Good Times at Pottersville, 4/29/15

 

Jack the Ripper's at Large

     The wait is over. Well, for me, at least. You've heard me yammering on about Tatterdemalion, my Caleb Carr-esque historical psychological thriller. Well, I finally uploaded it on Kindle last night and it went live today. You can find it right here for the low price of $4.99 (not a bad price to pay for a thriller that's nearly 200,000 words-long).
     And, as any author can tell you, books tend to sell better when they have trailers so these are the ones I'd made last summer with my Windows Movie maker. Be advised there are graphic images in the lead video above, especially at 39 seconds in. For those of you who could do without that or even music, try the one below which is silent except for some Victorian street sounds I'd downloaded off a public domain site on the internet.


     Some of you may recall that, originally, I'd intended to have these narrated by voiceover artist Debbie Irwin but she led me on by suggesting she'd be willing to negotiate then pulled the string and in the end we couldn't come to terms. Hopefully, they'll prove compelling enough to get people to buy it at this rock-bottom introductory offer of $4.99.
     Happy reading (I hope).

Fifty Shades of Gray, Black and Blue

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan.)

     "Running while black is not probable cause. Felony running doesn’t exist, and you can’t arrest someone for looking you in the eye." - Billy Murphy, Gray family attorney

     At first it may look as if the highly suspicious death of Freddy Gray, the 25 year-old African American who was arrested April 12 and died last Sunday morning, will see some satisfactory resolution. After all, Baltimore's police Commissioner is black, the mayor has promised a thorough investigation and six Baltimore officers have been suspended.
     Yet optics in our world are constantly and often deliberately deceptive. While the Baltimore PD has "made some concessions about lack of probable cause", the mystery deepens as to what exactly happened to Gray between the time he was dragged screaming in pain into a police van and when EMS was called a half hour later to the scene after spontaneously suffering a medical emergency in which, it was found, 80% of his spinal cord was severed and he was already in a coma.
     Baltimore police are also clamming up about why exactly he was arrested and deliberately targeted by the Baltimore PD when he, not the police, was obviously in fear for his life or if the switchblade they'd allegedly taken from his pocket was even his. Despite the autopsy having been completed, the ME still has not arrived at a cause of death.
     Only one thing remains clear in these fifty shades of opacity in the wake of yet another police killing: Freddy Gray is dead and the Baltimore Brotherhood, six of whom enjoying a paid vacation, is clamming up.
     It's impossible to see how anyone can still claim with a straight face that we are not living in a police state, one in which a wildly dysfunctional criminal justice system is skewed in favor of said police state and justice for its innocent victims doesn't seem to be a priority. Exhibit A:
     Just yesterday, Officer Dante Servin of the Chicago PD was exonerated of all charges by Judge Dennis Porter  In his ruling, Porter actually said, "Simply put, the evidence presented in this case does not support the charges on which the defendant was indicted and tried. There being no evidence of recklessness as a matter of law, there is no evidence to which the state could sustain its burden of proof... as to involuntary manslaughter. Therefore, there is a finding of not guilty on all counts and the defendant is discharged."
     In 2012, Servin was offduty and sitting in his car when Rekia Boyd, a 22 year-old African American woman, was walking with four friends. Apparently, Servin thought the dark people were being too loud and he told them to keep it down. Then Servin pulled his service pistol and actually fired four shots, over his shoulder, into the crowd of unarmed people and struck and killed Boyd.
     Servin had the nerve to claim he felt his life was in danger when he supposedly saw one of the men reach into his waistband, which is, in our criminal justice system, literally a get or stay out of jail free card. It looked as if it was a slam dunk case for the prosecution for at least reckless manslaughter.
     But then again, the case against Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo were also considered slam dunks.

