"Patterns"

Worry

Worry

I’m hella worried
Worried all the time
About serious shit
Global Warming,
War, Poverty,
Injustice, AIDS,
Social Security

My last statement says
I’m gonna to get about $339 a month
Which will hopefully be enough
for a can of soup and a dirty magazine
But probably not

Obama,
the Media
How my kids will grow up
How much of a bastard they will think I am
If my kids will grow up

Will Jen die before me
And if so will I be attractive enough to get a girlfriend
And if so will she have really let herself go

Will I before Jen, more likely,
And who will she find to update her website
Or throw a hot dog down her hallway

I’m worried about the markets
The stock market,

the bond market, the oil market,
That little market down the street with the super cheap bananas
How do Chinese people make everything so cheap?
This concerns me.

Cancers.
All kinds.
Brain cancer, Bone cancer,
Lung cancer, breast cancer, ass cancer, all of them,
I worry about them cause my doctor

won't describe to me what they feel like
So every unidentified sensation

given off by my body feels like one
The way unrecognizable tastes taste like chicken,

Back cancer.

I worry about work, do my clients like me, do they hate me,
Do they think I’m arrogant

yet have resigned themselves to dealing with me
Do I hate them, Am I

undervalued, overvalued, invaluable, irrelevant,
And when will we all find out.

My wife's work, will she get fired, or quit,
Or stay there forever miserable and undervalued, or overvalued.
Am I an asshole for making her work so hard
so that I can stay home and worry.

Plastics, HDPEs and PEPs,
Benzenes and styrenes and poly chlorinated biphenyls
Lead, Mercury, Radon, Arsenic, Selenium

Will I be hit by a bus?

Or an SUV
Or be that guy pinned by a subway train,
What will I do those last moments,
I don’t have a camera phone to look at my kids.

Blood parasites.

I’m worried that God had some higher purpose for me
And that said purpose had nothing to do with beer
And how sore she’ll be at me
And why worry,

I know rationally,
But maybe just maybe

I am inoculating myself.

Hep C.

Or maybe since the future

has never once conformed to my visions
That it never will –

I must explore the entire landscape of future calamity
Lest that unthought-of peril befall me

Zombies.

Palindrone

Caucasian, check
“Maternal”, check
Not so thin
( skinny-skinny, bad )
Mousy, Brown hair
Check, check, check
Good job, oh my.
Voice that some might find grating,
Ok. Keep going.
Makes sexy time after forty.
Glasses. Velma type (booo Daphnes )
Likes it cold. (cold women, grrrr )
Likes tall losers ( snowplow racing champ )
With bad facial hair
Are you fucking kidding me?
I’m not sure at how he’ll do with the economy
But McCain’s simulating the hell out of me.

Now, she doesn’t seem to dig black guys,
But I can work with that,
Such has been the case with the overwhelming majority of my mates.
And I must say …
After years of the Vice President screwing us
I’m ready for some get back.

So. I don’t know about yall,
But the next few weeks I’ll be honing my game,
Making myself more appealing to Sarah.
Maybe shopping cart racing,
Or motorboat flying?
Maybe a chin strap goatee with pointy sideburns?

And though I’ll surely vote for Obama,
My heart will be with Sarah.
My hope,
That the very same Fates
That guide the destiny of the sports teams I’ve loved
Will rule the day in November.

My 7 Stages of Obama

1. Shock and Disbelief.

I can’t believe a brotha might be president. Holy fucking shit. If I knew that, I would have studied in college, went to law school, not done as many drugs, married a Black woman, cultivated a powerful network of peers instead of the losers I hung out with.
( Sorry, losers. I love you. )

2. Denial.

He can’t win somebody’s gonna kill him. They have too, right? They don’t let niggas run the fucking grocery store, how they gonna let one run the country.

3. Bargaining.

Maybe I can get something out of this, hey Obama, hook a brother up. It’s hard being a webstitute. The shit I got to do to survive.

4. Guilt.

Man, I feel bad for hatin, O. I’m sorry, I didn’t believe in you. It’s me, it’s definitely me, not you. I really am a just contrary unmotivated Gen X bastard. I’m so fucking ashamed of myself I can’t take it.

5. Anger.

This shit is making me mad, Obama this, Obama that.They love Obama in Germany. They love Obama in France. They don’t love me in these places. I don’t fly, but still. They don’t love me anywhere. I’m Halfrican American too, shit dammit.

6. Depression.

All I want to do is lay around and watch Maria Bartiromo all day, and eat bread and cheese and eat candy and drink wine. The pain. It’s like spiders crawling around on the inside of my skull, no, not spiders, roaches, spiders walk lightly. I can’t lift my arm, seriously, I’m so fuckin sad, I can’t lift my fucking arm. Sigh.
I’m not sure the depression was Obama’s fault, though.

7. Acceptance

What do I care? I loved Clinton, I never got a cookie or nothin after he won.
So whatever. Obama wins. All’s right with the world. I’ll come to love Obama. Then after awhile he’ll screw up somehow ushering in an era of greed and desolation. He’s just as likely to fall into a mess o white intern cooter as Bill, or John, or myself for that matter. I simply have the distinct advantage of never encountering that hazard in my day to day, that’s what spares me. I’m not gonna criticize the guy.

