The Salmagundi
Gallimaufry Treatment
or
23 Skiddoo-Dude Hits His Stride
When I was a senior
in high school I worked in a record and book shop. Also working there was a
likable and diminutive fellow who was a bit older than me. It was the very
early ‘70s; I was in the record department he was in books. There was something about him. He seemed to know
things—things that I could learn from just hanging around with him. He had a
way of letting his gaze drift, revealing a mind adrift, an open sensibility to
his surroundings. And he was a pleasant sort of guy who conversed easily, matter-of-factly.
His way was meaningful and he became a kind of older brother to me.
One day he told me he
went to an office hoping to meet with someone there. He said that,
unfortunately, he couldn’t get past the secretary; that this secretary seemed
to be acting as some sort of bulwark protecting the person within the walls
behind the door, and that he was not able to proceed because of her officious,
protective force-field. He then told me that he decided to write a poem about
it and give it to her. I suppose he did. I don’t remember any more to the
story.
Well, that story made
an impression upon me. Imagine, if you will, documenting impressions of certain
people, places, things, that cause a stir within; sense impressions wanting to
be released, described, memorialized for all time—perhaps, like my elder
friend, you channel your sense of powerlessness-in-the-face-of-some-seemingly-implacable-force
into a set of words—and you find your power, or at least, a power—a power of mind, a power of heart and soul, to describe and
contextualize sensory inputs, thoughts and feelings—you get them out and these
words sizzle and pop their meaningful and satisfying existence, the ends for
which, well, you might just throw back upon a bullish “sentry-of-a-sexretary,”
for example. Or, like me, you may simply collect these scribbles and horde
them, for some reason or other. And then, one day, you suddenly notice them all
and decide that you just might throw the best of them all together into a
volume of “poetry”[1]<=YES!
Salmagundi
Gallimaufry
is no ordinary book of poetry (if any such thing exists). The poems herein are
a “smorgasbord.” (Indeed, the two words of its title actually refer to two
types of smorgasbords.) Readers are invited to eat their fill, to read until
they’re full—and if they do, they will not
be full of it, for sure.
These particular, chosen poems are gems that have been hand-picked by the author as representative of his work. These were taken from the author’s “driftscape,” a period that spans almost half a century, from about 1970 thru 2017, written in varying locales in America, as well as during travels abroad.
This book is beat poetry with existential twists that pop and sizzle, serving up a soul platter of surprises, red pill detours, and meditations for both the poet and the potato head in all of us. It’s a serving that is not only a sort of “raconteur’s travel brochure,” but also presents as an introduction to the “poetic impulse,” demonstrating how to transmute, transfigure, transmogrify poetic inspiration into sense-and-soul-bearing words, phrases, and inter-related stanzas that deliver “meaningful frequencies”—sound that breathes into the hearts of its readers and its hearers.
Salmagundi Gallimaufry delivers to readers such seemingly pedestrian notions that cover leaf blowers, a supermarket tour, and even detail a factory of bad attitudes; it closely inspects a life on bits of paper, while not discounting transpersonal progress, feeling the crush of fools, or being a symptom-bearer. The poems also relate some chancy realities such as Korean cultural impressions, a certain house of constipation, Memoirs from the Doghouse, and a poetic recollection entitled The Sick Book: A (Pop) Poem. And oh…there’s a whole lot more!
These
poems are peppered and laced with colorful graphics, pleasing to the eye, going
beyond the text into imagistic respites, reflecting romps that trace the “picnic of poetic excess” that document the author’s
rambles—rambles that vary from raw sensory observation to metaphysical
reflection. Yes, the poetry of Jack Suss infuses imagery from the physical
senses, as filtered both through the author’s cultural mutant mind and his
creative loafer soul—all uniquely packaged into a feast, ready to be
appreciated and nibbled upon by poetry lovers worldwide.
Each of these little
clumps of verbiage harks back to a memory of a place in time, once upon a time.
