Annoying, pitiful disclaimer: This is a rhetorical rant, and only that. If you can fight through the factual faux pas and numerous spelling errors, please take this on your quest: In no way would I wish to de-value any resident of the city of Milwaukee, the state of Wisconsin, or any race, creed, or trade mentioned herein...
Now is the winter of our discontent, that is, whichever poor souls choose to blacken their brainwrinkles with such drivel that shalt stream forthwith and notwithstanding...
I am entering into the 26th hour of a day that began yesterday. Romeo has not seen his bed tonight at all...I would say I'm more like a Hamlet, but I cant remember any cute quotes from that one right now.
I've been trudging through a grotesquely inclement day in downtown Milwaukee - one of the bleakest and most haunted cities in the midwest, in my most humble opinion -
It's London meets Alaska, architecture striking me as Roman and Gothic, simultaneously; built with the highest expectations: like putting a Barnes and Noble, a Starbucks, and a Fuddruckers on the moon and crossing your fingers in high hopes of quality, upstanding patrons, should any chance to appear...
And appear, they do: solemn, weighted with cold and routine and the desperate, caged wildness that roars in the bosom of every mid-westerner. I sat in a diner for coffee and dinner/lunch/breakfast/I stayed up all day and night food and observed the locals...
In my home state, the glorious and cornucopious land that is Texas, where buxom blonde brides blush while giggling over cocktails on green lawns under blue skies, sweating gloriously amongst fleets of pickup-trucks blaring rap music piloted by robust young Valhalens sporting polite drawls through Skoal-peppered ambescuers(sp?); I, a skeezy, slime-welted, black-haired gutter mite would appear more akin to the melancholy, trodden vestitude of this mortal coil..... Not so, in the case in Milwaukee, sons and daughters...
I must crow from the buttresses that I was indeed the most vigorous corpse in this mortuary north of the Mason-Dixon. The roles had reversed...I walked around wondering why in the world had the fabric of sense-makery gone and rended itself upon these wind-blasted denizens of Wisconsin? the undead waiting to die, working their jobs and raising their kids amidst the acrid breath of a most disgustingly soggy winter pendulum swinging down with full force, frigid and barren as the day after Christmas.
Back to the diner: all the characters in this scene were in costume. Not one hairstyle made sense (i'm one to talk, please hear me out) - everyone looked like they were in an elaborate disguise - trying to blend in while they stuck out, in unison, to me...TO ME...the weirdest of all weirdos. I could make Hollywood look like Branson with my wolfhungry leer and these folks were FREAKING ME OUT. My waitress was probably the second prettiest girl in her 19-years-prior high school class- her hair teased, sprayed, and pulled into a highlit bun as were the tidings of glamorous yesteryear...her features worn but soft, her aura almost inspiring a twinge of attraction when - WHAM- her brash accent hits me like a bowl of oatmeal in the face, extreme in its bland, homely, timbre...everyone else did it to! Yammering calmy to each other like rubber hammers on a rooftop. I was scared. The guy with the combover and the overbite and the gravy over bisquits and meat hash with the brass-rimmed glasses and the other guy with his greek wrap and his BobDylan hair and his two GOLD earrings, sucking one lenghty mollusk of an onion slowly into his mouth...The woman with ZiggyStardust hair after a hailstorm and matching makeup with her DannyDeVito body and the other waitress with almost RodStewart hair and the assorted black people linking arms at the grindstone, yoked alongside this germanic amalgam...the whole lot sucking bitter cigarrettes...why, oh why did I quit?
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
Granted - there is a period of 'crazy' that always rears its ugly head when hour 24 rolls around - everything is a Terry Gilliam camera angle - every emotion is the deepest, most profound abyss or apogee..it's just part of your second wind adrenaline playing its hilarious tricks upon your brain chemistry, well, actually my brain chemistry...
There is definitely no lack of norenomenophine (the one that makes you bad sad, the oppostite of serontonin) in Milwaukee - it is in the air, every sad snowflake, every ghost story - it dominates this town.
All of it means that this city is a macro-microcosm of misery - a dark night of the soul with its own chamber of commerce. It turns its human beings into derranged, violently bland creatures that strike fear into every sleep deprived wretch who gallumfs into its jaws by morbid happenstance. In the diner, I'm thinking, "Somebody save these people from Milwaukee! Oh God!"
Was I Charlemagne? Was I the Constantinoplian, learned, good-sensed soldier of a higher calling in this thickly overgrown forest of Deutsch desolation? Would my catechism turn their filthy, freezing, melted-snow brownwater into lively, Pan-pallatable wine? If I opened my stupid, vainglorious mouth, would fruit of the vine of civilization spew forth and immaculately concieve a hopeful existence for these frighteningly un-normal, un-dead dead people? No.
I am a corspe, too. Made of dust - to dust I shall return. The Barbarians and Goths and Visigoths sacked Rome after knowledge and organization caved in on itself. The white, dirty brutes learned to do hellmaries on the way home from the battlefield and sailed over to this continent eventually - they, in turned, probably charlemagned the resident Native Americans with guns and whiskey and kindof the gospel and in turn, set up their own Rome in the freezing northern midwest. Now, blizzards batter and chip the enamel surrounding the toothpulp of the American Dream, bad at the root in this area probably since the new barbarians came on the scene...
Real barbarians of the soul - Al Capone and Nazi Sympathy and whatever else someone who knows more and more specifically wants to add...they learn to do their hellmaries before one guy decides he wants to be an even more barbaric barbarian and cannibalize young men after goodness knows what other torture. What better setting for this gruesome begorgement than the murderously grey warmth-lack lustre of Milwaukee, Wisconsin - a true death trip - engineered by Sir Jeffrey Dahmer of the Knights of the Round Cylce Of Civilization And Barbarism, in the service of Her Base Majesty, Human Nature, and the Honourable Fall of Man -
This painful post-Eden requires a daily salting from reflector-clad guys with wheelbarrows full of it, and snow plows, fire engines- anything to shovel off the cold reality that this life will end, this world will end. The absess has reached full fruition and this putrefying, pissyellowwhite crown is overdue for ousting, seeing as it is weary of gnawing away at the dreambones of success, fame, and riches...
Nothing personal against Milwaukee. I stayed up all night and formed some opinions...
I went to the mall and a used bookstore later...stomping through the slush of the pure-driven snow after its beminglement with the grease-trap grime of the day-dark downtown. I saw grey matter as far as I could gaze - my brains strewn along the road for miles.
I need to go to bed. | 
Who Cares
