“BUYING A BOOK” (“For Somebody Else To Read”----by Joe Tex)

(And aren’t we all?)                               

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU8JCzOKxKM

I sit on the back porch of Old Times Café feeling the cool wind off the trees in Kurt Brill’s  huge back yard full of  12 and 14 foot tall looming mythological slash Marvel Comic Book pinch clay figures.  They are cast in tons and tons of bronze but still they cry out, I told him once, for reflective pools like Marisol’s River Goddess in the Museum Of Modern Art sculpture garden.  We could have such pools for those sculptures with real fish and plants, I said, and people could sit and eat and talk on the sculptures. The pools would support fish and the fish would support garden plants.  It would make the Café a living work of art.  An architect laughed at me, at the ridiculous scope of my vision for a place where poor folks come to eat.  And so I thought I might have a career in sit down comedy but the joke was on me.  

Evangelos lost all his money and his restaurant up in the foothills because it was too big to handle and should have been four businesses in one building, and because his brother stole from the till.  I heard him play his own compositions of Greek songs on his Bouzouki while his brother and friends danced.  He had a huge garden there where he grew produce for the restaurant. I watched him snaking out the sewer and feeding the javelina that came to the back door of the kitchen.  Things seemed to be so good and natural, but he told me privately business was down.  

“People are scared.” He said.

“What of?” I asked. 

He didn’t know, finances he thought.  

I could also relate to the old horse drawn farm equipment he had drug up to line the parking lot of the little café he built by hand.  It was all like the some crime too brutal to believe as the restaurant crumbled and lack of maintenance caused exponential cascades of damage and metal thieves or antique fanciers stole the farm equipment from the café,  one piece at a time.  He and I shared something of farming from our childhoods, he from a Greek Island and I from Olton, Texas. I could sit here and look at the rusty farm equipment after finishing my refrigeration work and see Granddad Dennis driving a four horse team across his dry cotton farm in Olton, Texas, the rich smells of the moist earth, overgrowth of wild plants and cotton plants, hope and tragedy in the air as one and inseparable.  

Granddad was dying in the hospital of diabetes when a nurse named Beulah befriended him, married him and nursed him at home for a couple months and got half the farm.  I was eleven or twelve at the time, and fancied myself a cowboy as I rode a worn out plow horse named Old Roan, bareback, in the dirt roads around the fields.   But even at that age I felt something totally desolate in the all too human heart, something to do with the Dr. Peppers and pecan pies in the icebox, something missing in us all that had to crave a sweetness beyond our reach,  something about Beaulah trying so hard to cry in the funeral service in the little wooden clapboarded church, the cracked voices singing the pathos of the pathless land, boring a hole straight through my heart and keeping time for years to come with the sucker rods of the windmill going thwack thwack through the well pipe at night and pushing the best tasting water in the world through the old wooden sluice box where the milk jugs sat.  

“On a hill far away

Stood an old rugged cross

The emblem of suffering and pain….”

If only it didn’t feel so empty, if only he had had someone to really care for him, so he could have gone out with the dignity of an informed choice.  I loved him. He used to sit me on his knee while we listened to President Truman talking out of the warm yellow lights in the big console radio, telling us all not to hoard things because it was WWII and we didn’t know if we could survive, all that warmth and understanding, and now this, this stupid stuff, was hard to take, where was HIS kind old grandfather guardian when he needed him? Why was I so helpless to give something back when he needed it? 

If love is him playing her and her playing him, let the games begin, but, no it’s not OK when someone,  a child or childlike says they want to be used that way, because of a hunger for attention in the bones that bore them, not your or my grief, but a million years producing the soap opera this beautiful desolation demanded.  And even if it was a level playing field, did anybody have the time and money to really be there?  If there is time for playing games are even the loneliest of us here alone?   Even a stone dropped in a pond causes ripples that seem to go on forever back and forth like a refrain of a crazy song I wrote for “the crazy lady with the crooked grin, beside the road”:

“And they call it love

And they call it sin

And it starts all over again

With the howling and the banging

Of the screen door in the wind.”

