A Traditional Politically Incorrect Holiday Greeting

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Ice Fishing for Brown Trout

Thirty years ago I made the stupid mistake of renting an apartment in an old, historic building in State College, Pennsylvania, owned by a non-profit organization whose very name suggested trust and respect. Boy was I wrong.

That first winter I had no heat for weeks and, when I complained, I was told to sit tight. I did sit tight, by the way, snug as a frozen bug in my sleeping bag as I watched TV and tried not to think about how cold I was. But I was patient and I trusted them. After all, this was Happy Valley, where people cared about other people more than they did anywhere else on planet Earth.

But my patience began to wear a little thin when I used the toilet one day in a bathroom that was still colder than a witch's you-know-what. After I flushed, I was greeted by an effusion of my own excrement. Apparently, it had been so cold for so long that the sewer line had frozen. I decided to investigate.

What I found wasn't an entire frozen sewer line but a break in the historic terracotta sewer pipe under the front porch and there, unimaginably, was my own frozen sewage, staring me in the face like a brown rock monster from outer space. Then I found out that the electric hot water heater was still working, even though there was no hot water in the radiator heating pipes from the cold furnace. A pick and shovel proved to be no match for The Thing From A Frozen World.

But I didn't give up — or give in — to the unwelcome presence of this creature from beyond commonsense. Like a resourceful pack rat, I shuffled 30-gallon garbage bags full of hot water from the electric hot water heater to the poop monster under the porch. It took three bags of hot water and about fifteen minutes before the turd monster melted like The Wicked Witch of the West and disappeared down the earthen slope toward the front yard. Apparently, this was the only frozen spot in the sewer line.

That tears it, I said to myself that afternoon. I went upstairs and called the local code enforcement people. The next day a man arrived who immediately became fixated on a small crack in the kitchen linoleum. He pointed to the crack like it was alive and about to consume us both. He got out his clipboard and wrote feverishly. I managed to tear him away from the hideous breach in the kitchen floor long enough to show him where I had to pick and shovel and then melt my own poop in order to poop again. I showed him and then made him touch the cold radiators. I showed him my pajama sleeping bag. Undeterred, he wrote up the non-profit owners for their unconscionable, crack-in-the-linoleum violation and left.

Later that day, a creature sporting a page-boy hairdo showed up at my back door, full of piss and vinegar. I knew she was from the goody-goody non-profit organization because hell hath no fury like a snob whose soft underbelly of elitism is exposed to a common hamburger eater like me.

"This isn't Parkway Plaza," she seethed. What she meant by that remark was that I should have felt privileged to pay her uppity organization $200 a month plus pay all my own utilities instead of complaining about the freezing cold or my frozen poop under the porch because I had been spared from paying twice that amount to live in Happy Valley's most exclusive high-rise apartment building (at that time). Being a woman, she got away with that remark whereas a man might have found himself on my kitchen floor, face-to-face with that hideous four-inch crack for which he'd been so inappropriately fined.

Not only was I totally speechless, right then and there I prepared to make quick tracks out of Happy Valley forever. It was a shock but I'd get over it. For all its posturing as the coolest and most loving and the most cultured place in Centre County, Pennsylvania, I quickly discovered that Happy Valley was nothing but a ruse, a cover up for people whose true love in life, besides the almighty dollar, is exclusivity and the limelight that goes along with it.

That was 30 years ago. I put Happy Valley, PA in my rear view mirror and never looked back. Not even once. In fact, I wouldn't go back to Happy Valley to take a crap.

My First Kindle Book

My latest book, Blind Fool Running by Jonco Bugos (my literary pen name) was published earlier this year as a 6x9 trade paperback.

Now it's also available as a Kindle book from Amazon's Kindle Store. Just click on the image below or the text link.

How do I feel abut my first e-book? Ambivalent, of course. I miss the old world of paper and ink and leather. But I'm also not one to dwell in the past. As I've said before, a writer is like a shark. You keep moving forward or you die.

Blind Fool Running Kindle Edition

Author's Note: No, "Blind Fool Running" by Jonco Bugos has nothing to do with the Jonco Bugos blog. Jonco Bugos (my alter ego) is the pen name I use for writing literary fiction and for writing the Jonco Bugos blog and the Think-A-Holic Lounge blog.

Another Day That Will Live in Infamy

Eight years ago today mass murderers who hate America murdered nearly three thousand Americans and foreign nationals in New York, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia in a single day and ruined the lives of countless thousands of others worldwide.

