Saturday, January 27, 2018

'Money Man'

Shot Caller starring Nikolaj Coster-Walau

Film review by James LaFond



The middle-class counterpart to Vince Vaughn’s Brawl in Cell Block 99, is a nearly identical story save for the social class of the protagonist. Rather than a doomed working class man, slated for extinction based on uncompromising ethics, the upscale hero played by Nikolaj Coster-Walau is doomed to fall into the abyss based on the racial politics of prison, which leave a white man doing time the choice of joining a white prison gang or getting raped. 

The hero must forever sever himself from his estranged family. The system offers no prospect of redemption in this high end whitesploitation movie, in which a fallen white man has no path back to civic decency. Like Brawl in Cell Block 99, Shot Caller addresses the singular issue, the one straw that has broken the postmodern Aryan camel’s back in the manger, the fact that incarceration for a felony effectively ends any paleface’s chance at a decent life and places him among the felonious races as the priority target for law enforcement, played by a three-race team of law officers with the immense federal hard-on for white identified criminals, who nevertheless respect this man.

The heroic theme is lukewarm in that this hero out-thinks more than he outfights his lessers and his betters. However, the pillar of the shot caller’s moral compass is the same as that of the other white genocide movie under discussion—family. Both heroes, the working class and the upper class, throw their lives away to reserve the remnants of their tiny nuclear families, all of meaning left to them in a mean, meaningless world. The whiggerization and traitorous nature of many white-identified criminals is addressed as a pitfall almost equal to the vastly evil system, which is rendered minimally evil but realistically faceless and soulless.

This movie has too many twists and turns and James Bond like solutions to be truly heroic, but is pleasing, masculine-affirming and might be stomached by the frails in your life. 




Friday, January 26, 2018

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 9

The dog ate the first version of these weekend links, which are, incidentally, by no means limited to weekends.


Tony Cox missed a train.

The Teutonic Fist makes his first appearance on weekend links with the backstory of the cover of 40,000 Years from Home.

Jeremy Bentham has thought pretty hard about the coming civil war, maybe you should too.

James traces the threads of Aryan heroism in modern entertainment.

A Baltimore pedestrian recalls 2017 by the numbers.

Billy's Pizza Caper is a quick and funny read and don't miss JJ's comment.

Checkered Demon, thank you for this: "Mostly, I'd just heard his Cousin David Allen Coe, a known race-healer and poet."  For readers unfamiliar, I recommend you preserve your innocence and do not click this YouTube link (don't blame me, blame John Paul Barber).

James illustrates honor in boxing in two iconic photographs.

James and Mescaline examine the remains of the Lee Jackson Monument in Wyman Park Dell.  See also James and Mescaline's video series created just days before the Monument was removed in the dark of night.

Tony Cox's housing bubble caper.

JJ paints a picture of another dead American city, Detroit


Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 8

Here is a midweek edition of weekend links, just for fun.

James sees the push for diversity as a means of destroying the Aryan concept of honor.

I am thrilled that James is reading Robert E. Howard's Costigan stories.

Is James considering Minneapolis for a 2018 Harm City Tour stop?

Doc tells us about old habits that die hard.

Thoughts on Thanksgiving and history repeating itself.

Food deserts?

James sees the varied and subtle range of humanity, now denied, in Howard's Kane stories. 

Long live the Conan of Baltimore.

Tony Cox and his girl get close to the action and come away unscathed. 

I have always admired the Scots for stopping the Romans.

I liked this story from the Checkered Demon, maybe it was the noisy bike, maybe it was something else, but it spoke to me. 

Ishmael's memories

James reviews the movie, The War Lord.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Good Fences - Crackpot Podcast Ep 22

The Body Breach


Welcome to Episode 22 of the Crackpot Podcast.  LaFond and Lockhart welcome our first guest in this episode, Baruch, an Israeli settler who was born in Russia, grew up in the US, served in the Army in Iraq, worked as a contractor in Afghanistan, found his faith and moved to Israel.  Along the way he became a reader, commenter and correspondent in the LaFondiverse.

