Reading

Entry tags:

Tigers

Someone I kinda, sorta, vaguely know was mauled to death a couple of days ago by one of his own tigers.

Ryan Easley:

Very long-term readers may remember I spent a good chunk of 2009 traveling with the Culpepper/Merriweather Circus, and that's where I met Ryan. He was one of Casey Cainan's proteges and when a painful divorce drove Casey to take himself & his tigers to Saudi Arabia, Ryan stayed on with Kelly Miller.

A very nice guy, Ryan couldn't have been kinder or more dedicated to the comfort of his animals, so if you're a PETA supporter or believe circuses exploit their animals—& I will concede: Some do—put a plug in it for now please. Thanks!

###

I think what it comes down to is the old story about the frog riding across the river on the scorpion's back. The scorpion turns on the frog & stings him to death because such is the scorpion's nature.

Tigers are predators.

You don't actually have to do anything to a tiger to get them to turn on you.

Tigers don't even have to think you're doing something to them to get triggered and turn on you.

Tigers will just turn on you because their innate preying & territorial instincts surface unpredictably.

Thus, tiger-training is a high-risk profession. I doubt very many tiger trainers make it to a ripe old age.

###

In other news, I am just rolling along on that old conveyor belt.

I did manage to clear the afternoon so I could labor a bit on the Work in Progress—Neal & Grazia are now standing in front of the old Sampson Opera House talking about sex—but first I must exercise.

And speaking of sex...

The real-life Daria is back from Switzerland, & I can't tell whether our texts are flirty.

They might be.

We both like gurlZ as much as we like boyZ sexually, and real-life Daria uses seduction kinda the way I use humor. Plus, of course, she's very beautiful.

I want to know everything about you, she texted from Switzerland. You’ve captured my imagination.

Hmmmmm...

I let her read Chapter 1 of the Work in Progress, and of course, that fascinated her—though I did go to great lengths to explain: The character is clearly based on you. But it's not you.

Most of the time, I feel like I am absolutely done with that part of my life (and good riddance!)

But every once in a while...

Entry tags:

books

No condors were harmed in the publication of this novel

It's forever since I posted, which is due to a variety of things, quite high among them being tired and returning to work, and also that I prefer to do DW posts on my laptop and this one is reaching the end of its life. Though I have done some more enjoyable things this summer, and am just back from visiting my parents. So with the train delay compensation payment requests submitted, it's time for a post. Books.

To Each His Own, Sciascia. What can I say, other than that I should have read it years ago? This is simply a superb book. The form may be a detective novel, the subject is political, the condemnation sharp, the writing exquisite (I read it in English). A pharmacist in a small Sicilian town receives an anonymous death threat, and is duly murdered. Life continues much as before, except for mild-mannered academic Professor Laurana, a little vain and certainly naive, who finds himself following a lead and slowly drawn into a dangerous situation. I can't recommend it highly enough to people who enjoy a book that is really, really well-written. Especially as it isn't even a challenging ride - part of the beauty of the prose is its straightforwardness. The narrative isn't complicated, but perfectly chosen; it is the situation that is twisted.

Legend of the Condor Heroes, Jin Yong. A wuxia (martial arts society historical fantasy, think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) novel set in the 1200s, this is the first of a trilogy published in the late 1950s and with many, many film and television adaptations since then. Like a lot of genre ur-texts that are basically pulp, it tells a rollicking story in sufficiently competent prose and makes for a fun read, although the translator's choice to translate some names* and not others felt a bit odd. If I tell you that chapter 2 involves a lengthy fight in an inn, it will give those who have watched cdramas a sense of the kind of book this is. Long-lost relatives, treachery, and beautiful chaste women abound. At some point, I'll read the next one.

*Her argument for keeping the title, despite the birds not being condors, is much stronger.

The Incandescent, Emily Tesh. I ordered this from the library and was very much looking forward to it after enjoying Some Desperate Glory, but alas, I wasn't impressed. The concept of a magical boarding school story from the perspective of the teachers is great, but unfortunately I found this deeply unconvincing: thinly plotted, didactic, a trifle smug, and the worldbuilding doesn't hold up at all. Paired with Some Desperate Glory, I can see that Tesh feels passionately about education, but you need more than that to make a good novel, especially given the aforementioned worldbuilding, which fails specifically in terms of secondary/tertiary ed. You can have learning magic at school being basically socially irrelevant like Classics, so it doesn't matter that it is only taught in very expensive private schools and the entire rest of the population is shut out except for a few who have to learn it for public safety, or you can have magic be something that military R&D are passionately interested in and every shop needs to pay for magical wards for safety, but you can't have both. In the world she sets up, in every respect except "this school is unjustifiable and of course the protagonist is appropriately aware but it is also old and special and lovely", there is no way that several Scottish universities and the redbricks wouldn't have been teaching sorcery ab initio since the 1920s at the latest and the government funding it. Also, if you are telling me that the teacher cares, she really cares, and is a sensible, competent professional woman, then why the hell is she repeatedly behaving like Harry Potter and his progenitors going off to investigate things without telling anyone? I could go on (the caretaker!), but I'll spare you.

