M.L. McIntosh's Blog

Shot down like a bullet.

There’s a girl in my shower two nights in a row now.

She’s got great  big tits and she keeps screaming my name.

Like a did something wrong.

Every night she shoots me down like a bullet.

I wish I could get you out of here.

I wish you were never here.

I wish I had the cash.

But things like “cash” and “chances” and “hope” “okay”

Those are things in the past.

I’ve been shot down like a bullet.

David, get me out of here.

Don’t  just stand there like ghost,

Cemetery host.

Don’t shoot me down.

Don’t shoot me down like a bullet.

The ticket stabber

Wants to Make Friends.

Sitting swimming

Mouths open, taking

Starving Chirping for chips.

Stuff your fucking mouths.

There’s a mortal moment,

everyone will know very intimately,

whether it was worth it.

This shift is turning into a hostage crisis.

We’re all going to die.

I’m a shitty negotiator.

The Unlucky are discovered. Just in time.

They do not go gentle into any night, or morning or day.

Their bodies are covered.

With hospital blankets and unpayable bills.

All of you, the doctors will eventually get you.

Then it’s ICU beds and hoses and waiting rooms.

Loss of life, ahhhh, but first.

Loss of Control.

Bereft of grace, and only then life.

Veins full of hoses,

tubes down your noses.

Loved ones hope you’ll never wake to know.

Found this article while I was doing some reading about the man Zu Zu Ya Ya Gris Gris Circus, who have graciously accepted me into their fold, is all about.

Towards the end of 1965, after their meteoric rise to the top of the charts with I Got You Babe, Sonny and Cher were invited to perform at a private party in the penthouse apartment of mining tycoon Charles Engelhard Jr. at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. The invitation came after Jackie Kennedy, a guest […]

via Gris-Gris, by Dr. John — The Music Aficionado

Never trust a man

who wears a suit

to the bar.

culturevultureexpress

Hello everyone and welcome to the 5th part of Writing 101. We have made the halfway point y’all. Today’s lesson is about writing mysteries.

Writing mysteries is very difficult. It’s actually one of the most difficult types of story to write. Mainly because you know who the killer/killers is and you have to conceal it all the way through the piece and the longer the piece of work is the more torturous that can be. Needless to say, when you start writing a mystery story you have to take your hat off to people like Agatha Christie who wrote over 80 mystery stories and still managed to keep each one fresh and interesting. But though it’s a hard form, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done so let’s look at some tips which can help you on your mystery writing journey …

Writing Mysteries

1. The Killer/Killers Need To Both…

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I dreamed I was on a dark stage, dancing to leilet hob

And I woke up choking.

Then the dream became a basement concert

We were listening to Nick Cave.

He crawled over the heads of the audience and right up the stairs

I tried to follow, but spiders rained down on me and covered my body,

And I could not overcome my fear of Them to follow Him.

The moral of my dream?

Leilet hob is a dangerous song for beginners, Nick Cave is the Christ.

And I am damned.

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That smiling face… whether you deign to speak at it or not, there’s a thousand razor-sharp barbs behind those little teeth. Those dull little eyes hold a vocabulary that would surprise.

Oh, shit, she’s capable of more than a, “Table for two?”

Her mind wanders as your eyes rove- oh she’s got an opinion of you.

________________

It’s a lot of people standing in line-

taking turns taking your life away until you die

Just so they can out and dine.

________________

The man in suit smiles, but only briefly.

He is seat  #7. Nothing else.

Salmon tie, did he chew on smelts

Before cracking into laughter.

I think I know him.

________________

The Bartender.

likes the Femmes.

The Violent Ones.

________________

Oh, God, come down and shoot me,

kill me, take me, break me,

open up my brain and scramble up these little cerebral bits,

Seize me into a thousand epileptic fits,

While I stand here, nothing at all to anyone,

Take all your fucking bullets and put them into me,

While somewhere overhead plays the place I should be.

________________

On Coworkers.

The redhead with magnet brains.

The man from 1971.

They make a pair.

And then the one

who’s a full fucking house.

________________

Table 11 is sooooo unimpressed.

Soooooo unentertained.

I could watch them all night.

Listen to them- I’m a bit of furniture at the door so I can-

They’re exactly what they look and sound like they are, all right.

________________

I quite possibly lead the least interesting life of anyone I’ve ever met.

At least…

that’s what I’ve been told.

________________

His face is flushed.

Now

Quite jolly, they become.

But no amount of booze

makes an asshole a better tipper.

________________

Smile and wave bye-bye

No matter how they treat you.

________________

Thank God sometimes they’re easy to look at.

Passive entertainment.

Like the covers of magazines.

The Church plays on.

Oh wait, shit.

That’s Morrissey.

________________

I’m not lonely or incompetent.

I’m bored and fucking tired.

________________

Oh. My. God…

I’ve never seen so much fucking flannel in my goddamned life.

________________

The shitty band upstairs

it’s drowning out the Bowie playing down here.

That’s OK.

Bowie always wins, in the end.

________________

Final 20 WTF

My legs are killing me.

I’m scrubbing menus.

Literally to pass the time.

I think they’re already clean.

Missed a spot.

________________

guest taps rotate.

we’ll tear the weekly menus out.

Hipsters rotate flannel patterns

One thing will never change.

No one will ever give a single FUCK FUCK FUCK

what the mousy little girl up front in writing in her crooked little book.

That’s the only power I have.

This night, it’s exactly as long as it feels.

________________

Help.

