magic Cape

Reading for January 31, 2010

Last Sunday left Charlie and I in St. Hyacinth's version of the Bermuda Triangle.

Possessed by idiocy, with no exorcist on the premises, we only regained our senses as the mass ended and church let out. Well, not quite all our senses, but enough to know - as we hit the courtyard – that the shit was hitting the fan.

Whatever murkiness of the triangle's depth that remained was removed as soon as I met up with my dad in the schoolyard. Man, was my father red in the face.

While I was totally oblivious to the rest of the people in church ~ neither they, nor my Father, were unaware of my antics. Antics that ~ I soon learned ~ were so outrageously disruptive, they earned me the one and only strapping of my life.

Frantically, self survival instincts scrambled to draw my Dad's attention to my innocent as a lamb essence.

“I can't wait to say the rosary tonight with you, mom, Bob and Jerry!”..........” I'm never, ever again, going to hide anything sharp under the seat cushion for Bob to sit on!”.....”I'll always eat everything on my plate and won't ever feed the dog under the table anymore!”

The light of a minor infraction at the end of the tunnel of easy pardon went off as I observed my father’s neck veins bulging.

“Go change your clothes, you’re going to bed without dinner” I was ordered.

While burning with guilt, I was called, from my adjacent bedroom, into the kitchen where my Father was explaining, with uncharacteristic drama - to my mother - what I had done. Upon entering the kitchen dressed in my t-shirt, shorts, and a bathroom, I discovered that it wasn’t the kitchen at all. It was the Roman Coliseum arena, and it reeked of carnage yet to come. Oh shit!

With a manner I have never before seen, nor thankfully, ever seen again, my Father took off his belt, commanded me to turn around and began his one and only ever whipping of me.

In the terrible intensity of a moment gone all wrong, came a surprising escape. The belt that my dad was using to give me a “strapping” as was the term, found itself hitting my bathrobe and not me. This was possible because, as the bathrobe hung straight down, I instinctively arched my butt away from the swinging belt, and space was created between my robe and my bottom. This miraculous guardian angel space was just large enough to absorb the strap, and small enough to be unseen. It actually took a few seconds for me to realize this as I awaited the painful contact that never came. Once that dawned on me, I gave an award performance hollering, yelping, and bawling. Fortunately for me as well, my Father’s strapping was over before I had to improvise further acting techniques such as throwing myself onto the floor and faking a seizure or the like.

I gladly hastened to bed to be free of the whole mess, the real pain remaining as the emotional anguish in having caused such discomfort and disappointment for my Dad.

Whatever angel/good-luck/magic/spirit/saint that intervened, thankfully continued late into the afternoon. Just as I was resigning myself to the fact that there would be no trip to the toy wonderland, I glowed with restrained delight as my parents announced we could make it to the warehouse for the last hour if we hurried. If I didn't exceed light speed then, well........ all the laws of physics were proved sound.

Join Captain Flip Side in his true life adventures every Sunday!

Happy daze,

The Captain

Out of Control

Reading for January 24, 2010

It all started innocently enough. I remember it well. In the 1950s, my father would close his drugstore at one in the afternoon every Sunday. After the spirited antics of my older brothers at the big family lunch, in fall, it happened.

My little skull was filled with gifts of Christmas merriment, as I looked forward to a trip to a real wonderland. During the holidays one of the wholesale outfits from where my dad purchased his merchandise, opened their warehouse doors to customers. The wonderland was in their warehouse wherein several rooms full of toys existed - existed for me to pick out my Christmas gifts............there was a hair-pin turn ahead, though, upon which I would loose total control.

Attendance at Sunday's morning mass was part of life. The mass for school children was at eight in the morning, so with my Father opening his store at 10 am. he too attended the 8 o’clock mass. So it was that I found myself in the area of the great church under the auspices of Sister Spongia..........soon to be St Hyacinth's own Bermuda triangle.

My classmate Charles was next to me. Charlie and I equaled disaster. Sinister forces probably from the “triangle” came into Charlie and me and totally possessed us. Our “possession” made us manifest the ultimate of all possessed states: uncontrollable loud and totally disruptive laughter. Yes........... we were in the most feared of all “loss of control” states: silliness. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could make Charlie and I stop laughing. We were literally turned into ridiculousness. When I started to edge toward self-control, Charlie would jinx me, and I would go to pieces. When Charlie started to take himself seriously, I would hit him with an idea so hare-brained, he would crack up.

Charlie and I were warned by the nun repeatedly; but it was of no use. We fed off each others’ deepest core of nonsense and became doomed as we were sucked into the triangle’s vortex of complete idiocy. Our only hope was in, of course, an exorcism. The mass ended before an exorcist was found, and I was …...............
to be continued............

Join Captain Flip Side in his true life adventures every Sunday!


Happy daze,


The Captain 

Unbounded functions zone flow

Reading for January 17, 2010

Resonance, spatial neural networking velocities, mitochondrial energy plates, ringed electromagnetic fusion, extrasystemic photonics.................................. 

