Living The Zine Life
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About this ebook
Good luck meets an otherwise-doomed poet who was all but certain to perish on the streets of San Francisco. By sheer luck, he falls in with a group of poets whose psychological and physical illnesses almost mirror his own. For the first time in his life, he feels his entire person is understood. He begins to tell his life story and the stories of others he has known in short prose works which also double as poems. His works slowly begin to get published in tiny homemade, underground zines. One thing leads to another, and before long, he finds more acceptance and publicity than he had ever dreamed possible. The prose-poems he writes and performs are dark, but underneath the darkness is the victory of survival and living to fight life's battles another day.
Mel C. Thompson
Mel C. Thompson is a retired wage slave who survived by working through temp agencies and guard agencies. Unable to survive in the real world of full-time, permanent work, he migrated from building to building, going wherever his agencies sent him, doing any type of work he could feign competency in and staying as long as those fragile arrangements could last. He somehow managed to get a B.A in Philosophy from Cal-State Fullerton in spite of his learning disorders and health problems. Unable to sustain family life due to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, lack of transportation and lack of income, he lives alone in low-income housing and wanders around California on buses and trains. He began writing at the age of 14 and continues till the current day. (He turns 64 in June of 2023). In his early years he wrote pathetic love poetry until, in his thirties, he was engulfed by cynicism and fell in with a group of largely antisocial poets who wrote about the underground life of drugs, sex, alcohol, poverty, prostitution, heresy, isolation and alienation. In his fortes he turned to prose and began to write religious fiction with an emphasis on the comedic aspect of theology and philosophy. He now writes short novels focusing on the attempt to find meaning in a economic world beset with money laundering, unethical marketing, contraband smuggling, human trafficking, patent trolling, corrupt contracting and every manner of spiritual and psychological desperation and degradation. When he is not writing, he wanders from hospital to medical clinic to surgical room attempting to sustain what little health he has left after a lifetime of complications resulting from birth defects and genetic problems. When he is able, he engages in such hobbies as reading, walking, yoga and meditation; and whenever there is any money left over from his healthcare-related quests, he goes to wine tastings and searches for foodie-related bargains. Before the pandemic, he spent many years gaming various travel-points systems and wrangled many free trips to Europe. He is divorced and has no children, no pets, no real estate, no stocks nor any other assets beyond the $550 in his savings account. His career peaked in the early 2000s when he did comedy gags for a radio station and had about 10,000 listeners per week. However, currently, he may have as few as five active readers on any given day. He no longer has the stamina to promote his work and only finds new readers through ran...
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Living The Zine Life - Mel C. Thompson
Living The Zine Life
Mel C. Thompson
Copyright © 2010, 2018, Mel C. Thompson
Mel C. Thompson Publishing
3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112
Lafayette, California 94549
melcthompson@yahoo.com
This book is dedicated to the late Denver Harold. May the poets always remember what he did for us.
Cover Photograph: Joie Cook.
Text Notes:
The following prose works are reformatted and edited forms of the original poems published in hard-copy zines. Because the school
of poetry I was involved in pushed the boundaries of prose and poetry to a place where they were barely distinguishable, it is fairly easy to present these works as short prose pieces in order to take advantage of the natural text flow of ebooks. The original versions were with line breaks, most of which were removed for this particular product. Copy editing and rewriting was done to make the pieces hold together better in ordinary prose paragraphs, and other changes were made to deal with issues caused by rapidly changing language and culture. In attempting to import works written in the stone age
of primitive desktop publishing into the modern area of multi-device compatibility, compromises were made to make this book readable on everything from large desktop computers to small handheld tablets and smartphones. However, I have still credited the publications that published the original versions of these pieces, especially since many of these works still have about ninety percent of the original wording in spite in spite of the many changes that were made to present the work in this medium.