Idlewild, James Frankie Thomas. A fandom osmosis read, except it turned out to be a misosmosis. I was under the impression that it was about intense Theater Kids (US spelling for what seems to be a US phenomenon) at New England private university level possibly murdering one another, i.e. a bit of a The Secret History rip off. It is not. It does feature sort of Theater Kids, but at an expensive New York private high school. Unfortunately, fairly contemporary US private high schools are about the last setting that I am interested in reading a novel so this book started out as not really my kind of thing and remained so. But, I did read it, and I did think it was a good book. There is no murder, but there are a couple of very intense queer teenagers in a very intense friendship at a Quaker-ethos school that I thought was rather well depicted as supposed to be offering something different because it was a Quaker-ethos school, but that actually was failing its pupils in a highly conventional manner*, and US 2003 setting that seems well-drawn but that, obviously, I didn't personally relate to. Mostly what I admired was the novelist actually having something to say and saying it in a book about queer and trans experience, in a particular time and place, and accepting that something with any depth is inherently not going to speak to everybody's experience, and Thomas doesn't waste his or the reader's time hesitating to commit to his story and characters. It didn't speak to me personally - much though I enjoyed the recognisable early 2000s LJ milieu - but what does that matter? It spoke to other people, and it made an effort to be something.

*I found myself wondering whether Fay would have been better off at a standard school that would haved force all pupils through the hoops to higher education and its potential for self-discovery, or whether that would have been even more destructive.

Entry tags:

work

The Conveyor Belt

Bogged down with a tremendous amount of Shit I Must Do, most of it attached to Dates I Must Do It By, so I am not a happy camper this morning.

This is basically the way my life is gonna be for the next six and a half months, & I am gonna have to figure out a way to live—and thrive—inside of it.

Ugh.

Entry tags:

Setting Up an Underground Railroad

Dreamed I was in law school, & I had a big test coming up. F________ (also in the class) & I set out to acquire a massive outline that would surely allow us to pass the test—though I hadn't studied for it at all.

We went to this 1950-ish office building and pulled all the books we wanted to xerox. The bill for all the copying came to $766.

Then we waited for the copying to be done. And waited. And waited.

I think we waited overnight?

And at some point, F________ disappeared, and I was handed a few mimiographed pages that weren't going to help me at all, & I was in a complete panic because I didn't know the material, & it was an essay test, and there wasn't a single thing I'd be able to write, & I would flunk the examination, & God knows what would happen to me after that—

And then I remembered that this was the first of three exams. I could flunk this one & still pass the class—

And woke up feeling relieved.

I think the dream was inspired by Curtis Sittenfeld's flawed but still remarkable novel Prep, which I fell asleep reading.

Friday was the Hyde Park Community Garden's annual Harvest Dinner.

I neglected the garden horribly this year.

After Brian died, I pretty much neglected everything except boring, livelihood-related scutwork. (At times, it still feels inconceivable to me that he's dead. Brian was always off taking trips. Sometimes, I still feel as though he's off on a trip and will return...)

Anyway, Claude—bless his heart—took up the slack, watering and weeding the garden! Just take the harvest & donate it to the food pantry, I told him by email.

Even with all the donations, there were still a lot of tomatoes to harvest when I checked in Friday afternoon:

Not enough to justify going to all that trouble to make sauce, but still enough so I oughta do something ambitious with them.

###

The Harvest Dinner itself was somewhat sparsely attended this year.

Also, I found standing & serving for two hours somewhat physically uncomfortable—a sign that I'm getting old or a sign I need to exercise more? Hard to say.

The only thing of actual interest that happened is that Deb, the woman who's the head of the garden, ushered me aside to tell me how much she ❤️LUV❤️s me.

I've always had a kind of aversion to Deb. She does Good Works, but makes sure everyone knows how Good those Works are, which rubs me the wrong way. Also, she was a rabid Trump supporter in the last election, and how anybody who helps run a food pantry could support Trump is beyond me.

