-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

March 29, 2016

Gay people don’t need defending by me. Yet here I write—because of a half-assed North Carolina governor/homophobe and his brother Republican homophobes acting Old Testicle—I mean, Testament—and trying to make his subjects—I mean constituents—into bigots.

If you’re in the arts, you always work with gay people. From there you meet their partners (or listen to your pals bemoan lack of a partner), swap straight and gay love stories, become life-long friends. One of my closest friends said to me, “No one would choose being gay. You just know it—I knew it when I was ten—and you either go with the flow, or be miserable.”

“Know it.” This is scientifically true. Nature’s genetic schematic makeup produces straight, bi, trans, gay. Straight is dominant. This is true for every species of animal on earth. Attention Neanderthals: sexual preferences are not menu items.

You don’t like it? Don’t do it. You don’t like it? You’re either heterosexual and afraid, or gay and afraid. You don’t have to like it. You HAVE to be tolerant of those who are different than you. You know who says so? That God so many of my friends profess to love and believe in. Gay and straight are genetic conditions, natural conditions. You can’t keep your daughter or son from being gay. He or she is or is not. He or she will know.

You have zero right to demonstrate public intolerance, very possibly fomenting violence, and every right to bitch all you want, at home. As to the latter, I guarantee your kids will grow to despise you. Why? They have gay friends, Bunky.

God may be love; God is absolutely evolution. Evolution gropes its way forward. Gay is not a sin; gay is biology.

Do not quote me passages from a book written before science by airbrained, archetypal patriarchs who “saw” visions and subjugated their world with tales of burning bushes. Oh go ahead, quote away. Hell, set your own bush on fire. Drink enough whiskey, you’ll have visions too.

Nixon’s Silent Majority was an ad campaign. The real Silent Majority is tolerant and loathe to publicly state opinion. Attention, all you silent: silence is not golden. Silence lets in slavery, sexism, genocide.

Silence is making Trumpettes emboldened. Speak up or live in misery. “You have the right to remain silent.” That’s a phrase for suspected criminals. Those who don’t speak on behalf of their minority brothers and sisters are complicit.

Or just sit at home and post photos from the fifties and lament about how it was better then.

I had at least six gay teachers that I know of. Alton High School had great teachers—period. Eleven per cent of the Class of 1966 was gay. Most of them kept their mouths shut.

I wonder why.

March 20, 2016

Dear Mr. Baldwin,

As you know, a Trump presidency is now a sure thing, therefore changes will be forthcoming, and we know you seniors don’t like change. As of next November, the Obamacare death squad will have a new name and logo.

Introducing: Trumpnocare! Sick? Trumpnocare! Need surgery? Trumpnocare! For anything you need and won’t get, try Trumpnocare!

Oh, Mr. B., we know everything about you, you naughty man. You write those hateful, disgraceful, “satirical” posts on Facebook. You lust after women. You sit and watch basketball with your hands in your pants. Last month alone, you wrote the words “vagina” and “pussy” thirty-one times—and it was a Leap Month!

For chump change (soon to be called Trump change), you make fun of good, honest Republicans like Carly and Sarah and Ben and Rick P. and Rick S. and beloved Ill Gov. Rauner and Old Turtleface Mitch C. and Henry the K. Keep it up (no pun intended), Genehouse. Come November, you will be Trumpeted! Put that in your cigarette hole and smoke it!

Just what the heck is “Trumpeted?” Write on, that Commie crap you espouse, and you’ll find out, Vagina Boy.

You are sitting at your computer right now. You are staring out the west window at the cornfield. How do we know? See that glint in the woods, past the white barn? That is a Trump sniper’s rifle, Mr. Pussy Palaver, and there is a Trump bullet with your name on it. Ewing Eugene Baldwin, Jr. (What kind of name is “Ewing?” Hm. Ewe—sheep—baahh—hm.)

Why wouldn’t you conform, Ewing? Why be salacious, Eugene, when First Lady Ivania Trump set the example for modesty by posing naked with her hand over her—.  Why not write good wholesome humor, Geno, like the Donald saying he’d like to sleep with his daughter? You pervert! You pulsatile puckfist!