White Paranoia Trumps Black Innocence

     Porter's decision sets a dangerous precedent for people of color all over the nation, even though a precedent has already clearly been established. Just a week and a half ago, The Washington Post released the findings of a joint study conducted by it and Bowling Green State University. Sticking out like a sore thumb was this horrifying statistic: Less than 1 officer in 1000 reported police killings of civilians resulted in charges (not convictions, charges) of wrongful death. And those thousands of reported shootings go back just a decade.
     Of the tiny fraternity of 54 officers who've been charged with wrongful deaths since 2005, one is now a police chief of a town not 20 miles from the scene of his crime because he was given the chance to plead to a lesser charge and keep a criminal conviction off his record.
     The Washington Post even cited a case of an officer in Cleveland, the same city in which 12 year-old Tamir Rice was gunned down without any chance for compliance, who went completely berserk and fired nearly 50 shots at a car after a chase, killing an unarmed couple. To this day, he's on trial for two counts of voluntary manslaughter.
     Those of you with a sense of history may recall the case of Amidou Diallo, a young New York man of color, who was gunned down by four NYPD officers and shot at no less than 41 times. The officers, too, cited fear of their lives over a phantom gun that never materialized and they were all exonerated.
     Last February, a 57 year-old farmer from India was visiting his relatives in Alabama to help care for his prematurely-born grandchild. Sureshbhai Patel was peacefully walking down the street when a paranoid white man called 911 to say he saw a black man and feared for his wife's safety. It's unclear if he was referring to Patel but when one of the two responding officers saw Patel, he thought he was a black man and threw him so hard to the ground he'd partially paralyzed him. Thankfully, he was fired from the force on the initiative of his Chief and another, Eric Parker, is up on 3rd degree assault charges.
     In the movies, when we see cops brutally beating and killing bad guys and firing dozens of bullets at one target, it's intended mainly for entertainment purposes. In real life, barring the most extreme of situations, real life law enforcement is not supposed to look like a Dirty Harry movie yet it is. And just like the cops in the movies, their real-life analogs often get away with such criminally reckless and public-endangering behavior.
     And it's notable that in the wake of an unjustified police killing, often white authority figures call for the public to remain calm and maintain order while not expecting the police to lead by example.
     The ongoing genocide of black people carried out with horrifying impunity by the thin blue line, this clash of black and blue, is a deepening bruise on the face of America. While white cops fire loaded guns over their shoulders into crowds of innocent people, while they use illegal methods to choke unarmed victims, while self-styled neighborhood watch captains kill children for walking in sundown towns and while white privileged teens get off scot-free on ridiculous defenses such as "affluenza", their black victims are regularly vilified.
     And there is something deeply wrong with a nation with pretensions to unequivocal equality that allows such institutionalized racism to continue virtually unabated.

Good Times at Pottersville, 4/20 edition redux

Good Times at Pottersville, 4/20 edition

Don't be a Dancing Bear

 

     15 or more years ago, my last family and I would go camping in New Hampshire and during those vacations, we'd go to Clark's Trading Post. Depending on your viewpoint, Clark's was either a delightful tourist trap, the perfect place to take the wife and kiddies or it was some exploitative place that used bears for the idle and witless amusement for those who loved to see them do tricks.

     But politics and animal rights has to take a back seat when one is on vacation with the fam so on two occasions we'd see the stupid little tricks the staff would make the bears do.

     Yet the only way in which they could get these so-called trained bears to do even the simplest stupid little tricks was to constantly shovel soft-serve ice cream in their mouths. Through their portable mics, they'd even admit that if they stopped constantly feeding ice cream, the fat, furry greedy bastards would immediately stop performing and perhaps even turn on them with lethal force.

     The bears could be looked upon by the more cynical of us as the Teabaggers, with the staff the Republican Party that feeds and enables them. Except, instead of soft-serve ice cream, they throw them red meat on a constant basis. The minute the red meat stops slapping on the concrete, the Teabaggers will revolt, stop performing their stupid little astroturf tricks and turn on their GOP handlers.

