Halo Sims' Late Night King Kong Radio Hour (PART 2)

All gristle and gumption, the sky was shedding its black skin as day burned it blue, cattle prattling, counting streetlights, and then there is that way the fog finally burns off and leaves you wearing a jacket and suddenly not shivering so much. Yes, as you walk off and worry about keeping your job, ‘cept it ain’t up to me, you see? Well, see here. It isn’t always all too much. Take a swipe at your brow, kick off your shoes, make a wish and trip on a dream. Get it all over with. Halo knows what it’s like. Say, maybe you walk on down to Tommy’s Joynt, without any pigeons attacking your head even, and you get some beef brisket, think about that old sycamore across the street from your now repossessed house, and you think about the house you grew up in, and what it really means to be home. I’ve got a tall glass of dandelion wine. This is Halo Sims. Halo Sims coming at you with the purring softness of a kitten. Around here where the trees are all bare and the fortune tellers have all lost their marbles and the moon don’t quite shine the way it used to. I know your pockets are a getting bare. I know the world is pounding away at you, and time is most definitely not on your side anymore, because, you know, you’ve got so damn much of it nowadays. Got a dime, got a quarter, got a dollar and thirty-five cents? Then you maybe get a parking ticket, and you’re thinking, damn, how do things keep going down and out like this? How much worse can this get? But if you yearn to turn up that there drooping chin of yours, well, Halo Sims has just the thing for you. This here is the rollicking rolling paino keys of one mister Thelonious Monk plunking and pounding away, sent here by way of a tugboat to reengage and scramble up your brains and take those mediocre and miserable thoughts away from your so woebegone head. So, listen up. Straight, No Chaser...

The streets are bone-dry. No rain clouds in sight. Things are getting pretty damn friable and dust is settling in for the long haul. Feel that scratch in your throat? Don’t flush your toilet too much. Let it mellow and stew. Walk the streets. Walk the streets. Walk the streets. In the streets are the heartbroken outcasts, the miserable, the losers, the lost, the rambling gun-toting poets, mastiffs that have been put out of business running amok, beat cops with bad mustaches, bored ex-businessmen, old ladies with no teeth, the battered remains of a few drunks, flat basketballs, goons without guns, jaywalking jesters without any gestures left in the their tattered bag of tricks, bullies, doughboys, failed dissidents, dour malignant creatures of unknown origin, the sound of words without any breath behind them. And your standing there staring into the fogged-up bathroom mirror, trying to squeeze the last of the toothpaste out of the flattened tube. I’m gargling turpentine. I’m breathing kerosene. I am the last lees of whiskey in the bottle, and I sure as hell ain’t housebroken. So, walk the streets. Walk these arid streets with a knife of disenchantment. Hold up traffic by blowing your nose in a crosswalk. Halo Sims here. Cops bust heads; I blow minds. If I sound like I’m shouting myself hoarse then, well, maybe that’s just the way I talk when I don’t even got the water to wash my hands. Let’s see. Here. Yes. We are in a drought. They say it’ll rain someday. Nobody’s sure when. Could be before my grandkids are in retirement homes. Can’t really say for sure just when. But for now things aren’t precipitating any precipitation, if you catch my drift. Lo and behold my faithful compatriots, this thing’s only going to get worse before we get any succor to ameliorate our current desiccated and perilous situation. This is just to say. Walk the streets. Walk them at night with a head full of dreams and a pocketful of plugged nickels. Use parking meters as walking sticks. Make small talk with fire hydrants. Catch a few dollops of moonlight in your eye. Cry in the gutter. Stare up at that big old obelisk that is the Transamerica Pyramid until you get dizzy and fall over and dive out into the street screaming, “The horror. The horror.” It’ll be good for your constitution. Trust me. Would I steer you wrong? Nah. Not Halo Sims. I am here for you, most magnanimously and irrevocably generous as could be, to give you the chutzpah to do whatever it is that you have to do. The battle is raging. We have nothing to lose but our minds. Walk the streets. Take them back. Take them back from those who would rather you stayed inside and watched TV, from those who think in terms of profit margins and building codes and cheap labor, from those who would rather you didn’t make any waves in their pool of moneymaking, form those who want you to be just like everybody else and to be a good little soldier and to wag your tail and fall in line and follow along with the herd and consume and finally to be consumed. Life is more in all of its myriad jewel boxes than any corporation’s pipsqueak, tiny, clean cut, box-of-a-mind could ever imagine. Rage on against the dying of the light. Put on your walking shoes, and get yourself out into the bathtub of the world. But just for now, I’m going to get your blood a boiling with Mister Howling Wolf pining away You’ll Be Mine. Oh yes you will…

Downcast, defeated, draining the last small change from your savings account, scratching your initials into the façade of a brick building while you smoke the last drag from a cigarette nub you found in the crack in the sidewalk, and some guy’s blinding you with his headlights, idling there at the curb down the street, making you kind of, well, suspicious of his intentions sitting there for some reason shining his damn headlights in your eyes. Life is absurd. Don’t worry about it. Things tend to work out in the end. Those bacteria swimming around in your gut don’t give a damn about your personality. Move on. It’ll be okay. Now Halo’s going to give you the inimitable and shrieking bark of Alfred Lewis screeching out the Mississippi Swamp Moan. Feel free to moan along…