When my sister was dying of the conglomeration of medicines, side effects and strains of insanity running through both sides of the family and me,  I wrote a letter to the doctor concerning when to pull the plug and said, 

“Nothing matters except the quality of the consciousness.”

But that was not a line for a doctor to draw, but for each of us on our own recognizance, and even then, the most difficult of bright lines. There are just crimes against consciousness that we live daily for which the law has no remedy and life has no solace.

As dad became more and more incontinent, Mom complained of having to wash the urine out of his pants, and I, at the time, took it upon myself, and at the time, had to go to a pharmacy to get adult diapers, and sent a package.  And he sent it back, with a note, 

“You were trying to be kind.  But there are some decisions I have to make for myself.” 

He always understood when my thoughtfulness took a wrong turn, and never overcorrected me.  But my mother should have had some freedom of choice and a vote on that.  Something we do, will be somebody else’s mess to clean up or manage or an empty place in which to do without.  

And we buried my mother, and then my sister, in a little clearing in a grove of scrub trees, a lone brave soprano sang without accompaniment, and my brother paced back and forth across the head of my sister’s casket shaking his head, at the insanity that sometimes turned her into an animal with the furniture piled up against the bedroom door and her smearing shit on the wall, and all the medicines, the electro shock and drug shock and nursing homes and nothing, nothing left except the bare brute facts.  There was somebody there but behind a chain mail veil that distorted every communication coming and going, just the bare horrible facts that all our love and words come from bodies and bodies come from dirt, and love and war are the same damn dumb hurt.  

Evangelos told me one day his doctor had seen a brain tumor in his head in a scan.  I asked where it was and he pointed to his temple.  I asked which ear he put his cell phone up to and he put his hand up to the same side of his head.  He started talking about how his strongest regret was he might leave his wife with the café to manage by herself.  She had stood by him for so long.  He also said, 

“Life is very precious.”

And I tried to balance that with how cheap and dirty and brutal it is, especially on the border.  But that’s just me I guess, always looking on the bright side.  

One day I was working on one of his reach in sandwich prep refrigerators and I was depressed and called him and said I needed his help.  Actually I just needed moral support. He was tired too but he turned his car around on his way home so he could help me.  We finished up and he said he felt dizzy and needed to lie down.  He lay down in one of the booths he’d upholstered himself and then got up and tried to talk to me but his speech was slurred and he couldn’t tell me which hospital he wanted to go to.  I said, 

“We’re wasting precious minutes.  We’re going to UMC.  If you remember where your hospital is on the way we’ll go there, but we’re going….NOW.”

He asked if I could drive his car and I said of course, but made a liar out of myself.  I couldn’t operate the A/C and when I tried to activate the windows and emergency flashers the rear trunk lid popped up but we got there just in time for him to start vomiting on the way in.  That’s the last I saw of him when I felt like he was really there.  

When I came back to the café after he had his operation, he looked at me and started crying, 

“You saved my life.”

“No.” I said, “I took you to the hospital.  The doctor saved your life.  Don’t argue with the English Major it just gets him all pissed off.”

He hugged me.  He was hugging everybody.  I think he was trying to say goodbye.  When I asked him questions about what he remembered of his past, he would look at me and then look down at the table and look away, and then this man who used to know seven languages said something that seemed to me to be irrelevant or nothing, but he could have been thinking something too deep for words, what the hell did I know? 

The tumor was in the same conical pattern of microwave radiation coming off a cell phone antenna.  The last scan he had was negative for even a trace of cancer, but he died of complications, side effects of the drugs and pneumonia, so it’s just an anecdote.  It will take thousands of anecdotes to make a theory and thousands of blind trials to prove it’s worth balancing our need for something we call communication with our need for consciousness. Ironic though, that the need for communication could turn brain cells into something like an endless subdivision or Israeli settlements on the West Bank? But, like they say on NPR “Marketplace”, 

“Let’s take a look at the numbers.” 