Table of Contents
Poems 1-10
1. Greener Pastures
2. The Ambulance
3. Suburban Families: Their Eating Disorders And Their Sexual Dysfunctions
4. Asking To Be Teased
5. The Sadness
6. The Dead
7. Would It?
8. Café Du Loser
9. The Final Assault On Burundi
10. Pyro
Poems 11-20:
11. Upon The First Meeting of My Two Tormentors
12. Robert
13. Urban Lullaby
14. What Andrea Told Me
15. Other Empires That Fell
16. Truth Or Dare
17. For P.W. Stevens In Honor of His Death
18. All Things In Excess
19. The Flames of Hell
20. Men
Poems 21-30
21. At The John Wayne Airport
22. Dance of The Bower Birds
23. Notes From Freelance Gardener And Landscaper
24. Trying To Date Sister Dharmastream
25. Sensei's Koans
26. One Great Path
27. The Fundamental Virtue
28. Visualization
29. An Unhappily-Married Woman
30. Facts About English Garden Robins
Poems 31-40
31. The Ghost Is The Machine
32. Elizabeth 2002
33. Moss Beach, El Granada, Miramar
34. Klipschutz At Rockaway Beach & Linda Mar
35. Selected Ancient Fragments From The Scrolls of To Fu
36. To A Woman Named Eli
37. Notes On Astronomy And You
38. The Physics of Despair — Part I
39. An Irresistible Sale
40. A Day At Cerebral Care Center, A.D. 2100
Poems 41-50
41. Sun Ships
42. Anthropology 100
43. South of Everywhere
44. Werner Erhard
45. Hegel — Abbreviated In Seven Stages (19th Century German Idealism Made Simpler)
46. Mass Transit Bedouin
47. The Libido of Power
48. Without Him, Your Whole Theory Collapses
49. Higher Consciousness Through Coffee
50. House of Lost Men
Poems 51-60
51. Virtually Reality
52. On My Preference For Humans
53. My Girlfriend's Butt
54. Former Academic Now Encased In Newspapers
55. On Intimacy And Future Shock
56. Nightmare Poetry Boyfriend
57. A Most Unusual Pink Slip
58. The Handjob That Saved The World
59. Soul For Sale
60. After The Sentencing
Poems 61-70
61. How I've Come To Know You
62. Consort Without A Nervous System
63. A Meeting of Suns
64. How We Made Our Fortune
65. A Language We Shared
66. Concept #2
67. The Wretched Ones
68. Carrying The Torch
69. Your Real Name Is Janis
70. The Human Paper Blizzard
Poems 71-72
71. Three Generation Xers Collide
72. L.A. Chinatown # 1
Notes On Zines And The Zine Life
A. My Introduction To Zines
B. How Zines Saved My Artistic Life And My Sanity
C. The Criteria For Choosing Zines And Poems
D. Short Notes On A Few of The Zine-Makers
Poems 1-10
Greener Pastures
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When you’re a poet, you watch your friends drift away. And after a while it doesn’t even make you sad anymore. You are only left marveling at the reasons they give.
Sandra got into Religious Science, and she told me she didn't like the universe I’d created for myself. That was before she called me from a South American jail. She was screaming and crying incoherently about latex and spandex and rubber. I couldn’t fully understand what she was saying about foreign obscenity laws and the porn flick she was trying to make. But she wanted me to come to Havana and bail her out. I told her I couldn’t help her until she created a better universe for herself.
Billy said he couldn’t hang around with me anymore: I expect a certain level of growth and functioning from my friends. And honestly, I’m disappointed with how little you’ve done with your life.
He changed his mind three months later after his fourth wife left him and he became an alcoholic again. I told him he could send me some of his poetry in the mail. If your writing is good enough,
I said to him, maybe we can be friends.
Poets can see the interpersonal politics for what they are. And after a while it doesn’t even insult you anymore. You are only left amused at how easily people sell you out.
Jerry and me were real close till he got into positive thinking. I can’t accept your fatalism and negativity,
he proclaimed. Me and my wife are trying to build a life together. We’re planning to start a business and have some kids and buy a home. We want positive reinforcement of our values. We want our children to be around inspiring role models.
The police came by my house five years later to ask me some questions. They wanted to know what could have motivated Jerry to blockade himself inside his house with a gun and scream to the authorities, The ham and rye sandwich! I won’t come out till you bring me the ham and rye sandwich!
Why, Jerry? Why?
Now it was hard to take when Renee left me. But I’ll be damned if I’ll let her get to me. She was always on my back about my self-image.
I need a man with more self-confidence than you,
she’d complain. That was after she confessed to me about the psychotherapy practice she was running and how she used to take Valium every day just to be able to face her patients in the morning, patients whom she was supposedly helping to learn to face life without using drugs.
Did I tell you she sent me a letter last week? I miss the little spankings you used to give me,
she wrote. Do you still have those black leather straps around?
I just decided to put the letter in my file box. And I thought to myself, Well, well, isn’t life just a tender little thing?
Bullhorn, Volume 3, Number 11, November, 1990
The Ambulance
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