What makes this heinous, monstrous and unforgivable crime against humanity so infamous is that the mastermind of all this murder, mayhem and destruction is still at large.

If we forget that, there's no point in remembering the dead.

Gooseport, PA

This is a recent picture of Gooseport, PA, a tiny haven in my Appalachian back yard for the two geese that live here year round.

It's also a place for summering ducks, wood ducks, egrets, herons, and king fishers, as well as the usual gathering of smaller song birds.

You won't find it on any map and maybe that's a good thing. I created it. But it's not mine. It belongs to the wild birds that live and summer here. And that makes me very protective of this little waterfront town.

Unlike the readership I never encountered as an independent author, the full and part-time residents of Gooseport, PA make me feel like I'm still living a full life, as the author of a different kind of creation, for followers of a very different breed.

At long last, I have finally been allowed to make a positive difference in the world. It's a wonderful feeling that you can't beat with a stick.

Author's Note 8-31-12: Our two geese "pals" are dead now. Broken Wing was killed in February 2008 by a nocturnal predator and I found Big Mouth dead one morning in September 2011. He probably died because there's too much sewage in our pond the past several years, running off people's overflowing septic tanks above us, right through our yard and into the pond. The ducks don't summer here anymore and neither do King Fishers or egrets or Blue Herons or other geese. I don't mow Gooseport anymore and I took the sign down in September 2011. I also removed the cracked-corn trough with the shingled roof (The New Gooseport Lunch Counter) in September 2011 because I don't want the birds to drink this pond water. Hell nobody likes sewage. Not even barn swallows.

Berry Pickin' Punk

Every July I look forward to picking the black raspberries that grow around my home. I like to have them with cereal in the morning and sometimes over vanilla ice cream. With coffee, naturally.

And every July I have to fight the birds for the black raspberries, especially the blue jays, who are the bullies of the yard bird world. But nothing will dissuade a berry lover like me. I pick them every morning for two weeks or more before they run out. It's the best two weeks of the summer for me.

Yesterday I had to, once again, flush out a squawking blue jay from the first berry patch. He didn't like it one damn bit when I called him a "berry-pickin' punk" but he left. I filled a styrene cup half full of lovely black raspberries and, after rinsing them in cold water, I enjoyed them over my multi-grain breakfast cereal. With coffee, of course.

The next day as I approached the berry patch with my empty cup and a big, bullying blue jay started giving me grief, I had a revelation. As if by some miracle, I was suddenly able to translate this noisy, wild bird's angry, squawking protest. I was dumbfounded. But only for a moment.

"You berry-pickin' punk!" it said to me in loud, blue jay squawks.

Touché, I said to myself, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I'd been dutifully chided and that I'd gotten the big picture. The sad, awful truth wasn't easy to swallow but I took my medicine. Here it turned out that, after all these years, I was the berry-pickin' punk all along.

Trading Up

When you get older the "darndest" things tickle your fancy. Like salads. Now that I walk crooked instead of in a straight line I get a bigger kick from eating a 5-pack of salads than I do out of drinking a 6-pack of beer.

Sounds a little strange, I know. But, like Scotch whiskey, it's an acquired taste.

My Kind of Guy

Robert D. Barry
E. T. Monitor Host

Back in the late 1980s I lived in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, where the summers were longer and hotter and the winters were shorter and milder than they are up here in Pennsylvania's Allegheny Plateau Region.

One of my favorite things to do on a Saturday night back in the Eighties was to stay up late and watch a really cool television show about UFOs, extraterrestrials, the solar system and outer space on a local TV station from neighboring York County.

This late-night TV show was called E. T. Monitor and its host was a guy named Robert D. Barry. The fact that this show wasn't broadcast from New York City or Philadelphia or Los Angeles or Chicago is what made it so appealing to me. It aired at midnight every Saturday night on WGCB Channel 49 from Red Lion, Pennsylvania. Only thirty or so miles from where I lived at the time.

Mr. Barry's show included prominent guests like Dr. Jack Kasher, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nebraska and Bob Lazar, a physicist who claimed to have worked at the secret government installation S-4, near the infamous Area 51 UFO research center at Groom Lake, Nevada, and Dr. Stanton Friedman, the man who blew the lid off the 1947 Roswell conspiracy. In addition, Robert Barry took phone calls from anyone who wanted to talk about UFO sightings or their UFO experiences. Mr. Barry's wife, Lucy, manned the phones during these broadcasts.

