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.  

The Two-Legged Creature Most Feared by Black Cats

by Tommy George

Friday, June 13, 2014. 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.

On Barbara Greene-Mann

Portrait of a Cancer Survivor

Trying to spin the life and work of the artist known to me as Barbara Greene, who somewhere along lost years became Barbara Greene-Mann, is critical folly. If there exists any spin, it is a (super) natural phenomenon, like the female Elijah sucked up in whirlwinds and transported from one enthusiasm to another, or one despair to another, from heaven to hell, ever-chronicling in one art-form or another the vertiginous view. She paints and she tap dances. She sings and she draws. She plucks feathers from passing birds and makes collages. is critical folly. If there exists any spin, it is a (super) natural phenomenon, like the female Elijah sucked up in whirlwinds and transported from one enthusiasm to another, or one despair to another, from heaven to hell, ever-chronicling in one art-form or another the vertiginous view. 

Malignant Narcissism: Trending or Ending?

by Tommy George

I envision myself as an author dealt a unique thematic niche based on my personal recognition and experience of Malignant Narcissism, a psychiatric disorder declared by Erich Fromm (perhaps a touch melodramatically) as the “quintessence of evil.” I ask you--reader, story editor, agent, publicist, and publisher--to consider such claims 1) in light of the theme's still-evolving definition, 2) in terms of Media Relations: what professional protocol is needed to legitimize and differentiate a new niche within the Mass Mind. After those near-imponderables, if you are still willing, I ask that you take a look at my writing so far in this odd milieu.

Exethalamion, Part the First

By Tommy George

Exethalamion > Greek: Homage to Divorce

168,000 B.C.

Seventeen-hundred steaming centuries ago 
Your future essence was conjured amidst clouds of acrid stink 
in an ungroomed farrago, when a gnarly ur-pimp 
pinned your greatest granny down at the tar-pit;
she came to in his cave wearing only a bear-skin carpet.
Thus entered politics ancient into the bargain.

Miss Piggy's Luv-a-Cop Telethon

Wipe Your Eyes, My Hero! Miss Piggy Will Find a Way!

by Tommy George

18 December 2014. Allison, Iowa. Scoff-laws of America, beware! You won't be breaking the law around here anymore, because law-enforcement has got your number. McGruff the Crime Dog has already put away over 2,300,000--that's two-million, three-hundred thousand!--lawbreakers. Human being-type people--gone wrong! That's the number of men and women presently locked up in American prisons and jails--more than any other nation in the entire history of evil-doing! We're beating the pants off old Eichman!