The numbers say the numbers win.  And money talks but it never says anything except “More.” The numbers left Evangelos’ wife with a 150,000 dollar mortgage on Old Times Café, and an invitation to a painful kind of freedom.  And those of us who share the misfortune of being mechanically inclined, pitch in and work for food or whatever.  We may not be able to fix anything else, but at least we can keep the equipment going.  So many times while I’m doing this I cry and curse him for making all those big deals on the cell phone, deals that some of us told him were just wrong, because his plans for condos were  crimes against nature and therefore crimes against our best chance at really being anywhere, because they involve tearing up more land and giving nothing back.  And that’s buying a book for his grand kids and everybody’s grand kids to read.  And he’d say, 

“Well something’s gotta happen out there. Might as well be condos.” 

But the argument was irrelevant because the deal fell through and the restaurant was auctioned off for not even enough to pay the taxes.  And he oughta known better, he coulda, shoulda, oughta not been like some drunk hanging limp on your elbow at the salad bar talking about this great deal he just did.  He coulda, shoulda, oughta, and for just a little humility he and we coulda had it all, but all his grand plans and bullshit were just part and parcel of the enthusiasm that let him love me and every other down and outer who ever crossed his threshold.  

I sit and watch the moon go through a few wisps of cumulus which I know is stratospheric ice crystals and then I hear the ice machine dump another load right on time.  And wonder how the time goes, and where it goes when it’s gone.  I think it goes to Cleveland where it gets made into dancing bananas for the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, but I wonder at that huge mass of a moon and all the other masses push pulling each other in the space/time continuum that always feels to me like it must be broken somewhere.  

And then I realize it is what it is.  And at the risk of sounding foolhardy I am still alive.  And he was right, life, for all of its predestined goneness, is precious, from a certain distance that we are charged with maintaining.  

It is what it is.  And I can’t complain.

"Buying A Book..."

“Buying A Book” (“For Somebody Else To Read”----by Joe Tex)

(And aren’t we all?)                               

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU8JCzOKxKM

I sit on the back porch of Old Times Café feeling the cool wind off the trees in Kurt Brill’s  huge back yard full of  12 and 14 foot tall looming mythological slash Marvel Comic Book pinch clay figures.  They are cast in tons and tons of bronze but still they cry out, I told him once, for reflective pools like Marisol’s River Goddess in the Museum Of Modern Art sculpture garden.  We could have such pools for those sculptures with real fish and plants, I said, and people could sit and eat and talk on the sculptures. The pools would support fish and the fish would support garden plants.  It would make the Café a living work of art.  An architect laughed at me, at the ridiculous scope of my vision for a place where poor folks come to eat.  And so I thought I might have a career in sit down comedy but the joke was on me.  

Evangelos lost all his money and his restaurant up in the foothills because it was too big to handle and should have been four businesses in one building, and because his brother stole from the till.  I heard him play his own compositions of Greek songs on his Bouzouki while his brother and friends danced.  He had a huge garden there where he grew produce for the restaurant. I watched him snaking out the sewer and feeding the javelin that came to the back door of the kitchen.  Things seemed to be so good and natural, but he told me privately business was down.  

“People are scared.” He said.

“What of?” I asked.
"Finances." he thought.
 

I could also relate to the old horse drawn farm equipment he had drug up to line the parking lot of the little café he built by hand.  It was all like the some crime too brutal to believe as the restaurant crumbled and lack of maintenance caused exponential cascades of damage and metal thieves or antique fanciers stole the farm equipment from the café,  one piece at a time.  He and I shared something of farming from our childhoods, he from a Greek Island and I from Olton, Texas. I could sit here and look at the rusty farm equipment after finishing my refrigeration work and see Granddad Dennis driving a four horse team across his dry cotton farm in Olton, Texas, the rich smells of the moist earth, overgrowth of wild plants and cotton plants, hope and tragedy in the air as one and inseparable.  