The Crackpot Podcast features prolific author and urban survival expert James LaFond, and Lynn Lockhart, a mysterious woman.

Audio:





0:00:30  Introducing our first guest Baruch
0:00:50  Baruch's Russian Israeli boxing gym
0:02:30  How did Baruch start reading James LaFond?
0:04:27  A little about Baruch's background
0:06:10  Early days in the war in Afghanistan was "like a big game hunting preserve"
0:07:14  http://freerangeinternational.com/blog/
0:08:56  Baruch's animals, including James LaFond the cat
0:12:30  Details on Baruch's time in the Army, contrast with time as a private military contractor
0:17:10  The slow but continuous trickle of action in the post-9/11 wars, the rarity of firefights, parallels to the North American frontier
0:19:15  The Yazidis in Iraq
0:21:35  Baruch's caveat on his combat experience
0:22:58  James wants to know about the Kurds
0:24:00  What does Baruch really think about Arabs?
0:26:00  Kurds and other groups, phenotypes found in the area
0:30:18  Ibn Khaldun
0:31:24  Redhead Thracian slaves and other genetic introgressions
0:33:05  Empires of the Silk Road, Beckwith
0:34:30  Bacon's Rebellion Weissman
0:36:15  Baruch's bike trip
0:38:36  Baruch describes his home in Israel, convergent evolution with rednecks
0:40:30  Government treatment of settlers
0:41:55  Fences, the philosophy and tactical implications
0:46:00  How to deal with razor wire, the body breach
0:48:00  The time Baruch had to manage a mob of underpaid Afghanis
0:54:00  ISIS and the history of Islamic conquest
0:56:04  President Frothy Latte & the CIA
0:59:35  Saudi Arabia, Israel, the glowing orb, what's going on?
1:01:55  Wahabi, Salafi, Sufi, Shia, etc., does it make a difference to the West?
1:03:28  Apocalyptic prophesy in Islam
1:05:20  The role of Israel according to the Torah
1:06:15  How Baruch found his faith
1:07:50  Marcus Aurelius
1:08:30  Stoicism and Buddhism
1:08:55  The guy that lived in a barrel
1:12:18  Bottle and potty break (its the Crackpot and baby care podcast)
1:12:30  The legitimacy of the Sultanate
1:13:50  Maimonides, the Law of Kings and Wars
1:14:45  Principles in Islam which are borrowed from Judaism, how Muslims set up a Caliph and Caliphate, Emirs, involvement of kidnapped and forcibly converted Europeans, colonialism.
1:20:33  The Crusade Through Arab Eyes
1:21:20  The story of Joseph's slavery in Egypt
1:22:45  The parallel to the American political system
1:25:30  Trump in the election was like James LaFond in a WWF match
1:28:30  Pizzagate speculation
1:35:07  Hanukkah greeting from Baruch

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart & James LaFond

Saturday, January 13, 2018

Shout from NYC Crime Report

Tony was kind enough to request a shout for James from Pat Dixon at the NYC Crime Report Podcast and got it on Episode 325.

If you are looking for a podcast to add to your listening, while you eagerly await your favorite, the Crackpot Podcast, give them a listen, I think you will enjoy it.

Thanks Tony, and thank you Pat!

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 7

Hello friends, here is a list of my picks, this list is about a week in arrears, so please bear with me while I get caught up (it will never happen).

The Red SUV, assessing a risk, giving no benefit of the doubt.

Reaching for the floor, retirement looms, not a moment too soon.

White Heathens and Praying Indians, a sample of what we can look forward to in James' books about the early colonial period in North America.

Catch up with the LaFondiverse gang in Yule News.

‘On the Ridge of the Silent World’ I am excited that James is getting into Howard's boxing work, because that means it will soon be time for Steve Costigan!

Some Folks, Checkered Demon checking in.  

A crime report with a different tone.  

Some light blade chat Welsh Trench Sword

Well Read Ed gives his prediction for James' Harm City Nationwide Tour 2018.

I will tell you again, I am excited about the Costigan stories!