Not to worry, Mr. B., your Trump organs will be donated to a Trump sausage factory and your ashes will be placed in a Trump urn and buried in Trump Cemetery in Trumpalton on Trump Street under a Trump pine with Trump wind rattling your bones and a Trumptombstone to mark your Trump death.

Happy Trump spring!

Sincerely,

Brittany Spears Mint

Director Emeritus, Seniors: Adios Lazy Shriveled Atrophying Asses (SALSAA) Division The Obamacare Death Panel, Now Director, Adios Lazy Shriveled Atrophying Asses Donald Is Coming Kiddies (SALSAA DICK)

March 18, 2016

In my fiction, I have been known to write two pages describing tree bark, five hundred words on the smell of a flower. There is so much meditation in minutia. The opening of David Lynch’s film “Blue Velvet” comes to mind, as the camera hones in on an idyllic yard scene to beneath the grass, and there is utter chaos and violence, as insects fight it out. Such is the artist’s attention to detail.

Speaking of (de)tails. I did a theatre residency in Harvard, Illinois. The folks I was staying with had a calico cat. This fat old boy would lie on the dining room floor, in front of an enormous grandfather clock, and it would fall asleep, rear end toward the clock. And before long, its tail would take on a life of its own, arcing back and forth in exact rhythm with the pendulum of the clock, in the exact same direction. Tick . . . tick . . . tick.  A dinner party of people would put down their forks and watch this performance. Tick . . . tick . . . tick.

I am quite fond of tail, have been ever since I was a boy (shame on the dirty-minded among you). My current favorite tail is attached to one Scout the Cat. She has invented a game, Cat Vs Dad. She demands to play this game five or six times a night. If I ignore this request, gentle paw pats are administered to my legs, until I pay attention.

Feline experts warn owners that cats do not want their tails touched, or their bellies rubbed. Scout rolls on her back several times a day, legs splayed (shame on the dirty-minded Trumpians among you) and I scratch her from neck to back legs—with a backscratcher. Her purrs sound like an Evinrude motor. She signals she’s done with this treat by biting the tines of the instrument.

Rules for Cat Vs Dad (transcribed by psychic connection): 1. Look at my tail; admire its symmetry and perfection. 2. If you don’t look at my tail, I will whip it furiously until you stop whatever it is you are doing. 3. Place your right hand on your lap and wait for my signal. DO NOT GLANCE AT THE TV. 4. I will lower my tail onto your hand and wiggle the tip, and probe your fingers. Think of a fisherman wiggling his rod tip thus making the purple plastic worm wiggle underwater. 5. Gently Morse Code my tail to let me know you know the game has begun. Immediately release the tail or I will bite you bloody. 6. Try to catch my tail, block my tail with your palm, pin my tail, pat my tail, or perk up my tail. 7. I win. I always win. If you actually catch my tail, I will bite you bloody.

My friend Kathy was owned by a fat cat named Fang. I once saw an inebriated party guest bend down, pick Fang up and kiss him on the mouth, whereupon Fang bit the gentleman, piercing his right earlobe with sharp teeth. Blood gushed. Forty people were doing cocktail chat and did not see this. The artist saw this. The bit gentleman threw Fang up the stairs to the next level of the condo, covered his ear with a hand, went to the bathroom, and emerged with a wad of toilet tissue stuck to his earlobe.

Like I say, it’s all in the details.

I was driving back from a party in Elsah last night. All along the river, the trees were fogbound, mist-kissed, and a thousand spring peepers trilled. I parked and walked several miles in the dark. I couldn’t see in front of my face; sense memory led me down the river road trail.

I heard scurrying, scratching claws grabbing the pavement. The thick air dripped and smelled of fish and skunks. Before long I was pleasantly soaked. The searchlight of an eastbound barge cast its rays along the shoreline. The river’s surface was glass.

The fog felt like a close-fitting suit, poking every bare crevice, fog flowing into my ears and up my nostrils, and I exhaled watersmoke. I started up Stroke Hill, but every house had its dogs, and every dog became a sentinel. I walked back to the river, and the din died. From the woods came the lone cry of a whippoorwill.

Honks and squawks emanated from Scotch Jimmy Island, nesting birds, restless geese, warning herons in the treetops.