Granddad was dying in the hospital of diabetes when a nurse named Beulah befriended him, married him and nursed him at home for a couple months and got half the farm.  I was eleven or twelve at the time, and fancied myself a cowboy as I rode a worn out plow horse named Old Roan, bareback, in the dirt roads around the fields.   But even at that age I felt something totally desolate in the all too human heart, something to do with the Dr. Peppers and pecan pies in the icebox, something missing in us all that had to crave a sweetness beyond our reach,  something about Beaulah trying so hard to cry in the funeral service in the little wooden clapboarded church, the cracked voices singing the pathos of the pathless land, boring a hole straight through my heart and keeping time for years to come with the sucker rods of the windmill going thwack thwack through the well pipe at night.  

“On a hill far away

Stood an old rugged cross

The emblem of suffering and pain….”

If only it didn’t feel so empty, if only he had had someone to really care for him, so he could have gone out with the dignity of an informed choice.  I loved him. He used to sit me on his knee while we listened to President Truman talking out of the warm yellow lights in the big console radio, telling us all not to hoard things because it was WWII and we didn’t know if we could survive, all that warmth and understanding for a little boy, and now this, this stupid stuff, was hard to take, where was HIS kind old grandfather guardian when he needed him? Why was I so helpless to give something back when he needed it?

If he was playing her and she was playing him, if they were each just playing themselves, let the games begin, but, no it’s not OK even when someone like a child or childlike says they want to be used that way, it wasn’t a level playing field, and there wasn’t time for playing games because none of us are here alone.  Even a stone dropped in a pond causes ripples that seem to go on forever back and forth, like “standing wave radiation” in radio waves, or like a refrain of a crazy song I wrote,

“And they call it love

And they call it sin

And it starts all over again

With the howling and the banging

Of the screen door in the wind.”

When my sister was dying of the conglomeration of medicines, side effects and strains of insanity running through both sides of the family and me,  I wrote a letter to the doctor concerning when to pull the plug and said,

“Nothing matters except the quality of the consciousness.”

But that was not a line for a doctor to draw, but for each of us on our own recognizance, and even then, the most difficult of bright lines. There are just crimes against consciousness that we live daily for which the law has no remedy and life has no solace.

As dad became more and more incontinent, Mom complained of having to wash the urine out of his pants, and I, at the time, had to go to a pharmacy to get adult diapers, and sent a package.  And he sent it back, with a note,

“You were trying to be kind.  But there are some decisions I have to make for myself.”

He always understood when my thoughtfulness took a wrong turn, and never overcorrected me.  But my mother should have had some freedom of choice and a vote on that, because lonely as it gets none of us are here alone.  Something we do, will be somebody else’s mess to clean up or manage or an empty place in which to do without.  

And we buried my mother, and then my sister, in a little clearing in a grove of scrub trees, a lone brave soprano sang without accompaniment, and my brother paced back and forth across the head of my sister’s casket shaking his head, at the insanity that sometimes turned her into an animal with the furniture piled up against the bedroom door and her smearing shit on the wall, and all the medicines, the electro shock and drug shock and nursing homes and nothing, nothing left except the bare brute facts.  There was somebody there but behind a chain mail veil that distorted every communication coming and going, just the bare horrible facts that all our love and words come from bodies and bodies come from dirt, and love and war are the same damn dumb hurt.  

Evangelos told me one day his doctor had seen a brain tumor in his head in a scan.  I asked where it was and he pointed to his temple.  I asked which ear he put his cell phone up to and he put his hand up to the same side of his head.  He started talking about how his strongest regret was he might leave his wife with the café to manage by herself.  She had stood by him for so long.  He also said,

“Life is very precious.”

And I tried to balance that with how cheap and dirty and brutal it is, especially on the border.  But that’s just me I guess, always looking on the bright side.  

One day I was working on one of his reach in sandwich prep refrigerators and I was depressed and called him and said I needed his help.  Actually I just needed moral support. He was tired too but he turned his car around on his way home so he could help me.  We finished up and he said he felt dizzy and needed to lie down.  He lay down in one of the booths he’d upholstered himself and then got up and tried to talk to me but his speech was slurred and he couldn’t tell me which hospital he wanted to go to.  I said,

“We’re wasting precious minutes.  We’re going to UMC.  If you remember where your hospital is on the way we’ll go there, but we’re going….now.”

