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BOB'S Art Studio
323 Fenn Street
Pittsfield,MA.

poetry & paintings

Spoken Word Forum
every sunday 3pm
poets, writers, storytellers...

413-212-7180

free admission

Bob Balogh
artistic director

ON TELEVISION:

"Herman Scuttle"

www.ctsbtv.org

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgJuwDkjzQz_1nhZ_9mXQjg

BOOKS:
"My Thursday Face" (2022)
"Search For Anything" (2021)
"Iced Tea & Apologies" (2018)
"Scat" (2018)
"Earthworms Have Five Hearts" (2016)
"Manage the Sweat" (2016)
"Incidents" (2014)
"Mornings" (2013)
"Greater Backfish Journal" (2006)
"Variations of You" (1999)

RECENT MASTERWORK:

ONE LAST DEATH INCIDENT

Next time I die, it will have to be the last time. Because death is wearing me out. And don’t worry about it, with my ensuing final death, I will be gone for good. Enough is enough.

There is plenty of money in my bank, earmarked for my adult offspring. Thousands of dollars are there, meant for my daughters & son. And they should have easy access & no problems. No reason for them to bother my interminable sleep by waging war in Probate Court.

Then I recommend taking my material belongings & starting a colossal bonfire. Especially throw in my published printed words. They have always been sufficiently flammable for a big, long-lasting blaze.

And staring at a good fire, whether it’s a backwoods campfire or the conflagrations in a household fireplace...it most often provides inspiration. A muse to just shut up & have one brilliant thought for a change.

As for the Pittsfield panhandlers who might be missing me, they can start to chisel pocket change from the beneficiaries of my estate. No more badass Bob, the ATM. No more sweet Robert, the Deus ex Machina.

Yes, next time I die, that’s all folks. Dry runs & dress rehearsals will be finished. And at long last, I’ll be decompressing & decomposing in everlasting peace.

ERIC INCIDENT

New neighbor, Eric, officially not homeless anymore. Berkshire Housing put him upstairs. I think he said his rent is prorated at $100 per month. He mumbles. He fidgets. But he’s a step ahead of the scurvy homeless shelters & the miserable couch-surfing.

Eric, 40, asked me for money. I put him to work. He showed up just in time to help me move. Moving out of my art studio on First Street over to a new one on Fenn. All of a sudden, artistic differences between me & the landlord. Don’t ask.

Eric, lifted a few boxes into my car. Lit a cigarette & made me take him to McDonald’s. Fell asleep. On the nod before he could place his order. But we managed to bring a few loads to the new place. Couple hours work. I paid him $60 cash. He napped again on the way home.

Eric is upstairs now. Weed & whiskey & a long, hot shower. A new neighbor. A possible friend, a probable pain in the ass. Just one more naturally imperfect perfect fool. Such as myself, the great freak magnet.

MAN OR BEAST INCIDENT

You fuss & fret & just plain worry all the time, which makes you forget who’s the boss. Which is a cockeyed way of carrying on. Now, any old anybody gets to give you orders.

And if you take a look at yourself, here you are edgy, jumpy, anxious to please. Overworked, underappreciated, misunderstood & nobody’s got your back. Never not nothing but moving to somebody else’s beat.

Then take a look at your dog, your shiny, happy dog,

who masters a life of pleasing you & himself 50-50.

Which could be a new trick for your breed of mongrel to rouse your animal instincts & maybe free yourself up.

Good inspiration for man or beast.

BOARDING HOUSE INCIDENT

12 people, 2 bathrooms. That was part of my habitat not too long ago. Life in a rundown boarding house in Dalton, MA. Single room occupancy (SRO). Each little room having that jail cell coziness.

Every room had a sink, too. And if both toilets were occupied, hell yes, I peed in the sink. But I learned to poop early in the morning before coffee. Because once that coffee smell was in the air, it worked as organic laxative.

Then among my fellow boarders, a dozen sets of bowels would relax in unison. And the 2 bathrooms would be log jammed. But even in those days, I had no patience to queue up for anything. So, I adjusted my metabolism to shit early.

I took care of my feculent logistics right before the crack-of-dawn. Meaning, I would seize the day by getting just ahead of the dawning of my neighbors’ open cracks.