The subplot of James' early retirement, Steevo's sour deal.


(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

Thursday, January 11, 2018

‘Blanco’


Brawl in Cell Block 99 with Vince Vaughn

Film review by James LaFond



In terms of masculine affirmation in the face of the indistinct and habitually faceless evil of the modern world, Brawl on Cell Block 99 is a masterpiece of the budding genre of whitesploitation.

The soundtrack is 1970s and new retro soul, although the protagonist is a rural white man with an unshakable moral compass, the moral compass put to the test when he is laid off and comes home to find his wife unfaithful to him.

Bradley, a Christian of Irish decent, who insists on being addressed as Bradley and not the diminutive Brad, lives strictly and truthfully in the bowels of the Lie of Modernity, is utterly and clearly doomed from the beginning of the film—which then expands inward and upward into a study in heroism.

At every step of the way the moral and legal authority figures are Latino and black, yet Bradley’s doom is held in the hands of the white enforcers of the System, just like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull would be killed by slave-traitors of their own kind, when it was decreed by the God of things that the old combative race must be done away with in favor of stepping and fetching souls of scant account.

The violence is first rate, the “bad guys” very often sympathetic actors, with Bradley finding common cause more easily with blacks of his own class—who, according to the soundtrack, bequeathed him their lot on the social swamp pyramid—than with the Latino invaders or the Caucasian traitors.

His best line, before ripping into a pack of Mexicans on a prison yard, was in response to being called gringo. He takes no offense to being called blanco, but when the man who hangs a flag from his front porch is called a foreigner in his own country, he responds that the last time he checked, the flag was not “Red, white and burrito,” demonstrating the primordially gentile lack of diplomacy which won his ancestors more berths on slave ships per capita than any tribe of West Africans.

Brawl on cell Block 99 is my new favorite movie and my favorite action star is now Vince Vaughn and his Frankenstein Fu depiction of a direct actionist possessed of a rare but awkward strength. The Character, Bradley Thomas, reminds me of nothing more than Robert E. Howard’s Esau Cairn, an inspirational hero for the men of a dying race.



(c) 2018 James LaFond

Sunday, January 7, 2018

‘The Ocean’s Dusky Smile’

The Isle of Hy-Brasil by Robert E. Howard, Reading from pages 51-54 of A Word from the Outer Dark


An impression by James LaFond


At 49 lines in 11 verses, The Isle of Hy-Brasil is one of Howard’s longer poems.

The poem whimsically addresses ages known and unknown, from prehistory to a dreaming present, where a writer searching memories of tales of old might wander through the imagery of man striving into the unknown for a setting for a tale, a tale that might be an echo of much more.

Below are verses three and six:

For sailing ships are anchored close, about that ancient isle,
Ships that roamed the oceans in the dim dawn days,
Coracles from Britain, triremes from the Nile,
Anchored round the harbors, mile on countless mile,
Ships and ships and shades of ships, fading in the haze.

...
High ships, proud ships, towering at their poops,
Galleons flaunting their pinnacles of pride,
Battleships and merchantmen and long, lean sloops,
Flagships floating with the schooners on the tide.

The Isle of Hy-Brasil, figuring prominently in Howard’s Gaelic mythology, with the voyage of Saint Brandon in his hide boats, is, it seems to the author of this whimsy, an imperishable place in the collective mind of seafaring and worldfaring men, both sailors on Oceanic Fate.

(c) 2018 James LaFond

Saturday, January 6, 2018

Dice the Scrounge by James LaFond

“Fuck your mother’s cold, nether eye,” snarled Gristle, as he shook the skull of bones, blackened by a thousand greasy hands, at the foot of the Whither Wall.

“The Consignment Crows beat you to her every part, I’m afeard,” hissed Dice, at his fellow scrounge, as the six mummified eyes and the single die tumbled, ever rattling the luck-speak, within the skull of bones, sacred to their feral kind for representing the luck—bad, worse and indifferent—that ruled the shifting gale of the life left to them in the City of the Faceless God.