He asked if I could drive his car and I said of course, but made a liar out of myself.  I couldn’t operate the A/C and when I tried to activate the emergency flashers the rear trunk lid popped up but we got there just in time for him to start vomiting on the way in.  That’s the last I saw of him when I felt like he was really there.  

When I came back to the café after he had his operation, he looked at me and started crying,

“You saved my life.”

“No.” I said, “I took you to the hospital.  The doctor saved your life.  Don’t argue with the English Major it just gets him all pissed off.”

He hugged me.  He was hugging everybody.  I think he was trying to say goodbye.  When I asked him questions about what he remembered of his past, he would look at me and then look down at the table and look away, and then this man who used to know seven languages said something that seemed to me to be irrelevant or nothing, but he could have been thinking something too deep for words, what the hell did I know?

The tumor was in the same conical pattern of microwave radiation coming off a cell phone antenna.  The last scan he had was negative for even a trace of cancer, but he died of complications, side effects of the drugs and pneumonia, so it’s just an anecdote.  It will take thousands of anecdotes to make a theory and thousands of blind trials to prove it’s worth balancing our need for something we call communication with our need for consciousness. Ironic though, that the need for communication could turn brain cells into something like an endless subdivision or Israeli settlements on the West Bank? But, like they say on NPR “Marketplace”,

“Let’s take a look at the numbers.”

The numbers say the numbers win.  And money talks but it never says anything except “More.” The numbers left Evangelos’ wife with a 150,000 dollar mortgage on Old Times Café, and an invitation to a painful kind of freedom.  And those of us who share the misfortune of being mechanically inclined, pitch in and work for food or whatever.  We may not be able to fix anything else, but at least we can keep the equipment going.  So many times while I’m doing this I cry and curse him for making all those big deals on the cell phone, deals that some of us told him were just wrong, because his plans for condos were  crimes against nature and therefore crimes against our best chance at really being anywhere, because they involve tearing up more land and giving nothing back.  And that’s buying a book for his grand kids and everybody’s grand kids to read.  And he’d say,

“Well something’s gotta happen out there. Might as well be condos.”

But the argument was irrelevant because the deal fell through and the restaurant was auctioned off for not even enough to pay the taxes.  And he oughta known better, he coulda, shoulda, oughta not been like some drunk hanging limp on your elbow at the salad bar talking about this great deal he just did.  He coulda, shoulda, oughta, and for just a little humility he and we coulda had it all, but all his grand plans and bullshit were just part and parcel of the enthusiasm that let him love me and every other down and outer who ever crossed his threshold.  

I sit and watch the moon go through a few wisps of cumulus until I hear the ice machine dump another load right on time.  And wonder how the time goes, and where it goes when it’s gone.  I think it goes to Cleveland where it gets made into dancing bananas for the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, but I wonder at that huge mass of a moon and all the other masses push pulling each other in the space/time continuum that always feels to me like it must be broken somewhere.  

And then I realize it is what it is.  And at the risk of sounding foolhardy I am still alive.  And he was right, life, for all of its predestined goneness, is precious, from a certain distance that we are charged with maintaining.  It is what it is. And I can’t complain.

CASA GOOFY INTERNATIONAL PROSPECTUS

Hang On To What?

I noticed suddenly I’d lost all sense of planning and was wandering aimlessly.  I was  thinking about Robin Williams’ suicide and repeating my mantra, 

“Death of a clown.  Is this some kind of joke?”

And stopped beside a huge tract of vacant land where years ago I’d done a performance about the end of a relationship with an incest survivor and the end of my year as (self appointed) “Urban Shaman”.  I skated around burning head high cardboard paintings of buildings done, week after week, with the help of my absurd acolytes on the lawn of the main library.  Then I lay semi naked in the mud holding up a jar of ashes which a child took and gave to a motorcycle rider who came roaring up out from behind some distant trees and bushes.  And took the jar up the entrance ramp and disappeared in the sunset on I-10.  The videotape was accidentally taped over by someone else, the pictures are gone, lost by disorganization, ruined by rain, but even if that hadn’t happened, and much as it still haunts me, I can’t take you back there, someone closed and locked the gates when I left. 