I was watching E. T. Monitor one night when the broadcast was suddenly interrupted and never came back on. A couple of weeks later Mr. Barry told his audience about a warning the FBI had given him about keeping his mouth shut, a warning that was followed up by the mysterious "plug-pulling incident". Bob Barry died not long after that and his dedicated wife, Lucy, tried in vain to keep the show alive. E. T. Monitor died the same undeserved death that its host had succumbed to and some of us dedicated viewers smelled a big, government conspiracy rat.

But the most intriguing thing about E. T. Monitor was the host. Robert D. Barry was an unpretentious, intelligent, inquisitive and brave man who dared to ask the questions I'd been asking myself since I was a kid and he confronted the skeptics and the authorities who are always there when the truth is about to be uncovered. They come out of the woodwork like insects, debunking and denying their lying asses off in an effort to keep mankind in the dark and to uphold business-as-usual as the true law of the land.

This simple blog post is my tribute, then, to Robert D. Barry, whose memory is kept alive by a few dedicated people at YouTube. Here's an embedded video from YouTube, the first of a 5-part video feature about E. T. Monitor with Robert D. Barry. My kind of guy.

Author's note: The very second I finished writing this blog post in WordPerfect 12, and before I could save the document, the power went out here in Snow Shoe, Pennsylvania, and I had to write it all over again from memory and then post it to Blogger. Now, that's no coincidence. And, no, I never get used to this manipulative nonsense. The feds who work with the alien-controlled "New World Order" are nothing but traitors who think they're above the law. Personally, I think they're worse than that. I think they're unconscionable, unrepentant, traitorous, rat-bastard, lyin'-ass dogs who should be jailed for life and fed dog food for breakfast.

Welcome to Science Fiction for Thinkers.com

TC

Happy Valley Detour

There's a signpost up ahead: Next Stop - Happy Valley! No, this isn't about an episode of The Twilight Zone. The following tale has nothing to do with the boundless imagination of television writer Rod Serling. This is a sad-but-true (and somewhat disturbing) story of a regular guy from the real world who once found himself in the upside-down and inside-out world of Happy Valley, PA. And who lived to tell about it.

Back when I blindly believed in the goodness of people and the sanctity of old age, I used to volunteer my time at various senior citizen events. I fetched and carried like a "gopher", moved furniture, set tables, helped people to and from places, pulled out chairs and pushed them in again, and generally served and respected my elders the way I'd been taught as a boy. And I did this because I liked older people and old folks, felt at home around them, and always believed that none of them was getting a fair deal out of life anymore. I still believe that, although I'm a little more cautious nowadays about practicing that belief.

Anyway, several years ago I volunteered to hand out bingo prizes at a big senior citizen event "just a stone's throw" from Penn State University. Lots and lots of senior citizen women and even a few senior men attended this blowout and it was held in Happy Valley, PA. Where else? That's State College, Pennsylvania, USA, for those of you who, naturally, have no clue. Happy Valley is a "Marginal People's Paradise" that's presided over by Big-Sister, Penn State.

I found a folding chair behind an unused podium and sat down with my little Mini-Igloo cooler, containing a few snacks and some bottled water. I'd already prepaid for the big, sit-down lunch with the others but I had this little life raft with me, just in case. I happily waited in this spot, out of the way, until I was needed by the bingo caller. The room was soon filled to the brim with people well past their prime, guys and gals who'd finally had to turn in their lease on life for canes and walkers and electric scooters and restricted activity. My heart went out to them as it always did. Senior citizenship on planet Earth was no way to treat a lady, or a gentleman, but it was the best this backward world had to offer them at the present time.

No one in the room smiled or waved or nodded at me. What they did was stare. They stared and stared. And it wasn't because I was a lot younger than they were. I was in my early 50s and would be one of them before any of us knew it. Besides, there were plenty of volunteers and workers at this shindig who were my age or younger. Anyway, they continued to stare at me until I wanted to rush to a mirror to see if I had a smudge on my face or something objectionable peeking out of my nose. But I knew instinctively what it was, why they were staring at me like I was "a little green man from mars" or something worse. It was worse. It was my clothing.

