THANKLESS THOUGHTY THINKLETS: HOURS or MINUTES of FUN FUN FUN

XXX A dream in which I minted this aphorism in the presence of a woman: “There are more who masturbate extremely well than there are who don’t at all.” It rolled off my tongue like a Wildean paradox in the dream and I woke up feeling momentarily proud of it.

XXX What year was it decided that if one is to appear in a photograph one is to grin like a fucking idiot? What are all these people smiling at in all these photos? The hilarious photographer? The “birdie”? The thought of lunch, dinner, oral sex or the painful death of an enemy? Didn’t serious people used to leave their default facial expression (“serious”) in place when having their pictures taken? In what year was this unspoken law (“Thou Shalt grin like a 4-year-old in all photos”) ratified?

XXX Trust Your Boredom

XXX It’s the little things: like how we were all taught, in High School and College, that Monotheism is an evolutionary step above Polytheism. Which is like claiming that a pinstriped business suit is an evolutionary step over a Sari: how? Where is the proof or the (non-ethnocentric) Logic in that?

XXX  A dream in which a beautiful kitten (muted orange-colored, white, green eyes) was stuck outside the balcony door of David Bowie’s apartment while Bowie was on the phone. Bowie said “I can hear Coperni” (accent on the second syllable, short “i” like a diminutive of “Copernicus” or was it a ref to COPD?) “but I can’t see her” (to whoever it was on the phone). I said, “She’s trapped outside the door there.” Bowie let her in (he was in his 50-year-old bachelor look; long hair and blue cardigan). Bowie quipped, while picking Coperni up, “We understand cats but we’re stuck with women.” I feigned horror, comedically, and was about to say something clever when I woke up. I suspect my snoring was the sound-effect of the cat crying from outside the balcony, but it would had to have been high-pitched.

The first part of the dream involved me being sort of drafted as a writer/ speech writer for Donald Trump. Trump was a negative figure in the dream (as he is in Life) but I felt it would be amazingly ironic/ funny if I were to do such a job, even just once;  a funny story to tell my friends. Early scene in the dream:  people are gathered in a dark upstairs space and it became time to leave for a party (possibly televised). Trump tugged my sleeve gruffly to indicate that it was time to go. Trump’s presence was a familiar one: who did he remind me of? Someone gruff, but not threatening, that I’ve known. Still trying to remember.

Everyone walks downstairs. A reedy type named “Mark” has been chosen to get me to this party where Trump will speak.  Mark gently critiques my style of dress (which is, in the dream, as it is in real life) and suggests I’ll need to get business outfits.  We leave the building.  As the dream commences, Mark, who is with his bicycle,  seems to keep getting us lost, and he disappears twice.  As it often happens in my dreams, I try to use a dream-cell phone to call Wife and/or Daughter but I can’t make any sense of the phone. In this dream, the face of the phone looks like the dark-blue,  or purplish, city-night-scene (the skyline etc)  of some kind of “Things to Do in the City”  website.  After my guide Mark’s  second disappearance, the Bowie phase of the dream began. “We understand cats but we’re stuck with women.” He chuckled with affection. What a line!

XXX Certain strata are afforded a kind of dream to live in, the dream that Life is not a bloody struggle for dominance that produces real deaths and ten thousand wrecked losers, for every winner, per hour of every day. It’s a dream of fairness and self-improvement and slow but measurable progress,  a dream that justice inevitably prevails and that most inequality is the result of nothing more sinister than unfortunate misunderstandings. The dream is poignant and preposterous. The poor of the poorest nations know it’s a lie and the ultra-powerful of the richest nations know it’s a lie but books, HBO, movies, pop songs, stand-up comedians and, of course, dead-eyed politicians with shit-eating perma-grins work every hour of every day to promote and preserve this dream and, further, to derive political power by suggesting that certain forces (forces that The Good Guys of The Dream are working to defeat) threaten this dream…  so vote for X, consume Y, believe in Z to protect the dream and all the dreams within it. The bourgeois cluster of self-serving Progressive-American delusions we call Hope. Let every celebrity adopt an African child; let the flash mobs push the beached whale back into the Ocean. Decrease your carbon footprint with free-range lattes. Incremental Utopia. By working within The System oppressing us,  The Dream informs us…

XXX  Speaking as an experience-hardened Agnostic: Richard Dawkins always indulged in too many faith-like leaps of logic for my taste (his sloppy hypotheticals “explaining” the processes of the evolution of the eye, for example) and his unshakable faith in the theory-thief Darwin borders on being Jehovah’s Witnessesque. And if being against cannibalism is a “silly taboo” (as Dawkins has positioned his opinion of that position),  so is being against using teens as breeding cattle. Some Silly Taboos are Good.