And reading what I had written, brings me back there, not unlike a pop song
that loops around in your head reminding you of a certain time and place in
your life. It doesn’t matter that you note and pen-in the spot and date at the
end of the poem; you just know. But there it is: “Sugar Tree, TN/ September 30,
2014” or “Mt. Vernon, TX/ September 12, 2014”<=places I was at and never
returned to at a time when I was driving an 18-wheeler truck—or—April 1, 2017/
Silver Spring, MD=>sitting at my desk at home when suddenly something sort
of just manifested…as… Twaddle.
Poems are like
photos-of-the-mind, jotted down, perhaps worked on later, polished and perfected,
at least in order to say what needs to come out. They memorialize what is
needed to preserve the context of a moment in time—a time in a place, in a
continuing drama, a stage in a life—the life of my choice, wherever it may be
and whatever I was up to. It’s almost as if there’s a monkey, not on my back
but in my mind, who jumps out from time-to-time with his little camera to take
a snapshot of what’s out there (but linguistically formulated from within) then
put down on paper.
In my poetry I’ll
take you to places, from stuffy old Chevy Chase and Silver Spring, Maryland to dopey
Hadley, Massachusetts, to New York City, San Francisco and Berkeley, over to
Glorieta, New Mexico and way across the sea to Port Douglas, Australia, and
even to Nonsan, Republic of Korea, with pit stops in Istanbul, Turkey, South
Bethany, Delaware, then back around to Queenstown, Maryland, with Baltimore
thrown in for good measure. The time range?—again, the 1970s through to 2017.
It’s a trek through time and space, pilgrim, and I’m the narrator.
Some might say I win
the booby prize in life, dealing as I have with my (self-diagnosed) career
identity disorder. And that’s just professional jargon meant to ask: WHO AM
I?—lifetime student? rambling bluesman? rough roofer? itinerant ESL teacher?
lawyer/attorney? JAG Officer? writer/journalist? doctoral candidate? chauffeur?
bakery delivery man? truck driver? explorer? a pick-up-sticks golf course
worker? hobo?—I am all of these things: the sum of my experiences, while taking
none of them too seriously.
Accordingly, there’s
a lot to be said for experience. It
might be said that I’m a traveler, a time traveler through varied modes of being,
of going and doing, just tasting the juicy flavors of these roles while not
stopping too long to get “trapped at the feast”—or as I prefer to say: “I’ve
been in training my whole life for my retirement,” so I don’t have to worry
that boredom will encroach upon me and I’ll soon die from lack of any
meaningful stuff to do, the fate of many a retiree these days.
Experience is the
foundation for the writing of poetry, the fountainhead of prose. Putting
oneself, all of one’s senses, one’s
mind—with its mysterious aura, its electro-magnetic frequencies, its pumping
magic soul-plasma—as it playfully imparts from its surroundings whatever is
there; the brain draws on the vocabulary, choosing the words, and the hands
write them down (or tap them out)—the word-sounds, whose vibrations and
frequencies express the experience of being there at some certain time. The
moment is memorialized in accordance with the being/doing of the author<=that
wily narrator, ME.
The rhyme, the
rhythm, assonance, alliteration—it’s an almost speaking-in-tongues. But…hold
the complexification!...let’s not get too complicated. What’s just as important
is that a poem tells a story of sorts. And when you have a collection of poems,
you have a collective over-story=>snapshots
of a life, an organized confusion that congeals, budding and blooming into a
formative wholeness, in spite of the preferences and results of one author’s
experiences, one who narrates occasional parts, almost accidental aspects of
the whole.
The poems document
that journey. Some might describe it as the odyssey of a truth seeker bound to
a prison planet, who learns on this soul-making plane via lots of hard knocks
along the way; records of an action-life, of theories and hypotheses worked
out; a rag-tag serendipitous synchronicity of one’s hard knocks identity.