Anyway, I met and raised her effusiveness—No, Deb, it is you who are wonderful! Such an inspiration!—because my new policy is to keep my head down, network, and restrict all reveals of my true thoughts to situations where they may have some meaningful impact. How does it benefit the Cause to say to Deb, You fuckin' hypocrite! Get your hands off my sleeve? It doesn't. And I may find uses for my connection to her, she carries some heft in the community.

I should be setting up an Underground Railroad, right?

Send your trans children & grandchildren to me! I will make sure they are ushered to freedom in Canada!

###

The Work in Progress continues to move along nicely.

We are now into Grazia & Neal's introductory meeting. They are out touring the Rondout District in Kingston.

After that, I think we'll need one roadtrip—maybe the one I coaxed BB into taking me on to Pennsylvania when I wanted to see real live slag heaps.

And then I think there has to be one scene at Neal's house where Grazia offers to give Neal a massage, possibly preliminary to pouncing him, only to realize that they are firmly in the Sibling Zone from which there is no going back.

That will be the end of Chapter 2.

Chapter 3 will be Grazia in the ER during COVID. Somehow, I will have to introduce the other sister wife characters. Haven't worked out the action timeline for that one yet, but the end of Chapter 3 will be the end of Grazia first-person. Chapter 4 leaps into Daria first-person.

The real life Daria moved from Mexico City to San Francisco when she was 11.

But I am thinking the novel Daria will have to move to somewhere in the Northeast. Because if the way the novel Daria & Neal get together parallels the way the real-life Daria and Brian got together, it will be too-ooo-oooo complicated.

Entry tags:

politics,
wallkill

The Era of Virtue Signaling Is Over

Out canvassing yesterday, Adrienne & I hit the foothills where road frontage gives few clues to the great tracts of land behind its ramshackle houses.

We only talked to three people, but we talked to them at length.

First up was a vigorous man who looked to be in his 70s. His accent placed him as an Eastern European transplant. He lives in the Peaceable Kingdom! Cats, goats, sheep, hens, and peacocks wandered the property; no dogs or horses, though, which I thought was an interesting choice.

He lives in the Decker House, which was built in 1730—very old for the New World!—and has its own New York State Historical marker:

He had a grievance: Over a year ago, the golf cart he uses to haul feed to the sheep who live on the back acres of his property was taken for a joy ride by some miscreant teenagers & ditched about a mile from his property. A neighbor discovered it, and not recognizing its provenance, alerted the police—who in this part of the boondocks, are actually state troopers. The state troopers hauled the golf cart 40 miles to Kerhonksen and are now demanding $400 for its release—which does strike me as horribly unfair! I mean, why should the victim of a crime be financially penalized as a result of that crime?

"They hear my accent, so they think I'm not real American," he said. "They say, 'Drop charges and we will give you back.' But I will not drop charges. I was psychologist, you know. I come over here, and they say, 'You cannot be psychologist, you must wash dishes.' So, I wash dishes." He shrugged. "I am not afraid of work. Work is good. I work hard. I am a happy man."

I doubt very much that Adrienne can do a thing for him, but, of course, we didn't tell him that.

###

The second person we talked to was a pleasant man with an eye-catching mustache that he actually waxes, who told us—a bit challengingly—that he worked as a guard at the maximum security prison up in Ellenville. "I'm 44 years old," he said. "I can't change careers. If I did, we wouldn't have this—" His sweeping gesture took in a paddock where horses stood flicking their tails and a small pond on which ducks & geese were getting into each other's faces. "We'd be crammed into a one-bedroom apartment in Middletown. I work 16-hour shifts. You're lucky you found me home today."

This guy almost certainly voted for Trump (I didn't ask), but he heard us out with good grace, remarking, "I think both parties suck frankly. I vote for individuals."

###

Our third conversation was with a man whose face was utterly unreadable. He had long grey hair but that is no longer a clue to anything.

About 10 minutes into the conversation, we were joined by his wife—who evidently had been waiting on the sidelines to make sure we weren't Jehovah's Witnesses. She was a lot more forthcoming and gave out old hippie vibes.

We talked for half an hour. About environmental matters, about the municipal water supply in the hamlet of Wallkill, currently under a boil advisory due to bacterial contamination, an issue that has gotten exactly zilch publicity. (It doesn't affect me; Icky has his own well.)

As we were leaving, the old hippie lady, Margaret, said, "I'd avoid going to the house next door if I were you. Our son lives there. He'll wave a shotgun at you. He's big on Charlie Kirk. In fact, he's blocked me on social media and cut off all communication because I think Charlie Kirk was an asshole." She laughed merrily.