Now and then, a minute part of that great Cosmic jello-in-the-making sets just long enough to become my working brain.  Analytic geometry, calculus, string theory, zoning, differential equations, non-linear geometry, all suddenly become things I clearly realize I will never understand.

As Poet or fool, go?

With a soul in tow..........

By chaos or of rule........

what will be my tool?

Third grade began for me in 1954. I figured I had the home front secured with my “chosen” child status; theology properly adjusted to reality by extrapolating catechism; and, an after-life plan in place. The one area of life that started  to be [life long] challenging..... was.............. girls.

The 1953 movie “How to marry a Millionaire” with Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, and Lauren Bacall added its weight to society's fashion dictates and my childhood psycho-erogenous development. Females with high heels and nylons over shaved legs in combination with the most potent mind-altering substance ever to bloom from human inventiveness - the dress - permanently shaped the foundation of my libido.  When I was five, going on six years of age, the number of opportunities to sojourn over to my same age neighbor's house to look under her mother's dress by fetching errant marbles, began to lessen as the demands of Kindergarten took its toll on my time

At age six in first grade, and age seven in second grade, however, I was able to to range the halls and discovered {at the first staircase} the eighth grade girls' legs as they proceeded me. The experience of these innocent childhood curiosities were nothing, I would learn, compared to teenage revelations - and then, the puzzle of puzzles: women throughout my adult life. While cosmologies, to this day, struggle to understand the creation of the universe – the prevailing styles of women's clothes in the tender years of my youth, for all practical purposes, began the map that I would use as an adult to locate the origin of the cosmos  between the top of a woman's shoe and the bottom of her dress.

Things were different with the upper body. 
One day, being young enough to be dressed by my mother as I sat on our kitchen table (age 3 or so) the topic of breasts came up. My mother was adeptly answering questions I had about the differences between hers and mine. When mom's healthy parent sanctioned remark scientifically described the function of the female breast in terms of providing milk for a baby, I whimsically asked if one breast might be for chocolate milk and the other for regular. The air, then, thickened with increased seriousness, her tone resonating gravity, she solemn decreed: “........we don't joke about things like that”.

So I never joke about breasts................ rarely, anyway - and that would prove to be one of the  most important of my life tools – somewhat later in life.

No to sexism that functions to bind; Yes to romance oui' unbounded functions.........

Join Captain Flip Side in his true life adventures every Sunday!

Happy daze,

The Captain

Lightspeed

Reading for January 10, 2010

.....sounds blended in perfect silence aware timeless existence with change, more of a flow, perhaps – but, alas, it's soul can no sooner be put to the vernaculars of earth, than my own human soul can.

It may have started with altars of tin foil and artisan clothes-hangars fashioned for Mary Mother of God, in May – the month She is most venerated. I couldn't read a calendar - but didn't have to – for when the two neighborhood lilac bushes bloomed, I knew it was May. My childhood home was encastled in brick and concrete accessed by moats of asphalt, so when I saw that first lilac flower in a hallowed space down the alley, it transformed me, and became the crowning touch for offerings to Mary.

It was nothing short of a miracle when the one carrot [from a packet of 30 or 40 seeds] grew in the few square feet of soil in my backyard before it was cemented over – so I think it added to my sense of God in nature.

A narrow view of life shrouded with reverent recitations of ideas of Muhammad , Buddha, Abraham, Jesus, and Brahman - from others seeking God/the Divine - broadened with a junket profound beyond infinity............in the jungle.

Number of days lost in the blur of fasting came to a moonless black. Sounds blended in perfect silence - aware......... night became day …............ change was occurring yet time ceased to exist..........as a single ray of sunlight made a leaf visible,  illuminating an entire prime forest cathedral – both - in succession, and at the same moment.

Little did I know that in traveling from the mundane to beyond infinity, a return trip would be de rigueur in my life.
In other words, no matter how much I have it together one minute, the next moment I can really mess up – really mess up big time..................and while wanting to think myself the poet, rather than the fool...................most of the time I simply have no friggin' idea.

Nonetheless, the yearning keeps me reaching.

Join Captain Flip Side in his true life adventures every Sunday!

Happy daze,

The Captain

WONDERJOY for 2010 and beyond

Reading for January 3, 2010

Happy New Year ~~*~~ 2010

wishing you all WonderJoy …....... the amazing harmony of beneficence amidst wacky frolicking friendships and life's endless adventures.................

Without WonderJoy, I would have never been able to be the Captain, yet alone find the Flipside.

Looking through the photo albums of my mind, the following images represent, best, the loci of elements that bore WonderJoy ............................

…........... 1950s of the great city on lake Michigan, that north twenty-seven hundred block of Lawndale avenue, where it intersects the west thirty-six hundred block of Diversey avenue....

.............Barbara disappears; part of Darlene's hand disappears.....

calm personality of high school girl disappears...............

