I: Grandmother Undantva (Oona) Whitekiller

A History of My Mother in Three Parts.
Part I: Earlier Generations

by Tommy George

My Grandmother Oona at age 18, circa 1913

I have grandparents whom I never met, nor even heard of until I was in my 40's. The revelation came in the early 1990's, when my mother, in the spirit of the times, loosened up about the particulars of her mixed-race heritage. Mom had been seen as a purely white individual for half a century by then. It took a bit of doing, but the hastened process of documentation caused by World War II pushed her to passing, and she looked white. She certainly had very few happy memories of her Cherokee childhood.

Treasure Trove of Toilette Reading Rolled Up

Click Upon the Picture for a Preview Manuscript Copy of Millennial Humours, an anthology of many of the writers you encounter at "Shut Up and Say Something." Great bathroom reading!

The Two-Legged Creature Most Feared by Black Cats

by Tommy George

Friday, June 13, 2020. I long tried to make friends with a big black tom-cat that roams the farm town of Allison, Iowa. The animal and I never did share anything beyond a single, brief transaction, the outcome of which guarantees that our friendship now shall never be. Superstition has sprung up between me and Big Black Tom like prison walls that will not come tumbling down any time soon. Any hope of this was killed by the accidental connection between us: exchanged glimpses of the soul that lasted less than a second, but carved dangerous pits in both our minds.

Soulmate or Cellmate?

by Tommy George

Waverly, Iowa. New Years Eve, 2020.  Like most wishes flowing from the romantic heart, the soulmate is yet another emotional delusion that arises when orgasmic sex mixes it up with cool vanity and declares it has found something larger than love or a single life.

Fatherless Fields

by Tommy George

Do not remove the ancient landmark, nor enter the fields of the fatherless: For their Redeemer is mighty; He will plead their cause against you. Proverbs 23:10-11

In fatherless fields, men struggle for their reason
If winnowed there by birth or circumstance
To dwell among the chaff a barren season
Perhaps to die, perhaps to kill a man.

Each soul must learn patience in fatherless fields:
In its words, no cause of action to belie;
in demeanor, no blunted ax to grind,
no apostasy from the wonted God
Who serves every just cause in its due time.

II. Sula Whitekiller Enters the World in 1915

by Tommy George

Part II. A History of My Mother in Three Parts. 

Left to her own devices, Grandmother Oona elected to remain living alone in the old wooden house, the walls of which exuded salt inside the home. When the wind blew, the outside world turned to a turbulent moonscape, tiny grains stinging Crudestruck for a menial's wage. The marooned Cherokee maiden by her final teenage year had become an accomplished pianist with mind and fine hands to match, consumed by the passionate dexterity required by the music of Mozart and Beethoven, Liszt and Chopin, great European composers.

 

She sometimes lamented of her dark skin tone, for the world was far larger than her young experience, and filled with conflicting words and meanings, stated intent and far different experience. The one principle she had avowed unequivocally was to remain chaste--and not die of rotten sex gone into the blood and the brain, and then blown out the ears, as had been her mother's end, so piteously weeping blood. The solitary maiden resisted for months the animals pawings at her door--young red men, not yet braves but clearly not boys--pleading to be let into her house. 

III. Sula Whitekiller Overcomes Racism the Old-Fashioned Way: Passing

Part III. A History of My Mother in Three Parts. 

By Tommy George

8-year-old Sula Whitekiller

Even as a child, my mixed race mother felt herself a dislocated person--she was half Cherokee, half Irish, but looked lily white. Early on, she vowed to remake her world. It would require silence and cunning for the child Sula Whitekiller to resist the hopelessness overtaking Native Americans of the 1920's. She was born on the Cherokee settlement land of her forebearers and wanted nothing more than to be a different person, somewhere else. Her grandmother (my great-grandmother) had managed to get away from the Cherokee settlement by joining up with a Wild West show, but she returned after a dissolute decade of bad acting to make an even worse exit from life, her teeth turned black and her person suffering from tertiary syphilis at the age of 40.

My mom's extended history says something about the mutability of race and caste, poverty and power, and their relation to human will. It also supports an idea I always detested, that everybody is where they are supposed to be at any given time. By extension, that means that you and I may yet have miles to go before ending up to our necks in some predestined mess, either to overcome and triumph or let ourselves get sucked under and die. Worse, it may take a lifetime of horrific accidence to get there.

COVID-19, Fauci, Videos

From the A.M.A.: New Videos on COVID-19

News on Our Pandemic from the American Medical Association

Clik on Dr. Sick for AMA Covid Info 

Suicide for the Lethally Fashionable

Leave ‘em mourning merrily

A Thousand Wurds in 106 Lines of Doggerel Poesy

Written By 

Tommy George

The A-B-C's of a Much Cooler Detroit

by Tommy George

2019-01-01

See the grinning wraith below. He is L. Brooks Pattersen, a former Michigan bureaucrat who declared in a national magazine that he believes fencing off Detroit, throwing in some corn and blankets, and giving the city back to the Native Americans from whom the land was first stolen is the answer to Detroit's problems. While he probably thought he was making a cutting remark, American history may bear out that his impudent prattle is the only intelligent idea the man ever expressed.

L. Brooks Pattersen

Narcissus Mortified: an Epicedium

by Viktor Quixote

10-13-2019 

Nemesis, dealer of ironic fates, killed Narcissus by drowning--
not him, but his twin sister, on whose grace long he had fed.
Death left him peerless, his mirrored reflection nowhere to be found.
Mythical fairness slept only in most handsome bed. 
Fairness so fouled complained, "What fruit compares
to that born of my mother?
What bloated prune of Poseidon be crowned in her stead?"
Diving black-water depths where dearest sister slept, Narcissus spied palest light shone from beloved face so like his own, 
fated to glow unkissed amidst eternity's cold, dateless night.
Unsealing every lip, Narcissus drank of her gloam,
and drowned for the ache, all in one take.  Some voice cried:
"That's a wrap, people!  Good work!  Now we all can go home."

