waiting for my muse in a dark alley with an aluminum bat

unedited pure neanderthal musings NeANDERThallus's DONut EDiT!!! historical records from my cave walls... brutality, menial labor, minor victories, hot sexy interludes....... 3 years on the edges of a society that i cant distance myself enough from

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since 2005 i've been picking at this keyboard. the thoughtstreams flow, who knows from whence they came, or to whence they go? enjoy the ride...... i am

Friday, June 27, 2008

my non profit agency is established to try to get more people to drink at work
jobs are more fun when you drink
so ill write a quick book about how to be a drunk teacher
types of booze to drink
booze delivery systems
avoiding the man
im going to bring some rum to the coffee shoppe
get one of these chicks buzzed
on their new frozen concoction machinethe 200 pound behemouth that was delivered
mid day
to the curb
thats when i packed up and left
cuz the owner of the cafe didnt have a plan
he and his wife ordered it
thought it would be a profit center for their little java empire
saved money on delivery by choosing the curbside option
otehrwise they have to pay a teamster and his helper two hours union wages to bring it up the steps and in the shoppe
so i saw the owner scratching his head
and wondering how the shit was going to levitate into the shoppe
and i refuse to enable a cheap ass business man
im not an enabler
so i left
before the heavy lifting began
cuz thats how i roll and shit

Thursday, June 26, 2008

and if you teach a man to fish
he will stick it to the man for life
so i gave an informal seminar last night
at the banquet i worked
to the young kid from the temp agancy
he and his pal were demoted to barback
one was next to me behind the bar
chatting
when his gal pal rolls thru
infuriated at not being behind the bar
starts a fuss
im a bartender
thats what i was sent here for
this isnt right
theres too many dudes behind that bar there
indicating her friend and i
and the five other bartenders
behind a bar which needed three
so she gets put next to me
he becomes a barback
and shes all happy
about screwing her friend over
and shes in the way
and flirting her ass off
and people leave cash
which is good
until she puts it in her pocket
and that seems wrong
and i mention it
and she seems not to get the concept of shared labor
and whatever....
so shes basically standing in my right pocket
cant move
so i basically go into fuck it mode and start chatting
some people you just cant reach
we have 2 dudes
one recently dispossesed and bitter
pulling the knife out of his back
so i try to heal him
i relate an old timer banquet trick
i mention theres alot of people here
and its a big place
and that the bararound the corner has 1 dollar happy hour bottles
and no one will catch one
just come back to sign out later
that that would be the move that i would make if i wanted to stick it to the man
he and his dude dissappear
and a karma is satisfied
they show up a couple hours later
lie to the boss about pitching in elsewhere
for a change
and now the man has had it stuck to him
the little guy wins
and if the boss is reading this its PURE FICTION
id never do this
im a team player
i love my new job
i just like to make up lies about what a radical i am

Monday, June 23, 2008

Tattooed titties
She grabs the bar stool on my left
Im interested
But im no lonely jerk off
Waiting for my moment
The time to intrude into her world
The time to tap her consciousness
The juke box gives me my in
It’s a journey song I know
And I can warble
With the best of ‘em
I warbled loudly
In tune
With her and her pal
Was noticed
And we chatted about how lovely she was
Well that was my agenda
She talked about her job
Her rehab
I was talkin about our sparkly future
And she was participating
Shame my game is bad
Rusty
Forgetting the basics
Forgot to get the email
Forgot to close the dealio
She knows where to find us online tho
www.skillrugby.com
I hope she shows up at rugby
I hope im not too big a fag too play then

The chain is as fat as my pinky, and I have a fat pinky
Ham hands was one local wits assessment
26,000 pounds of force is required to cut it
It’s the meanest chain home depot sells
Its in its own bin,
locked in cage
Kept away from the others
Or the skinnier chains disappear over night
And the mean chain looks fatter
Burping sometimes
The machine to cut the chain labored mightily
The pistons protested when I cut my five foot length
In order to maintain possession of my bike
I needed the meanest chain around
I wear it like a bandelero
Over one shoulder
All che Guevara
When I ride sometimes a taxi asshole wants to be blowing his horn
as I legally ride down the middle of market street
Right down the middle
He honks again
Hes in a hurry
I unsling the mean chain
Dangle it with one hand
While maintaining my pace and position
See if cabbie dude wants to get all road warrior or not
At the light I half turn and glower
They usally don’t make me fuck their shit uo
Especially if theres a passenger
And and a new form of road rage is invented
The road warrior pedals on

