A Burning Man Flickers Out

Rest in Peace, K.V.
You sure inspired millions,
not the least of which me.
May Your Heaven be a cool place.
The fires of Dresden died long before you.
Say Hello to Hunter for me. And Luci. And Bukowski.
And Jimi Hendrix, too. Ahh, shit. I'll see you all soon enough.
In Literary Reverence,
RSM

Ah, Good Times, Good Prose

Just flitting around on the World Wide Web today, peering down on YOUR rooftops from Google Earth (fucking amazing!) and working the research angle when I had to pop into Jigglebox.com for a quick info visit. Pulled up one of the five or six chapters from 2003 of an intended novella on Burning Man, one that never got finished due to my grief over friend Luciano's suicide, read this and had a good laugh. (Kudos to Tommy and Flash for keeping the dream alive. I dropped the ball.)

 

"Back in the Chevy, spare tire installed, the shredded tire and heavily-torqued tailpipe perched atop the roof like some kinda Bumfuck, Arkansas junkyard art, Tom and I crack another coupla Hamm's and toast to our relatively dogma-free minds. "Jesus, did you hear that Big Brother shit? That guy's messed up. What the hell is Larry feeding those dogs?" I don't know which of us said what, but that's the gist of our dialogue. And having said that, let me add that we know perfectly well that Larry Harvey isn't the one disseminating this kind of twisted propaganda to burning volunteers.

No. It takes squinty-eyed, paranoid, highly-caffeinated & oftentimes mean-spirited Napoleonic management types to run a monster endeavor such as Burning Man has become. If left to the synaptically-scrambled organizational skills and propane blast attention spans of the kind of hardcore radical self-expressionists that are rumored to have started this gig, Burning Man would have burned out a long time ago."

If interested in reading the whole bit, here's the link: http://www.jigglebox.com/rants03summer.html This bit came from the one called "Once We Were Pirates." 

Back to work on the next leg of the tale of the journey which is mine and mine alone. All the best, RSM

Wal-Wedding

There's this hep, shorn head army cat buying drinks for everybody within shouting range here tonight at karaoke night at St. Elmo's saloon. He's celebrating his engagement to his rather Rubinesque fiancee. He's singing Beach Boys tunes to her in the key of drywall. It's touching, if a bit silly. But what intrigued my helplessly sardonic whit was the tale of his engagement. To whit:

"I asked her to marry me in the woman's clothing section of Wal-Mart! Isn't that crazy? I figured, hey I love Wal-Mart, and won't this be a great story to tell our kids?!"

Welcome to the new world order where war & consumerism are ONE.

Wait a minute? Did I say "new?" - RSM
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Second Line

Oh woman
Oh woman
They're playing our song
Sade, here in bed my head 'neath 10 pounds of down
Nursing a hangover, sipping chicory
Staring at my Gretchen Baer six feet wide and half as tall
The only piece of real art I've ever owned now serving as headboard
Called "Leaving Home" it fits me well
My temperament, my eyes-to-the-horizon daydream life.

Oh woman
Where have you gone?
Oh yeah, you're down there
Straight through Earth's core
Out the other side
"Standing under skies looking for holes
Arms outstretched
Waiting for falling birds."
Lovely sentiment, though you may as well be looking at the ground 'neath your feet
I'm more worm than bird
Warm in my bed down here in Sinkhole, USA.

James cries sometimes when I read my work.
It makes me feel uneasy.
I don't take compliments well.
And his tears are nothing if not twisted praise.
The pain writes the poetry, the prose.
Not me.
And he taps that pain like a sugar maple
But the taste for me is bitter.
Recollection, remorse.
This is why I avoid public readings.
They ring of pomp and ego and leave me
Feeling dirty.

But hey, no tears.
No sympathy for the Devil.
Have you heard the news?
They're moving the White House to the La Brea Tar Pits, so strong is that nutfucker's jones for fossil fuels.
With any luck, he'll swim in the muck
We'll have a tar baby for president.
Quid pro quo, eh?

They hung the wrong man, some guy said, almost got his ass shipped down to Guantanamo for his pluck, and I say bravo.
Go man go.
Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

If I were made leader of our jackass backwards government, I'd give every man, woman & child a grenade.
Do it for love of country.
Level the playing field.
Do it in Hunter's name
Fourth Amendment, Bronco!

