tried the cigarettes in Telluride. I had been working from my rented room the rural Massachusetts, trying to scrape out a living as a freelance writer after working for a year at the Robb Report, a magazine for rich bastards that was decidedly anti-peasant. I was climbing the walls of this sleepy surbuban hovel, Acton, maybe 20 miles west of Boston, and I was needing my smokes just a bit too badly.

The problem: You just can't buy bidis in rural New England, thus making my addiction to them a total nuisance. I didn't feel like quitting, because, after all, being a freelance writer meant being anxious about just about everything, and I had two choices in order to obtain more.

I could drive an hour and a half north to a New Hampshire mall, which was the last place I found bidis in ample supply, or, I could take a train to Boston, where there were sure to be plenty of bohemians about who could point me in the right direction to a cigar shop that carried them.

So I end up at Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a very crowded place bustling with its famous mix of chic retail franchises, coffee galore, lots of stuff to read, very old stone and brick and smarty pants liberalism for a select elite of people who can afford to be so. I looked down and saw half a spent bidi discarded on the street. I felt that I was on the right track.

I found them easily, in stock at the David P. Ehrlich Company on Tremont Street, which has been supplying generations of tokers with smokes since 1868, a considerable legacy of suffering for more than a century's worth of hacking and general git stupidity. I bought a carton for $27, which I could not really afford since I was a starving writer. But hey, I figured, the smokes would at least kill my appetite. The carton contained 10 red packs, a flavor called strawberry and that really means sweet, the first of which I peeled open practically before I was out of the cigar shop. I quickly found a seat on the patio of a Harvard Square pastry store, lit up, and watched the grey-templed professorial sorts and pretty people dressed in dot-com black passing by.

Cambridge was fairly unimpressed by the bidis smoky blue essence wafting between the tables by the pastry store. The guys playing chess didn't even look up when a cloud as big as a bus fart polluted their pawns. Worldly places like Harvard Square know bidis all too well.

A week before in Miami, my experience was very different, but still it wasn't the novelty that caught people's noses toward my smoking, it was the familiarity.

A woman from Spain sat near me at a bar in South Beach and wanted to talk about her experiences with bidis. A Haitian cab driver on the way to the airport recognized the smell as I let the smoke drift out the window as we listened to an angry political commercial broadcast into his car's radio from Haiti. The heavy accented voice ranted as I took another puff of my peasant's pleasure. A South African lawyer in the airport bar recognized it and wanted one. While waiting for the plane outside the entry to the terminal, where everybody tends to smoke in a nervous, frenzied way, a couple of people came up to me, saying,"Oh, I recognize that smell," recalling "I haven't smoked one of those since I was in Paris," or" May I have one?"
Lest I not forget the wary looks on the faces of the luggage staff who looked on in disbelief; wondering whether they should call security or not.

Indeed, it's always a good idea to keep the original packaging around in case somebody thinks you are smoking a joint.

Once, at a U2 concert, a security guy grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the aisle, accusing me of smoking pot. He grabbed the lit cigarette, the last one I had, and in the darkened gloom of Foxboro Stadium it certainly looked like a joint. He was ready to lead me away as I fumbled in my pocket for the crumpled red packaging with the surgeon general's warning crudely stuck onto it. Fortunately, a half-dozen U2 fans sitting nearby saw what was going on, had seen me smoking for most of the show, and came to my rescue."He's just smoking those bidis," they all said. Even though I was set free, I felt like a criminal.

Three days after my trip to Harvard Square, I had seven packs left, so I was on a pack a day rate. At the time, I had a female visitor to share my fascination with, and she became so enamoured we got married. Though she claims she doesn't smoke, she has done her part in depleting the reserves. I was a little tired, strung out from smoking too many of the unfiltered tiny demons. I had this heavy feeling in my lungs, but I ignored the symptoms, as though bidis had lit my soul on fire and turned the self-awareness switch to"off."