XXX We of the Non-Fooled ARE LIKE AN ER STAFFED WITH BRILLIANT DIAGNOSTICIANS AND NO SURGEONS.

XXX The Life of a Dedicated Crypto-Surrealist is a thrilling adventure of reaching 22% of the people 2% of the time to no conceivable advantage.

XXX  Civilization is an Asshole Amplification Device.

XXX A Little Poem

The problem with putting

more energy into appearing

to know things than actually knowing

things is that this leaves

you vulnerable to manipulation by tricksters who  know

they can count on your pride as a force to push

you unquestioningly along in

any scheme hastening

your tragic undoing as you act

as if you knew

exactly what happened all

along

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XXX  Sophie Scholl is the kind of example They love to give us, isn’t she, because she was detected and neutralized early in her Resistance (I write this not far from a school that’s named after her… but the school itself is not far from a street named after Hitler’s lair in Munich, so…). What’s needed, in the end, is effective, next-level Guerilla Sneakiness. Don’t sacrifice yourself as a matter of principle… live on to keep fighting. Out-think the Fuckers, Out-maneuver the Fuckers, Out-live the Fuckers and by all means, if you can, outbreed them.

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XXX Excellent Royalty-Free Band Name #1:  WE HAVE NEVER FUCKED IN THAT TRUCK

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XXX Daughter and I went shopping today. We walked up to the salad bar in our favorite grocery store (open containers of chopped tomatoes, chicken,  beans, diced cucumbers, olives, potato salad, corn, ham, coleslaw, boiled eggs, etc, under a sneeze-guard) and I said, “This is the best salad bar in a town full of salad bars!” As if to illustrate my point, a woman in a mask walked up and began ladling chicken, corn, tomatoes and beans  onto her plastic salad plate with gusto. I turned to Daughter and said, “But if there really were a pandemic, would salad bars be possible?”

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XXX THE COUCHPOTATOTARIAT

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XXX  A Letter to Dear Old College Fuckface

Dear Fuckface:

Re: upness at 6 after c. 5 hours of sleep: that was my rhythm until they physically shut down the schools here (was that before Xmas vacation last year? I think so, though there were some intermittent variations, early in the year, that are blurring it up a bit)… now I’m up at 7:30 every morning. Six hours of sleep seems to be my maximum, unless I go to sleep during the day and I know Wife is watching things… then I relax into the many-fingered embrace of the afternoon’s back-lit dreams and I wake up at 9pm or 10pm, thoroughly rubber-jawed and woefully jet-lagging my schedule for the next day. Taking a nap in the afternoon is nearly as bad as jerking off in the morning.

I won’t say much about the placebodemic (I’m pretty sure you know already I consider it blatant hokum, accomplished in part by hijacking/ rebranding the annual Flu and spicing things up with lethal and unnecessary intubations and strategically-placed, corrupt and very probably military-or-intelligence-employed X-Ray technicians who deliberately over-expose the supposed C-vid plates… and so forth). A means to an end.

Re: over-committing yourself: I never had that problem but Wife did and I had to wean her off it.  Actually, no, wait, I did have that problem, once. In c. 2003 I started helping this old expat filmmaker do his laundry every week. It started off as an Art Project… he had all kinds of 16mm footage of the 1960s (including Hendrix, The Who, The Village full of mod hippies, naked beautiful sex symbols of the era like Patti D’Arbanville, Be-Ins, Altamont, the 1968 Democratic Convention, William Burroughs and Jean Genet et al) and I wanted to write a script to incorporate that footage in a film. This was after I’d sold an option on a script to a German Production company (this must have happened after your visit to Berlin). During the process of cataloguing all his footage the sly old bastard (who not only got me as a free assistant, cataloguing his goddamn footage)  asked if I might, as long as I was at his place (on the other side of town from where I was living then) accompany him as he did his laundry. (Too cheap to get his own washer/ dryer combo: should have been a tip-off). To make a long story short, I ended up helping that old guy do his laundry (every Thursday at 2pm) for well over a year… long after the idea of incorporating his footage, in a script of mine, evaporated… the old bunko artist never intended to let anyone else make use of his footage. When Wife got pregnant I had the perfect “excuse” to quit, though why I needed an “excuse” escapes me. So many dangerous, self-centered, crypto-pushy Users out there, in this world, if you’re a nice guy who’s so happy with himself that he can afford the luxury of stooping to help at others. I wasn’t virtue-signalling, I wasn’t expecting to laundry-help my way to a career in Hollywood… I was just being the kind of guy I thought I should be. So the wily old fucker exploited me.