###

The political situation in the U.S. is ominous. The Pentagon is mulling over making Turning Point chapters into military recruitment centers. That's all the U.S. really needs, right? An army of Christian, right-wing, white supremacists.

The FBI is apparently preparing to designate transgender people as “violent extremists.”

There's so little I can do about any of this.

I guess we will have to start doing what Black people in this country have been doing for the past 160 years: code-switching and being very, very careful not to make waves unless you 100% know that making waves is gonna lead to a productive end. The era of virtue signaling is over.

Entry tags:

Yes, Virginia, There IS a "They"

Not that I'm a Jimmy Kimmel fan, you understand. I don't own a television. I've never watched late night talk shows. My only association with late night talk shows comes from an ancient Harold Robbins novel in which an aging movie star, propped up on vodka & dolls, masturbates to a late night show applause track.

But firing Jimmy Kimmel over saying this? The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.

That's BAD.

The FCC chair threatening ABC with nonsense investigations for Kimmel's opinions on Charlie Kirk's murderer is even worst.

###

My immediate conclusion was that they—and yes, Virginia, there is a they—wouldn't be acting this way if they weren't absolutely certain they were gonna keep their hold on power (which they're not going to be able to do with votes.)

Thank Gawd that turns out to be wrong.

No, it turns out just to be about money: The dying television industry is trying to consolidate. In Olden Times, this would trigger monopoly fears. But nobody cares about monopolies anymore, & anyway, if they did, in 10 years, television will be deader than rotary phones.

###

I keep thinking that I've been here before, and that there's something I didn't do then that I can do now. It's the same feeling you get when you're working your way through a particularly absorbing video game scenario.

The one universe-changing act is there.

But where?

Is there some gold ring I'm supposed to toss in a volcano cauldron?

Really, I'm not much good at anything except bearing witness.

I'm superb at bearing witness.

But what good does that do?

###

Meanwhile, a very low-key yesterday in which I did no work of my own but labored for filthy lucre.

The sky was overcast. When the sky is overcast, I get despondent. It's some brain chemistry quirk, & I know it's just errant brain chemicals, but knowing doesn't stop the feelings, it just makes it so I have to ignore the feelings.

Entry tags:

chickens,
writing

Of ChickenGurlZ & Bluestone Quarries

I went out early this morning to let the Chicken GurlZ out of their coop only to discover that I'd forgotten to go out & lock their coop up last night.

The coop was empty...

And I was seized with panic because if something happened to the Chicken GurlZ on my watch, I would never, ever forgive myself.

I stood in front of the copse of woods where the Chicken GurlZ like to hang out—the new GurlZ are still pretty shy—making desperate clucking noises and instantly, Black Chicken appeared, asking (in Chicken), All right, Human. Where are my tortillas?

And right behind her were the other two GurlZ.

So whew!

But I am still beating myself up over my carelessness.

The two new chickens are growing very fast, and Black Chicken is just over the moon with joy that she is once again the leader of her very own fowl posse.

###

I've gotten into the habit of doing Remuneration and Work In Progress every other day because try as I may, the two types of writing use such different parts of the brain that I cannot easily go back & forth between them.

Yesterday was a WiP Day. I skipped around in Chapter 2: a couple of dense paragraphs about why it is so difficult for people to leave New York City, the all-important opening banter between Neal & Grazia.

I left off just as Neal & Grazia are taking off on an invigorating tromp through Kingston's Rondeout District. There's a lot of (no doubt) bor-rr-rrr-ing history of the D&H canal—well! Boring to most people, but interesting to me and therefore, interesting to Grazia. They tramp 19th century bluestone pavers past 19th century row houses with weird cast-iron lintels, and dilapidated hotels, and, of course, the old churches—since churches are the things that most often survive attempts at urban renewal.

Neal has to say, If we really hit it off, I'll take you to the bluestone quarry!

Grazia has to tell Neal about her online diary, which also has to be foreshadowed in Chapter 1—though I have taken the Vow not to do any rewriting at all until the First Draft is completely finished.

I am still trying to come up with Grazia's existential crisis in Chapter 3.

I am thinking it has to do with being an ER nurse in the time of COVID, using Public Policy Eleanor's anecdote about scoring N95 respirator masks on a street corner at 4 o'clock in the morning because Kaiser was too cheap to provide their medical staff with adequate personal protection.