Regardless of their obviously damaging effects they had seemed to have become an invaluable ice breaker, which had opened many new faces to me. They were a mask and a crutch and an everyday thing, like orange juice or bills in the mail. Payment due? Maybe 20 years, I'd say.

----

Postscript: In the time since these experiences were first recorded, about two years, I guess, I have stopped smoking, and then started again, then stopped again.

Right now I'm lighting one up, joylessly though, but I'm pretty sure these flavorful little flame sticks have passed their prime as novelty items. Arizona legislators were so incensed about their incense scent that they made bidis illegal to sell in that state (ck), known worldwide as a hovel of reactionary Americans. Too many kids thought they were candy, due to all of the cute flavors, and lately I've noticed that the cigar store salespeople are looking at me like some kind of 40-year-old juvenile. Once again, I think about quitting, and this mental exercise seems soul inflicting to me. But then, I keep going back to what a Cherokee shaman in Telluride once told me about smoking the peace pipe. He proclaimed the social importance of a good smoke, and said when you exhale, it's like sending out a prayer. That's the funny thing about this smoke: It's the shortest distance between you, me and big deep dark oblivion.

He quit smoking right after the war. One day he was tooling around, heading toward a casino on the other side of the Colorado River at Lake Havasu, Arizona, and he came to a dock and the dock led to a loading ramp onto a ferry that would carry him to his dicey destination. But then he remembered, shit, he didn`t have any cigarrettes. He thought about turning around. As a thoughtful guy, heading back down the ramp, he started to do some math. He calculated, probably as he was also thinking about the money he needed for gambling, that if he stopped smoking for 10 years he would have saved himself about $40,000. With that, he turned around. He never smoked again. However, he still gambles.

To bidi, or not to bidi? That is the question.

For a little more than eight years, I have been smoking a little Indian cigarette called a bidi. In many respects it has changed my life, not all for the better, mind you. After all, setting fire to one's lungs defies logic and contradicts the proclivity of human nature toward longevity (i.e., smoking too much of anything of any kind will eventually kill participants, willing or unwilling, myself included). I was not really a smoker before I started inhaling them. Some kind of existential dilemma, however, induced by a knock-down drag-out divorce, as well as the untethering from the old modes of behavior that such an event implies, led me to an era of unmonitored experimentation. Whatever the case, the pleasing aura of the smoke and its surprising effects made my life a lot more interesting.

Douglas McDaniel Photo of Doug McDaniel.
What are bidis? Well, they are basically peasant cigarettes from India. A eucalyptus leaf wrapped around tobacco.

Various brands are available. Multi-flavored Darshan-brand bidis are dominating the market these days. Small Shivsagar Bidis are shaped like a hand-rolled cigarette, reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart's only accoutrement.

A larger version by Sher Bidis are longer and fatter than an ordinary cigarette and much more powerful, quite capable of making even an initiated smoker sick to his stomach. Indeed, when first smoked, a bidi can have a profound effect on the senses.

It's not the shape nor the smell but the almost narcotic sensation brought on by the leaf. A kick in the head, basically. Perhaps that is the reason why some smoke shops in the United States had trouble keeping up with the demand for the little buggers when they hit a trendy flashpoint two or so years ago.

I have always thought of this peasant's solace as a type of marijuana substitute since the two share many characteristics, except for the THC, which is too bad. Hell, it could be hay wrapped in a maple leaf, for all it matters. It's the skanky, sweet- smelling smoke from the eucalyptus tree that delivers a powerful feeling. For a hyper, overemotional sort like myself, it really takes me down a notch. Its slight, twisted body, too small to hold like an ordinary cigarette, needs to be held between your thumb and index finger. To enable you to take in the bidi's last offering, you can unravel the little threads at its base like a roach clip. Just one of several reasons why this organic device resonates with thoughts toward its illegal associate.

Sound kinda scary? Well, don't get too excited. They are novelty smokes in the truest sense, like cloves or quirky cigarillos. And though they will probably always remain a cult item, bidis have changed my life.