Then I’ll just feel bad about that as people are criticizing him, it’s inevitable that we (brown people, and all the other hues as well) we will get what we want, be happy, come to regret it, then be denied what we want, regret, and come to be happy, and so on and so on.

Que sera, sera.

Father Days

while I normally prefer to
focus upon the negative

i decided to this father’s day
to accentuate the positive
latch on to the affirmative
and so it goes …
what I like about being a father

i like that there’s someone with skinnier arms than me

i like café-ing with them
and pretending that they are my business associates

that I can say whatever I want
whose going to tell a father what not to say

that I get to blow up
traditional gender roles
bullshit racial stereotypes
in front of them

i like that they have to listen to my jokes, I like gags that run for years

that look they get
when they don’t know
what I’m going to do next

the ability to refashion
my neuroses as arbitrary rules,
like no jumping before 10:30
or no touching the bus seat
or you shouldn't ever buy anthing over 6 dollars

that time when wyatt was like,
“virgil, come to the bathroom
and look at daddy’s huge penis”
i don’t actually have a huge penis,
i know this because when I asked my wife she said,
she’d handled bigger.
she didn’t say “handled” of course, but I couldn’t resist dialing up images of jen,
Big Cock wrangler, with her Levi’s and Prada bag,
where was I? Oh yeah …
I remember seeing my dad’s
johnson in the bathroom one time
and really being intimidated by it
that thing was like a
2 liter bottle of dr. pepper.

i like that I get to know everything

it’s nice to walk to the grocery store with them in the evening,
old lady passers by like,
"aw, you’re such a good father"
and they don’t even suspect
what a jerk I am,
old ladies are suckers.

i like being able to hold hands with somebody, and not have it feel corny.

i’m pretty proud of the fact
that I taught them most of the dirty
words that they know,
and all of the best combos

flying into fits of manufactured rage, then feeling guilty about it.

refering to myself as
“your old man”.

i like that I get to make up the things that give you cancer,
like diet soda,
sitting too close to the television,
any food boxes with cartoon characters

I like looking into my child’s eyes
and seeing all the magic inside,
blah, blah, blah

mostly, i like knowing that if something ever happened to me
that someone would be really messed up about it,
that I’d be mythologized
as this omniscient feminist iconoclast
jerk packing a gigantic member.

Happy father’s day to all.

APRIL FOOL: A Birthday Affirmation

I am an April fool.

It’s good to be me
I’m happy no one’s called Child Protective Services on me yet.
I’m happy that I don’t have an iPod,
I listen to Public Enemy on cassette. I’m thankful.
There’s lot’s about life I like.

I like opening my utility bill and comparing it to last years bill, I like year over year percentage reductions.

I like walking everywhere, and shaking my fist at drivers on their cell phones, not all drivers, just old ladies who I know I can take.

I like not liking the Internets.

I like San Francisco. I’m a few blocks away from where Jimi and Janice lived, and the Grateful Dead. I can feel their energy, I can. I like that.

I like talking like a hippie.

I like a nice hoppy IPA.

I like the looks of old Chinese people.

I like going to PTA meetings, to get in some good mommy watching.

I like it when my son calls me “asshole”.

I like to call my Grandma and talk about the good old days.

I like to listen to NPR while I sleep.

I like to pluck leaves of lavender, rub them on my shirt then stick them in my pockets. – I like smelling like a girl.

I like abandoning my pride, and contemplating my cosmic insignificance.

I like dressing the same way as my seven year old, and cutting my own hair, and making art from cat food cans.

I like to hug with one arm only.

I like waiting until the last minute to do something I’ve been dreading, and then when it’s done I like to think “That wasn’t so bad.”

I like to work on the floor,
in lotus position. I can wait until I get back to a 9 to 5 - so I can be that weird guy who doesn’t have a desk, sits on the floor, and reeks of lavender.

I like to take home discarded items I’ve found on the sidewalk, and the hairy eyeball Jen gives me when she comes home.

I like to greet a person with an enthusiastic “Hey You”, when I’ve forgotten their name.

I like when my kids use the effin word.

I like making economic models, and playing with them in my head.

I like doing Yoga while listening to rap music, so that I can be both relaxed and agitated.

Mostly, I like all the people in this world I’ve known, those who’ve understood me, those I’ve allowed myself to understand, and all the rest with whom I’ve been unable to connect – because disconnects are nice things too.

Thank you World, from this April fool.

Defining Myself

winslow (winz-lo)
v. intr.
1. To be inhabited by multiple personalities, each one more anti-social than the last.
2. To be out of place or distinctly different in a disquieting way.
3. To appear wistful.
4. To be both overly humble and obnoxiously arrogant.

v. intr.
1. To make harmfully truthful statements at inopportune times in inappropriate places.
e.g. “Sally winslowed everyone at the party last night.”

n. A slender stick used to prop open a window.