in time

 by  roving reporter   shaun grub 

  dumzine's not about anything in particular, so it gets to cover a little about everything. our staff remembers the days we used to buy poetry books for .10cents a pound, I fondly recall the campus bookstore cashier loading up a whole stack of the ted hughes book the crow on the scale and charged me a buck and some change for a tidy pile of 'em, this would've been back in the mid-80's, when I began my sophomore year in college pursuing a degree in creative writing at arkansas tech located snug in the ozark mountains in russellville, a quaint little town caught under the splendorous web of radioactive sunsets. nevermind the times we spent in total darkness in the heart of eden fall's hollow egg cavern sanctuary, perhaps the only cathedral I've been in. 

    dumzine reporter shaun grub here, sent forward in time forty-two years to cover the state of the dream in the mind of the two very weird heroes, shaun and greg grub. theirs is a legacy with a history so labyrinthine and mind-meltingly complicated with its entanglement not just at the quantum level of the universe but enmeshed within a diabolical scheme as if entangled in the twisting strands of a jacob's ladder trap, it would arrest the majority of us into a state of paralyzed apprehension or send some fresher and more pliable minds into spastic reactions of pleasant panic bordering on synaptic lubrication.  y'all can go pluck yourselves right about now, just pluck yourselves out of the loosely strewn gardens you managed to get yourselves planted into for time's sake, or am I the only one that allowed this to happen to me?  speaking of, here in the year 2024 there's a series on a streaming service reinventing time bandits, and its really quite charming to say the least. I watched along with my wife and son a show with a unique take on shape-shifters called me.  we all really adored the six seasons long young sheldon, and are eagerly awaiting season seven to arrive to our channel. 

     our current favorite show, that is my wife and son and I, is without a doubt a series of unfortunate events, reprising the books with immaculate, if sometimes getting carried away representations of most of the events in the books, or so I've been told by someone who appeared suspiciously to know, now I feel as if I've been lowered on a rope into a tornado hole, and landed on another plane, a prairie leading towards a mountain range and up into a valley 4,600 feet above sea level, nestled along a drying out lake of salt beginning to shed aluminum and other compounds of dust into the air to be mixed with and settle into the periodic inversions awaiting in the future since the pandemic momentarily hit the reset as it did with pollution worldwide.  

     the things happening post-pandemic embedded within their russian nesting dolls of different sets of context, combined in a world-wide stirred phenomenon that can be seen as a conflagration, emblazoned within a pixel, forged into a mustard seed that will grow into the flaming tree that will produce  the double-edged mercurial sword running through the sap coursing in the veins of the forest.  blinkerbeasts we've been called, because we can blink through time at episodic intervals, which creates the eerie effect of teleportation for reasons of complex planetary orbital and revolutionary advancement factors.  in the grub tribe, shapeshifting becomes an integral skill when moving through the underbrush caught outside in the after hours with the moon low in the sky scudding after you.  reporting back from another ripped interval. it occurs to me at exactly the same time it occurs to you, just as its always been doing for everyone since the beginning it seems, only we've already proven there hasn't been a start able to be established since the limits of our vision into the rear view mirror diminish before the uncanny valley can open its eye. when the whole universe remains an eye the metaphor cannot be lost. all I'm saying is we better pay attention at the wheel because not only were we not even at it actually, but the real wheel's been left unattended, I mean how many of us here don't already know this, raise your hands so I can get a count of how many of you are still being driven along without even having one single finger of yours on the wheel.  see the grub bros knew this because they shared the secret in silence.  I suppose we were best friends because we both eliminated the impossible and whatever lay around us, wherever we happened to be, was the truth, because it was all that remained.  we had a knack of knowing we were each thinking the same thing, because it was only obvious to us.  we led people to believe we could read each other's minds so well that we began to believe it ourselves.  and why shouldn't we. 