     Scott Brown learned that the first time he cast a vote in the Senate that agreed with the Democrats. A typical self-serving politician, he cynically used the Teabaggers to defeat Martha Coakley when they ran for the late Ted Kennedy's seat. Then he forgot they even existed once he was sworn in. After all, who cares about the Teabaggers when you can always suck up to the Koch Brothers for a cash infusion?

     And, just as much as when Obama was running for the presidency in 2008 and 2012, we're going to be hearing about blow jobs and Benghazi for the next fucking 18 months, especially if Hillary Clinton, God help us, actually gets the nomination. And you're going to see the red meat fly like a food fight at a junior high cafeteria. Because the GOP seems to think the Teabaggers make up a much larger faction than they really are.

     But the Teabaggers didn't just spontaneously rise up fully-formed as Athena from the skull of Zeus. As anyone who's been paying attention to these mouth-breathing psychopaths knows, they're just regurgitated and reconstituted Klansmen, militia types, anarchists and libertarian holdovers. They are the dregs of human society who all have a few things in common: Not wanting to pay their taxes, not being regulated even when it's absolutely essential and basically being allowed to flout, ignore or outright break the law when it impinges on their "sovereign rights."

     And now I'm going to say something that'll briefly get me in hot water with some Democratic deadenders who still insist that voting for a so-called Democrat like Hillary Clinton is still better than voting for the slightly less extreme and lobbyist-infested Republican: I'm not voting for Hillary. I've made my views on this known.

     When I voted for Dennis Kucinich in the '08 Massachusetts Democratic presidential primary, my ex girlfriend told me my vote was wasted and I told her that a vote of conscience was never a wasted vote. Yeah, I voted for Obama later that year but did it holding my nose because I bought into the bullshit that a third party candidate had no validity and no chance of winning.

     Sure. Tell that to Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders.

     And those of us who fancy ourselves on the "right" side of the tracks also need our red meat. Only, instead of "nigger", "Muslim" and "Benghazi", we respond to "universal single payer health care", "campaign finance reform" and "investing in peace." But red meat by another name is still red meat and you'd be surprised how fast it disappears in your stomach once you gobble it down.

     Hillary Clinton had more lobbyists attached to her campaign in 2008 than K Street and the Federal Bureau of Prisons combined, more than even John McCain's campaign. She was a corporate attorney that was on Walmart's Board of Directors and she opportunistically got herself reelected to her Senate seat out of New York even though it was the most open secret of the day that she wouldn't even last the year before wildly throwing her hat in the big ring like Mary fucking Tyler Moore and look what happened.

     And I will believe to my dying day that Hillary Clinton inspired Meryl Streep when she played that hard-as-nails, ball-cutting Senator in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate.

     One more thing I will keep repeating to my dying breath is the illusion that we live in a nation with a Two Party system, something vehemently opposed by both George Washington and John Adams. Such a fallacious story is the biggest bag over the head con job that's ever been pulled over the head of the American voter since the amusement park entrance fee, commercials on cable and extended warranties.

     Because when you get right down to it, both parties are alike. They will undercut underperformers when it comes time to count campaign contributions even if it means the Other Guy grabbing the seat when they withhold support for Their Guy. They all tiptoe through the back door of the Bilderberg group's meetings and they all work for the same Wall Street banks and the same corporations. Their pretense at shadow boxing each other and the fact that one side's rhetoric is slightly less extreme than the other has successfully fooled Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives alike into thinking there really is separation between the parties.

     Freelance journalist Michael Collins calls both The Money Party. And he's right.

     So don't put on the little tutu, don't dance on the yoga ball or ride the little tricycle and don't let them stuff your face with endless soft serve ice cream or red meat. Make an informed choice. Don't be a stupid dancing bear.

Why Isn't Anyone Saying the "G" Word?

No doubt that Okie cop's reason for shooting #EricHarris was he thought he was one of the Columbine shooters. #blacklivesmatter
— Robert Crawford (@jurassicpork59) April 12, 2015

      Perhaps it's a semantic term relying heavily on sheer numbers. That is, after all, a prerequisite when looking at definitions of the word "genocide" in our most esteemed lexicons. Yet one cannot argue against the definition's expansion on reading the 1944 interpretation of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist:

By 'genocide' we mean the destruction of an ethnic group... Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.