Most people show up to work, feel absolutely nothing, do absolutely nothing, and contribute absolutely nothing to anything without the tangible promise of money. That’s how normal people work. The fact that you’ve read this far indicates that you are not one of these people. Sorry about that. I think it might be much easier to be a heedless, thoughtless, careless money-acruer perpetually at the end of someone else’s line constantly saying “no” than to ever stop and think, “Well, what can I actually do?”

By this point you’ve either sneered in disgust and quit reading (poor old you) or you’ve sneered in disgust and kept reading.

Poor old you.

That’s exactly how the majority of people feel when they interact with anyone less fortunate than them in any regard. You, being an artist, are probably largely ignored, largely poor, and struggling to make ends meet, or live in these other peoples’ world, at all.

You might as well save your breath trying to tell anyone about it. The only people who give a shit already know, and are in it with you, so you might as well surround yourself with like-minded people and quit wasting your time on the rest.

2. NO ONE WANTS TO OR WILL HELP YOU

Just. Stop. If you thought earning an advanced degree, working tirelessly at an occupation you’re supposed to do for your whole life or giving up everything you ever loved, damaging your marriage for work, losing your youth and health, somehow entitle you to receiving any kind of assistance from the blokes who cockamamied you into signing away your life and any potential for future income, just. Stop.

The only thing that entitles anyone to anything in normal-people-land is money. If it’s not important enough to you to table everything else and waste your life earning money, the normies are not going to lift a single finger to help keep you in this physical plane. Refer to Bullet 1.

3. MOST PEOPLE THINK YOU’RE A FREAK, THE REST DON’T CARE

Most normies are not going to want to have anything to do with you, because they assume that you, not working a 9-5 job or spending the majority of your time doing as you’re told by someone with a God complex, are here to rob them. The 0.01% of humanity remaining are probably your manager and their sole purpose in life is to make every effort to ensure that you fully and legitimately believe you have no other option than scrubbing toilets for them. Refer to Bullet 2.

4. MOST PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU DO. THE REST THINK THEY KNOW AND ARE READY TO JUDGE YOU FOR IT

Most people are incredibly angry and bitter about how mind-numbingly mundane and stupid their lives are, and how little anything they do will ever matter to anyone. And since misery loves company, the normies will generally do anything to unspecialize special people. They do this with two predominant methods:

They will either pretend to politely pretend that what you do is interesting while really trying to act as if your work is so boring they might die to death right in front of you if you say another word about it…sometimes before you’ve actually said anything.

They will take anything you do and judge your moral character as lacking because you’re creative. And as everyone in Hollywood knows, the only person more likely to be a villain than a smart person who is good at science is a smart person who has an imagination. Normies will take the piss right out of anything you create because they couldn’t create it themselves. Anything creative is different, and different is scary. Besides, the world revolves around the normy brain, and if they couldn’t some up with it, it can’t be worth a shoe of shit, right?

5. NO ONE, INCLUDING FAMILY, FRIENDS, LOVED ONES, CAREGIVERS, WILL EVER UNDERSTAND. NOT EVEN YOUR BEST ENEMY. GET USED TO BEING LONELY.

This is, perhaps, the toughest essential truth living the life artistically. Musician with great compositions, visions of musical masterpieces? Multi-instrumentalist? That must mean you’re good at math, why can’t you go do something with that? Or even better, teach? Brilliant painter, mixed media explorer, house filled with master works, each more refined than the one before? Guh, they take up and awful lot of space, don’t they? Why don’t you just sell them?

A quick Saturday yard sale will do, and if that doesn’t make the trick, there’s always Goodwill.

Even other artists (despite what I may have said in Bullet 1) will only ever understand what you’re going through to a point, for inevitably the entity “friend” has got to end somewhere and “you” have to take over. It’s at that point exactly that even your best artist buddy will no longer be able to understand what is happening, being done, and befalling you.

The best answer to all these conundrums is NOT to find a dead end job somewhere and waste away bussing tables. It’s also not buying into all the self-help bullshit about how you can be a rich asshole through your art if you just imagine the world abundantly. I mean maybe that might work for fantasy writers, because it IS sheer fantasy.

What you’ve got to do is either 1) be OK with being poor your entire life, 2) Be lucky or 3) Find a meaningful occupation that can compromise with your artistic work and springboard your art to a life larger than your own. Writer? get a desk job in publishing, and take names and numbers whenever you can. Actor? Teach public speaking classes. Painter? Find work at a local museum- even if it is scrubbing the toilets. Musician? Work at the local guitar shop (unless you’re a girl. Female musicians should probably just give up and die. You’ll never make it, unless you’re a perky violinist or you can live as being the obligatory pair of tits with a tamborine.)

Try to find something that doesn’t make you pull over to the side of the road to vomit on the way to work everyday, and try to work in what you’re REALLY good at whenever you can. Who knows, maybe you’ll make something brilliant.

Molly Malone grew up in La Grange.

She was a young lovely girl raised free-range.

Until she was seventeen,

and three men came to the farm at La Grange.

But she felt no alarm

even as they took away Dad and dear old Mom.

Oh, and she did sing,

Oh her voice did ring,

Molly Malone sang Cockles and Mussles

from her cradle to the table.

And they sent Molly Malone to a factory

university

where she learned to smoke and drink, and fuck

and pay out all her money, funny but

no one actually taught her to think.

Oh, and she did cry

Oh and she did cry,

Cockles and Mussles,

Even as they took the needle out her arm.

Miss Molly now she preferred Mistress to whore,

if one HAD to apply a label.

And she didn’t come round to the farm anymore,

on Sundays she beat down to the sea,

she was the finest sight to a boy like me.

And she’d cry, “Eat my cockles and mussles, alive-oh.”

She did cry from the cradle to my ladle.

Oh, and she did cry

Oh and she did cry,

She cried from the cradle straight to my table.