        we create our own reality, you believe what you want, but our lives were not a fantasy, despite being in full blown possession of the dream, I guess you could call it possessed by a certain filthy sort of breed of angel and demon, a mongrel anamorphication of sorts, depending from which angle you look at it. in time we all come to believe something or other. in time we all come to be leaving.  we have no idea who's turn will be next. 

      in time I will be leaving, too; before or after you.  I repeat this because it has yet to become all too clear. until another soul mate gets reaped from our garden by the grim sickle, we can't even have a clue. that's because television has done so much for me and you. don't forget that was in a sense just one of the phases of the genesis of our mass hypnosis. primed by radio signal decay imbuing the slightest charge in what creation assumed was a dead battery.

     so the heart of the dragon lay dreaming yet, squandered in the hidden chaparral of the carbonales valley. I know this to be a fact, since I was born there, in the exact center of the sixties, and lived my first eleven years as a child in the midst of the eye of a storm of such proportions I would not learn about the details and context for thirty seven years. now this year 2024 is the second set of nineteen-year spans since the annular revolution of the infinite dragon distended the rings of its mind, until we were caught up in the middle of it all, staring at the constellations from the frozen ice of chalk pond in abject fascination by our lonely little ski chalet we rented deep in the woods behind arkham. my father was born in marblehead, do the math. 

         don't talk to me about asylums and mayhem. I walked through the fire until my face burned to ash and got licked up by the wind.  I rode my bike bareskulled without slowing straight through all the downtown boston intersections passing right through red lights even while jam-packed rows of automobile traffic going 30mph passed along sliding leftward on  commonwealth avenue like a river of cold and glistening molten steel while I pedaled my 21-speed racing bike with curved back handrails using a keen eye for steady timing to match the velocity crossing through to intersect with the moving strip of head- and tail-lights knowing by instinct I could thread between the red and white to make it to the other side, and I always did without altering the course or speed of my easygoing ride. Centaurcycles we were, prowling the late night streets of boston, following curved sidewalks lit by random lamp lights, hardly a human soul in sight, maybe the wind blowing scraps of trash and wrappers across the concrete walks, we were as free as a couple of prehistoric birds soaring the bluest of skies. in a sense, we worshipped the avian race. the world sent omens our way in the shape of a wide variety of raptors and assorted other birds.  these sentinels remain in our time and are still there not just in our mind but more to the point our mind remains in there. think of it as a big panoramic diorama menagerie cornucopia. 

    the black box canyon where our buried dream lies hidden in a cache of rock. the striations in the mineral landscape are the fossilized remains of the great dragon's wingtip. we always knew the northernmost territories of the aztec kingdom extended to the wasatch mountain range. it’s patently obvious many stalwart a tracker from any number of indigenous tribes from south and central america would've likely wandered in awe and wonder until they discovered this jewel of the inland sea. more than bright mythic dreams leave golden flares in the traces of our memory. for within the packed folds glinting mica sparkles amid the rings of a long petrified tree.  that's where you'll find the remains of our dream.  in the undulating cloudscape being siphoned through the sky. the harrowing shape of our wildest imagination whipped into stately grace and passing with such eloquent consistency, reminding one of the very passage of time and the slowly arcing mass of constellations which you realize is actually the velocity of the planet turning, their counter spinning parallax achieving megahertz perfection. 

      blossoming up and open through our eyes.  we knew how to finish each other's sentences just for fun. we innocently gaslighted a jock into believing his shadow was chasing him.  much worse nightmares lay waiting for us in the darkness ahead.  we eagerly ducked into the shadows of the cloud forests deep within honduras. little did we know what the spores we breathed in while exploring the mutant rainforest would do to us in a few short years. without even knowing it, we became living revenants sent like sentient capillaries from a remote colony of the vorrh into the urban landscape we came to fear as dark city.  those were the days and at least I can say for myself they haven't ended.  not one of my friends in this life were ever pretended. the joke can only be on the last one of us standing because the laughter of the wind sounds like the cold yawning void of outer space having leaked through the planck cracks of this reality, see what I mean. you're damn straight this is america.  

      it means we are here. 