Saturday, June 14, 2008

While walking my anarchist gal down thirteenth street, a car drives by, “Hey, Mr. Baker!” shouts the head disappearing down the block in fast moving traffic, into the gayborhood.
“See, it can’t have been all that bad,” she says, my little anarchist Pollyanna, seeing the good in all situations, people and animals.
She wasn’t there as I slogged through a dozen years in the heart of North Philly. The school reformer. The agent of change. The enthusiastic purveyor of literacy in a mighty battle with the forces of apathy, aggression and street culture. I fought the good fight for as long as I could, setting blood pressure records, assaulting and being assaulted, self medicating, and finally disgracing myself by repeating a phrase I had heard fifty times a day in the ghetto ass school I was trying to bring words to.
The kid in the car was one of the cool ones. Raised right. Respectful. The kind you worry about as you shepherd him through, knowing in your heart he is way, way, way behind his suburban peers in educational achievement, yet the cream of the crop in the human arena. You hope he wins the lottery and gets into one of the magnet schools in the city. That would give him a shot at college. That would give him the chance that every kid in catholic schools gets. The chances that most suburban kids get. The chance to fuck up his schooling on his own terms. Instead he must survive a fucked up school system and get lucky and then maybe catch up in one of the few good high schools in the city.
In the kind of schools I worked in at the end of my career, the Principals could have been charged with criminal neglect. Assuming a litigious parent, and careful accumulation of evidence. When I started there the staff would have to lock their doors in order to keep the visitors out. Visitors who were cutting class, roaming the hallways, getting high and engaging in prostitution in the gym. Kids having the kind of great time that I only stumbled across in my college years. Kids living the thugged out lifestyle.
So you try to hit them where they live. You parse raps for similies and metaphors, when they find them all you will play the song.
When Biggie raps “Girlies play me like butter plays toast” he is using what literary device? Did you know that he was on the honor roll up until sixth grade? Do you know who else was always on the honor roll before he attended the creative and performing arts school in Baltimore? Do you know what kind of school record you need to get into one of the elite magnet type schools like CAPA? Tupac, Biggie and billionaire Oprah Winfrey on the honor roll.
Gimmicks. You buy peace and sanity for a few hours when you find the right gimmick. Pollyanna, on the other hand, has the luxury of paying customers. She knows about the defeaning silence, when you put it out there, when you speak from the heart. Then you gotta dumb it down a bit, build some bridges and maybe a handful will get it. Exposure to ideas. Maybe the second time they hear it they will remember what you were saying. Like advertising on a low budget.
The teacher in your Master’s course always is going on and on about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. Pop quiz hotshot. You have thirty kids of widely varying educational levels and needs. You are required by the state to teach each one on his or her grade level. They all have short attention spans from that demon box TV. Is a dollars worth of candy such a bad price to pay for relative peace and quiet?
I think it’s a bargain. In some form or other it’s only bribery that gets these little extortionists attention at all. They train you as they have been trained by years of sticker bearing teachers in elementary schools.
The stakes are higher in seventh and eighth grade, and the kids are harder to buy off. You need leverage.
And for the true hardcore kids you have none. Some sit in your class, counting out hundreds of dollars, and that’s not against the rules and they don’t want your fucking candy. Or they were already kicked out of the disciplinary school and by law must be returned to the neighborhood school and there is nothing the administration can do about it because, legally, they have already been suspended too many times already this year.
So you sit in the after school sessions on what constitutes sexual abuse and finally catch one, dead to rights, and report it confidently to the assistant Principal. Behavior that would end a job in the square world of laws and other nonsense. The AP confers with the children in the hallway and offers this report to you, “Mr. Baker the kids say they were just playing.” Floored. So “playing” is apparently permitted in your classroom. The heck with education, plus the paperwork on the abuse claim would be both time-consuming and nightmarish. This AP is such a strong advocate for the rights of children that even in the midst of a wave of fires in the building, your word that you saw a lighter in a child’s hand is not enough to go on, because when the school policeman searched the child he had no lighter and “what do you want me to do, Mr. Baker?” Protecting kids from teachers with different visions of what a school is supposed to be like. And they wonder why I drink myself to sleep….