Then, when a wink from Gristle informed that the fickle fates of the all-seeing Crones of Hel were addled enough not to know with a certainty who they cursed and blessed, Dice, luckiest of his ill-starred kind, hooted, “Two crones eyeing the horizon, two looking to Heaven and two to Hel!”

If his prediction proved true, he would take control of the skull, if the singled die within agreed by speaking two dots, he took the ventured item. If there was a disagreement between die and eye, he added an item to the, pot—the skull of a giant bear, just now occupied by a trinket of ivory despair given him by a Sacriphant Beauty of high sort, before she flew from the Whither Wall in gossamer shroud, against which Gristle had placed a coin of unrustable goal.

Up turned the die speaking two.

Up turned two eyes, gazing upon the realm of the Faceless God.

Over rolled two eyes, gazing at the bleak horizon circumscribed by their hide-shod toes.

Down rolled two crone eyes to gaze into their pit of bitchful bemoanment.

“And such me wee pee pee, crones of hel!” capered Dice, as he spun on heel and reached for the coin of unrustable goal and his ivory trinket of dainty despair…

Only a boot of iron-banded black, heeled in kraken-hook grey pinned his avaricious hand to the cold bone-plate pavement—cobbled of countless layers of human shoulder blades, pelves and vertebrae—as a matching boot of High Aisian design, crushed the bear skull pot, obscuring that ventured within.

As a brother in service to the faceless God should, Gristle had his back, so to speak, and as he scampered away, declared in solidarity, “I’ll whisper your name to the crones whenever I piss into the wind, Brother,” and off he clambered, up the Whither Wall, a battlement against the ever-moaning winds sweeping down from ice peaks to the sea, fashioned of the countless eyeless skulls of the Faithful. Up climbed his fellow, toward the distant scaffold, where the Yellow Man defleshed a young dainty of virginal appearance, retrieved from yonder fall, to adorn forever, this unmeasured wall.

A tear reached his cheek, the first shed since the Consignment Crows took off his mother, forty warm moons ago.

Was that tear shed for his own wicked self at his glory end?

Or did he cry for that Dainty that flew on gossamer wing after he so gingerly escorted her—carrying her most the way—to the place of her terminal desire?

A creature of conformity, even in his final extremity, Dice dared not look up at the towering form who bore such weight so deftly as to have glided up behind the Scrounge of Scrounges, at Dice yet—when witch-senses were alert—but rather awaited the summons to serve or the severing stroke, whichever it was to be, mouthing only what duty he long wed to his cracked tongue:

“Lordly booted of Ais, so gracious not to grind my knuckles ‘till I piss, here me wait, scamperest scrounge of World’s End, wheedling doorsweep of the Whither Wall, damned of the Faceless God to serve his Supplicants’ needfulest whisper—what will yeh ‘ave of wee me?”

He shuddered to think what the answer might be as the cruel whither wind swept down the cavernous, bone-paved alley, piteously walled with howling skulls, and the craning neck above tucked under the black-of-black cloak that of a sudden engulfed him like a recessional curtain and placed him in unforgiven conclave with that which profaned, THAT WHICH had long ago damned Dice to scrounging kind.

(c) 2018 James

Lockhart's Top LaFond's Volume 6

Happy New Year to the LaFondiverse!  December 2017 was supposed to be a chance for James to retire from the grocery business, step away from posting and take time to finish books and catch up on writerly pursuits.  It turned out to be all that and much more.

In Winter's Prone Throne, James announced his intention to lay low for the rest of 2017.
Our podcast Farewell Grocery was taped only hours before James retired from the grocery business for good, slightly ahead of schedule, and shortly after the death of a fellow combat artist.  After being retired for only a week or so, James suffered a major injury at the hands of his office furniture and hardwood floor.  James is now recovering from surgery to repair his doubly broken nose and settling into his new routine as a former wage slave.

There were some reasons to celebrate during this period as well, for one, James is developing his Plantation America slavery research at Patreon.  You can access exclusive work there and support James for $1 per post, or more, if you wish.  You can also donate directly to James through Paypal by using his email address, jameslafond.com@gmail.com.