         

 

dumzine's not dead yet! {a brief autobiographical synopsis}

by  your roving reporter, Shaun Grub 

 (how much you wanna bet dumzine will live forever)

har har as if that's very clever. 

   This is roving reporter Shaun Grub (of the weird heroic duo the Grub Bros). You don't know anything about me, but it's aight. I arrived here from a long, strange and twisted journey after graduating from high school at Joe T. Robinson in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1983.  After that I went to UALR to begin my Freshman year exploring creative writing under the professorship of David Jauss. That's when I met Mona, three years older than me; we quickly hit it off and began dating. Once we were lovers...can they understand?   

   She introduced me to the music of David Bowie and Lou Reed & the Velvet Underground.  I already was an Iggy Pop fan, so that annealed the trifecta.  Prior to meeting Mona, I hadn't been introduced to the underground world of gay bars and going clubbing. 

   Mona was my vector into the realm of actual living punks.  One of the more outgoing ones (for some reason I'm thinking his name was Paul, but I'm not at all certain all these years later) would brazenly drop trou, squat and do the dooky out on the sidewalk in front of the club late at night after last call had died out, it was just one of his rebellious quirks. Various goths and punks hung around, smoking cigarettes and paired or grouped off in discussions, mostly amused at the sight. It was nothing, so I stood and tried not to look as if I were staring at him. That scene certainly left an impression on me. I can remember that Sisters of Mercy FLOODLAND was playing very loudly from inside the building, at some point that night. It was the first time I'd heard music in a club at such a loud volume. I thought it was amazing. I'm trying to remember if I'd even started drinking alcohol, at that formative time of my life. I'm going to take a guess and say yes. I remember Mona used to take me to the military balls, back in those halcyon days. Those were the days of burning out fire with gasoline. 

    

   [This Xerox of an old sort of concrete poem I wrote, just over a decade after those years trapped under the lid of a steaming, recalcitrant youth simmering along the rim of the Ozarks, designates another chapter in my developing life as a poet and artist. With hormones going full bore and a sense of pure adventure running through our veins 24/7, we were up for anything back then.]  

    I'm trying to remember some of my creative writing instructors at Arkansas Tech University. (I remember one of them wrote smut as a sideline to bring in money, "D.C.” or something, if I recall correctly; he was quite a character.) I transferred there after one semester at UALR because ATU offered a creative writing degree. It was there that my best friend Greg & I met Craig Fields, who was to also become one of the best friends I ever had in this life. Craig responded to the hand drawn D&D posters we'd pinned up across various bulletin boards on campus. [Greg & I = The Grub Bros] That was when Greg and I actually got lucky and ended up as roommates by sheer coincidence, as if our mutual energy fields made it so.  The previous tenants had painted an eye with a pyramid over the legend THE TEMPLE OF ETERNAL ROCK upon the surface of our dorm room's door.  Another perfect piece of synchronicity, in which we fit like fated missing jigsaw puzzle pieces. 

 

     By the time I got to Emerson college in Boston (I'd had enough of the radioactive sunsets in Russellville), my mentors would become Ray Ronci (Zen monk poet), the eccentric genius Bill Knott, and the unfathomably meticulous Franz Wright, with whom I eventually became great friends.  Franz and I often haunted the late night cobblestone streets of Boston together, plastered out of our minds, with his arm wrapped around me snug and gripping me tight, while we rambled on about every subject under the stars.  Strangely enough, Franz passed from our mortal realm on my 50th birthday back in 2015, having left a permanent impression on my life and the lives of many others.  

    It's strange and altogether too appropriate that along the wild course of my life I'd eventually meet and befriend another fantastic writer, John Shirley. 

