Wednesday 21 February 10 a.m.

My turn at the counter, Sono, my favorite Barista, she asks me how I’m doing.

“Top of the world!” I blurt out.

When somebody asks me how I’m doing, I often say, “GREAT!” or “TERRIFIC!” or “FANTASTIC!” like it’s automatic. Makes me feel good, saying it. But this morning I say, “TOP OF THE WORLD.”

Why this particular phrase?

I don’t know why, exactly.

I do know where the phrase comes from.

It comes from my favorite James Cagney movie.

WHITE HEAT.

My favorite scene:

Cody Jarrett robs banks for a living. His mother, a member of his gang, often reminds him how great he is and he responds by saying “top of the world, ma.” At one point in the narrative Cody becomes the prime suspect in a murder he did commit and to provide himself with an alibi admits to a bank heist he didn’t commit but that places him nowhere near the scene of the capitol offense. As a result of his admission he receives a two year sentence he says he can do standing on his head. But while he’s away in the big house a less loyal member of his gang double-crosses Cody by bumping off his mother. Cody goes crazy in the prison chow hall, chewing the rug instead of his chow, chewing like only James Cagney could chew. Now bent on revenge, he breaks out of prison, hunts down the errant gang member, and bumps him off. By now he’s even more unhinged than he was at the start of the movie. But even Crazed Psycho’s need walk around money. He pulls off a bankroll robbery at this oil refinery. Too bad for our Hero, the cops were tipped off by yet another of Cody’s less than loyal gang members, and, well, you see the result…

This is the kind of Top Of The World I’m feeling…

Been Raining for days and days

Maybe it’s the rain that affects my mood. I have no desire to blog. So when I say TOP OF THE WORLD it’s more like I’m hanging off the top of the world. IF you asked me to delve into the reasons for my low spirits, I wouldn’t know where to start.

I might as well be discussing Egyptian Mummies.

Mummy Salesman on a slow day

Did you know that at one point in time the Egyptians had so many Mummy’s lying around you could buy one for around eighty cents, depending on the mummy’s condition. Then you could take your Mummy home and have what they called a unwrapping party. Nice Eh? Chemists of questionable reputation grinded up mummys and made a kind of therapeutic ointment out of the dust. Mark Twain claimed the Hartford Railroad was stoking their locomotive furnaces with mummy’s rather than logs of wood.

Mummy Powder

People bug me when I’m feeling low

Sometimes the behavior of People will deepen my low spirits. It’s bad enough I gotta deal with my own life as a human being. I would’ve been better off as a squirrel or a cockroach or even a mosquito. Those creatures are not stuck thinking about shit all damned day, every day. They just go about their business. Self-reflection would only get in the way of their work. Especially a creature as loathsome as a mosquito. Imagine a mosquito thinking about himself. I mean, if it suddenly dawned on him what he was, he’d think, “how the fuck did I end up a mosquito?” And he’d promptly commit suicide. Unless he had a mind like that of Ted Bundy. I imagine Ted would get off on being a mosquito. It baffles me how a seemingly normal, intelligent and charming dude like Ted pulled off crimes so depraved they make mob killers look like angels. Now, I see that it’s no mystery.

Ted had the mind of a mosquito.

A good day is bad enough. But the behavior of certain groups of people will darken my mood. Thoughts of Trump for example. Not Trump. The People who support Trump. People, otherwise normal, kind-hearted, peace-loving, even logical people, millions and millions of them, supporting a man with the mind of a mosquito. The world has gone crazy and I’m seeing it but there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s like that old movie Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. These huge veggie Pods hatched into duplicates of their intended victim. Then, when the victim falls asleep, the pod being replaces the original.

Don’t you see?

Trump Supporters are the pods!

Can you think of a better explanation for Trump World?

Trumpies are no longer human beings.

This means my girlfriend, Joan, is a Pod.

OMG!!!

Soon Pods will replace all of us. It happens when we fall asleep. That’s how they take us.

When you fall asleep.

You fall asleep and wake up a Pod.

Then…you vote for Trump.

Mulling over this reality is quite enough to depress even the most jovial dude out there. I try to remind myself I’m an old dude and it doesn’t really matter that in November of this year a diabolical human with the mind of a mosquito will occupy the White House once again.

I’m trying not to think about it.

Yesterday around noon

I’m sitting at the office. Trying to make sense of all this madness.

This woman sitting behind me is coughing.