Grazia can have a breakdown when a fifth person dies—amidst much gagging and horrific Cheynes-Stoking—in the ER waiting room because there's no place to segregate COVID positives.

I'm still not sure how Neal helps her resolve this existential crisis, but hopefully that will come to me—

And then it will be time to start Part 2, which will be first-person Daria!

The very first part of Chapter 4, Daria’s first point-of-view chapter, will be memories of Mexico City and the contrast-compare to San Francisco when she moves there at age 11.

About the only thing I know about Daria at this point is that Daria’s defining characteristic is that she thinks in several different languages simultaneously: The narrative voice in her mind is not English but is not Spanish and not French either. In other words, she speaks & understands a language nobody else does.

This will be difficult since I only speak English, but oh, well...

###

And now it's time to Remunerate!

Entry tags:

New Improved Purpose! Products

The political scene in the U.S. just keeps getting worse & worse & worse.

Trying to justify an attack on what turns out to have been a Venezuelan fishing boat, Trump foams, 300 million people died last year from drugs. That's what's illegal.

He can't be talking about 300 million people in the United States, can he? I mean, if that were true, it would be so-oo-ooo much easier to find parking, wouldn't it?

But that's just comic relief.

###

JD Vance's current plan—and he's the true Annointed One—is to compile a database of those who are insufficiently reverential over Charlie Kirk's death and then harass their employers into firing them.

America! Land of the Snitch!

Like I've said, I think all political violence is bad, and people ought not to be assassinated for expressing their opinions, regardless of whether or not I agree with them. I'd never heard of Charlie Kirk before he was shot. I can't say I like much of what I've learned about him after his death, but those candle-lit vigils being held in his honor across the land are more or less the equivalent of all those George Floyd vigils back in 2020—the significant difference being that the Floyd vigils were an urban phenomenon & the Kirk vigils are a rural phenomenon.

(There was actually a Kirk vigil in Montgomery I almost went to last night because I am very, very curious! But I talked myself out of it. I don't think I would have been able to blend in with the crowd, and that raises personal safety issues.)

I've seen several photographs of Kirk flashing the white power sign, circle of pointer & thumb, other three fingers erect.

But is it a white power sign? For decades, that particular hand gesture signified A Okay.

###

I will say that while there is little in Kirk's ideology I agree with, the one thing I think he was 1,000% correct about is that the youth in this country—especially the youth with penises—need some kind of structure that the culture at large is simply not providing them with.

He was very, very smart to target college campuses.

Adolescence is a social construct. (cf Philippe Aries' remarkable Centuries of Childhood.) It was invented in the 17th century at roughly the same time as the Industrial Revolution, and it served to keep individuals out of the labor market at a time when great numbers of workers were being displaced from their traditional employment slots.

Adolescence, then, almost by definition, is a waiting period, a socially sanctiioned interval of utter aimlessness.

But aimlessness is uncomfortable.

Adolescence is not strictly a chronological definition. The boundaries of adolescence keep shifting as the labor market shifts—and right now, thanks to AI, the labor market is tightening. College kids today are equivalent to, say, the high school sophomores of 50 years ago. A significant number of them are clinically depressed—it's hard to come by exact numbers, but one recent study posits that 34% of Gen Z are taking antidepressant meds, and that doesn't account for those who are self-medicating.

Anyway, this is a group of people who really want a purpose.

And Charlie Kirk was peddling purpose really successfully. Charlie Kirk's New Improved Purpose! product evidently was able to make people feel good about themselves.

That's the key! People want to feel good about themselves.

It's too bad the Left can't learn from that. In the aftermath of George Floyd's death—which, as I say, I see as kind of an analogue—the purpose products seemed to all be from people like Robin DiAngelo who hectored well-intentioned people, You will never be good enough.

And you know what?

Fuck that shit.

###

In other news:

I was highly productive yesterday in the sense that I did lots of things that needed to be done. But not in the sense that I did lots of things I much wanted to do.

The tax class remains interesting. Big Company uses a completely different computation method than TaxBwana does. Very systematic! Branchings of the probability tree! If this, then this. It's a canon!

Then I got a tidy chunk of Remuneration done and went to the gym.

My Fitbit doesn't actually register any of the exercise I do at the gym. Which is a major bug. Because one of the reasons one owns a Fitbit is to bask in the dopamine ping and gloat.

Once home, I watched the original Willie Wonka movie, rendered sublime by Gene Wilder's exceedingly strange, haunted, otherworldly performance:

Watch on YouTube

Sigh.

If only it were that easy.