VOICES

by John Shirley

  Synthographic art by Charles Carter for the flash fiction story VOICES, by John Shirley appearing in the 30th issue (December, 2021) of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. 

   Incidentally, I happened to meet John on my 40th birthday, in 2005 when I made the trip out to San Francisco to a science fiction and fantasy bookstore where he was doing a reading.  I got an autographed John Shirley card from him that day, and he invited me to have dinner at a nearby fish taco style restaurant.  Andrew Phillips was with me (I was visiting Andaru Grub on that trip, and staying at his place; this was not long before he consciously took his own life in the bathtub of his apartment in the most painless manner possible).  

    A year later, I paid the $350 or so fee to take a six-week creative writing online workshop with John Shirley in 2006.  I learned some solid rudimentary nuts-and-bolts aspects of writing that have really helped me polish my style. Additionally, the things I've learned from publishing John's stories in the FREEZINE are measureless.  My own writing has slowly been taking this natural evolutionary course streamlined by all the literary influences I've relished all my life. (There will come a day when very few left among us will say "no one does that anymore" when referring to the unique perspectives of talented creative writers like them. My personal aspiration as a poet is to beg to differ, even while in general agreeing with the sentiment.) 

    The other writer who's been a great inspiration to me and I can say I've corresponded with enough over the years that I feel a real bond of friendship with is the revelatory and lucid A. A. Attanasio. The written threads I've woven online with him over the years have really helped guide me toward sharing a scientific based outlook on this reality.  Considering my heavy fascination with the writings of Philip K. Dick (which began in '82 when VALIS was published during the summer I turned 17) I can say that my strong cyberpunk undercurrent, coupled with having collected Creation Books in the 90s and having dovetailed my literary obsessions with Alan Moore's legacy, and augmented by reading a lot of K. W. Jeter's books, eventually led toward aligning my recent online energies with none other than Kenji Siratori, a truly enigmatic figurehead perpetually on the cusp of the evermorphing avante garde cyberscape of posthuman literary glitch deconstruction. 

     My intense ambivalence and tightrope-walker agility over the highest tension wired stylistic crevasses along this poetic journey have allowed me to reach previously inaccessible realms along this developing post-literary landscape.  Long ago, Franz told me my poems were possessed of an inherent musicality, and so too have I more recently discovered that same pulsing melodic and lyrical beat remains inherent to John Shirley's writing; in fact, John told me the same thing, that a certain musical rhythm was inherent to my writing, so somewhere along the pathway of my development as a writer, I recognized that I'm one of those types where the writing itself matters more to me than whatever run-of-the-mill plot lines etc. define more typical or mainstream writing. This has been my number one challenge and struggle, as an aspiring author. It's hard getting a foot in the door when your writing leans too dangerously close to the experimental. On the other hand, I've already penned an inordinate amount of these stylistic writings, enough to gather them together into one volume thick enough to stun an ox, so it's just a matter of time before I release that tome under my own self publishing imprint, Plasma Press. 

      With the advent of the FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction, I've developed an underlying editorial thread into a futuristic narrative that's slowly cohering the further along I work on it.  (That would be the reports from the bloodHost, which I'm writing piecemeal as The Nanochronicles, which continues to be serialized incrementally on my aforementioned science fiction webzine. Follow the hyperlinks above to catch up.  

      (to be cont.)

    

Populating Lollipop Lake in the Kingdom of Mushroomland

by   Shaun Grub

     These days, it's impossible to tell, not the difference between what is and isn't real, but more to the point, to differentiate between that which appears to be masquerading as another false front, and whatever's left (i.e, whatever's actually part of the natural scene).  It's not only difficult to tell what's really going on nowadays (unless you separate yourself from whatever shell-guise you happen to prefer strutting down the lanes of Candy Town all dressed up in) but there still persists that nagging question following us around, what the Hell are we even doing here? 