Re: your Dad: did he ever drink alcohol… or even sodas? I have a theory that “Dementia” (and even Schizophrenia*) is a blood-sugar / para-diabetes thing. My mother didn’t touch booze but she drank Pepsi Cola “religiously” (that adverb is always more apt than we give it credit for being) and the constant hit of that high-fructose-corn-syrup, combined with her epic inactivity, in my opinion, turned her mind into a  carbonated protein-Smoothie. I think the so-called “medical establishment” (and, again: how stupid to turn the public health into a for-profit industry! Of course that will end up killing people! It’s a Logical Inevitability! If any Life-And-Death commodities/ services… that includes food, politics and shelter… are provided on a for-profit business model, easily-avoidable mega-deaths will necessarily  result!) is not super-invested in our aggregate health and there’s more money in chemical prescription than folksy old dietary proscription. Also, if original problems are possibly down to diet (more than genetics; there are all kinds of powerful booze and junkfood lobbies that wouldn’t want us to know), then first attempts to “fix” these problems… with drugs… lead to the cascade of problems causing problems by trying to fix the problem.

*I came to that conclusion years after reading Mark Vonnegut’s Eden Express. As you may recall, Mark had his first “psychotic break” after smoking a ton of grass and then eating a gallon of ice cream. That’s got “blood sugar roller-coaster” written all over it. Also, the fact that the early-20s is the typical window for the psychotic break makes me suspicious regarding diet and blood sugar, as the metabolism changes then, too, as humans downshift from the fast-metabolism of Nature’s creepy (laugh) peak-mating scheme. Mark (a doctor himself, now, and a mediocre literary stylist who sometimes unleashes Oedipal snark against poor Kurt’s jazzy, sockless soul)  has since repudiated the mega-vitamin “cure” he was touting by the end of Eden Express… he had a few more psychotic breaks well into his 40s, apparently… but “I’d be curious to know” (as people put it, but look carefully at that sentence fragment: what does it mean?) what Mark’s sugar intake was around the time of each break. I had a bass player (JD, K’s brother), as you probably recall, who went “Schizo” at c. 23 (he’s still under institutional care, btw) and, a few years after that, a model named J, whom I was fucking, went “Schizo” at about the age of 24… started “hearing voices” and ended up in a hospital when we were meant to meet, at The New French Cafe, on Bastille Day! I think that was ’86. She was eating tons of junkfood back then, skinny as she was.

XXX Who’s enjoying  THE MONOPOLY on MONOTHEMATIC MONOLOGUES in this  UNIPOLAR WORLD?

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XXX  How to divert an Infinite Regress into a First Cause?

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XXX SHORT STORY 1: PLUTO MY LOVE

Beatle George chopped and sanded one of the thick old split-center cutting boards from the  kitchen into a fat disk. We were going to discard it anyway.  Beatle George glued the split, then  he drew a red circle on it by tracing a plate with a medical marker.  When Beatle George cut the circle out of the square with a very loud table saw, peddling furiously,  head very low between his shoulders, and then tried to smooth around edges of the cut-out  by hand,  with a scouring pad, also from the kitchen,  without taking a little breather first, there were  humorously uneven results.  When the loosely-mounted  disk spun it looked like a wobbling cookie. We got a good laugh out of that but Beatle George correctly interpreted the laughter as  affectionate  so no harm done. We were all excited about the experiment and chatted nervously as Beatle George hummed, whistled, grunted and chuckled mysteriously to himself as he worked. Perhaps a dozen of us were crowded on the porch with its good ventilation and strong midday light.  The animals creeping up the hill toward the porch,  through the terraced garden,  in curiosity (or hoping for food),  ran off when the saw seized up and howled, everyone’s fingers in their ears but Beatle George’s.