Entry tags:

movies,
politics

Satori

As the Charlie Kirk thing took over the headlines, the Republican-led Senate voted on whether or not to set aside the budget amendment that would have compelled the Department of Justice to release Epstein files.

They voted 51-49 to set it aside.

The suspense, right? Who woulda guessed it?

###

When I'm Remunerating, I park myself in front of my computer, and when I get bored, I delve into social media in quick spurts as a—ha, ha, ha—palate cleanser.

Except it really is a palate defiler, something calculated to leave a really bad taste in your mouth, because man, the people on both sides are fuckin' insane.

The right wing is trying to make a dam-breaking moment out of Kirk's death. Spinning a left-wing narrative out of what is essentially an age-old story: 22-year-old punk lashing out against a restrictive (in his case Mormon Republican) upbringing.

The left wing is slithering like a snake with its head cut off.

I'm tempted to check out of activism altogether except I don't want to lack conviction while the worst are filling up with tasty passionate intensity.

###

I watched Mel Brooks' The Producers last night. It remains one of the most hilarious films I've ever seen, though I daresay very few progressive leftists would agree.

One of the (many) things I dislike about the progressive left is its utter humorlessness. Maybe that's a good thing? You have to be a bit of a hypocrite to get humor because you have to understand about duality. That's probably why on the whole, hypocritical right-wingers are funnier than left-wingers.

Yes, you should make jokes about racism, sexism, every societal injustice.

Because getting a joke is akin to the concept of satori in Japanese Buddhism when for one brief moment, you see the absurdity and you see the profundity fused like yin & yang.

And in the spirit of that moment, I bring you Springtime for Hitler:

Watch on YouTube

Entry tags:

Plotting the Incipient Doom

I'm grumpy because one of my clients just sent me a ginormous assignment. My favorite method of making money involves glancing down at the ground & picking up that $50,000-bill nobody else has noticed, not laboring over a keyboard.

However, I should be grateful since the U.S. is clearly in a recession, even if they haven't called it yet. Time to start stuffing money into that mattress! Although that dollar bill you stuff into your mattress today will only be worth 90¢ next week.

Recession plus inflation—just about the most horrible economic formula you can possibly imagine.

I'm cheering myself up by thinking thoughts like, Well, it's really not going to affect me! I'll be dead soon!

Which when you get right down to it is not a particularly cheerful thought.

###

Meanwhile, Adrienne had chided me—deservedly—for not updating the Shawangunk Dems' website for months & months & months, so I spent yesterday morning working on that.

Then Ichabod called & chided me for my insufficiently progressive views on the racial divide. Yes, I do believe in color blindness—say it loud & say it proud!—and you're gonna have to reset the starting marker for history at some point else the current (completely unacceptable) situation is just gonna go on & on & on. So why not do it now?

Then I trotted off to the Shawangunk Dems' monthly meeting where I learned that Trump's Big, Beautiful Bill cut all Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. Not just for abortions! But also for birth control and Pap smears. And this made me very upset indeed. There's not a single thing I can do about it, though.

In the evening, I watched a documentary about Charlie Sheen who ingested more drugs than any other single person on the planet, & I decided—Work in Progress alert!—to borrow his crack cocaine habit & give it to Flavia, since that's an ongoing motiff in the Work in Progress: Neal is gonna save each of the sister wives from some incipient doom. Flavia's doom will be drugs, Daria's doom will be some mountain hike, but I still haven't figured out what Grazia's doom is, and I need to come up with it before I can start Chapter 3.

Entry tags:

television

Love Life

The state of the world depressed me so much yesterday that I spent the day binging a Netflix series called Love Life.

Love Life starts out with that age-old addage that everybody is looking for their perfect soul mate and proceeds from there into the quaint rituals of Millennial couplings, spread out over 10 half-hour episodes. The show got canceled after two seasons.

There were things about the show I really liked and things about it that irritated the hell out of me. Among the things that irritated me—

The second season focuses on the romantic misadventures of a young Black male protagonist.

When he meets the woman of his dreams, she tells him, "Honestly, I just can't dance in a room full of white people. They make me feel like I'm on display."

And the couple flirts by googling "ugly white babies."

###

Now!

If you showed a white couple flirting by googling "ugly black babies," you'd be portraying ignorant racist creeps. There would be no cute, ironic subtext to it.

But this Black couple, we're given to understand, is hip & adorable.

This kind of double standard is absolutely fucked.

Either nobody should be allowed to make these kinds of racially motivated digs or everybody should be allowed to make these kinds of racially motivated digs.