BULLSHIT ARTISTS INCIDENT

Admittingly, I am an extremely prejudiced man. I vehemently hate 3 kinds of people. Those who engage in Stolen Valor, Plagiarism & Counterfeiting. All of them genuine Bullshit Artists.

STOLEN VALOR: Fake, fraudulent phonies, who usually pose as military veterans for fame & fortune.

PLAGIARISM: Someone who takes ideas from a source, without giving proper credit to the author & represents those ideas as their own.

COUNTERFEITING: A person who makes illegal copies of things such as cash, bank notes, official documents, etc.

They get off by using their talent for deception, selling mendacious information as if it is fact. Just plain Bullshit Artists. Most folks will swallow their bullshit. But I use my talent of Bullshit Radar to expose them whenever they get too close. And for the record, I don’t really hate them. I violently despise them.

BAD BREATH INCIDENT

But she had bad breath...She was giving off a smell of an undigested lunch of garlic & rotten eggs. Which was seeping through her COVID facemask. And yes, she had movie star good looks, hair to high heels. Porcelain skin, hazel eyes, black mini dress, hourglass physique…

Right there by the only seat left in the Greyhound. She wanted to stay in the aisle seat, so I wedge into the window seat, last available seat on the bus.

But she had bad breath...Garlic & rotten eggs, even through the COVID mask. Her phone in one hand & a vape in the other. I had half a bag of Werther’s butterscotch. Offered her one, but she shook her head No.

Then: “I know you think I stink,” she said. “But it’s caused by excretion of dimethyl disulphide & methyl mercaptan, arising from an excess of methionine.”

I said: “Oh, I get it. So, in that case, do you happen to have an extra COVID mask?”

I fell asleep right out Port Authority, woke up just after Stamford & she was gone. Too bad. Wish I could have made friends, surrendered to her bewitching allure. All the qualities of an ideal soulmate. Near perfection.

But then again, she did have that significant imperfection, that pungent circumstance of really bad breath...

NEWS

ACCORDING

BOB

3 men drifted out to sea in England on an inflatable duck…650 feet from shore. Lucky for them, they were rescued by a paddleboarder, who towed them back to safety. To no one’s surprise, the 3 men were found to be under the influence of quack cocaine.

At the Post Oak Hotel in Houston, TX a prankster checked in & asked the front desk to immediately send diet water & melted ice cream to his room. The concierge immediately decided to prank the prankster by disconnecting the room’s AC…to give the guy a warm reception.

Serena Bodunrun just graduated from James Martin High School in Arlington, TX. with the class of 2023. Serena is only 14 years old. The graduates in the school’s auditorium must have been very hot. It was 98 degrees outside with 500 degrees inside.

The world’s fastest trash can was designed by Michael Wallhead of Yorkshire, England. It was a regular trash can equipped with a 2-stroke engine & go-kart wheels & reached a speed of 55 mph. Sadly, the speedy trash can crashed & now it’s a trash can’t.

The annual Cheese Rolling Race took place in Brockworth, England. The winner was 19-year-old Delaney Irving, who chased a large wheel of Gloucester cheese down a steep hill. The event was broadcast on Brie-Brie-C TV.

A former high school in Burbank, Oklahoma recently sold for $60,000 & was converted into a 1-family home. 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms & an indoor basketball court. The anonymous buyer said it’s where his high school sweetheart broke his heart. She was a tennis player & love meant nothing to her.

A recycling group in Bucharest has created a tee-shirt measuring 357 ft. long, 241 ft. wide. The massive tee-shirt is made from over 500,000 recycled plastic bottles. On a smaller scale, the recycling group is making something normal-sized, so the Romanian Army can go to war in tank tops.

Yoga fanatic Josef Salek set a world record by remaining in the Plank position for 9 hours. Later, he was convicted on tax evasion & sentenced to 5 years in prison. He said: “Hell, I can do that time standing on my head.”

The state of Georgia has had to remind drivers they can’t pose for their licenses in the nude. Which makes the DMV photographer flabbergasted. He says: “Some of these people seem to crave exposure. And with a lot of them, I can clearly see they’re nuts.

balogh613@aol.com

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