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

Friday, January 5, 2018

The Art of Poormouthing by John Paul Barber


Growing up poor certainly has its share of disadvantages, but it does toughen you up and enhances your ability to improvise. 

I was the third of six children and my daddy was a chicken farmer. There can be a lot of ups and downs in that business so there was never a consistent cash flow into our home. The necessities were all we got. Treats and extras were a rarity. Partly due to our circumstances but mainly because my old man was such a skinflint. He was so tightfisted with his money, if it cost a nickel to shit, he'd throw up instead.

Unfortunately for me, my next door neighbor was a boy named Billy Suddreth who was the same age as me. Billy was an only child and his daddy worked for the railroad which was a good paying job in my part of the country. Billy never wanted for anything. I was constantly reminded of all the things I could be enjoying in life because Billy had everything I desired and I had to witness what a great life he had every time I passed his house and saw him playing with all his toys in his front yard.

But it wasn't Billy's toys that I coveted the most. As a boy, my favorite thing to eat was peanut butter. My daddy would never allow mama to buy any because "it cost too much money" and "Do you know how much pinto beans you can buy for what a jar of that peanut shit costs?"

Much to my disappointment, Billy loved peanut butter too and got to eat it whenever he wanted. Billy's mama went to the store every Saturday to get their weekly haul of groceries. She always bought Billy his very own jar of peanut butter every time she went. Because he loved it so much, Billy would devour the whole jar as soon as she handed it to him. It didn't take me long to learn this pattern.

I would patiently wait on Saturday for Billy's mama to get back from the grocery store. I knew about how long it would take for Billy to eat that jar of peanut butter. When I knew my window of opportunity was open, I'd go down to Billy's house, knock on the door, and ask if he could come outside and play.

Once Billy came out, we'd play around for a few minutes and I'd always find a way to pick a fight with him and make sure it turned into a wrestling match. Now, you might be thinking I did this because I was a mean and jealous child and I somehow wanted to punish Billy for having a better life than me. You'd be wrong in thinking that. I just wanted to get close enough to him to smell that sweet scent of peanut butter on his breath.




(c) 2018 John Paul Barber

Thursday, January 4, 2018

Farewell Grocery - Crackpot Podcast Ep 21

Hello friends, Happy New Year!  My last few weeks have been spent celebrating with friends and family, and contracting every available cold and flu virus, as well as generously passing them all along.  Thank you for your patience!

In Episode 21, James tells us about his retirement plans from the grocery business and a little about his career.

The Crackpot Podcast features James LaFond, a full time writer, urban survival expert and former wage slave, and Lynn Lockhart, some strange lady.


Audio:





00:50  James' impending retirement from the grocery business
07:50  How easy is it to sabotage a workplace
10:30  Litany of James' physical ailments (incomplete)
11:15  Truth about the holidays in retail food
12:15  Retail food is a failed business model
15:25  James still has to fill out time cards
16:00  Prank job application
21:20  James draws attackers because he walks with a cane
28:30  How did James get started in the grocery business?
44:15  Looking ahead
48:09  Quotation from Markings by Dag Hammarskjold

For more about James' life in the grocery business, check out Ghetto Grocer, in Kindle or paperback.

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

Wednesday, January 3, 2018

In Search of My Unconscious

A Forensic Study of a Writer’s Fall by James LaFond

Two weeks ago at this wee hour [2:30 a.m.], I was being wheeled into an emergency room bay at Franklin Square Hospital after having awakened at 12:11 a.m., on my feet, feeling like I had just come through a standing KO, blood running down my face.

Over the next three days I would be asked to recount the sequence of events and my history of waking up in the wrong circumstances ad nauseam.

A chill in the back of my neck challenged the warm fountain that was my face.

I had lost four hours.

The last time I looked at the computer monitor, as I considered the last few minutes of a podcast before crawling onto my futon mattress and under the quilt made by Ishmael’s wife on the floor to my right, the computer screen read 8:14 p.m., a view that stands clear, unnervingly clear, in my mind.

My first thought was the mess and my embarrassment.