I tried them for the first time in a bar called the Fly Me to the Moon Saloon in Telluride, Colorado. Located in the dank basement of an old mining town building, the Moon is one of the more sultry nightspots in all of the Colorado Rockies' ski towns. One reason is because of Deejay Harry, a bleach blonde rastafarian who could turn"Trash Disco" Thursday nights into orgies of sampling at 100 beats per minute. The voodoo king of trance music, a kind of local celebrity, would induce his crowd into aerobic states of glee, turning the Yups into rhythm-possessed Yorubans.

The stage set, the mood was conveniently in place for the two young men. As they began to unwrap and pull slow drags of their strawberry scented Kailas Bidis, perhaps the most popular brand at the time, I watched as an amazing situation developed for the pair. Several women were immediately drawn, as if some animal magnetism were at work. The women ventured toward the illicit aroma and the increasingly enigmatic, though otherwise unremarkable, men. Obviously questioning, and soon requesting to sample the wares of the two young rich hipsters, nicknamed locally as"trustafarians" because they were most likely living at that elevations with the support of a trust fund. It wasn't long after that these strangers were dancing in a swirling rhythm of the young, the beautiful and over-exercised.

The next night I awoke savoring the previous night's indelible image. I was determined to conduct my own experiment with the little wonders.

Not that I have ever had any trouble meeting people, but the temptation to have an instant "in" with total strangers was too great to resist further investigation. I began to question whether it was the cigarettes or something about the combination of the mood in the bar, maybe the vibe in the room, that was intoxicating enough to bring such good fortune on these men. Curious if I would fare equally, I located the town's cigar shop (which has since closed), walked in, and stocked up on ammunition.

That night, I smoked bidis in bars from one end of town to the other, a stretch of about a half-mile. And yes, perhaps I did smoke a little too violently, but the results were amazing. I continued to move from one bar to another, wary of my initial findings and impressions, just as much as any good John Lilly of the West might try (remember"Altered States"?). Sure enough, everywhere I went people were asking"What is that?" ,"Where did you get it?" and, of course,"Can I try one?"

When I returned to my home at the time in Phoenix, Arizona, I was assured that I was carrying some kind of socializing magnet in my shirt pocket. The results were much the same in the urbane confines of mall-dressed Scottsdale. It was my experience that people, especially women, would invariably stop to inquire and eventually ask for one. Even if they didn't smoke! A couple of hours into a night I would reach for one only to discover that I was left with an empty pack, being able to account for less than half of them myself. They were the ultimate first line."They are Kailas Bidis," I would say with a certain jaded, half-closed right eyelid squint. As I said it, blowing out smoke to accent my exotic qualities, I'd add, enigmatically,"They are from Indjeeaaaaa."

Now fast forward: A year had passed since I first tried the cigarettes in Telluride. I had been working from my rented room the rural Massachusetts, trying to scrape out a living as a freelance writer after working for a year at the Robb Report, a magazine for rich bastards that was decidedly anti-peasant. I was climbing the walls of this sleepy surbuban hovel, Acton, maybe 20 miles west of Boston, and I was needing my smokes just a bit too badly.

The problem: You just can't buy bidis in rural New England, thus making my addiction to them a total nuisance. I didn't feel like quitting, because, after all, being a freelance writer meant being anxious about just about everything, and I had two choices in order to obtain more.

I could drive an hour and a half north to a New Hampshire mall, which was the last place I found bidis in ample supply, or, I could take a train to Boston, where there were sure to be plenty of bohemians about who could point me in the right direction to a cigar shop that carried them.

So I end up at Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a very crowded place bustling with its famous mix of chic retail franchises, coffee galore, lots of stuff to read, very old stone and brick and smarty pants liberalism for a select elite of people who can afford to be so. I looked down and saw half a spent bidi discarded on the street. I felt that I was on the right track.