Entry tags:

gerard,
politics

Of Charlie Kirk & Gerard Vanderleun

I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage. --Charlie Kirk, 2022

###

Went out canvassing with Adrienne yesterday.

"I'm a bit nervous about going out today," she confided.

"Why?" I asked. "Because it's September 11th?"

"Charlie Kirk," she said.

Oh.

###

I don't think I ever heard the name "Charlie Kirk" before yesterday, when the youthful conservative activist became the year's 46th victim of a school shooting just as he was answering a question about... school shootings! (Who says the Universe has no sense of irony?)

There was another school shooting in Denver a couple of hours later: one death (the shooter turned his gun on himself), two injuries. This shooting got minimal news coverage.

Having never heard of Charlie Kirk, I had no real thoughts about his death—beyond the cursory disclaimer that violence is always a bad solution, blah, blah, blah, which I totally believe but which seems like an increasingly irrelevant aside in 21st-century America.

###

The countryside Adrienne & I drove through was beautiful. Though leaves were falling, the trees were (mostly) holding on to their green. We canvassed Jansen Road, a back country road with newish asphalt and a line of modified A-frame houses probably built in the early oughts, backed by scrub forest. I wondered briefly who the original "Jansen" had been: the farmer who'd originally farmed this land?

We rang around 10 door bells. This area has been zoned for two-acred lots, and many of the houses had circular driveways with a giant flagpole in a small center island. The Stars & Stripes flapping gently in an almost imperceptible breeze and beneath it, various auxilliary flags: "Don't Tread on Me," "9/11-Never Forget."

Not a liberal NYC-minted Democrat like Adrienne's natural constituency, in other words.

###

About 9/11, I have no deep thoughts either. Beyond wondering at what point they will start doing 9/11 reenactments.

Maybe I would feel differently if I'd actually been in New York City on that day, but I was not. I watched the whole thing unfold on a television set in Monterey, California, and the most immediate effect it had on my life was that they closed the Monterey Presidio. Before 9/11, every day I walked Xena the Jack Russell terrier up Franklin Street through the Presidio to Huckleberry Hill Park, and it was a really pleasant tromp; after 9/11, I began having to take her to the beach, which she didn't enjoy as much.

###

Several people I liked, though, did a complete 180 as a result of 9/11. One of them, Gerard Vanderleun, was a guy who made his Big Buck$ writing dirty letters—Dear Penthouse Forum, I have an etiquette question: When I ask that stripper with big, pink, pendulous pussy lips to sit on my face, should I remove my glasses?

I knew Gerard from the Well.

Gerard was an excellent writer, if a bit fulsome. And an even better editor. One night, he'd driven up to my then house in East Oakland in an enormous white Cadillac to waft me away to the bar in the Claremont Hotel, where we sat drinking Manhattans and storyboarding the apocalypse. Gerard was an amazing riffer, right up there with Robin Williams; practically every stray utterance out of his mouth was brilliant, sardonic, hilarious, rife with subtext. I came away with a bit of a crush. He was never what you would call a political liberal, though. Maybe a libertarian. He worked for a while for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

After 9/11, though, Gerard metamorphosed into a right-wing extremist. Nobody got tearier than Gerard watching Old Glory flapping in the breeze! Nobody was more thankful for Jesus's love! Nobody more deeply loathed wily, two-faced leftists! He started a blog called American Digest, which attracted a deeply loyal readership as obsessive as he was. He died a couple of years ago.

###

On September 11, 2001, Gerard watched the disintegration of the Twin Towers from the vantage point of the Brooklyn Heights promenade. He wrote an excellent piece about the experience, which I wish I could find to link to, but which—alas!—seems to have disappeared into the same cyber-La Brea tarpit that American Digest itself got sucked into.

The detail I remember best from the piece was a description of the slow current of debris wafting out from the explosion, advancing across the East River silent as snow, settling on his clothes, clogging his nostrils. The debris was made up of pulverized concrete, granulated glass, metal, plastic, paper, asbestos, and, of course, human cells.

Now! It is quite possible that had I, too, stood on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade that day & watched those planes assault the towers, that I, too, would have metamorphosed into a fulminating right-wing extremist. One's own personal experiences, after all, are always infinitely more persuasive than reasoned analysis or logical exposition.

But since I wasn't, I tend to view 9/11 as just another pretext for American exceptionalism. Yes, for sure: 9/11, just horrifying! But was it any more horrifying than what's currently going on in Gaza, which our elected officials would prefer us to ignore?

It isn't.