Imagine the book
brought to life in film. The language of the poems themselves will provide much
of the script. Talented screenwriters can put together a skillful series of
scenes that document the intelligent vagabonding life of the protagonist as he
uses the language gleaned from the poems presented in Salmagundi Gallimaufry.
And yet your
poet-author also wrote an autobiographical account of himself in another of
this works, Plight of the Cultural Mutant. This tome was
written more or less contemporaneously. Thus, the essays or articles in that
book expand and "fill out" in prose form that same journey of almost
half-a-century with a wealth of additional, perhaps explanatory, imagistic
substance and detail.
This begs the
question as to what in the hell is the riveting point of interest for the
moviegoers in this story of self-discovery?—a crucial question. It’s an inquiry
that’s there to be uncovered, unveiled. And it’s more than exploring one’s
travels, various jobs, or a doctoral romp into integral consciousness. Imagine,
if you will, witnessing the grace of the Holy Spirit, an over-soul that guides an
entity through this worldly maze—a soulful journey, you might say.
The author here is a
man who, unlike most folks these days, never liked and tried not to live in a
phony-baloney world. In this sense he was, in essence, a cultural mutant. Oh,
like all of us, he got mind-controlled by the mass propaganda machine all right.
But he always thought something was off,
was slightly askew. He internalized this unreal sensibility. And his career
identity disorder manifested via an ability at being a multi-career virtuoso as
he navigated or “surfed” consensual reality and culture trance.
In 2006,
(coincidentally the year he earned his PhD in Humanities from the California
Institute of Integral Studies) he became “red-pilled”; and seeing through the
matrix of lies he began his ferreting through many a rabbit hole. Of course
that led to the typical stages of awakening:
- shock and awe when realizing the lies we’ve
been taught
- incessant search and research
- latching onto the “alt-news”
- suspecting and seeing conspiracies everywhere
- becoming a smug know-it-all as to “what’s
really going on”
- losing friends and feeling lonesome with very
few friends who “get it”
- gradually calming and learning to hone one’s
inner discernment
- getting a sense that there is no “reality”
anymore (perhaps many realities)
- finally adapting to being a “stranger in a strange land”
And so a documentary
emerges: the bio of a man who is waking up; a man in search of truth. Among
other identities, he is a poet. His poems reveal a self-reflexive mirroring of a
magical realism that is all around him. In fact, his favorite books are his
three in this genre: 23 Skiddoo (2016);
Time Tweaking (2017); and Spyoptaelip the Cryptic (2020).
He’s a blues man: a
professional underground piano player and singer known as Stubby Knuckles. He
learns the roofing trade and can do anything on a roof, then goes down to New
Orleans following his serendipitous 9-year plan, his on-again-off-again slog to
earn an undergraduate degree (in business). He goes to law school and becomes a
lawyer, then joins the U.S. Army JAGC as a First Lieutenant. Of course he’s
always scribbling something. After the Army he does a stint as a journalist in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, always a gigging bluesman on the side. He also tried his
hand at teaching English as a Second Language—in Korea, (with a bluesman
respite in Australia) then in Istanbul, and finally at a military installation
in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. He married a Korean gal—bla, bla, bla…though now he’s working
toward having two wives…
The point is, for
most of his life he’s gone about all of this as a citizen slave and more or
less a pauper whose interest in money-making ranges from marginal to close to
nil.