Roberta's freshly washed hair glistens in the sunlight..........

my brother, Jerry, runs into our two-story brick building and fractures his skull..........the kids across the street team up against me and a couple buddies, as idiotic as I, to throw rocks at each other........some older guy in the apartment opposite ours on the side street refuses to come down to where the largest human being I have ever seen is waving a large piece of metal, and shouting about damage to his car.............Freddy gets a cool new car sporting taillights in huge fins...........

wax blobs darken and become a permanent part of the sidewalk as we kids spit out the resinous matter that held sugar water posing as candy.......my parents make the decision that I am old enough for an expensive wristwatch which is given to me for Christmas, and which I don proudly, flash to the gang engaged in an all out street snowball fight, and lose it, as it flies off my wrist into white oblivion......

my brother Bob buys his first diamond needle for the prized Webcor phonograph.

Breathing deeply and cherishing friends, course is set, sails are up, and visibility is unlimited.

Join Captain Flip Side in his true life adventures every Sunday!

Happy daze,

The Captain

Peace on Earth

Reading for December 27, 2009

     Because …........................... I love you............

       

      this     I       p r a y.....                 
                 
                      ….the sacred, by every existence ….......

Angels of Light, Angels of Dark,

…....protect your soul...........

embolden your heart.........................

make peaceful every thought, each action ~  time    place

…... nurturing and nurtured  by .......health , and well being …
............in a world of such

Permission - to use this prayer and image for any, and all non-commercial purposes - is given of the spirit inherent within.

Join Captain Flip Side in his true life adventures every Sunday!

Happy daze,

The Captain

post nuclear prep

Reading for December 20, 2009

At the age of seven, I would have attained reason; the adult world informed me. I kind of thought that meant I would possess a magic wand for life..........oh, not so.  One day in second grade, having barely made it through the preparation for likely annihilation by an Atomic Bomb Blast, I came home to find my home in an uproar.
In my village, my brothers had a friend, their age, whose name was Ronnie.
“What was the matter with him? Was he mad? What was he thinking? Was he crazy?
I had my first glimpse into craziness in no time at all.
Ronnie would often come over and play with my brothers in their boyhood days. I could only watch from a distance as their high energy fun and games excluded me by virtue of the age difference.
I will never forget, though, the succession of wild circumstances which evolved out of Ronnie’s idea.
Now, I thought what Ronnie actually did was, like super cool. Obviously not sharing my point of view, the grown ups were so fraught with dismay over the incident, an alarming tumult like nothing I had ever seen before, was developing right in front of me.
Adding to the chaos, was my introduction to the shadow world of nuances, innuendos and judgment calls. In years to come, I would find the only thing to rival its mysteriousness was the world of young ladies. Girls - I would come to find out - were a life form of their own, with powers to vaporize my brain.
At present, though, I had a situation. This was the first time in my tender years of childhood that I was not only confused on an intellectual level, but emotionally split into different directions by the attempt to relate to the conflagration of emotions that the adults were consumed in.
Between the number of years separating Ronnie and I, and, the apparent sequestering that I sensed he had received, I never came anywhere near even mentioning the event to him - yet alone being able discuss it in any detail.
What was at the eye of this storm, to the best of my knowledge and memory, was that Ronnie had come upon a great practical joke to play on his mother.

With incredible insight into both the laws of physics and the neurochemistry of a mother’s heightened state of response, Ronnie marched into his back yard and pretended to hang himself.

His brilliant scheme, which left him virtually unharmed, was to hang from the yard’s lone tree, but do so in such a way that he was completely supported from the waist. An ingenious combination of a rope with his pants’ belt held him safely, albeit somewhat uncomfortably, aloft. With the touch of nothing less than theatrical genius, while his body was solidly supported at his mid-section, he managed to bring a loop of the rope around his throat, creating the illusion that his entire weight was borne fatally by his neck.
One can, but only, i m a g i n e……. what primal responses get triggered in a mother when she is suddenly confronted with the hanging dead body of her only child.
Probably, she was held in that unnameable state for but a few seconds, because in a stunning reversal of events, her son returned to life. With this re-occurrence of life, came an understanding of the hoax.

It was said that Mom took Ronnie to an inch of his life as she beat the holy shit out of him.

This is how I remember the story told and retold so often that it reached near epic proportions. I have no firsthand knowledge of this event; but the intensity and scope of the swarm of stories about it were such that it was impossible to pass through unaffected. I attribute much of the staying power to the graphic details (I left out as a courtesy to Ronnie's family that I have nothing but the fondest memories of) my mother repeated over and over again. My brother Jerry, who has thankfully abandoned his dream of being the United States representative on the Olympic controlled long spit team; and, even more thankfully has become a best friend, recalls Ronnie playing a joke on both his parents in the form of being shot to death. In this version, Ronnie creates a life like pool of blood with a ketchup mix and is found in the middle of the shop. When I told Jerry what I remembered and pressed him for more of his memories, he said “who knows?” maybe he did them both.
Who knows?
There was definitely a part of me that wanted to see the tiniest morsel of recognition in behalf of either or both of the masterful simulation(s); but, a greater force overcame that – the survival instinct.

Join Captain Flip Side in his true life adventures every Sunday!

Happy daze,

The Captain