I Resolve to Stop Making Resolutions

by Tommy George

Just before the start of each new year--about 11:40 PM each December 31st, filled with some spirit sufficient to resurrect my belief in the Tooth Fairy--I find myself in the ammonia-scented, empty corner of whatever riotous tavern I happen to be in, chin in one hand, stumpy pencil in the other, drawing up a list of impossible resolutions for the twelve months about to befall my besotted existence. These annual compendiums of wishful thinking are a habit hard to break, because of the items I include, I sometimes accomplish one or two, at least in part. For example, last year I resolved to start using the bathroom for nocturnal calls of nature (i.e., no more bed-wetting). I made it work for a full four months. The other occupants of our family bed--my wife, mother-in-law, and four children--stopped calling me a wretched pee-boy father figure during those pleasantly arid nights.  

Four-and-Twenty

by Tommy George

Birds of black feather may wish to attend
memorial services for fallen friends
sent to pop merrily out of a pie
chirping a tune, and then wasting their guys.

Black-ops turned tragic when agents discovered
two dozen dead birds beneath the crust smothered

O, Four and Twenty, remember them well!
Patriot wings fluttering scared as hell,
the horror of  twenty-four burning blackbirds
a-cry in the kiln, all their chirping unheard,
their mission forfeited by dying in pie,
twenty-four operatives lost to the sky.

Sing a song of justice!  Court-martial, begin!
Your lie's been discovered; you're guilty as sin.
The two-dozen birds you assigned to the op
never could sing in that misguided flop.
God knows what else that you have buried in there,
what skeletons in your Skull and Bones lair.

You skyjacked a country on leveraged wings
to prove to the world you could make the dead sing.
When smoldering corpses produced not a note,
Your Uncle Dick hid himself deep in one throat,
falsetto-piping his misinformation.
The outpouring of tears inundated a nation,
caused by the stench of your Uncle Dick's breath
Singing an ethos of lawless intent.

O! Four-and-twenty!  Look not to the sky
when black-as-hell tactics turn up in the pie.

Addiction: It's Not Just For the Depraved Anymore

Fun, fun, fun 'til the bank takes your credit away.

by Tommy George

Disclaimer

2015-10-25. Some homeless persons suffer terribly from real physical and/or mental illnesses. To make matters worse, they are ofte incapable of untangling the red tape required to apply for the services they need. These forgotten people don't belong among those described here, and deserve everybody's help.

Two GA Meetings Fail to Attract One Single Compulsive Gambler

by Tommy George

Trinity United
Methodist Church

Have you ever thrown a party and nobody showed up? I hosted several gathering in my earlier years characterized as "dismal" and "the worst party I've ever been to," but at least one or two people came. However, the Gamblers Anonymous group I am trying to establish in Waverly, Iowa takes the cake. High and low rollers alike stayed away en toto from two G.A. meetings--one held at 6:30 PM on October 18 and the other November 1 of this present year 2018. Both were held at the Trinity United Methodist Church on Bremer Ave W adjacent to the public library. Nobody came to either. Zip. Nadie. Zero.

Some of you may not know this about me but I am a degenerate gambler who has lost everything with a capital "E"--every penny plus far more (I will spare you my melodramatic litany of non-monetary losses). I was earler in life addicted to several vices that I got over without breaking a sweat. Alcohol. Opiates. Sexual perversions and egregiously bad literary efforts. But these were all cake walks compared to gambling addiction. 

Save Yourself Any Further Degradation

Can’t Stop Gambling?

A Gamblers Anonymous group is forming in Waverly, Iowa, on Thursday, November 1, 2018, at 6:30 PM at the Trinity United Methodist Church, 1400 W. Bremer Avenue (across from the Public Library) in Waverly, Iowa 50677. The church phone number is 319 352-2590.

Thirty-Five Years inside a Venus Flytrap

35

Tinkered time hardens the face 
with ever-thicker bones
And teeth like stone daggers.

Cravings for something soft to eat vanish

She feels no contrition for those she's banished.
She needs only her own heat hanging round her throne.

Chronicles of Frantic Leisure

By Tommy George

2015-2-14. (Republished 6/6/2018)  In the winter of 1973, a droll, gnomish seventeen-year-old stopped his car at a freeway ramp near Detroit's Wayne State University to pick up a hitch-hiker, me. He didn't know me, I didn't know him. I was simply a man out in the cold.  The good-hearted kid who stopped to give me a lift was teenage Joel Bacow, who years later was to produce DeadwyreS and also some artists of which you've actually heard.  (Incidentally, among the Dutch a "gnome" is a financial heavy-hitter.)

Coin-Touch Iowa Gambler Confesses, Declares Let's Sue 'Em

by Tommy George

The Tyrannical Reign of the Hot-Spotted Brain Four Days in the Life of a Coin-Touch Machine Addict, February 2006 24 February thru 27 February

Actual X-Ray

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a psychiatric disorder with a neurological pathology. Using brain-scanning technology and brain-chemistry analysis, some researchers postulate that OCD sufferers, in addition to imbalanced neurotransmitters, demonstrate repeated activity in localized regions of the brain--continuous synaptic firings, or "hot spots" in the brain, like a broken record, endlessly skipping--repeating the same synaptic patterns firing, over and over again. These involuntarily synaptic repetitions, in combination with stimuli-induced changes in brain chemistry, cause in the OCD sufferer an insatiable desire for some activity—insatiable because it cannot be fully satisfied.