And then I heard footsteps. I wasn’t the only romantic out for a walk. I flattened my body against a limestone outcrop and watched as a hunched over man in a long coat went by. He had ear buds; I could hear strident music echoing. Who walks in fog and blasts music, when the still music of the night is so seductive?

There was a cracking noise above me and I ducked. A sliver of cliff had separated two hundred feet above and was knifing down, and I couldn’t see it. It crashed and burst across the path.

With a quarter mile to go, the fog now obliterating all sight, I heard rapid, tapping steps. Some four-footed critter was coming toward me. So I became a tree and waited. The coyote sluiced through the thick curtains of the air, stopped and sniffed and grunted. And it went on its way.

Genehouse was wrapped in white, like a present. I sat on the porch step and listened to dogwood buds snore. And I thought of life, how my words are mere hitchhikers, how they would disperse, how I would be forgotten. The first man to stand upright a million and a half years ago is forgotten. His guttural sounds and my words are weak attempts to understand something which defies knowledge.

I was happy to be, contemplatively depressed. Knowledge evolved and became a burden to the one specie which, ironically, discovered knowledge. Last night, there were no existential herons, no coyotes thinking about death, no fog singing a funeral dirge. But I was, and I bet the man in the long coat was.

All along the river, the trees were fogbound, mist-kissed, and a thousand spring peepers trilled.

March 8, 2016

“I’ve been sick all winter,” Kody says. He is cleaning out his rental house on the river. His arms and neck are tattooed, and a ring pierces his nose. “I woke up one night, and I looked at the wall, and I pulled off a panel, and there was black mold. More panels, more mold. My lungs are pure mold. So Debbie and Anthony and I are moving out to the country. Anthony and me will have our own room.”

“We are gettin’ a present,” Famer Orville says. “A new pup, a herder just like Reba. I hope Reba don’t teach it to swallow voles whole. And it better not mess with them barn cats.”

These are the conversations I have on my walk. There are other conversations, notably among the birds, as the rush to mate is on. Robin males compete with their shouty trills, and Carolina wrens whistle like their heads are coming off. The cardinals preen, the sparrows do that hoochy-coochy dance, their tails fanned and sweeping the ground.

I wouldn’t mind “mating.” I had a blind date on Sunday. She was partially deaf and crammed into skinny jeans, a look which only flatters high school girls. She doesn’t like the country—ugh! She only reads newspapers—double ugh. She generously allowed me to pay for lunch. I had the chicken stir fry, she went vegetarian and eyed my plate as if a murder had occurred. At least I don’t wear skinny jeans. I wear jeans that could fit two quite comfortably. No mating in the Central West End of St. Louis, to be sure.

Me, I have no color, no preening junk, no cardinal’s red robe. I’m the man in black sometimes blue and New Balance walking shoes. Perhaps I am a house of mold.

Near Admire’s Bench, I see the first butterfly of the season, a checkerspot tumbling as much as flying into a gale west wind. The air smells like rain. Yellow jonquils fill the road ditches. Dandelions are abloom. How did the European settlers come to disparage a native prairie plant that makes great salad and wine, provides brilliant color, and makes me so happy? Ach, dandelions, ve must kill!

Europe is a house of mold. Europe needs a good bleaching.

On the home stretch, I see a line of robins running downhill, slaughtering worms as they go. They chatter like first graders. Thought for the day brought to you by Stag Beer: Robins can sing swan songs, but swans can’t sing robin songs, and mockingbirds can sing all birdsongs in a single breath. Song sung blue, Muddy Waters knows one.

The cat climbs on my lap and sniffs my armpits, the whole aromatic walk trapped in there. She loves a dirty boy—the moldier the better. Which is why I’m writing instead of showering. I’ll shower eventually.

Day after tomorrow for sure.

March 5, 2016

I went into the kitchen last night, to fetch my nightly allotment of peanuts. When I returned to the living room, Scout the Cat was perched on an end table and lapping up Caparone Vineyard’s wonderful sangiovese, from my wine glass.

So now I have a wine-sipping cat, and artistic vintners and great guys Marc and Dave Caparone, of Paso Robles, California have a new customer.