     Naturally, given the time in which this expansion of genocide's definition is ventured, Lemkin was obviously talking about the Holocaust and the horrors of the Warsaw ghettos. But totalitarian mindsets remain unchanged and eternal even if the victim profile changes every generation or so. And as the unwarranted deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott and now Eric Harris are painting a more and more detailed picture, we need not be talking about 6,000,000 murders of a class of people to use the word genocide.
     It had made the rounds last week that Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, while admitting details and specific numbers were lacking, was certain that in 2014 alone more African Americans were killed by police than had perished on 9/11. This is a horrifying enough statistic when one considers African Americans comprise only 12% or so of the national population. What's even more horrifying is that it seems every week brings news of a white cop killing another unarmed African American man, often shooting him in the back.
     As it happened with Eric Harris on April 2nd and Walter Scott a mere two days later.
     Yet, according to police and their invariably white, authoritarian-loving apologists (as long as said authoritarianism doesn't impinge on their "sovereign rights"), every one of these African Americans had it coming to them because they were "thugs" or maybe shouldn't've acted all uppity.
     Yet when one looks at police action in this generation, one sees more than a mere pattern of behavior. One can connect only so many dots before those dots actually begin to form a detailed picture as if it was some pointilist portrait of paranoia.
     James Holmes had murdered 12 people, wounded 58 more and was armed with several automatic weapons when he was taken alive without further incident.
     Jared Lee Loughner had murdered six, including a child and a judge, and nearly assassinated former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and sustained nothing worse than a black eye.
     Jeffery Dahmer had murdered and dismembered at least 17 men and boys and was taken into custody without incident.
     John Wayne Gacy had murdered nearly twice as many men and boys and was also taken into custody without incident.
     The list goes on.
     Now let's look at the other side of the coin, without having to resort to much cherry-picking.
     On New Year's Day 2009, Oscar Grant was shot in the back and killed at Fruitvale Station for a crime he didn't commit while handcuffed and on his stomach. Officer Mehserle claimed he was going to tase the incapacitated Grant yet shot him with his pistol.
     17 year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by self-styled neighborhood watch captain and police groupie George Zimmerman for simply walking back to his father's house from the store after sundown, even after the latter had been advised by the Sanford police to stand down. He was exonerated. Zimmerman, despite subsequent repeated violent offenses, was hailed as a hero while Martin's name was smeared to the point of racists posting supposedly incriminating pictures of other young black males.
     John Crawford III was shot and killed by two police officers at an Ohio Walmart for holding a toy gun after a scared old white woman's call to 911 (Although she did say it was probably a toy gun.)
     12 year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by an unvetted, mentally-unstable Cleveland cop two seconds after his arrival for also holding a toy gun. He was then denied medical assistance and his distraught 14 year-old sister was actually arrested for Grieving While Black.
     19 year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, MO by Darren Wilson for jaywalking. Racists raised over half a million dollars for Wilson on Go Fund Me and sold tee shirts while claiming that cigars that Brown allegedly stole (he did not) alone justified his execution.
     Walter Scott was shot in the back and killed eight days ago in South Carolina for a busted tail light and the cop who shot him, Michael Slager, quickly and calmly planted a taser that Slager alleged was taken from him by Scott as if the planting of evidence is a default tactic in the wake of a racially-motivated shooting. The mainstream media, without double sourcing or vetting, blindly accepted and disseminated the police's version of events, including the alleged "scuffle" until the video emerged. (Yes, the MSM calmly reports that black people can be killed after a "scuffle.")
     In an eerie reprise of Fruitvale Station, Eric Harris was caught in a sting operation in OK on April 2nd and the 73 year-old reserve deputy pulled his gun instead of his taser and shot Harris in the back. When the dying victim gasped he couldn't breathe, one of the cops present said, "Fuck your breath."
     In Miami Gardens last February 15th, police shot and killed 25 year-old Lavall Hall, a mental-ill man, after family had called 911 for medical assistance. He was armed with nothing but a red broom he wasn't even holding at the moment of his execution.
     Last November, Kansas police shot and killed Carlos Davenport for wielding a sword on a second story balcony. As usual, the cops cited fear for their lives.
     Eric Garner was choked to death over a loose cigarette (that he didn't have) on Staten Island July last year by Officer Daniel Pantaleo with a choke hold that had been banned 21 years before. The man who filmed the incident was arrested on a suspicious gun charge and was only recently released from Riker's Island. Despite Mr. Orta's video evidence, Officer Pantaleo, as with Darren Wilson before him, was exonerated by a grand jury.
     Obviously, this is far from an exhaustive list and doesn't even include the countless murders of people of color by white civilians. Yet in virtually every one of these cases we see the same narrative replayed like a broken record: The officers were in "fear for their lives" despite not a single one of the victims being armed. Racists and fair weather police proponents insisting every one of the victims, including 12 year-old Tamir Rice, "had it coming to them."
     And, most inescapably, every single killer was white and every single victim was black.
     Yet, do we hear calls from the law enforcement community for a paradigm shift in attitude and policy in their rapidly deteriorating community relations? Hardly. Instead, we've seen a doubling down of the totalitarian mindset that makes these genocidal acts possible and going largely unpunished. Instead, we hear police chiefs and heads of police unions actually expressing rage that African Americans would dare to peacefully protest the murder of another one of their own with little or no provocation.
     They insist the protesters are muck-raking rioters, looters and are deliberately smearing the police, who are the real victims, further making community-police relations deteriorate. This insistence on portraying themselves as the victims, insisting the African Americans are needlessly inciting public disorder and have no right to protest an execution of one of their own and refusing to defuse volatile situations and that their safety should come before that of the public they're allegedly sworn to protect bespeaks of a mindset that is unmistakably motivated and guided by racism, fascism and paranoia.
     So, yes. Let us freely use the word "genocide" because we have literally come full circle from where we were when the Freedom Riders took to the streets half a century ago.