     Most citicents don't know this, but their souls are already bought and paid for. That's how they manage to rush en masse down concrete city sidewalks while regulated through a synchronized system of traffic light sequences programmed into the hive of a metropolitan complex that's no longer run by an electrical grid, but rather maintained by the plethora of geosynchronous orbiting stations aligned in a super-symmetrical cybernetic shroud of Turing wavelengths interpenetrating at the solar plexus of the world. 

     The courtesans of industry float in and out of their reserved parking spots in an industrious multi-levelled traditional exercise that could be better described as a modern tesseract dance, but no further developed really than its beginning-to-be antiquated precursor generated by more recent historical episodes (such as presented by the early frontier days of the wild west, for example). 

     

   When the connective tissue presented itself by which the mystery could be solved (various petri-dish incantations that had been written for a key sequence in the circumstantial orchestra to be showcased), I was led by a surehanded means from a series of impulses drawn from having begun dabbling in the ongoing software development exercises helping to shape the artificial intelligence algorithms responsible for not just individual requests but for the general approach toward semantics that machine-learning may be bound to take, and shown where to go ahead and try being myself despite potential adverse consequences.  Since all possibilities should be explored ahead of time, I took it upon myself to generate various renderings of vital icons I had already determined played an integral role in our developing consciousness.  Especially when it comes to documenting impressions of the paranormal. But I digress.  

    Outpainting in my mind be like "Show me the Guardian of Lollipop Lake surveying the Kingdom of Mushroomland during a Rainbow Thunderstorm in a lightning flash," or some such spontaneous wordplay designed not to stump but rather challenge the AI algorithms. Somewhere along the synthographic mutation of a subvariant following a series of remolded prompts into the next iteration of expression, my eye got caught up in a recurring theme of mirrored similarities I kept seeing pop up with certain sequences of modified variants.    Don't try to figure out what I mean, just trust me that I know what I'm talking about. 

   Since the best art remains a process of elimination, I like the challenge of eliminating the three worse variants, and nevermind the efficacy or lack of what's left; I just use it even to the point of going against my own aesthetic, because more often than not it produces results, yielded from a process whose common denominators cross-reference one another just enough to take hold, like ivy on a trellis, or snowflakes on a cherry tree branch, to name two relatively obtuse examples.  Bear with me.    

      This character was borne of a prompt my wife snuck into my DALL-E 2 account: "A Takashi Murakami character trick or treating in a post-apocalyptic Hellscape."  

  The initial render prompted by my wife with the trick or treating Murakami character a quirky inspiration.

     This variant depicted above happened to come along after many different rendered  manifestations. To my mind, this curious character has something to do with a subvariant line of escaped SCPs, and something tells me there may be a programmer whose game got twisted into another reality, courtesy of random interstitial holographic spark induction maneuvers, as in the case where an army of alternate hallway mirror reflections morph toward a different outcome amid the war they are waging, forging a divergent potential line of futures beckoning.  

       The suggestion implicit in this illustration appears as a singular slash of a lightning stroke split-dividing the possibilities of the Transmission Beams, shown here clearly depicted as being architecturally associated with the folds and division within the Mirror Labyrinth.  Our cloaked explorer holding the Lollipop Staff seems to be in the midst of a journey being transported across adjacent realms of wonder grown from the perspective of a seaside meadow where mushrooms flourish on a hillside by a lake with glowing green globules gently hovering in the distance casting their mercurial twinned reflections in the glassy water.  

     The message in this graphic mystification becomes more evident in the glassine shape of the figure relaxing on the weed infested shoreline (seen in the larger image above), their having gradually taken the shape of river stones, exemplary of the way time can creep up on the best of us, while we're admiring the gleams of the sun upon the surface of a river or pond we happen upon one fine day. 