I'd abolish the work week
Make every day Mardi Gras Day.
If God really did create All This in six days, well, I bet he quit on Tuesday and
Adorned Himself in beads of green, purple & gold.

Oh woman
Go on with your life.
You never did like the Bacchus in me anyway, and Baby, he's goin' strong to this day.
And thanks to you and this poem and the chicory what the Cajun dun drunk,
That mean old hangover be gone.
Time to work up another one.

It's Tuesday with one week left in the world.
This time tomorrow, it'll all be over.
So s'cuse me while I blow this sinkhole and
Stride on down to Napoleon & Magazine
To dance a second line at the jazz funeral
For Liberty & Justice For All
And blow a trumpet out of my ass, singing
All hail the Commander & Chief!

Oh woman
Be glad you are an Aussi
And not an Ameri-Roman
Here & Now
At the ugly end of an empire.

Sieg Heil.
Could UPS be the first wave of the new Nazi regime?
They DO deliver to the world.
Beware of men in brown shirts.
Jesus, if you're coming
You best get here soon.

-RSM

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Good Advice at the Grand Hotel Saloon

"As your attorney, I advice you to buy your own nail polish." - Danny the Crossdresser, admonishing me for overly envying his turquoise nail polish over a happy hour beer at the locals-only round table with Chris Allen who, since a bad motorcycle tumble, has ever and always addressed me as "Doctor!" [Chris, too, is a fine doctor. Good bone man.]

The Great Google Easter Egg Hunt

No, this is not a rant. I'm still on strike. But for those of you who can hold out on new stuff and entertain yourself running around the labyrinth of past rants and the myriad other goodies on this site, you'll be happy to know I've set an April Fool's Day goal for finishing the first draft of my new book, working title, "GENERAL DELIVERY, USA." I'm crankin' out 1000 to 1500 words/day and bound and determined. For now, here are a few weird mentions of me I found in my ever-narcissistic perusal of the web for mention of myself.
http://www.blert.net/thecat/t/boston02/globe.html

This one here addresses the subject of my "lost" first novel, Catcher in the Sky, taken down with a 1000 other starry-eyed authors by the vanity press crooks I found listed in the allegedly trustworthy guide, The Writer's Market.
http://www.very-clever.com/books/author-Rick+McKinney

For these next two, you'll need to go to the Edit button on your browser and punch "mckinney" into the FIND engine as I'm quite a ways down a long page.
http://www.johnnydailynews.blogspot.com/
http://www.ohjohnny.net/newsaug05.html

I bless the day I met Angela at Booklocker.com:
http://www.writersweekly.com/publishers_desk/003614_09062006.html

Oh, and this one's great, much more recent. If you'll notice the writer hardly mentions Bisbee at all. He just goes and on about me. God bless him! http://www.automobilemag.com/reviews/suvs/0604_2007_toyota_fj_cruiser/road_test.html

ps: It snowed six inches here in the desert last night. Very weird.

A buncha photos and I quit

I'm tired of getting flack for the way I depict things in my rants. I'm honest and that's that. Fuck the Top Shelf. I just began a new book and I'm gonna have my nose buried in it for the next coupla months. And NO, I'm not gonna post the chapters as I go. Suffer and wait. It'll be good. I'm on fire, finally, after damn near two years of fomenting.

In the meantime, here's some photos I posted on Photobucket.com months ago and forgot to link to Jigglebox.
All you gotta do is click here, http://www.photobucket.com and enter the word jigglebox into the search box. You don't need to sign up or none of that shit. Just search jigglebox. There's a whole buncha cool shit up there, and you can watch em in slide show format. Just click on the blue worded categories.

Also, here again for those who missed it is the entirety of my Mississippi River Trip slideshow, on Kodakgallery.com:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/BrowsePhotos.jsp?&collid=57414802411.91406802411.1169084254084&page=1&sort_order=0&navfolderid=0&folderid=0&ownerid=0

Autographed copies of Dead Men Hike No Trails are for sale again from the front page. All the best, RSM