Archive for category B'yo Tales
Is poetry allowed here?
Posted by belmont yo in B'yo Tales on December 2, 2009
While it’s not a big tale, its been sorta quiet around here lately, so I thought I’d toss this out there…
Five Dollar Poem
So Im standing on the loading dock at work
just watching all the little circles
form in the big puddle in front of me
feeling just as grey as the skies above
thinking about all the little battles I have to wage
some asked for, others not.
Just a bad luck stretch for me,
I guess
and I shrug in the small moment of self pity
usually reserved for four a.m.
And I turn to return to my cube and I see
on the ground
crumpled in a receipt
a five dollar bill.
And I stare at its obviousness,
its “value”,
its familiarity,
with the sort of stunned disbelief one has when finding paper currency.
“Perhaps my luck has turned around”,
i think to myself
as I stoop to pick it up
and as I un-crumple it
I glance at the receipt…
“Harris Teeter: Salad. $4.86″.
My lunch yesterday.
Memories of the Afterlife
Posted by belmont yo in B'yo Tales on November 18, 2009
On my ninth birthday, I got presents and cake, and my father got the flu. My father wasn’t a lot of things. He wasn’t very reliable, he wasn’t a hard worker, nor a very good provider. He was however one thing – a very very funny charming man. A conversation with him always ended in laughter. He was also a prankster, April fools day being a national holiday for him. He was always up to something. Legend had it that in high school, an older gentleman across the street was pegged as to his schedule, and always parked in the same spot. So my father and his friends, having no wheels of their own, would simply “borrow” the car every night, and made sure to return it at the appropriate hour with the appropriate amount of gas in the tank. He never grew out of behavior like that, so to a nine year old, he was a god. Sounds stupid, but at that age, sneaking an entire pizza into a movie under his jacket was often more fun than the movie itself. I loved him very much – but I guess that goes without saying. Read the rest of this entry »
What happens in Vegas…
Posted by belmont yo in B'yo Tales on November 18, 2009
I suppose for this tale, a little bit of context is in order. For a period of time in the late eighties early nineties, I worked for the Grateful Dead in several capacities. Their mail order ticketing program was handled by a group of people named the Hog Farm, who run Camp Winnarainbow in Laytonville CA. After a particularly nasty beat down of deadheads by the police in Los Angeles, the Hog Farm approached my friend and pot source Bobbo (again, all names have been changed) to start a new program for West Coast shows to help grease the wheel so to speak. This involved two phases. One show up to the lot where the show would be the day before and as fans arrived pass out garbage bags, talk about the rules camping or no camping for example, and just sort of be emissaries to promote good will and safety. For this Bobbo and crew would receive free tickets to the shows, and sometimes backstage passes if there were extras. The second aspect was to scoop up folks that had had a little too much of their vice of choice before the police did, and find a place to make them safe. For this we were exquistly suited, as Bobbo drove a 35 foot International Harvester school bus named Laughing Jack. Read the rest of this entry »
Second Date
Posted by belmont yo in B'yo Tales on November 11, 2009
Inspired by Donk’s almost dying story – here’s one of mine:
_____________________
After I graduated college, I lingered around for a while. I rented a two car garage in a house known as the “Witch House”, which was a house occupied by five young witches. I guess they would be more accurately described as “wiccans” or “pagans”, but owing to their penchant for performing elaborate rituals involving fire and costumes and whatnot, the house could not have been more descriptively named by the locals. Shortly after moving to the Witch House, I developed a crush on the girl next door. Well, it was actually three houses down, but close enough to stretch for the cliche, eh? As I have said before, I was rather freaky in my daily attire, and this girl could not have been more the opposite. Clearly an athlete, she looked more like a sorority sister than anything else. Also, the house she lived in was nice. Really nice. There was nothing burning in the backyard, and no one lived in the garage. Everyone knows the freaks can often turn the normal chicks, but my crush lay idle. I mean what was I going to do? Invite her back to my cement floor repository of bones, art and laundry?
That all changed one evening when I ran into her at a party and she bummed a cigarette from me. We got to talking, and I had to pretend to be surprised to find out we were neighbors. We walked around and talked and she turned out to only be half of what she appeared. She was from a wealthy-ish LA family, the only daughter with three older brothers. She did dress normal on the outside, but on the inside, there was definite strangeness. That strangeness appealed to me greatly. We ended up kissing a little and setting up what we would consider our second date for later that week. For the sake of the story, I will call her Zulu, in honor of her strange side, as here real name definitely reflects the normality she projected at that time.
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Muni: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly. Part II
Posted by belmont yo in B'yo Tales on November 3, 2009
The Bad.
Paul was a kindly old bespectacled man who was the proofreader at the newspaper where I worked. He looked the sort of idealized Norman Rockwell grandfather archetype that some how instilled in me the urge to go fly fishing with him at some bucolic cabin, despite my never having had in interest in such activities. So it was to my surprise to find out that he collected weaponry. Collected may be too soft a word actually, I better go with horded. If his claims were true, his home was a depot that housed enough various implements of destruction to arm a small South American militia. After I had recalled to him yet another tale of feeling menaced on my midnight commute cross town, he gave me a small gift. He called it a “CIA LEtter Opener”, and it looked rather like a triangular tent spike with a handle. It was made of black hardened teflon of some kind and was about 8-9 inches long. It was explained to me that I could carry it anywhere as its material would not set off metal detectors, and that its beveled triangular sides were designed to cause “the maximum amount of bleed out from a puncture wound”. Um, thanks? My fly fishing fantasy kinda died that day, but I digress. As I am not accustomed to being “armed” in any sense of the word, I threw it in my messenger bag and kinda forgot about it.
Some weeks later I found myself on the good old 38 Geary line about to embark on yet another adventure to make it home. It was years until I figured out that riding a bicycle was a much more fun, more safe and more healthy way to approach this epic nightly voyage, so here I was, paying my dollar and trying to pick a seat. There are many schools of thought when it comes to picking a seat on a bus late night. Personally I have always been fond of sitting all the way in the back, thus being able to have a visual on everything thats going on. Now the problem with this is that the back of the bus is almost invariably where the brigands, ruffians and highway men gravitate, so one may find oneself in close company with such nefarious characters. I am of the opinion that to keep these folks close is bad, as you may be forced to interact and as such have to utilize “The Crazy Eyes”. For those wondering, The Crazy Eyes is where one allows just a little white to show over the *top* of your iris, cultivating a truly maniacal visage that can be varied by degree – the more white, the more crazy (see ref: Michelle Bachmann, Charles Manson). By practicing in front of the mirror, you too can become a master of The Crazy Eyes, and when accompanied by the hollow demented half smile, pretty much everyone will just want to leave you alone. Now as bad as getting into an interaction with the hive of scum and villainry that congregate in the back row of seats is, I still would rather have them where I can see them. After all,I dont have Crazy Eyes in the back of my head. The very front of the bus is out of the question, as it prematurely ages and feminizes a young man.
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