      Of course, every day remains that "one fine day" we may happen to stumble onto a body of water with the sun or moonlight reflecting off its surface in wavery suggestions of the evolution of stones. It's just a reminder we should all be more prepared to take on unexpected guests. Bear with me as my mind makes a series of small leaps, not unlike the sequence of hops that flat stones make when skipped across the surface of a still pond. 

   There has been zero information on the name or possible whereabouts of this creature, and how it relates to the SCP SERIES 21-77-12 anomaly last spotted in a remote dada club in the Netherlands.    

   Their swirling "Lollipop Cane" seems to me to indicate a sort of transmitting antenna, I mean by now it could be anything if you stop and think about it for a second. Maybe it's an interdimensional vortex cane, I don't know.  But my mind's set on finding out, the only way I know how to.  And that's by continually adding up the clues provided courtesy of this ongoing rush of synthographic emulations churning from computer monitors across the world.  I take a momentary break and crack my knuckles as I wait for the next onrush of variants to come. 

     

Accessory to the Fisherman on the Loose

by our roving reporter shaun grub

   Here we've all managed to escape into the fibrillating interiors within the fluctuating skein of Aurora B-time, a fractal manifestation of what we experience as ordinary realtime that remains a subvariant offshoot of the preliminary Oceanic time the electromagnetic aspects of the universe keep in bonded subatomic ratio-reversal electric equilibrium sufficiently for us to a) not only have manifested into the post-harmonic but b) lived to tell about it, something that c) 99.999% of individual beings incarnated have managed to escape from during that fraction of the Wavecrest that has yet to even begun to be considered Fallen.  

     Welcome to the minutest hair's-breadth, the most microscopic, unimaginably thin slice of the current brane of Laniakea known to have produced our thralldom, an exteriorized cross-section of the magnifie4d portion of a single cilia-strand revealing a Canyonland Kingdom curling into sight, which is the mirror-image of the Carnival Cusp reflecting the summary crawl of our species, from inception to concurrence, all the way through the constant molting and shedding of a succession of multiplicities of skins, from barest and smoothest of multicolored silks on up the roughening index of parameters which successively sprout chitinous formations resulting in the complete array of talons and horns befitting the bewitched among the squalid subjects of the Endless Forest, namely mammals and amphibians which remain among the few whose genetic programming allows a crossover-current of a certain amperage to be processed effectively enough for conducive shrines to be built in honor of the fathomless Sea that spawned them. 

       

     It's taken me this entire investigation hunting down the alleged paranormals which escaped their facilities to come around to various inescapable conclusions this wild goose chase has led me to consider.  The variant-generating aspect of the twisted trail whose scent I'm on leads me to believe the series of events which have led toward my having been alerted to even the remote possibility of these ex-convicts having escaped into the wild confines of our planet has me reconsidering the position I'm in from a whole new perspective.  And that viewpoint has warped sufficiently to form a sort of moebius-like continuum of events whose outcome appears to have seeded its inception, remarkably this configuration of impeccable logic happens to share it's variables with those selfsame quarks, atoms and electrons which make up our universe.  The realization this process engenders within the individual human mind can trigger heretofore undiscovered pathways in the brain of the recipient.  These pathways in no way shape or form alter the biological physicality of the subjects experiencing them nor the direct environment of the subject, but rather allow the subject's ratio/cortex sub-processing to reconfigure certain stability inducing protocols of the human brain which allow its consciousness to access certain electromagnetic sub-frequencies, in other words the solid nature of our direct environment gets to be temporarily bypassed in favor of a quantum induction action whose tangible results in our megahertz, if witnessed, could only be categorized under a paranormal heading. 

    The Fisherman was reputed to have been an escapee from a covert government organization's maximum security protocols.  Therefore, it can be surmised that this mysterious entity currently resides somewhere on Earth.  The city or country which harbors it at the moment remains unknown, as does the answer to the question of its whereabouts in any capacity.  For all we know, it has ensconced itself in a remote wilderness area.  The Fisherman' (called so due to his reputation as a blink dog analog remote controlled virtual puppet) said by some to be as vicious as can be and yet by others reckoned as more to be determined. Make no mistake about it, this creature possesses a sort of radar mind control ability rumored to be powered by gazing into its eyes. 