The shot I had poured for myself was gone, but the beer was still there, un-drunk, warm and flat. I wasn’t drunk in the least, not even buzzed. Should I pour it out?

Yes, I did, somehow, for the empty mug was here, when I returned, un-washed.

There was a lot of blood. I could see where my nose hit and bled on the edge of the white desk and where it hit again on the keyboard tray below, and at my feet there was blood in a star pattern where my face had obviously smacked.

These were all deductions.

I recalled nothing but the two bracketing times.

Embarrassment.

I grabbed a red shirt and soaked it on my face as I stood, weaving, heavily concussed, but in no pain. It felt as if I had just eaten a left, a hard straight one, just some pressure and numbness on the nose.

The red shirt was soaked.

I grabbed a black shirt and soaked that.

“This is bad,” I thought to my stunned self. “I’ll have to tell Steve, ask him for a ride to the hospital. No, I can fix this. It’s just a broken nose.”

The black shirt and red shirt soaked, I put them on, then grabbed a burgundy washcloth so that the blood wouldn’t show. By the time I got my socks and shoes and a jacket on [my son told me I also turned off my computer, which I do not recall] the wash cloth was soaked and I pocketed it, grabbing an embarrassing sky blue cloth.

I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

I saw a piece of bone poking out of the top of my nose—which was off center—with blood squirting up in front of my eye every time my heart beat.

I applied pressure, cleaned up the blood, so that my dyke roommate wouldn’t think I was carving up black bitches in her bathroom, and walked into the TV room to find Steeve. With an amazed look he offered a ride and took me to the ER, where the lady behind the desk took one look at my face and said, “Oh, hell—head of the line—what happened to you, sir?”

“Beware old white desks with cosmetic surgery ambitions.”

For three days I was wheeled around on stretchers by nice young people, catered to by an army of little Filipina babes and had to deal with only one dindu tech, stoked with bitterness and hatred—my mission to make her smile.

I was a fall risk, so anytime I got out of bed to stretch in that ridiculous backless gown, some nurse, aid or tech would come running. Once it was her. She told me to sit down and took my blood pressure. I don’t know how blood pressure works, so asked her what the numbers were and what they meant.

She snapped, “124 over 80!”

“Is that good or bad?”

She beamed eyes of envy at me and snarked, “Oh it's real good.”

I then got up and began stretching, hanging my head down by the floor. I was in terrible pain in my hip and knee and back from spending more time laying down in 24-hours than I normally spend in a week or two.

She suggested a prone stretch and I told her I head done that one thrice.

She then looked at me and said, “Okay, I would feel better if you did this facing the bed.”

I then looked out in the open hallway, where I would be facing away from, if I complied and said, with a nod at her rumble seat and a wink, “If I had a nice ass I might.”

She shook her head in disgust and postured, but could not hold back the smile as she declared me crazy and went on her ebony way.

Many, many tests later, on the third day I was permitted to take a shower, but only if this smoking hot Goth-girl nurse's aid and the cut-as-porcelain doll Filipina nurse assisted me. I had numerous sticky pads stuck to my hairy chest and belly which they had to remove. The Filipina nurse scrunched her face in empathy and squeaked, “They should have shaved you. This must be so painful, as she tugged for two minutes on one tenacious pad, which caused my skin to separate into a cut when she finally pried it loose with the hair attached. The Goth-girl then asked, “Fast or slow?”

Determined not to flinch, I said, “Rip ‘em off, baby.”

And with gusto she tore all the rest of the pads off, the Filipino nurse wincing at the fabric-tearing sound of my hair ripping out in patches as the Goth-girl raised both of her eye-bows in excitement and snarled, “Now you know how it feels when we have to get waxed!”

I could not help myself, “So you’re getting in too?”

They both giggled and vacated the hairy space…

The food was excellent, the nutrition staff consisting of gay men who sneered at me and more little porcelain dolls who treated me like some important chief.