In 2021 he discovers
the American state national movement[2] whose
Assemblies in every state aim to resurrect the original American constitutional
republic. He changes his status from citizen to Maryland state national and, so as not to have one foot
in two jurisdictions, disavows his B.A.R. membership. He has already become a
writer, a red-pilled writer that no traditional publishing houses want to
publish because he is a “Matrix decoder.” So he self-publishes=>eleven books to date with two more currently in
the hopper. See, https://wyamwicket.com
This is the
documentary of a guy who has become, not a conspiracy theorist, but a
conspiracy therapist. His books
reflect and teach what he has come to know about the world—a fallen world run
by Luciferian globalist elites, their secret society minions and helpful idiots,
and he’s here to help others. Now, with Trump in office as the tip of the spear,
with the covert and nebulous white hat alliance and their Secret Space Program
in charge, with Palantir helping to secure the Golden Dome in place, the corrupt
old Deep State is on the skids and the world is waking up. But this documentary
is timely in that it tells the story from this protagonist’s twisted human
interest point of view; many can relate to this now endemic state of (not being
“woke”, but) “waking up.”[3]
As for presenting a
story line with enough guts and glamor, twists and turns, I’ll leave that for
the screenwriters to visualize and set forth. I believe the strength of my
contribution is the book of poetry (aided by the autobiography) from which many
lines of script can be borrowed. This story goes beyond the power curve and is
a timely one, considering the current news.—and the notion of portraying the
personal struggle of a red-piller who has overcome many challenges while coming
to often mind-blowing conclusions about the reality of the world and the cosmos
that have proven themselves true, over time.
I’ve had my share of hardships,
beginning with going through puberty and trying to handle the hormones coursing
like kerosene through my veins—and I was a lusty lad. At right about that time,
along came the so-called Aquarian Conspiracy, hatched by the British Tavistock
Institute. You know, that whole “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” thing that
ravaged the morals of the post-war baby boomers. Yours truly bought into that,
for sure, beginning way back in 7th grade (’66-’67. At least the music was good back then.)
As a child, I rode my
bike into a parked car and ended up with a scar on the lower left side of my cheek.
Some years later I ran headlong into some plate glass, breaking and badly
cutting the bridge of my nose. Years later, I fell off a roof and broke my
wrist. Nothing too traumatic…a few scars and banged up a bit.
But I note here that
psycho-spiritual demons can be more terrible and difficult to deal with than any
physical trauma. I was plagued by depression over some years. I learned not to
get too upset over being depressed, though, and to let it “pass through me.”
After all, I am a bluesman. (I suppose, looking back, being depressed might
very well have had a lot to do with overcoming a bad diet.)
The way the
government, banks and society generally treat the common people when it comes
to money is stress-inducing to say the least. Materialist striving, now quite
in the ascendant position, is also a sad state to be caught up in. Add to that,
TV and Hollywood, all of the lying institutions, a bloated, on-the-dole, do-nothing
Congress, franchise corporate courts—post-modern life in general is hell. Your
protagonist has been fighting this most of his not-very-happy life. Taking
frequent tactical retreats to the beach or to exotic foreign lands has helped
somewhat. Yet, seeing the effect of false consciousness, mindless consumption,
and a dumbed-down, mind-controlled world going full tilt is so gut-wrenchingly
sad, even though it’s beginning to change for the better.
I finished my
university undergraduate education in New Orleans back in ‘81, in my off-time playing
piano and singing down on Decatur Street in the French Quarter. I worked
through a bad bout of jealousy down there. (I wrote about that in Forever Safari (2022)). Drinking has had
its negative influence; smoking tobacco too. Escaping by altering one’s
consciousness only goes so far…
And yet, your
protagonist, as big and bold as he could be, never lost his faith in Jesus.[4] He
stood by his moral convictions, and always aimed at being a gentleman, while
still having his rowdy moments—riding motorcycles, going to bars, embracing a
playboy philosophy. (Oh but there were some real Hall of Famers among those
women folk. Yet woe-be-told when recalling all of those wasted days and wasted
nights!) And, besides never raising my own children there was a
psycho-spiritual price to pay—and pay I did, even as I wrote a three-volume
Christ-centered work I entitled Soul
Enticed.
So it wasn’t until 2006,
when I was about 52-years old and married for eight years that I began my red-pill,
wake-up journey. I thank the Good Lord that I came to find myself, to begin to
discover my purpose in life, and to adopt the right perspective at last. As
many attest, the access to information on the internet had a lot to do with the
waking up process.