Meanwhile back in the Pleistocene present, it was sunset again and clouds had come down to form a ring around the distant mountains.  It was beautiful and I was depressed. Robin had taken on a lot of grief and stupidity and traded it in on funny.  And now it was payback time.  Yeah, I’d made a little progress on my non profit gardening and art center but it just seemed to point up all that was needed to make it function and all the years of struggle threatening to come to the same meaningless end I’d seen with several other local efforts trying to reach out to global consciousness. And I wasn’t getting any younger. 

Why couldn’t someone help me?  I worked hard with my hands all my life looking forward to the day something meaningful could come of it.  Maybe the mail hadn’t been delivered.  Maybe the presentation was fatally flawed.  Maybe the heart of man was indescribably evil. Whatever.  I had staked my claim to a worldview on the wisdom of clowns, and the Clown In Chief had flipped out on me.  THAT was totally depressing. And then someone called needing their water heater lit.  

Why didn’t they understand there are bigger problems we need to address together? And huge questions to take out and look at, questions like what is Superman’s underwear made of, and how do you get the skid marks out? Why weren’t they calling up to say, we saw your website and we understand, can we give you some money?  What was I thinking? Why was I trying to think?

I went to their apartment and found the water heater dribbling out the inner liner.  And sat there a long time watching the stream of water make a light show of projections from my flashlight and remembered Robin saying, 

“Well like the guy at the suicide hotline said, ‘Life isn’t for everybody.’”

I don’t know what he was thinking, but I can’t help thinking about it.  I know you gotta put up with a lotta nothingness, you gotta just stand there like a good soldier in a bad war with toy gun and ragged flag without a country singing nonsense bravely into the fading light. I know drugs are just crutches for broken people, and sometimes jokes are just drugs. And what goes up must come down.  And when you’re down here on common ground with the rest of us, and the rest of you, the poverty of this world breaks your heart sometimes.  But plenty of broken people find some way to just keep on going.  And if you can help one of them get on down that road, that’s the bright side.

Threatened Properties

(stepping in shit and digging myself into a hole and trying harder? What the hell it's good exercise.

Dennis Williams DBA Casa Goofy International

1323 W. Hualpai Rd.

Tucson, AZ 85745-2051

dennishwilliams@gmail.com

520 288 6624

To:

Ward Three

Judith Anderson

Karen Uhlich

In regard to our discussion yesterday about the steel building at 3430 E. Presidio Rd., and my intention to deed that and all my other properties into a non-profit as part of an ongoing effort to create an art and urban agriculture resource in two neighborhoods,

I was told,

“Just because your intentions are good we can’t interrupt an ongoing process.”

But I didn’t say my intentions are good, my intentions could be evil for that matter, what I said was a lot of community benefit that is already fact can be lost and existing resources damaged to satisfy the letter but not the intent of an ordinance.  And I didn’t propose to interrupt an ongoing process.  I was trying to say a statement from your office to Planning, Code Enforcement, the Board Of Adjustment and/or Appeals could be a necessary part of that process as your representation of community interest.

We elect representatives to resolve rather than reinforce catch 22s, legal fictions and “gotchas” such as:

3 legal properties when they were bought, fifteen years later have to be considered one complex and subject to different rules than anyone at the time could have conceived, and a sudden requirement for a developmental plan beyond the scope of any individual purchaser. 

A building that was “just there” at the time my family trust bought the property to take care of my mentally ill sister, fifteen years later becomes a problem that the real estate agent didn’t figure out, had no cause to figure out, and the seller did not disclose at the time. 

Code Enforcement came out on a complaint from my tenant next door who was angry because I could not give her deposit back because cleaning and repairs amounted to two and a half times the deposit.  She complained that someone was living in the steel building.   But Planning And Zoning told me that live/work space is the most appropriate use of that building in an R2 zone.  Also “Loft Living” has even become fashionable in that type of building. But applying for and pulling permits for "live/work space" can't be done because the property is now part of a complex that didn't exist at the time of purchase.