My cargo shorts didn't say "Dockers" on them anywhere. My sneakers were not Nike or Adidas or Reebok. The crown of my ball cap was way too high by collegiate standards and it didn't sport a cool Nike logo or the name of a U.S. Virgin Island on it. My shirt wasn't an expensive golf shirt with a tiny Izod Lacoste alligator on the left chest. It was a teal-colored T-shirt that said "Penn's Cave" on it and that made it all too common in Centre County, Pennsylvania, Land of Penn State and Penn's Cave. That was it, then. That had to be it. An alien, redneck hick from The Mountaintop (that's anywhere in the Snow Shoe, Clarence, Moshannon or Pine Glen area of Centre County for those who, naturally, don't know) had entered their shallow world of superficial things and symbols and meanings, and they didn't like it one darn bit.

Then, before I could even hand out my first bingo prize, a short-haired female head appeared over the podium from the front. I craned my neck to engage her eyes with mine. She was somewhere in her late forties or early fifties, I imagined, maybe older, and I waited for her to speak. Maybe she was about to welcome me aboard or she wanted to introduce herself or thank me for my volunteerism. I waited patiently and quietly for what she had to say. Then she spoke. Her voice was chilling and clipped and her words were unforgettable.

"Don't mess us up," said the talking head. "Don't mess us up," she repeated, her carefully-controlled hostility making her point very clear to me. "Because, if you mess us up, I'll kill you." Her penetrating stare assured me that this was no joke, no prank. She was serious. And then she turned on her heels like a Gestapo Agent and disappeared into the mostly older female crowd. I was even more speechless than before. I wanted to open the little Igloo cooler and crack the seal on the first bottle of water in the worst way. But assuaging my sudden bout of "cottonmouth" might have been some act of "messing up", I wasn't sure. I wanted to consult someone, somewhere, about what I'd just been told but that might have also been some way of "messing up". So, until someone finally hollered bingo, all I did was just sit, sit, sit, sit. And I did not like it. Not one little bit.

I apparently "didn't mess up" and successfully verified each bingo winner's winning numbers and eventually handed out the last of the bingo prizes. But I was a little taken aback by the fact that no one spoke to me as I did this. No one said "Thank you." No one smiled or nodded his or her head. They just kept staring and staring at me as if staring at me would somehow make me go away and not come back. I tried to blame my own imagination or some hidden paranoia but I snapped out of that zone when I realized that seeing is believing and the sound of silence cannot be mistaken for anything else.

Afterward, I found out that the terrible little face at the podium with the great big warning for me belonged to none other than the person in charge of this big shebang. I found that very hard to believe, at first, but then I reminded myself that this shindig was taking place in Happy Valley, not the real world. I ducked out before lunch was served. They could keep my lunch money, like bullies on an elementary school playground. I'd lost my appetite.

When I tried to figure out what this misdirected hatred toward me was all about, the only thing I could come up with was the fact that this disturbing incident had transpired in Happy Valley, a locally infamous Shan-gri-La where little enclaves of dysfunctional people huddle together against the natural, normal, everyday, outside world. Beyond this unhappy bubble of screwed-up humanity which is incredibly called Happy Valley, telling a complete stranger out of the clear blue that you will kill him, is considered to be a terroristic threat. And inside this bubble (or outside of it, for that matter), any man telling anybody a similar thing means a swift and irrevocable trip to the slammer for him. But, in Happy Valley, PA, whenever a woman tells a man that she will kill him, it's considered to be therapy.

Did I ever volunteer to help out at subsequent senior citizen events? You bet I did. On numerous occasions. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays a Baby-Boomer go-for from the swift completion of his appointed rounds. I just never volunteered for any more events of any kind in Happy Valley, PA, that's all. In fact, if I ever did volunteer to serve my fellow man and fellow woman in such a place as Happy Valley again, it would be either a cold day in hell or an unplanned and unexpected visit to The Real Twilight Zone.

Patina

When I was a young man full of high hopes, and piss and vinegar, and all the other things that make a young man want to see the world and maybe even conquer a piece of it, I used to daydream about walking on a moonlit beach somewhere in the South Pacific with a beautiful Polynesian woman on my arm and an umbrella drink in my hand.

Now that I walk slowly and a little crooked like an old dog and have seen and heard far too many terrible things to have much of a wanderlust left in me, I still daydream about places. But not so much about people.

In my favorite daydream I'm sitting on the front porch of a log cabin somewhere deep within a wooded hollow on a starlit summer evening. I am not alone but with someone I care about, not someone I desire. We watch the sunset, feel the warm breeze, smell the honeysuckle, listen to a whippoorwill and sip our coffee.