[Kzyxtalk] Trouble in Limboland.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: Trouble in Limboland.

/"See, the hardest thing for me was leaving the life. I still love the 
life. And we were treated like movie stars with muscle. We had it all, 
just for the asking. Our wives, mothers, kids, everybody rode along. I 
had paper bags filled with jewelry stashed in the kitchen. I had a sugar 
bowl full of coke next to the bed. Anything I wanted was a phone call 
away. Free cars. The keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the city. 
I'd bet twenty, thirty grand over a weekend and then I'd either blow the 
winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the bookies. Didn't 
matter. It didn't mean anything. When I was broke I would go out and rob 
some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We 
paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the 
taking. And now it's all over. And that's the hardest part. Today, 
everything is different. There's no action. I have to wait around like 
everyone else. Can't even get decent food. Right after I got here I 
ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles and 
ketchup. I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a 
schnook." -Henry Hill, in Goodfellas/

The recording of last night's (2021-06-04) Memo of the Air: Good Night 
Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg is right here:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0439

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a 
fresh batch of dozens of links to not necessarily radio-useful but 
nonetheless worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the 
show together. Such as:

I hate lipstick. I hate it on people. I hate it just standing there in 
sight being a repulsive, uh, substance, its texture, the smell, the feel 
of it when someone, even your adorable sweetheart, kisses you with 
lipstick on; everything about lipstick is awful… But-- I don’t mind 
crayons at all. Crayons are fine, though I clearly remember as a small 
child being frustrated by how fragile they were. They could break in 
your fingers just by picking them up, before you even touched anything 
with them, and they wore down so fast. I preferred ballpoint pens and 
regular pencils; I really enjoyed sharpening pencils with a real 
crank-type pencil sharpener. The big fat pencils they gave you in school 
were insulting somehow. Anyway, here's Stacy Greene's creepily magnified 
visual paean to lipsticks which, oddly, I enjoy looking at, the way a 
person who hates spiders might enjoy cringing at magnified pictures of 
spiders: (via Everlasting Blort)
https://stacygreene.com/portfolio/lipsticks/

As much as I hate lipstick (and cigarets), I have always loved cigaret 
lighters. My uncle Pat used to take his lighters apart, to the tiniest 
part, on the kitchen table and clean them and reassemble them with fresh 
flints from the drug store and fresh cotton packing, and fill them with 
fluid. He kept and cherished every lighter he ever had, from even before 
the war against the Japanese in the Pacific.
https://laughingsquid.com/slow-motion-lighter-being-lit/

A neat project. Also the narrator pronounces the word kibosh the way /I/ 
do and not the way they tell you you're supposed to, so extra points. 
And I appreciate that he recognizes his physical limitations and hires 
professionals to safely demonstrate the eventual product; he gets 
professional roller derby women. I used to watch roller derby on teevee 
after school. How tough the players were. They'd elbow each other off 
their skates sometimes and barrel completely over the rails. That was a 
goddamn /sport/; not like all this boring baseball and football and 
basketball and volleyball and golf and fricking /swimming races/. Now I 
want you to imagine roller derby, the way it was in the early 1970s, but 
with jetpacks. The idea of it makes me think of the rollerskating ball 
game the kids play in their ground level slum in /Alita: Battle Angel/; 
Alita is basically a teenage girl /Astro Boy/. We could have that now in 
real life, here in what we got instead of the future we were promised. 
Jetpack Roller Derby.
https://boingboing.net/2021/06/02/real-life-jetpack-tested-out-on-roller-skates.html

That's it for now, except: Email me your written work and I'll read it 
Friday night on the radio on the very next MOTA.

--
Marco McClean, memo at mcn.org
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com