I can cut it closer
Her bedroom clock is ten minutes slow
Factor that in and maximize sack time
Why wouldn’t I want to linger longer?
Nude and spooning a naked lovely
Flesh on flesh, nestling in her crevices
Throwing clothes on at the very last instant
Buttoning the shirt as I race down the street
chomping an apple in leiu of "brosse les dents"
i can splash water on my face at work on my first unscheduled break....

Rushing towards brain death
Towards the train to hell
The 7:28 to Hades
For the Brimstone special
Connection to the shuttle bus to agony
Agonizing as my life ticks away
Wasted
I am a foot soldier in george w bushes no child left behind program
I am the decider
The program makes kids take a zillion tests
Someone has to grade them all
Teachers and administrators cant be trusted
Theyd give their kids great scores so they could get their raises
Thus an industry is born
Intrastate test grading
I decide if the kid is on grade level
Where he goes from here

Attired as a homeless Romeo, I enact governmental standards
The gatekeeper with underwear in its 48th hour of service
Coated lightly with my essence
Leftovers that she didn’t swallow last night
Some still dried on my belly and chest
My ass is zinging, kickin, foul
Hair akimbo
Fourth day for the khakis
And they are neither stain nor wrinkle resistant
The worlds biggest idiot clicks away at a keyboard
As heaven sleeps away the morn, 53 minutes away

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

on the roof
beating the heat
watching the lightning strikes in the distance
20 degrees cooler up here
with a breeze
the hatchway feels like an open oven
hot air from the crawlspace from it
the clouds are moving back to front
a flash to the right
a flash to the left
another straight ahead
i start some calculations
draw a triangle
and find im in the middle of a triangle of electicity
this could get interesting!

the mamma cat peeks out
sniffs the air
then is up
trotting for the far edges of the roof
meowing
looking for cat cock
her heat coinciding with the heat wave
she inspects every inch of my roof
now is on the neighbors
looking at the tree
she wouldnt
would she?

i meow hornily at her
it gets her attention
she trots back
catches my lie and is off again
two rooves over
my brother brings me up another sixer
plus limes, and opener/knife
i figure if im suffering thru a hot ass night
i may as well drink stylishly
like a dude with a job
like a middle class boozehound
the recycling guys wil be surprised this week
at a finer class of empties

my brother is more of a prude
worries about the cat
worries about her reputation in the neighborhood
if she gets down she'll become the newest cat to be fed by the stripper next door
every night
at three
after shes done being all nude all the time
she calls the kitties
dumps a can on her steps
and one on the ground for her favorites
he puts the cat in the front room on the next beer run
we watch the light show
which seems closer and closer
carried on the wind
booming behind us
flashing closer
drops hit us
here comes the real break from the heat
im out of beer anyway
down the hatch we go

Sunday, June 08, 2008

the cat lies unmoving on the chair directly in front of the fan i leave on all day to make my place liveable
air you can see today
thick smoggy stuff, makes you think you just got out of the pool
with chlorine damaged eyes
the horizon is gone
this is what bejing looks like, only bejing is 2o times worse
the sun, a brighter spot in the sky is obscured by all the haze
ah capitalism
money, money, money
if you have money who needs breathable air?
lets all head to the oxygen bar


its only june and the air is mid summer nasty
humid, sticky, like walking through cobwebs
no way to stay sober in weather like this
you sweat out the beers as quickly as you drink them
you try to hide from the heat as best you can
but eventually yo are stuck in an 80 something degree apartment
sweltering, broasting
and theres no way i have found to fall asleep in sticky weather like this unless I am well lubricated
so much for sobriety
or else its toss and turn all night and wish i can fall asleep
ill be at the coffee shop until the sun goes down tonight
maybe a movie marathon tommorrow
i can see five before my brain starts throbbing
a job with air conditioning seems like a very good idea
so ill shave and cut my hair and feign interest in whatever torture outfit is hiring

