Sailing Down Shit River in the Cloaca Maxima.

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

The Trumpathon continues. Now he wants to punch protesters in the face. He laments the days of old when this practice was in place. The irony here is that this practice never went away. Violence against people who are vocal about their oppositional perspective is still alive and well.

I keep waiting for the public to wake up, not only to the disparity between what politicians say and what politicians do but the whole Circus Cloaca Maxima. They are sitting on the banks of the River of Shit, feeding the rats that scamper about, with the processed food in their pockets and with themselves, once death has claimed them. In between their births and deaths comes the dream, poisoned by the redolent fumes of the coursing River of Shit. Flow on big river, flow on. Once cannot tell when night falls or day breaks in a place like that but there are moments and periods where the shine of romance glimmers off of the waters of The River of Shit, as if some hidden moon, as by osmosis penetrated the rebarred concrete ceiling of the cloaca with its light and brings an ambergris like luminescence to the surface of the clotted waters. It's not butter or tofu that is the product of the churning waves. Portions of it ride up on the moss slick, tiny beach at their feet and are washed up beyond the lapping excrescence where they form feeding mounds for Lilliputians so disposed..

The atmosphere produces vivid hallucinations of elephants and clowns in kayaks; hippos and crocodiles in wet suits swim by. On the further bank is a replicating bandstand that seems to extend for the length of the channel and sad lugubrious music wafts across the water. It's the kind of music that would cause Mahler to commit suicide. Chopin would say, “Ah... now that is melancholy. I used to write as if rivers and streams were flowing from my mind into my fingers and thence upon the keys but I never imagined a river or stream such as this.”

Is the music really sad? Of course not. It is rousing and anything but enervating. It is a strange combination of Sousa and Hendricks but that is simply the result of the quality of the air. It is, in reality, as I first said it is but it sounds to the intoxicated like the latter and you can see them rise here and there and go marching into the sewage as if Hannibal were calling them from the alps that are spray painted on the walls behind the bandstand. Carthage is burning somewhere out of sight while Asian entrepreneurs talk about all the soy sauce that can be made from the salted landscape, once the festival of fire ends. Tamari may be the desire of some but it won't be coming to a Chinese restaurant near you soon.

The track of the Cloaca Maxima is a sinuous and torturous one and the quality of the contents of this particular river of darkness changes according to the quality of the effluvia that comes into the waters at different points. One might imagine that there would be particular differences in the South Bronx than in Chinatown and also a variations in texture, odor and taste once one finds themselves under Trump Towers or the Upper East Side. This is not to say that, on the whole, all of the contents do not stink and taste bad... initially anyway but coprophagia is an acquired taste and can even be considered both daring and acceptable cuisine if it happens to be served warm and over toast. They don't call it shit on a shingle for nothing.

Eventually the Cloaca comes into a main cavern and more resembles a lake than a river or stream. At that point there are green highway signs that appear overheard and assist the traveler in terms of their chosen disembarkation points. There is a current in this lake and so, if one does nothing more but remain there they will be eventually taken to a bottle neck area and transported through a raised portcullis into some new and fascinating environment that we will talk about further on.

Other signs will indicate going left or right to the showers or in the other direction to Party Land. There is a certain difficulty in going to the showers and then intending to go to Party Land when one has to enter the waters again to do so. Since Party Land is always pretty crowded, it seems likely that various sojourners have figured this out.

In the land beyond the portcullis, the contents of the river are transformed into something else that they once were previously... a little while ago or a long time ago. It is at this point that those who observed the sign that said, “onward bound passengers please remain standing, floating or on your heads and you will be carried to the next port of call” are also transformed, recycled or 'insert applicable term here'. There are showers in this location as well and one can experience that which was butchered of meaning in whatever scriptures might have been formerly read, concerning being washed white as snow, given the amount of bleach that is a given part of the process of change which takes place here, it is certainly no misnomer. In other places the waters catch fire and another kind of cleansing process takes place.

One might imagine that all that has been described here is simply a segment in the grand concourse of endlessly circling existence. One should also keep in mind that rivers of shit run in most aspects of existence and it is not simply for the purpose provided by Mighty Nitrogen. All hail Mighty Nitrogen and we expect, we hope that all are genuflecting accordingly at this precise moment. As a Hellbound Israeli once said, “Nits make Yahoos”... or it might have been something else but... point taken in any case.

Every time a politician opens their mouth they make a large contribution to the rivers of shit. It is not just politicians but everyone who lies as a matter of routine who adds to the volume of the rivers of shit. In these times it is not unusual for the rivers to overflow their banks on a regular basis, given the extreme generosity of so much of the public contributing in some way to that great river which is all the same river but which might seem like different rivers that, in any case, all run to the sea. In this case they all run right back into the river; cue Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen, I don't care.

I have had the opportunity in recent times to see Materialism in action in a way I never thought would demonstrate itself to me. I've been so good at walking around the block and taking other routes that I had accorded myself almost a professional status in terms of avoiding such dramas and presentations but no... I was either fooling myself or was mostly lucky, or... could it be that the whole process got ratcheted up without my being informed of it? Perhaps the river of shit with it's large chorus of shit gollum sirens that serenade one from the islands in the stream, had drawn my attention away from what was happening around me. I do not know and perhaps I never shall but... it will be alright. I know that regardless of the unimaginable reach of time and the unimaginable difference in degree between time and eternity; not to mention length of reach, I know that it all comes right at some point. From what I understand it comes right over and over and over again and then it starts the same cycle it had concluded previously... all over again. I don't know how many times this has happened by now but I am led to believe that no human mind could comprehend the size of it.

Roll on big river... roll on.

Every four years an enormous barge floats down the Cloaca Maxima and the biggest contributors of toxic shit the world will ever know are present on that barge and it sails the length of Shit River. The politicians and their financiers and all the members of their massive support structure are on that barge. That barge is probably ten times larger than the Queen Mary 2 but I've never measured it nor seen its dimensions in The Shit River Times. I should add that representatives of The Shit River Times are also on the barge and that seriously swells the number of occupants. The Shit River Times has many other names, depending on the location where it gets printed ...but all of the issues are under the umbrella of The Shit River Times and to say they need an umbrella is pretty much something that can be established through observation. There is also The Shit River radio and television complexes and The Shit River Entertainment Cabal and all the people that work in all those places are proud of the job they do and especially proud that all of their products are composed of 100% USDA Grade A Shit.

There used to be a Shinola industry but that got converted into shit as well, so there is no longer a reason for anyone to be able to tell the difference between the two and that is probably because there was never much effort put into that in the first place.

We're pleased that you took a few moments to travel with us on Shit River in the Cloaca Maxima. Usually it doesn't look anything like the way it has been portrayed here today. We sort of lifted the filters just for a short while but no one needs to be overly disturbed by this because it will go right back to looking like what it pretends to be real soon; Lights! Action! Camera!

End Transmission.......

There will be a radio show this weekend.