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    The Waste Basket
    The Waste Basket
    The Waste Basket
    Ebook38 pages25 minutes

    The Waste Basket

    By Mel C. Thompson

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    About this ebook

    Like countless millions before me, I was quite fascinated with Eliot's "Wasteland," and his "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and I sought to do a kind of tribute and parody of it. While I barely even quote more than a few words, here and there, from the poem, and while almost all of the work is actually "original," it seeks to bring the reader forward in history so that one could imagine Eliot traipsing the streets of Northern California after the year 2010.

    I attempted to both copy his style in some places, and then to radically oppose it in others. I find that, whether I'm going with the author of "Wasteland," or going against him, still his "mood stamp" is all over this experimental piece. The goal of this experiment is to bring the reader into my life and to see the conflicts I live here in this time and place, and also to simultaneously attempt to speak it with an Eliot-like voice, (except where I disagree with, or have moments of not liking his voice, at which point I often go into a mode of outright mockery.) Putting these odd parameters around this project made me make a lot of decisions at each juncture. I'd read a bit of Eliot, then imagine him in my shoes a half century later, and see what sort of "compromise" writing I could come up which would ideally come half way between his way of expressing things and mine.

    Coming from the San Francisco confessional school of poetry, mostly influenced by the 1990s style, I appear to the millennial reader after my time, or the more aged baby boomers before my time, as too negative and severe. Wildly, at the height of the time in which my style was more popular, audiences actually laughed all through works like this. But that has apparently all changed. In these times there is somehow a struggle with irony, parody, and satire, and a kind of humorlessness about cautiousness surrounding poetry. A kind of innocent and ultra-earnest literalism has set over the poetry establishment. This change of prevailing style took me out of the performing circles which have been purged of edginess, the former edginess now being replaced by a kind of obsession for safety and certainty, an atmosphere where the goal seems to be the banishment of uncertainty.

    If there is any prevailing religion now, it would neither be Christianity, nor Islam, (nor does Atheism prevail now). Instead certainty-ism is the all-consuming faith, the obsession with certainty merely undergoing a change of costume once in a while. This work, if one is looking for certainty, won't help your quest much. The work is admittedly meant to make you a little nervous and to disturb the complacent and controlled and orthodox messages now disseminated by virtually every major school of thought, whether political, religious, literary or romantic. In spite of all these disclaimers, I hope a few of you will make this poetic journey with me, and, if luck permits it, have a few laughs along the way.

    After writing the work in poetic verse form, I then folded the formerly individual lines back into regular prose paragraphs, not only because my poetry verges on prose, but also because I like the way the paragraphs flowed in ebook formats.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMel C. Thompson
    Release dateJul 23, 2017
    ISBN9781370421992
    The Waste Basket
    Author

    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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      Book preview

      The Waste Basket - Mel C. Thompson

      The Waste Basket

      The Lost Song of A. Milfred Bluefrock

      Quasi-Found Poetry

      — After T. S. Eliot

      Mel C. Thompson

      Copyright © 2012, 2017

      Mel C. Thompson Publishing

      Mel C. Thompson

      3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

      Lafayette, CA 94549

      zinelifecalifornia@gmail.com

      The Waste Basket: Table of Contents

      The Waste Basket Part One: A Funeral For the Living

      The Waste Basket Part Two: Failed Strategies

      The Waste Basket Part Three: A Lukewarm Doctrine

      The Waste Basket Part Four: A Loss of Faith At The Embarcadero

      The Waste Basket Part Five: An Aborted Tornado

      An Endless Irrational Epilogue

      The Lost Song of A. Milfred Bluefrock: Table of Contents

      Preface I

      1. Attempts To Marry Badly

      2. The River of Claustrophobia

      3. No One Mourns Their Deaths

      4. Paradise Which You Refused

      5. Then Instinct Kicks In

      Preface II

      6. The Testosterone Paradox

      7. Omega Male Orbiter

      8. Let Us Fly To Brighton

      9. Mother Shoved Me From The Nest

      Afterword

      Partial Reconsiderations

      Other Books by Mel C. Thompson

      The Waste Basket

      The Waste Basket Part One: A Funeral For The Living

      Return To Table of Contents

      I would begin this with a quote in Latin, except my cheap-ass, social-promotion education in the slacker high schools of the Seventies ensured that I would never get beyond inept Spanish.

      April is truly the fool's month, forcing ineligible bachelors from their ugly apartments, sending incompetent sole proprietors to flea markets, tempting uneducated shoppers out to buy cheap plastic junk from China.

      Winter was as miserable as Hell. It nearly froze all the low-income, artsy posers too cheap to blast their heaters. It tortured lonely cat-ladies with an even deeper isolation.

      Summer was just a complete farce. Sun-burnt and sweaty, we lumbered on. We stopped by City Hall, took the antique street cars to Pier Thirty-Nine and were tempted to revert to marijuana in North Beach.

      Here I would insert something in some Germanic tongue, but the sound of that language irritated me, and so

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