Not So Happy Trails

     So, it all ended up with a hilarious Nigerian banker-type email I got from someone through Craigslist. The story doesn't begin so humorously. But I'm deliberately putting the cart before the ox. (Sometimes when listening to generic surf music, I fancy I'm the Quentin Tarantino of bloggers. But enough time displacement.)
     It started two days ago when my formerly even-tempered landlord of just over six years and I got into a completely unnecessary pissing match via text messaging. It stemmed from a separate pissing match he'd gotten into with his (now former) waste removal company who'd decided to pull a dick move on April 3rd (or the day Mrs. JP came back from Florida). They parked the dumpster after emptying it right in front of my car, blocking the walkway so I was retroactively in the wrong for having my car in the wrong spot, although I was parked in my designated parking spot.
     Long story short, I and not the dickish trash company got blamed for blocking egress which explains why my landlord insisted I had to move my car yesterday to make way for the platform truck that never actually arrived to take away the old dumpster. His fat-ass Ford F150 takes up almost half the driveway and I asked him why he couldn't move his truck instead of my having to move my car for a tow truck that could come at any time.
     After about a half a dozen exchanges, he finally tells me he's not renewing my lease when it expires. Nobody but Mrs. JP and me thinks this was a disproportionately harsh response to a spat via text message, the first one we've ever had in 6+ years. Furthermore, when I took Mrs. JP out to get away from it all later that night, he continued texting me and calling me names because another tenant whom he'd long since dismissed as insane now suddenly was making valid complaints about how I was parking my suddenly very offensive car because they were about yours truly. When I informed him that she parks next to me and not vice versa, he called us both clowns. In other words, I've come full circle and am in exactly the same position I was in six years ago when I finally got out of a toxic environment in which I couldn't do or say anything right. Self defense and trying to apply truth, reason and logic, at this point, just further enrages those around me. Think Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and you'll have an idea of what we have to deal with here.
     This was delineated rather vividly when I came back from the supermarket and Mrs. JP informed me my landlord's mother called. She said I should go over and talk to her. I did and within minutes she was screaming at me because Junior (His real nickname, to this day, is "Pee Wee". No I am not shitting you. His nickname is actually "Pee Wee.") shared my private texts with her and she''d pronounced me "rude". I wasn't the one slinging ad hominems and resorting to name-calling. But, whatever. Then she actually said, and I shit you not, "Get the fuck off my lawn."