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

i look-

but it is an appreciation
a celebration
rather than a leering drool fest-

you got mirrors
you know you fine

im just giving my eyes a sugary treat

theres no frantic dash to the bathroom
holding your image in my mind
frantically pulling my weiner with the other
im not 17 any more

but
geez louise!
please louise
the human eye evolved
as most huners eyes do
to tracj movements
and you are moving through my mind
even standing still
you make me want to invent a time machine
so i can travel to the future when you are closer to my age
and we can laugh about the one about you
or the one about the next one walking into cafe tang

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

i feel that i can think clearly again
for the first time in a hen's age
i have no impending financial doom thoughts
blackly polluting the free flow of ideas
today i think that when i get to LA i should be a poker dealer
im going to find the school in the neighborhood today
sign up
learn a new trade
find a job dealing poker in an exciting new city
but until then i need to look for work
just work
work which utilizes my years of experiences in the school district
so i wrote a helpful little letter
and sent it to the newspaper
i think ill write a new letter/article/query letter every day
one or two
just as long as the ideas are flowing, why the hell not share my alleged genius
heres the letter
Oh how I miss the lovely, warm blanket of union work, where a person employed by the school district of can tell the incoming CEO that “that’s not my job” when asked why something obvious wasn’t being done. And she or he was probably spot on. Trust me the contracts the union and the district go to battle on every five years or so are scutinized to the last comma. Jobs in the 2.3 billion dollar behemoth are intricately described in the contracts, down to the minute and you know why? Because bad bosses abused the public servants that take it upon themselves to sit in rooms with 30 disinterested hostages for six hours a day. If you want teachy-poo to stay a minute longer than that you had better be prepared to pay 25 bucks an hour. And if you pay one for it you have to pay them all. Every decision has to be the fairest and wisest of all or they will grieve you and win. All because of the abuses of the past. All because a few dozen poor administrators wronged someone who kept more accurate records than them. Teachers are all about record keeping. Justice was done. Everything was and is written in contractual stone.
So the incoming CEO is facing the same daunting task that has faced the last few reformers. Philly is a tough town. Full of lawyers and people who know them. The schools are in the shape they are in because so much that needs to be done work is someone else’s job. And there are only three of them in the union for the whole school district. And they have work orders for the next six months and are paid by the hour and in no hurry to finish quickly. There is no incentive in it.
An illustrative example occured in my last school when the children got a hold of the master key and had free access to every room in the building for months on end. Teachers who previously could lock their door and find a quiet moment amid the chaos would have a visitor. Hear the key in the lock, and there’s one of the largest and cleverest of the work avoiders in the school , who then leaves because it’s hard to steal from someone with a cell phone in her hand with the 9 and one one already dialed who is screaming at you.
Teacher goes to administration, claiming a very real safety issue. Admin blames “teachers” for losing the master key. Which was only issued to trusted members of the inner circle, who, instead of being bothered to get up off their comfy leather thrones to unlock doors a few times a day, made copies for cronies and led to the situation at the school. A situation that persisted for months. And in the ultimate slap in the face, when the teacher reported the incident to admin, and the admin response was, “are you sure the door was locked?” followed by “when we searched him and he didn’t have it” and that was the end of that.
A deadly combination, inadequate administrators with ironclad contracts and ultimate deniability. A principal can destroy a school and be transferred to carry on their incompetency in another and another because it can always be blamed on the teachers. Who can then blame the students parents, tv, and a drug culture and it’s all a very tidy little blame game. It’s not my job is the mantra of the school district.
The schools are in the business of serving the children and meeting their needs This is not being done. But there are school that work. That is undeniable. Safe havens staffed with veterans. I watched a poor administration gut a school by not repecting the veteran teachers there and every year there were less and less as they worked their contacts in the district they all found better jobs elsewhere. These were advocates for the neediest children, teaching in the heart of north Philadelphia, doing heroic public service and becoming so fed up with horrible administrators that it became a question of their own sanity. I talked to them about their heart wrenching decision to abandon children they had spent a decades serving. It was their last resort and quite a painful decision.
So, maybe there needs to be some sort of oversight when there is a flood of transfer requests from a particular school. No one wants to quit and start over. Teaching is about being a legacy and a part of a community and getting to know the families. A transfer request is a warning sign of a failing school.
The contracts are the way they are and that is the cost of doing business in this modern age of ours. So how do you fix it? School by school. And that can’t be done in some brand new office building downtown. Schools are fixed when caring adults interact with, and inspire children. If they aren’t inspired by the curriculum, you had better find something they like about their school, some point of pride, or you will be fighting the impossible fight. So issue a challenge. If Masterman is the flagship school, the envy of the system, the place mayors and politicians daughters all go to, then open it up.
Inspire 25 percent of the teachers there to make another place more like Masterman. Inspire them with cash is you have to. Replace them with rookie teachers so that they can get the feeling of what a great school is like for a year or two, then send them out the door to make mini-Mastermans all over the city.
I know the people at Arthur Ashe Youth Tennis would love to have a lot more scholastic tennis teams in the city. I bet Masterman has soap in the bathrooms. I am sure that the dedicated and public spirited, children first, professionals who are serving the future by teaching, would have no problem being part of the teaching revolution as I humbly suggest. Otherwise we have a very sad two teired public educational systems and that’s not just sad, that’s illegal.
Harry Baker
Harry is starting his own charter school someday, and was forcefully retired from the Philadelphia School System because he had a really bad day. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have good ideas. He will share his ideas with anybody at anytime and loves realistic discussions about school reform. Someday he’d like to be paid for ideas, but he doesn’t have the “credentials”. bakeowski@yahoo.com