I helped Beatle George  secure the thick wooden circle of the ex-cutting board to the wind-up mechanism he’d screwed into the biscuit tin.  I was bewildered as to what exactly I was doing as I helped him.  I loved the big tin decorative biscuit box and sincerely hoped that this was not one of the misbegotten projects that Beatle George occasionally embarked upon, wasting materials on pipe dreams.

XXX  The Aleatory interaction of Opportunity and Capability as delivered by Necessity:   Earth’s Racial Dominance Hierarchy explained in a nutshell. A nutshell self-servingly misunderstood by Racists of every temperament.

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XXX I tried and failed (or so it seems) to get Daughter to start calling pigeons “Christmas Chickens”

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XXX  ”I’ve just made up a word. Quazala. It means ‘I’ve had enough’. It starts with a ‘Q’. No, it means ‘you’re the best’. Quazala. I made it up!”  Daughter (6), Thursday, May 10, 2012, 21:00

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XXX  I’m always fascinated when people who barely got through High School physics explain the secret mechanisms of the Universe to me,  especially when they get their info from YouTube, New Age magazines and vitamin supplement websites.  Or even better: when they pull a theory straight out of some Wizard’s ass.

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XXX Excellent Royalty-Free Band Name #2: DAZE OF THE LOCUS

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XXX  THE RISE AND SIMULTANEOUS FALL OF THE DUPESUMER: YOUR CREDULITY IS A COMMODITY

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XXX Let’s look, for example, at “The Mandela Effect,” in which some people (rather egocentrically, if you ask me) come to the conclusion that parallel Universes are generated in which minute alterations in Anglo American Pop Culture appear in these parallel timelines… and they think that’s more likely than that people merely misremembered the title from “Sex and the City” or “Bearenstain Bears” or that they mixed up Bantu Stephen Biko’s death with Nelson Mandela’s before it happened, et al. If we are experiencing off-shoot Universes, why are the divergences limited to Anglo American trivia? Why no three-headed Trumps and Headless Talking Hitlers in this Alteration? And how would we know enough of other universe-variants to find the Headless Talking Hitler noteworthy? For a “Mandela Effect” to be in effect, you’d have to be, by definition, unaware of it. If there are multiple varieties of an Anglo American Pop Culture Artefact title occurring in one time-stream, it’s not the “Mandela Effect,” it’s A) your bad memory or B) somebody fucking with you or C) both.

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XXX PLEASE NAME ME ONE INSTANCE, IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, IN WHICH A KING, QUEEN, HEAD PRIEST, DICTATOR OR ELECTED GOVERNMENT HAS STRIPPED A POPULACE OF BASIC RIGHTS AS A PRELUDE TO ANYTHING OTHER THAN ATROCITIES.

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XXX Excellent Royalty-Free Band Name #3:  LUXURY BUM

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XXX  Well it’s almost midnight here and I have to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow, so I’m going to leave something here I just wrote and posted, in exasperation, on Faceboot, to all the Useful Idiots I’ve known for 40 years, the old college chums, all the willfully clueless and spinelessly obedient middleclass Vichy geese and sheep and hens who think they’re pets and not lunch (or compost); especially the twat who keeps posting “glamor shots” from “Old Hollywood” while the newer people in my Faceboot post things like testimonials from parents insane with grief over perfectly healthy children who died in their sleep after being pumped with snake-oil…

“However you choose to interpret current events, and whether or not your interpretation is the one best designed to protect your shaky image of yourself and the world, the scheme at work is nothing new, it’s always the same scheme: the killing of the poor, the killing of the poor in the cleverest, most creative way They can come up with, the scheme with the most élan, the scheme with the wittiest subtext, generating the greatest casualties and steepest profits and the richest, most-tongue-in-cheek opportunities for sentimental speechifying about the dead, the dead and dying poor, whom the bastard on the podium, who never learned to fake tears properly, will send to all those holes in the ground with a smirk the vast majority of you are just too relieved (that it wasn’t you this time) to notice.”