 

     Yeah, just like that, only minus the shotgun.

     So, despite paying my rent on time 71 of 72 times over the last six plus years, despite Mrs. JP and I being model tenants, I'm now suddenly the most despised man on my street over stuff I hadn't done that started with a pissing match between my landlord and one of his contractors. I offered to speak to him face-to-face but he refused and now he's essentially avoiding me while letting (as usual) Mommy fight his battles for him.

     He's 50 years-old, by the way.

     So, I began poking around on Craigslist as I was forced to do over six years ago while searching for suitable housing. I'd found quite a few winners on CL in 2009, let me tell you, including

creepy guys calling my house and asking if I was gay when all I wanted to know if a room or apartment was available.

     But nothing I'd experienced back then could prepare me for whatever or whoever I'd met yesterday.

     I'm sure by now we've all gotten at least one of those Nigerian banker chain emails originally written by unemployed Engrish-speaking fortune cookie writers in the 90's that are long since dead. I found something that seemed to be the trick in a city about 20-25 miles west of us. For $50 less a month, someone purported to offer the 2nd floor of a private house, 3 bedrooms, two baths, with all utilities included. So I wrote them through the email address I was given and finally got a response today.

     It was written by someone for whom English is obviously a second or third language. This is the first paragraph:

Thanks for your interest and inquiries about my house. Yes the house is still available for rent and we are looking for a responsible person/family to occupy and maintain the house now that we are not around. I work with the united nations development program(UNDP) Edinburgh Scotland and I just got a transfer that is bringing me down to West Africa. Myself and Family just traveled to West Africa for the program. My transfer would be for a period between 3-6 years, so I would definitely be renting my house to whom ever that will take good care of it.

     Wait, it gets better. "She" then goes on to state she once had a realtor to represent her all the way from Scotland but the realtor charged too high a realtor fee, which jacked up the rent, explaining why she's representing the house herself... all the way from what is now West Africa (no country specified).

     The cell phone I was given to text features an area code and exchange number from Polk County in central Florida. So, in short, we've already gone all the way from central Massachusetts, to Edinburgh, Scotland, to West Africa to central Florida all in the space of a day.

     The original Craigslist ad had meanwhile been flagged for removal, obviously by other people who'd gotten the same Nigerian banker-style email I'd gotten.

     And it actuslly gets better. Much better.

     The first email had embedded in it an "application" consisting of softball questions largely asking for information I'd already provided (name, email, phone numbers, etc).

     Within the hour, I got the marvelous news that my application was approved and that they were about to Fedex me keys and "documents" that would allow me to move in immediately.

     Meanwhile, I'd found out my new "benefactor", supposedly named Mrs Deborah Rutter, doesn't work for the UNDP (which, a quick peek on Wikipedia told me was rife with corruption, counterfeiting and other criminal activity) but is actually the new President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. A quick check of the address of the listed property showed it was still being represented by a realtor here in MA who's renting not just the second floor for the paltry sum of $600 a month, with all utilities included, but the entire house for $1700 a month.