I found them easily, in stock at the David P. Ehrlich Company on Tremont Street, which has been supplying generations of tokers with smokes since 1868, a considerable legacy of suffering for more than a century's worth of hacking and general git stupidity. I bought a carton for $27, which I could not really afford since I was a starving writer. But hey, I figured, the smokes would at least kill my appetite. The carton contained 10 red packs, a flavor called strawberry and that really means sweet, the first of which I peeled open practically before I was out of the cigar shop. I quickly found a seat on the patio of a Harvard Square pastry store, lit up, and watched the grey-templed professorial sorts and pretty people dressed in dot-com black passing by.

Cambridge was fairly unimpressed by the bidis smoky blue essence wafting between the tables by the pastry store. The guys playing chess didn't even look up when a cloud as big as a bus fart polluted their pawns. Worldly places like Harvard Square know bidis all too well.

A week before in Miami, my experience was very different, but still it wasn't the novelty that caught people's noses toward my smoking, it was the familiarity.

A woman from Spain sat near me at a bar in South Beach and wanted to talk about her experiences with bidis. A Haitian cab driver on the way to the airport recognized the smell as I let the smoke drift out the window as we listened to an angry political commercial broadcast into his car's radio from Haiti. The heavy accented voice ranted as I took another puff of my peasant's pleasure. A South African lawyer in the airport bar recognized it and wanted one. While waiting for the plane outside the entry to the terminal, where everybody tends to smoke in a nervous, frenzied way, a couple of people came up to me, saying,"Oh, I recognize that smell," recalling "I haven't smoked one of those since I was in Paris," or" May I have one?"
Lest I not forget the wary looks on the faces of the luggage staff who looked on in disbelief; wondering whether they should call security or not.

Indeed, it's always a good idea to keep the original packaging around in case somebody thinks you are smoking a joint.

Once, at a U2 concert, a security guy grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the aisle, accusing me of smoking pot. He grabbed the lit cigarette, the last one I had, and in the darkened gloom of Foxboro Stadium it certainly looked like a joint. He was ready to lead me away as I fumbled in my pocket for the crumpled red packaging with the surgeon general's warning crudely stuck onto it. Fortunately, a half-dozen U2 fans sitting nearby saw what was going on, had seen me smoking for most of the show, and came to my rescue."He's just smoking those bidis," they all said. Even though I was set free, I felt like a criminal.

Three days after my trip to Harvard Square, I had seven packs left, so I was on a pack a day rate. At the time, I had a female visitor to share my fascination with, and she became so enamoured we got married. Though she claims she doesn't smoke, she has done her part in depleting the reserves. I was a little tired, strung out from smoking too many of the unfiltered tiny demons. I had this heavy feeling in my lungs, but I ignored the symptoms, as though bidis had lit my soul on fire and turned the self-awareness switch to"off."

Regardless of their obviously damaging effects they had seemed to have become an invaluable ice breaker, which had opened many new faces to me. They were a mask and a crutch and an everyday thing, like orange juice or bills in the mail. Payment due? Maybe 20 years, I'd say.

----

Postscript: In the time since these experiences were first recorded, about two years, I guess, I have stopped smoking, and then started again, then stopped again.

Right now I'm lighting one up, joylessly though, but I'm pretty sure these flavorful little flame sticks have passed their prime as novelty items. Arizona legislators were so incensed about their incense scent that they made bidis illegal to sell in that state (ck), known worldwide as a hovel of reactionary Americans. Too many kids thought they were candy, due to all of the cute flavors, and lately I've noticed that the cigar store salespeople are looking at me like some kind of 40-year-old juvenile. Once again, I think about quitting, and this mental exercise seems soul inflicting to me. But then, I keep going back to what a Cherokee shaman in Telluride once told me about smoking the peace pipe. He proclaimed the social importance of a good smoke, and said when you exhale, it's like sending out a prayer. That's the funny thing about this smoke: It's the shortest distance between you, me and big deep dark oblivion.

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