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XXX a little poem:  the zombie, sheep and the ostrich

a zombie, sheep and ostrich

were walking late one day

across a twelve-lane highway:

i’m sure they’re all okay

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XXX  The thing regarding Black Males (being one, I get to comment on this) is that the Social Engineering aimed at the Black Consumer has planted self-destructive Macho-Toxins at the core of the culture for thirty years. The most influential suit in Hip Hop, who engineered the “Gangsta Rap” take over (pushing aside deeper, more creative, non-violent acts of the early ’90s like Digable Planets, PM Dawn, Guru, Del, et al) was not Black. The imagery pushed under Lyor Cohen’s direction turned rape culture, bling-obsession and hair-trigger gunplay into a cultural standard (if you weren’t a rapey killer with stolen gold around your neck you were “soft”)… and a slow-mo auto-genocide. (Cohen was named YouTube’s “Global Head of Music” in 2016, to indicate how negatively influential Cohen still is; who do you think is responsible for the obviously mega-degrading psyop of Lil Wayne and all his subsequent, and progressively-more-grotesque, clones?). This on top of the standard American brainwashing that any articulate, well-educated, punctual, polite, socially-integrated Black Male is “trying to act White”… since when are any of these positive qualities hardwired racial traits? So so-called “Hip Hop culture” was an accelerant on a very American fire that was already busy burning Black America (the success of a few tokens in sports/ entertainment/ politics notwithstanding) to the ground.

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XXX SHORT STORY 2: LIL LOKI

Lil Loki extended their muscle-bound arms straight out from their sides  like they were doing an iron cross. And hold: one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three. Then slowly raised each arm, fingertips extended,  toward the vertical. Staring into the mirror of the water-closet, they were transfixed by their own image though they weren’t just staring for staring’s intoxicating pleasure this time. The intern fleshtech had told them to note at which angle (90, 135, 180) one or both of their new double- tits hurt. If neither double-tit hurt: fine. If both double-tits hurt at the same point at which their arms were at a given angle: also fine (and natural as the supportive muscle  tissue was still creating itself). What they were on the look-out for, the fleshtech had said, was asymmetrical discomfort. Asymmetrical discomfort would mean that Lil Loki would have to come in for unscheduled updates before all the tissue matured.

Six foot four, black as iron, cheekbones high as cliffs: Lil Loki continued admiring theirself after their hands had touched at the pole position and dropped to their sides, hands on hips, double-tits like nippled bowling ball clusters, semi-tumescent dick draped like a languid cudgel over the coy entrance of an  immaculately brazillianed cunt with brightly rose-red curtains. Sixteen years old and in their prime and they knew it. Lil Loki moonwalked out of the water closet, a muscle-bumpy Mona Lisa in blackface.

Twenty minutes later they were on their river run in their favorite mirror singlet loping down the immemorially steel-grey day. The wind was in their long-ass ass-long Paki mane, the chronic pain in their scalp largely irrelevant, totally adusted-to, the price of looking fly.  They ran as if to pace the headlong bang and churn of the dull metallic waste of the river. The river was the sound of a junkyard poured from up high.  Lil Loki looked to their right and saw of a sudden that a Lord in his air-chair was keeping pace with Lil Loki even as Lil Loki kept pace with the perpetually self-demolishing body of water and the Lord gestured for Lil Loki to turn their music down so the Lord could speak.

“Forsooth, Nigga,  you verily a fine-assed mass of fucken… you a blackass boybitch deluxe.  I’ll bet your blood like syrup. Who your fleshtech team, Nigga?  For real. Shapiro?”

To get away with a string of actionable profanities like that,  calculated Lil Loki, this had to be one helluva Lord, a Lord from the upper reaches; no,  this wasn’t any minor Lord whose eye Loki had caught running like a black dream beside the jangling river. To please a Lord of that stature could mean doubling Lil Loki’s annual SoCreds  in a day. Which could mean a kitchen with a frying pan or even a big ticket procedure or two.  It could even actually mean affording even possibly maybe a womb, perhaps (though  all they could ever gestate in one would be a five-kilo slug of undifferentiated tissue,  for:  folks who claimed you get a real still birth to hold at the climax of the process were straight up trippin  but nine months of carrying anything inside would be such bliss and wouldn’t all of Lil Loki’s jelly frenemies just die of high tech status anxiety if Loki could? The thing literally grows inside you). Lil Loki smiled with every perfect signal-transmitting tooth  but did not dare to look directly in the Lord’s blue eyes and said, as though to the wind,  as Lil Loki chugged along to keep pace with the silent wobbling air-chair the blubbery pink aristocrat in a terrycloth bathrobe straddled,

“I could not afford a  Shapiro, my Lord, but Rosenblatt is almost as good! You like the handiwork?”