Scout’s tastes are very un-catlike. She eats whole grain bread, watermelon, strawberries and corn on the cob. She goes into a nightly conniption fit when I make my salad, as spinach and other greens make her batshit crazy with joy. I have to hold the spinach leaves because it is difficult for her to pick up the greens from the oak floor. This has led to some inadvertent cat bites on my delicate fingers.

Father and son Caparone only make red wines, unfined (their term) and unfiltered, in their beautiful, narrow microclimate valley above the Pacific Ocean. They bottle a mean cabernet, a luscious zinfandel, a worshipful nebbiolo and the aforementioned ruby-red sangiovese. Scout has shown no interest in the other varietals, but last night it was like she was in a party scene from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

I picked up the wine glass and pooh-poohed my naughty kitty, who looked at me like I had just put her in rehab. I have written this before: Every living creature gets high. With songbirds and raccoons, it’s fermented berries. There is nothing more pathetic than watching drunken goldfinches on a blackberry bender lurching on an electric wire. Heck, cows eat wild marijuana—even worms imbibe. Politicians drink three-day-old cherry Kool-Aid. So God (if He exists) is the universal inventor/dispenser of High.

(From the desk and window ledge and sofa back of Scout Cat Baldwin, for Cat Fancy Magazine) “Caparone Sangiovese is rich and fruity, melony even, with just a hint of catnip and cardinal wing, and a crunch of salad green. Serve this wine with salmon, tuna, cod, lobster, chicken breast, Big Mac, Fritos, and mouse sushi. 4 Meows—highest rating.”

Marc and Dave, you may want to put a “cat caution” label on your sangiovese, next to the one about pregnant women. I suspect Scout the fine feline is not alone.

“Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly” . . .

And cats just want to have fu-un.

March 5, 2016

I went into the kitchen last night, to fetch my nightly allotment of peanuts. When I returned to the living room, Scout the Cat was perched on an end table and lapping up Caparone Vineyard’s wonderful sangiovese, from my wine glass.

So now I have a wine-sipping cat, and artistic vintners and great guys Marc and Dave Caparone, of Paso Robles, California have a new customer.

Scout’s tastes are very un-catlike. She eats whole grain bread, watermelon, strawberries and corn on the cob. She goes into a nightly conniption fit when I make my salad, as spinach and other greens make her batshit crazy with joy. I have to hold the spinach leaves because it is difficult for her to pick up the greens from the oak floor. This has led to some inadvertent cat bites on my delicate fingers.

Father and son Caparone only make red wines, unfined (their term) and unfiltered, in their beautiful, narrow microclimate valley above the Pacific Ocean. They bottle a mean cabernet, a luscious zinfandel, a worshipful nebbiolo and the aforementioned ruby-red sangiovese. Scout has shown no interest in the other varietals, but last night it was like she was in a party scene from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

I picked up the wine glass and pooh-poohed my naughty kitty, who looked at me like I had just put her in rehab. I have written this before: Every living creature gets high. With songbirds and raccoons, it’s fermented berries. There is nothing more pathetic than watching drunken goldfinches on a blackberry bender lurching on an electric wire. Heck, cows eat wild marijuana—even worms imbibe. Politicians drink three-day-old cherry Kool-Aid. So God (if He exists) is the universal inventor/dispenser of High.

(From the desk and window ledge and sofa back of Scout Cat Baldwin, for Cat Fancy Magazine) “Caparone Sangiovese is rich and fruity, melony even, with just a hint of catnip and cardinal wing, and a crunch of salad green. Serve this wine with salmon, tuna, cod, lobster, chicken breast, Big Mac, Fritos, and mouse sushi. 4 Meows—highest rating.”

Marc and Dave, you may want to put a “cat caution” label on your sangiovese, next to the one about pregnant women. I suspect Scout the fine feline is not alone.

“Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly” . . .

And cats just want to have fu-un.

March 3, 2016

“Gulliver’s Travels” author Jonathan Swift famously wrote “A Modest Proposal,” which “advocated” eating the British poor, thus solving the poverty problem. Upscale England was shocked and outraged. Had they taken his advice, Charles Dickens would have had nothing to write about.

Yesterday we saw astronaut Scott Kelly climb out of his space capsule—thank you, science!—then we saw a man with a dyed raccoon pelt on his head spout hate speech to the haters, the bottom feeders, the crack heads, the crack pots, the crackers, then suddenly the joke was not funny anymore.