I  spent twelve hours of my time and a draftsman’s time drawing up a plot plan on the initial word from Planning and Zoning that that was what I should do and then when I presented it was told that they had thought of some other requirements that made all that work irrelevant.

If the law can’t be consistent and not contradict itself in the view of the proverbial and fictional “reasonable person” then it seems appropriate to me for a city council person to restore community representation to the code by saying something more creative has to occur here or great harm can be done.

I have worked for fifteen years to improve and dedicate this property to the point it can be deeded in to a non-profit that is picking up the flag dropped when the International Arts Center (the old Lohse Y at 5^thAve/6^th st or MUSE) was demolished.  I worked for seven years previously at the same IAC as the HVAC guy and promoter. 

It was demolished in violation of the City’s own stipulation in trade for alternate zoning that:

“the building will always be used as a cultural resource”

And in violation of its own ordinance, issued a demolition permit on what some engineers were saying was a perfectly sound historic building.

And with promises of landscaping and help in other areas still not kept by the City, Mayor and Council “bought” the developer’s “Overlay” type excuse that he would  “give us” a sculpture garden.

But instead of even that cheap grace the developer said,

“OOPS! Made a mistake! My bad! The market just isn’t there for condos.”

So the community got an eyesore, a hole in the ground, for 7 years until some of the ugliest student housing in the country got put up in its footprint in a process called OVERLAY in which a commercial development plan such as the one I can’t afford is laid over existing code and cosmetic remediation is proposed for the general area.

Now I, the recipient and last man standing of that legacy of shame am proposing to restore some of that promise to the community and I get the responsibility for remediating a problem that "didn’t exist" for a building that "didn’t exist" at the time of purchase by a legal entity which no longer exists and in which I had only a minor vote.   But

“No good deed goes unpunished.” And as Henry Kissinger said,

“The infighting is so bitter because the stakes are so small.”

So if creative interpretation at this point makes the law applicable and helps it work in context then the community need for representation is served.

On the other hand I am seeing a situation where any jealous neighbor or disgruntled tenant can file an anonymous complaint creating a situation where there is no right for a person to confront his accusers, I am seeing Code Enforcement Officers making instead of enforcing law, and tricking old people into signing demolition agreements under duress and misinterpretation, their houses bulldozed and themselves put in nursing homes where they die of loneliness, I am seeing neighbors having to spend money that no working class person has to make their properties compatible with developer’s plans (for the El Rio Golf Course and Neighborhood), I am seeing the City make deals behind closed doors bypassing all neighborhood input for this very purpose as proven by Bill Risner’s suit on behalf of El Rio Coalition II and to top it off the Deputy City Attorney according to the judge in that case, suborned perjury.

So what community purpose is served and where does the moral authority come from to tell me my non- profit can’t have grandfathered rights for a building so far out of public view it’s practically invisible? 

So if Mayor and Council can get creative to serve the interests of money why can’t they get creative to serve justice?

I didn’t just suddenly invent this rationale for the purpose of protecting an endangered building. My non-profit, developed through fifteen years of work since the fall of the IAC, is called CASA GOOFY INTERNATIONAL in keeping with a philosophical set which I developed while studying legal fictions and semantic absurdities such as those listed above.  You can see our profile at WWOOFUSA, the website at wix.com, two Facebook pages and blogs in blogger.com.  As such it has ongoing relationships with the Cabrini Neighborhood Associations, The El Rio Neighborhood Association, Neighbors For Safer Wireless, the El Rio Coalition II, the Casa Maria Soup Kitchen and Los Amigos Childcare.  We have worked in the capacity of a program under Artfare, a 501c3 and are now ready to formalize our own non profit activities on our own. 

Finally I am saying this is a win win situation if we just let it be one.  

Dennis Williams

(Chief Cook, Janitor and Bottle Washer For Casa Goofy International)

CC: Mike Wyneger, Steve Leal, Marc Haberman, Ceci Cruz, Sal Baldenegro, Treeful Realty