” Lo:  I have a mind to fist your jet-black ass right here and now until you scream.  I’d like to pull your guts out with chopsticks and stuff them back in at my leisure. You scream good, horse?”

“I scream real good, Lord!”

And the air-chair rose high against the leaden sunrise and hurried ahead and Lil Loki was straight-up jubilant for their horoscope was kicking goals that day.

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XXX Excellent Royalty-Free Band Name #4: MESSYPTOMANIA

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XXX SHORT STORY 3: THEO

Someone will have to clean the refrigerator soon and we can be sure it won’t be her. Had that dream again where I staggered into the bathroom burning bright as a bonfire moaning and gushing smoke and she douses me with a cold bucket of menstrual blood. In the dream I am genuinely grateful. Wake up and well how do you do it’s a nocturnal emission after weeks without nookie.  Lying alone in groggy shame stuck to musty sheets on the couch we got from the guy upstairs after he got his job back. The A-Team, toting bazookas across a very big screen in brilliant silence are my only lights. Her snore down the hall is what woke me. I write this as quiet as I possibly can and hope to be done by morning. That refrigerator was a wedding gift. Boy some ironies and symbolisms there for you. I thought I might like a little something to snack on. A bowl of cherries while I write. The refrigerator bulb burnt out the same week she lost that tooth biting that olive pit so I had to use a torch which I think is what heightened the horror of all the grime and decay in the foot-temperature box when I eased the door open. The fridge only gets really cold in the winter now and that’s if the kitchen window stays up and the door to the fridge is cracked. There’s a mold-wigged, foil-suited baked potato in the Crisper with its guts turned black. I remember when this machine was new and pure and cold as a starship. A wedding gift from Theo her Ex. Me too naïve to see a grateful Ex as the obvious red flag before any marriage. In my defense I was twenty seven. People should need a license to fuck, a license to fall in love and the implicit blessings of the state before bamboozling the fiancé of one’s Ex. 18-cubic-foot Whirlpool with a noose-sized, clot-red ribbon on top. Don’t know how much it must have cost. He’s got some money, Theo. Theo was whooping it up at the wedding and I offered him one last chance to dance with the beautiful bride and old Theo he winked and he leaned in like he was going to fuck me and he whispered perhaps another time. The thing down the hall is stirring in its sleep. Pillow-muffled shouts and slit-lid laughter. The baffling case of Grendel’s mother dreaming that she’s Grendel’s mother in a cave which is the rotten corpse of Grendel’s mother, mucking through her own ooze and stumbling over leg-bones and skulls. Mine, mostly. Boy was I dumb. Twenty seven going on ten. I’m still young. Forty in a month. A young forty. Waiter mistook her for my mother once and when we got home that night she broke a lamp over my head. A stitch for every year.

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XXX Success is an STD

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XXX Dreamed that B. mentioned the devil’s invention “8 centuries ago” by Benedictine monks. Googling upon waking,  I read:

The Codex Gigas (English: Giant Book) is the largest extant medieval manuscript in the world. It is also known as the Devil’s Bible because of a large illustration of the devil on the inside and the legend surrounding its creation. It is thought to have been created in the early 13th century in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in Bohemia (modern Czech Republic).

If this were a movie the next scene would be me on a plane to Podlažice.

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XXX As an Artist, your dream is always to reach people before the Rulers make them Stupid, but it’s almost always too late.

XXX–SPITEGEIST

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XXX Everyone gets their own role to play in The Struggle as it exists in their era. No one gets to choose the era or the struggle and no one gets to opt for the struggle, of a previous era, that seems both easier to grasp, and more romantic, in hindsight, than one’s own. Just remember that to future generations, The Struggle of your era, in your Now, will seem obvious. As will your role in it. Think on this.

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XXX- QUAZALA

 

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