     Here's how this would've played out:

     They'd've Fedexed me some fake keys, a fake lease, then instruct me where to mail or wire the $1200 they wanted for me to take occupancy. Then I'd drive to the house and discover my keys wouldn't fit the fucking door. Suddenly my emails and calls don't get taken in Polk County, Florida/West Africa/Edinburgh, Scotland. It's essentially the selling the Brooklyn Bridge scam. They stole some photos and address of an actual real estate listing, then tried to pass it off as their own while making up some bullshit story about why no one could physically be there to show me the unit first before sending me the keys.

     So I wrote back to Ms. Rutter's illiterate doppelgänger, after she'd implored me to recite the 71st Psalm with her (Because, as we all know, godly people can't possibly be crooked. Ask Pat Robertson and his completely up front and aboveboard Operation Blessing), and informed her of these things and much more. I'd also contacted the legitimate realtor and left a voice mail asking if she''d ever heard of this "Mrs. Rutter". I'd also texted the number I was given and was given another bullshit reason why she couldn't be there in the flesh to show the house even though she was supposed to be representing herself allllllll the way from the Dark Continent.

     I never got an answer to my email when I openly flouted the idea that perhaps she should really give that 71st Psalm more than an average workout and pray that someone in the Florida AG's office doesn't get a complaint about her.

     So, bottom line, we're on borrowed time and we're back to where we started. So if posting continues to be light, this is the reason why. It seems I'm at war with everyone who's ever laid eyes on me, I'm living on borrowed time and will be evicted when our lease is up, I'm trying to put to bed a book that's already taken up nearly two and a half years of my life and a whole other host of myriad problems.

     In the meantime, if you see any rental units in central MA going for $600-700 a month, please pass it on. I'm checking CL several times a day and I've already alerted my landlord's realtor on the sly that we're ready to bust a move out of here and break our lease. I insist on leaving here on my own terms and am even willing to surrender my $300 security deposit to get that fat, sociopathic freak and his senile mother out of our lives.

     And, to quoth Baretta, that's the name of that tune.

Addendum:  I couldn't resist tweaking this spammer with the answers I should've given to their "rental application." It'll be interesting to see if I still pass with these answers.

LEASE APPLICATION FORM 
1) Your Full Name? Would an alias do? I'm obliged to use several in my line of work.
2) Your Full Address? #10 Downing Street
3) Phone Number? I could give you one but it'll be for a burner. I'm obliged to use a lot of them, too, in my line of work. Think BREAKING BAD.
4) Are you married? For now. I love getting married so much, I'm a widower "seven times before." Just kidding. I've been widowed ten times, all by the same cause of death. Fancy that.
5) Age & Email Address? Age is just a number, wouldn't you say? And my email address is DrLectersNumber1Fan@comcast.net
6) Occupation? Does "aspiring serial killer" count? How about professional crack whore pimp?
7) Picture of the occupant If Available? Check FBI.com. I might or might not still be on their Top Ten list.
8) Do you have a pet? Do other peoples' children count? If not, then no.
9) Do you have a car? Again, I go through a lot of cars in my line of work. You can get a lot of pimped out ones at the police impound yard, btw.
10) When are you ready to Move In? Uh, how do you know I already haven't?
11) How many people will be living in the house? It depends on how many people need a place to, uh, crash until the lights and sirens go away.
12) How long are you willing to stay in the property? Until the house is staked out 24/7 by fake-looking florist and plumbing vans with suspicious antennas.
13) How soon can you make payments? Depends on when my ho's cough up the money they owe me, the bitches.
14) How many months rent can you pay upfront? See above. The bee-otches are holding out on me. This is why they say pimping ain't easy.
15) How soon do you want to receive the keys/documents? Wow, I don't know how to answer this. I can't recall the last time I actually entered a house with keys.

Happy Easter

     This past Easter was especially sweet because I just got my baby back barely in time to celebrate it. The recent unpleasantness in Florida keeps reverberating like a recurring herpes sore but we refused to let that disturb our holiday feast. So we had a baked ham with pineapple slices, Brussels sprouts, corn, mashed potatoes, Charlene's Cheesy potatoes and a good Riesling white wine.
     So how was your Easter?