Since then it’s been
a matter of staying informed of current news without obsessing about it. As
mentioned above, I believe that there is a definite white hat group out there,
as well as a Secret Space Program—even a Galactic Alliance. They are the counter
to the Deep State/globalist cabal of elites whose Satanic agenda is being
methodically dismantled for the first time since Babylon. The military
intelligence operation known as “Q” is very real too, and worth scrutinizing as
we dismantle the Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMBs) and deal with encountering
The Storm.
I also wonder if we
may be about seven years from the Apocalypse as is related in the last book of
the Bible, Revelation; that we are in the early stages of the Tribulation. So
hold onto your hats, boys and girls; just in case, repent and get your soul
straight; the time is now.
What does it all mean
for this cultural mutant? Well, besides sitting in the peanut gallery with
popcorn in-hand watching the current shit-show, it just means that the times
they are a’changin’—and it does a fellow proud to watch all of the commies shit
themselves and the Luciferians start to run for cover. I feel as if I knew this
time would come. At least I hoped it would. And I find it absolutely amazing
how America is finally being pulled out of its lethargic and hopelessly stunted
state and is beginning to right itself—to shed its Brit controller, those Pilgrims
Society masters and their SERCO/SES pirates who have been leeching off of
America the Beautiful for much too long. There is much unwinding yet to come. However
it has started and it is grand!
I
have tried to express all of the above in my writing over the past ten years
and
more (among which I would include my blogs,[5] began in 2007). So the poetry hits some hairy highlights over a period of almost half-a-century. In that respect it provides a sort of running script in colorful language as a knowing sort of lead up to throwing light upon what is transpiring right now. And yep—take it from me—old Jack Suss aka Wyman Wicket—I told you so!
I would advise going
through each poem. See what each one brings up for you. These beat poems should
guide screenplay writers along nicely. I think good poetry can do that (he
said, modestly). Seriously, give the poems some room to breathe inside of you.
I think they just might lead the narrative along into its film adaptation,
mostly documentary but with lots of side forays into “wild thing misadventures”
and sensuous fantasy destinations that may tend to enrapture. They may even
inspire an audience toward an inner journeying of their own. I hope so. After
all, I believe there is a tremendous thirst for the real, the authentic, for
being and doing something meaningful
in life—definitely something beyond that 9-5 world of making money and being
boxed-in a limited tunnel of un-reality. We long to be free from our
controllers—to embrace our liberty full throttle while loving and helping others
and all life forms.
It’s a big old world
out there—a cosmos in fact, full of magic and mysteries—with an even bigger
inner world to soak it all in. People are ready to live more fully, to move
into their dreams and visions that call to them throughout their lives—lives
that are all too miserable most of the time—boring lives of boredom. Instead, let
your imagination out for an evening stroll; walk-the-dog, so to speak, and while
you’re at it, nibble on some poems, even compose your own, but folks, never
forget to let the good times roll![6]
[1]
Salmagundi Gallimaufry Poems By Jack
Suss (2017)
[3]
In this respect, my magical realism
novels (see, p. 7, above) are also ideal templates for developing films.
[4]
I worship, adore, and pray to God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Jesu
Christe, the Divine Son of God, is my role model for being an ideal, ensouled
human being. I am put off by parochial declarations that all who don’t accept
Jesus Christ as their personal Savior are damned or necessarily lost souls;
there are sincere spiritual seekers, not necessarily religionists whatsoever,
who seek God by standing for the good, the true and the beautiful in accordance
with the foundation and principles—the Golden Rule—of our creator God, viz., Almighty
God’s creation of nature, of life, the universe, and the perpetual and
boundless existence of a guiding sacred grace.
[5]
Stories, Essays, Detritus – https://spyoptaelip.blogspot.com/
U812 BeatPoet – https://jsuss.blogspot.com/
Wyman Wicket’s WonderMat – https://wymanwicket.blogspot.com/
[6] “Laissez les bon temps rouler, oui!” sings old Memphis Slim (John Len “Peter” Chatman)