In fact, what's going on in Gaza is a whole lot more horrifying.

The salient detail: Only it's not happening to us.

###

Anyway, nobody slammed any doors in Adrienne's face. The majority of people we talked to were polite though I have no doubt her campaign materials were swiftly dumped in the trash the moment the doors closed.

And nobody mentioned Charlie Kirk.

I went home, and set my browser to Facebook for a quick peek before I started doing Useful Work.

Fuckin' amazing! A miniaturist whose work I sorta follow ('cause you know I like 28mm-scale miniatures of D&D archetypes as well as the next person) had posted this:

Normally I try to keep this page only about miniatures and fantasy in general but something has changed and I feel compelled to make a statement.

I am Right Wing. I am STAUNCHLY Right Wing. I will make no apologies or explanations for that. Think whatever you will of that. If it is intolerable to you I will not miss you. Be gone. I do not want your money. I do not want your friendship. I do not want your encouragement. I do not want your support in any way shape or form. I do not care who you are how long we have been friends or associates. I do not care what this costs me to say. I want NOTHING to do with you. And being totally honest I want to know who you are. I will not keep company with cowards or louts or liars.

Charlie Kirk was a good man. He was a moderate who opened a stage for anyone to debate him in a public forum with no censorship. Yesterday he was murdered for that and last night and today there are people mocking him and celebrating his murder.

If you are one of those people...... FUCK YOU. I hate you.

If you are one of those people who choose to ignore the destruction of Europe and Australia and America by the importation of hordes of third world savages. FUCK YOU. I hate you.

If you are someone who despises the Right Wing or uses " White " as a pejorative or wants the destruction of European Culture and White People in general.... FUCK YOU. I hate you.

Gods Rest You Charlie Kirk. You were a warrior and did not die a straw death.

SKAL!!!

And that was just one post among many.

I mean WT-actual-F?

It really is a race war, isn't it?

The Cro-Magnons versus the Neanderthals.

This is deeply Not Good.

Entry tags:

friends

Phyllis Shakespeare

Out of the blue, Phyllis Shakespeare texted me yesterday.

Phyllis Shakespeare is someone who was just incredibly kind to me during the very bleak period of my life when I was living on Long Guyland. (Ganeshopolis, Brian used to term it on account of the concrete elephants decorating the fronts of the houses occupied by New Hyde Park's large Indian contingent.)

Kind and supportive. Phyllis would take me out for restaurant meals, buy me clothes, take me to museums. But more than that, she would reiterate: This is temporary. You are going to get out of this.

I was living at the time with a woman who just absolutely hated me. I felt like Sara Crewe in A Little Princess!

She hated me for a host of complicated reasons that basically came down to the fact that even though I was absolutely destitute, I commanded more attention than she did in her circle of friends.

It was a hard situation.

I was working on not being destitude! I had a plan!

But in the mean time, I had no money, I was constantly late on the rent, there were sometimes still tiny fragments of food on the kitchen counters I washed.

I was grateful to this woman, you understand! She'd offered me a place to jump to when I wanted to leave Ithaca.

And I understood that rent ought to be paid on time, that kitchen counters ought to be clean.

So it was very easy for her opinion of my general worthlessness to become my opinion of my general worthlessness.

Phyllis was one of the few antidotes to my general worthlessness. This is temporary. You are going to get out of this.

Brian was another.

###

After I joined AmeriCorps Vista and moved up to the Hudson Valley, Phyllis & I became Facebook friends.

And then I woke up one morning, and we were not Facebook friends.

Had she blocked me because I'd spouted some thought that was absolutely awful? (Even more awful because I had no idea what that thought might be?) Or had she canceled her FB account?

I had no idea.

And online etiquette is such that I couldn't call her up & ask her.

###

Anyway, this was more than 10 years ago. Ten years in which I clawed my way all the way back into the middle class (with the credit rating to prove it!) I'm still kind of iffy on the kitchen counter front, though.

Hi Patrizia … don’t know if you remember me but I remember you, Phyllis texted.

Of COURSE I remember you, I texted back.

And we spent half an hour texting back & forth.

I hope we get together soon, she kept texting, and since that is unlikely—Long Guyland is a long way from the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley especially for me since I won't drive anywhere near New York City—I had to wonder what on earth had inspired her to reach out to me. A cancer diagnosis? A heart attack? A stroke? She was clearly assembling all the characters for the last scene in the movie, the way Fellini does in the final scene of 8½.

Anyway, I kinda want to do something for Phyllis. Send her something. But what? Flowers seem so... funereal.