Do you doubt, given the rise of the Whitey Party’s Donald Trump, how stupid Americans are? Science is in a parallel universe with the Whitey Party, which doesn’t believe in evolution or logic or even common sense.

“A Modest Proposal 2: Kill Pussycat, Kill, Kill”

The solution is to promote guns. The Whitey Party is literally shooting itself to death, albeit it too slow for me, and we can only pray that home deaths by handguns increase, thus thinning the population of Gomers.

In today’s news, a teenager was rudely awakened (never wake a teenager, rude or otherwise), pulled a handgun from under his pillow and shot his mother, his sister and his grandma. Just as he wished, he avoided going to school. Unfortunately, the relatives lived.

Then we have the boyfriend in WashingtonState who spent yesterday with his girlfriend shooting (pun intended) selfies while holding a handgun to their heads. The girlfriend told authorities that they had emptied all their guns of bullets. Except the one which blew the boyfriend’s head off. This incident will be nominated for a Darwin Award.

Gun deaths in the home are not tragedies. They are stupidities, bringing new meaning to “I’m with Stupid” tee shirts.

We have the baby boy who saw Mom put a handgun in her purse. She walked into the kitchen for her last drink of water on Earth, and Junior, having reached into the purse and retrieved the gun, shot her in the face. Ka-ching! We have the little girl who listened as her father sat on the couch with her and explained gun safety. He handed her the gun and she shot him dead. Ka-ching! We have the boy who, when his mom opened his bedroom door with pizza bite snacks, as he and his pals were having masturbatory adventures with his dad’s .357 Magnum, shot his mom dead and the pizza bites to bits. Ka-ching!

How You Can Help

Buy Pops and Cousins Jewhater and Ihateniggahs guns for birthdays and Christmas. Pre- load the weapons, grab the kids and run for the car as the relatives recreate “The Gunfight at the OK Corral.” That’s right, Second Amendment them to death.

Come on Whiteys now, smile on your mothers, everybody get together and shoot one another right now (apology to Crosby, Stills and Nash).

February 19, 2016

There was a thirty mile per hour west to east tailwind today, on my Genehouse walk. The River Road trail was a stream of dead oak leaves tilt-a-whirling  and rolling and pinwheeling down the path, the sound of the brittle leftovers like a thousand grasshopper wings whirring at the same time.

The river was choppy and gray-blue, and gulls struggled for balance in the sky. A lone bald eagle perched at the bay mouth of ScotchJimmyIsland, bent toward the river to catch a hapless windblown fish. Robins scurried along the bluff bottom and finches sang madly.

I met Hummingbird Man, Vance, as he worked on his car. Marley the rat dog jumped into my arms. Vance is a self-proclaimed river rat, but his soft spot is his way with hummers.

Just up the hill, crocuses poked out four inches from the black dirt and clusters of daffodils stretched green stalks and readied to bloom, and Osage iron trees leaned out over the road. A handful of peeps came from the marsh: pioneer spring peepers warming up for the mating dance.

There were empty Bud Lite and Coke cans and McDonald’s wrappers and chewing tobacco cans and cardboard boxes strewn along a one mile stretch of highway, and a hundred flying plastic shopping bags performed a perverted ballet in the air.

I met Farmer Orville on the last leg of the walk. He was looking forward to taking his wife Quilt Queen to an all you can eat fish fry at church tonight. She’s about to have a knee replacement surgery, and can barely navigate the kitchen.

“I took a outdoor piss this morning,” my friend said. “First one of the season.” Indeed, one of many reasons to own your own land: peeing freely, manfully, joyfully.

It reached seventy degrees today. I had opened the living room window nearest to the birdfeeder, and Scout the cat slept on the top of the couch, the breeze making her nose wiggle. She woke up when I came home and greeted me with a back flop and belly presentation.

If I ever meet a woman who does back flops and belly presentations, I will scratch her infinite itches with great pleasure.

In the meantime, spring flowers are better than comfort food; birdsong outdoes the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; blue sky is greater than the bluest eye, and I’ll take eagle wings over stealth bombers.

And long live fish fries.