Monday, June 02, 2008

into cafe'tang walks a legend
robbin drugstores in the flesh
one of the meanest mamas to don skates
i summon up the courage to talk to this icon
im giddy
then she confirms the rumor
my fave band is playing at the 2 day roller girls POOL PARTY
20 womens teams from all over
a swinmming pool
beer
and black landlord
possibly THE social event of the CENTURY
im more excited about it than i am about recieving umemployment

im taking the show on the road
who has a couch?
my apartment is miserably hot in the summer
and it looks like my genius grant came thru
i can look for work from your couch as easily as from my south philly location
and i am a fair cook and can lift heavy things
the pa state labor people agreed with me that my last job was horrible
and are paying me to find another
which is awfully cool of them
i love it when a dream comes together
so why not look for work in exoctic far flung locales?
my buddy called me yesterday to say hes getting an apartment in LA
hmmmm
i can look for work out there just the same as here
and why the fuck wooden eye?
time to put things in tubs and milk crates
reduce my bourgeoiuse accumulations
too many books
too many rugby shirts
too many baseball cards

step one
ebay sale of legendary drinkers possessions
step two
find a person to live in my apt and take care of the demon kitties
step three
stop drinking after a celebratory round tonight

dry up, do some situps, a pushup of two
hit LA looking semi brawny
find some bukowski bars out there
choke on some smog
learn hate a whole new cities inhabitants

reduce the operation to shit i can carry on my back

Sunday, June 01, 2008

my newest hit single

poontang peeping at the coffee shop
i dont wanna be rude but i just cant stop
glancing and peeking at the nip over there
when she walked in she took the air
outta my lungs and she even talks cute
hi voice, soft spoken biker chick cute
hot shorts just flushed
wish she moved slower
if she was a dude
id prolly blow her

summer summer summer
OH FRIGGIN YEAH
my eyes fattening on all this candy