I once had a female transporter—I think that was for the ultrasound of my arteries—who was popular among the older ladies on the housekeeping staff, who asked about her fiancĂ©, apparently a hospital employee who had moved onto something better. They asked about the many Christmas gifts that they suspected she had been showered with and she responded that it was so and that she felt so inadequate because she could only afford to get him a sweater. The older black lady said, “Oh don’t you worry, Girl!”

I was surprised how much transporters talked to me and she was no exception, “Mister James, is there something better than a sweater—my mother was no help at all.”

That statement said a lot to me, that there was no dad in her life. It then occurred that I had neglected my duty and not appraised the young lass.

She was now walking me from the side as she swung the stretcher around for a turn and I sat up and checked her out—a pleasing brunette shorty, only five feet tall, maybe 100 pounds, with perfect proportions and really big brown eyes.

I laid back down and said, “Put a bow in your hair and sit under the tree.”

She giggled, “That’s what he told me.”

I told her, “Stick with him—you’ve got one of the few men left out there.”

Eventually, my pretty Hindu doctorette, came for a serious interview and wanted to know everything about my decision to stop working. I told her that I had been passing out at my desk for almost a year and that for the past few months I have not recalled going to bed and would often wake to obvious signs that I had fallen out of my chair.

“And you did not think to seek medical care?”

“No, ma’am.”

She then asked about work and I told her about straining myself yelling at the first set of muggers on my last trip to work, because, “I didn’t want to stab them.”

“You were going to stab them?” she asked, taking a step away.

“Yes.”

“You saw no other logical course of action?” she asked, as she crossed her arms in judgment.

Remembering that my friend Doc Lumsden told me that MD’s were now supposed to question patients about aggression and weapons in their lives, I decided to risk the censure of this fine Semitic philly, I answered “None.”

She backed all the way up against the cabinets, snuggled herself with crossed arms and then said, “All tests have come back negative. Despite a total lack of regard for your health you still possess it. You are experiencing sleep paralysis, a condition which, when seated and asleep mimics a seizure. This is brought on by severe sleep deprivation. I did this in my residency. It is not something a person does for decades without serious consequences. This will eventually cause brain damage. You must sleep, eight to ten hours a day, at night.”

After watching my son’s house for the holidays I found myself back home, faced with cleaning up a mess that was much worse than it looked at a glance, with blood on redwood stain. As I spent an hour on my hands and knees with dish liquid and alcohol, using up a roll of paper towels, I tracked the struggle of my unconscious self over the course of seven feet of hardwood floor.

I had thought I hit desk, keyboard and then floor, and do know that I bruised my left knee when I pivoted unconscious in my swivel chair and slapped my face on the floor. My hard palate is still bruised. I had counted myself lucky not to lose teeth. Now, as I traced the numerous different bleeds and impacts I began to pity the poor mindless bastard that struggled across this floor for what might have been minutes or even hours, where I had thought it was seconds.

-Blood squirted from my nose at the impact on the desk edge, but I seemed to have slept there long enough to make 4 nose prints and abate the blood flow.

-My dry nose then dragged across the key-board, leaving some blood on the tray.

-A star-burst of blood seems to have resulted from me falling to a knee as the a chair pivoted, then standing and stepping back, then falling face first right next to the seat.

-I then raised myself to squirt blood to the right across my Tribes binder and my face pancaked again.

-I attempted to drag myself with bloody hands into bed. Thank God I didn’t make it. My right hand reached the mattress.

-Then my face hit the floor again, causing the last of three starbursts. I laid there and apparently moved my face in stages, that caused four distinct, resting nose prints.

-At about 12:10-11 I stood, blood running and squirting, from approximately the same position where I had stood after falling to my knee, before taking the hardest fall.

Four seconds?

Four minutes?

Four hours?

I’ll never know.

But that animal that crawled blindly across this hardwood floor in its own blood lived a life of its own for whatever time was granted him, between an arrogant man’s refusal to write off a poor day’s effort and a concussed mind’s attempt to piece together that point in time when body and mind failed a driven will as one faltered being.

It feels like no accident that the coldest winter in recent memory now chills this desk.

Winter in a Dying City

(c) 2017 James LaFond