Okay, she keeps coughing. That bugs me cuz I just got over a bout of RSV and I don’t need yet another badass lung infection. She stops coughing. Now she’s talking. She talking on the phone to somebody about housing. Where she can find temporary housing. I realize the woman is homeless…

Okay, homeless woman coughing. Best to pack it up. On my way out Sono offers me a dish of hot sweet bread. Mighty tasty. I offer the dish to the homeless woman.

“How about some warmed up cinnamon bread,” I say.

She accepts the dish. “Thank you,” she says, “Would you like some sushi?”

Safeway sushi.

“No, no, I’m fine. I’m trying to lose weight.”

“What? You’re not fat.”

“I’m thirty pounds overweight.”

“No you’re not. I know, I’m a chef. I’ve been a chef for thirty years. You just need to eat the right food! Are you eating the right food?”

I’m out the door.

She calls to me, “Are you eating the right food! You need to eat the right food!”

Now I’m thinking of homeless people

Homeless people everywhere you look. My ex-girlfriend Sharon’s living in her car. I’ll soon be living in a minivan. My own planned homelessness has no bearing on my mood. It’s homelessness in general. The feeling that society is just falling apart and no housed person seems to give a shit. The housed allegedly normal people are thinking, better thee than me. I know this cuz I’m feeling it. Yet the solution to homelessness is at hand. Soon the Fascist PODS will replace us completely. Not all of us. Only housed people will become Pods. Homeless people will remain stragglers, picking through the give-a-way piles like always. Why? Cuz they’re free spirits. Our Pod selves, those of us unemployed, will get good gig jobs as MUMMY SALESPEOPLE. Then we’ll go about putting an end to the homeless. We’ll clear the streets of encampments.

A homeless encampment on Anderson Drive in San Rafael

And find proper homes for the homeless in shelters.

We’ll lock them up at night.

And lock them up during the day if necessary.

No more allowing this sort of ridiculous display from an obvious degenerate.

And if they don’t like what we plan to do.

Well, then, we’ll just let them starve to death.

Like Jeremy Bentham advocated during the Irish famine of 1845.

Jeremy Bentham’s mummified head.

Earlier this morning

I’m coming out of this protracted funk I’ve been under. It lingers but nowhere near as bad as the last few days when the storm was raging on my dock. I came awake this morning in the fog.

Fog over Richardson’s bay.

Here’s a shot of the tarped trawler owned by Davie The Peach, an old dude my age, anchored out in the fog like he’s been doing for…for how long?

Forever.

I’m thinking better thee than me.

Been thinking that a lot, lately.

Abruptly the scavengers show up for breakfast.

The Peeper.

And his Mom. It never ends for them.

But why should it end? They got nothing to worry about but a meal. And they don’t even worry about that. They’re too busy hunting food to worry about it. I’m thinking, okay, they show up, I feed them. No big deal.

Scruffy’s been holding up just fine in these storms. He’s not just a shelter. He’s kinda like having a home.

Shit could be worse for old Gloomy.

Least I aint a Mummy

Not yet.

Elmer McCurdy (January 1880 – October 7th 1911) was an outlaw killed in a gunfight in the Osage Hills in Oklahoma. A newspaper account gave Elmer’s last words as “You’ll never take me alive!” His body was taken to a funeral home in Oklahoma. When no one claimed the corpse, the undertaker embalmed it with an arsenic-based preservative and allowed people to see “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up” for a nickel, placed in Elmer’s mouth, which the undertaker would collect later. Five years later, a man showed up from a nearby traveling carnival claiming to be Elmer’s long-lost brother wanting to give the corpse a proper burial. Within two weeks, however, Elmer was a featured exhibit with the carnival. For the next 60 years, Elmer’s body was sold to wax museums, carnivals, and haunted houses. The owner of a haunted house near Mount Rushmore refused to purchase him because he thought that Elmer’s body was actually a mannequin and not lifelike enough. Eventually, the corpse wound up in “The Laff in the Dark” funhouse at the Long Beach Pike amusement park in California. During filming of the The Six Million Dollar Man shot in December 1976, a crew member was moving what was thought to be a wax mannequin that was hanging from a gallows. When the mannequin’s arm broke off, it was discovered that it was in fact the mummified remains of Elmer McCurdy, who was finally buried in the Boot Hill section of the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma on April 22nd 1977, with 2 cubic yards of concrete over his casket so his remains would never be disturbed again.

ListVerse

Oklahoman’s cherish their outlaws.

They gave Elmer a nice headstone.

Here’s a song Elmer’s ghost might appreciate.