      Too many valid reports of a creature matching this description have been filed with the Organization, as of late. What's interesting to our panel of secret scouts seems to be its ability to shapeshift through a limited range of bodily contours.  Said to be accompanied by a presence of astral spirits or strange forms of radiating energy, as depicted by the enigmatic red cloaked figure to the lower right in the illustration above.   

    

   

DETERMINISM vs. FREEWILL (?)

 

an exercise in true itching

by  Shaun Grub 

    Roving reporter Shaun Grub here over this morning's cup o' brew.  Whilst skimming through my daily stream, I came upon this ad put up by MoveOn, which is a grass-roots organization, so let's try to move on ourselves from this confusing claptrap while I conduct some fast and loose riffing over what it all means to me. 

   First off, why in the Hell are they even televising this trial?  In a nutshell, it's because while federal courtrooms generally don't allow cameras, many state courtrooms do, and in this case, the state of Georgia believes allowing cameras helps to preserve transparency. Fair enough. 

   What really irks me about this is that the state of our national divisiveness has now reached such a critical mass that "bipartisanship" appears to no longer be on the menu.  It seems useless to even ask if anyone reading this remembers how it was years ago when some democrats voted for republican bills and some republicans voted for democrat bills, but that's the way things were in what appeared to be a more fair and balanced world. But was it, really? Allow me to suggest that this deadlock stalemate is a perfectly natural and inevitable outcome for our experimental form of governing.  So we have merely reached that imminent stage of the evolution of our democratic republic.  Third party, anyone? 

   Today, democrats and republicans seem to have become ultimate enemies, fighting each other in a death-lock of mortal combat, each party vying for supremacy in order to take back or maintain control of our country (that they each have irreconcilable views about).  Let this sink in for a minute while I finish my coffee. 

   Okay, I'm back, theoretically wired, except that's my natural state, so now I'm justifyingly hyperwired enough to continue this impromptu essay.  My point being, just a cursory glance at this sort of paid ad streaming through the MetaVerse [FaceBook, et al] pleading for us everyday Americans to "help run ads to combat MAGA lies" suggests, to me at least, that vested corporate interests in the United States of America circa 2023 [meaning "just three years post-pandemic"] have taken such a stranglehold on the everyday American's wallet, that it got me to thinking. It seems to me more and more every day that we are sadly living in the midst of a craven new world that's inexorably culling the poor and disenfranchised while invariably strengthening and enlivening the one percent. 

   It must be due to the fact that our ordinary way of conducting politics has been fully subsumed by profiteering. I mean, what else could it be?  It seems to me that we have long ago abandoned conducting our political affairs with earnest integrity.  The very notion of "civic duty" seems to have nearly withered altogether from the vine.  Somehow, after all the dust from the rapid succession of previous storms hasn't settled fully, but on occasion thins enough to let us catch a glimpse through all the haze, it seems the answer lies half shrouded before us all, that is if you're straining your eyes and mind to pay enough attention. 

   If you ask me, our two major political factions in this deadlock have simply merged sufficiently to the point where profiteering motivates enough of their respective careers. It must be as simple as that. Which leaves us with a question that should be asked by us all:  

   "How much longer will we, the American public, continue to allow ourselves to be fleeced dry of our money and blood to these revenant undead politicians?"  In other words: "When will WE, THE PEOPLE take back our country from these con-artists proliferating in our government?" 

Only YOU and I can STOP 

these Corporate Vampires

from draining our lifeblood dry!  

SO BE SURE TO VOTE! IN OUR

FORTHCOMING ELECTIONS 

BEFORE OUR COUNTRY

IS STOLEN FROM US ALL

BY SELF-SERVING

POLITICIANS