He used a bow and two arrows to put down a lion named Cecil.  In Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, Dr. Walter Palmer, a dentist and part-time he-man, killed a thirteen year old lion lured to its cruel fate by two trackers for the purpose of letting a "sportsman" kill a big cat for a fee of $50,000.  Pictures of Palmer posing with his four-legged victims have been shown on American cable news.  A large horned beast, a huge spotted cat held upright and limp by the victorious dentist.  His popularity, if polled, would probably hang somewhere below that of ISIS.
     He's in hiding.  The Zimbabwean government wants to extradite him for prosecution there.  Arguments against doing so on cable news include that African nation's atrocious human rights record and its terrible prisons.  The United States, supposedly, has no bad prison conditions.  In any case, Palmer hasn't been accused, yet, of violating any laws.  Hunting big game is legal in Zimbabwe, bringing in millions of dollars each year in tourist/hunter cash.  Palmer claims he didn't know that Cecil was a lion from a protected wildlife preserve until after he killed him and saw the tracking device around the dead animal's neck.  According to one of the trackers working for him, Palmer "panicked," and put the tracking device in a nearby tree.  The tracker faces a possible fifteen years in prison for poaching.  The Zimbabwean authorities, presumably, would like to get Palmer for poaching.  He could be a prison dentist.
     If Palmer comes out of hiding, will the U.S. government give him to the Zimbabwean justice system?  Will Dr. Palmer become an American to fight for?  Is a lion's life worth less than that of a callous son of a bitch operating along the murky edge of a legal system which allows wealthy white people to "hunt" big land animals, not for food, but for the fun of it?
     Palmer's killing of Cecil, legal or not, was the act of a bungling sadist.  His first arrow wounded the lion.  Night fell and they had to take a break from tracking him.  Forty hours after the first arrow entered the lion's body, Palmer killed him with the second arrow, saw and "hid" the tracking device, skinned and cut off the animal's head, posing for a picture that shows the fine teeth we expect in the skull of a dentist.
     Did Palmer break Zimbabwean law?  I point out the evidence that he believed he broke the law--his awkward attempt at hiding the lion's tracking device shows a man worried he's done something that may come back to bite him in the butt.
     Zimbabwe's leader, Robert Mugabe, ninety-one years old, has been president of that country since 1987, and was prime minister from 1980.  He obviously doesn't like political challengers.  Zimbabwe, to the United States, is a so-called pariah nation.  Mugabe's human rights record includes institutionalized torture, suppression of free speech, and other typical fear-based behaviors associated with iron rule supported by the consent of First World powers.  Iran has cultivated good relations with Zimbabwe, which has uranium and diamonds.  Barack Obama looks down on Mugabe, while Mugabe says Obama's nothing special.  Zimbabwean military equipment comes more from the People's Republic of China and Russia than from Western Europe and the U.S.
     On June 6, 2012, according to The Guardian, the forward-most motorcycle in Mugabe's motorcade struck and killed a homeless man, injuring the motorcyclist as he flew off his bike.  Mugabe, "riding in a one million dollar Mercedes Benz limousine, 'zoomed past the accident scene moments later, probably unaware of the serious crash,'" adds Zimbabwe's Daily News.
     An eyewitness said, "The bike ripped through the man's legs while the bike rider was thrown off.  The scene was so ghastly and bloody that one would not take a second glance."
     Or, in Mugabe's case, a first glance.
     "Mugabe's motorcade," the article goes on, "usually comprises police escort bikes, state security vehicles, police vehicles, his Zim 1 limousine and Land Cruiser trucks full of heavily armed soldiers...He also travels with an ambulance among other vehicles.  His motorcade is regarded as one of Africa's longest."
     In 2005, the motorcade ran over and killed another homeless man.
     It's an offence in Zimbabwean road traffic regulations to "make any gesture or statement within the view or hearing of the state motorcade with the intention of insulting any person traveling with an escort or any member of the escort."
     Do not say "Fuck you" to the motorcade.
     Callousness towards the continuation of innocent life, a lion or a vagabond, is not a sociopathic condition demonstrated just in the Third World.  Marco Rubio griped in a tweet: "Look at all this outrage over a dead lion, but where is all the outrage over the planned parenthood dead babies."
     A Planned Parenthood employee was secretly videoed talking about abortion doctors preserving tissue for research, a latest smoking gun argument used by those who employ the term genocide when describing the killing of prenatal human life.  Rubio wants to take away funding for Planned Parenthood.  He also wants to close the new Cuban embassy in Washington.  He's a curiously narrow-minded young man.
     Rubio's views on the killing of a lion suggest he doesn't give a shit about animals and nature.  What kind of president, then, would he be?
     Mugabe's twenty-eight years of presidency have made him the kind of person who doesn't realize his security epic in motion, the motorcade, sometimes runs people down.
     What made the dentist, Walter Palmer, into a man who gets his thrills killing animals from a safe distance?  Indifference?  Stupidity?  Heartlessness?  I don't know, except that everything I've brought up here shows words coming from some people's mouths don't match the severity of their actions, or in Rubio's case, his words suggest he's incapable of feeling compassion for a lion who spent forty hours in agony.
     Dr. Palmer: If you don't already know you're a piece of shit, you never will, so you've got nothing to learn, except how to aim better.

                                                                            Vic Neptune       

     Eric Trump, son of Donald, said his father, if elected president, will be "fixing things."  Vagueness characterizes Trump statements, son or father, when talking about solving domestic and world problems.  At this early stage of the electoral process--a stage never existing before, since campaigning for president hasn't begun so early in the past--do Donald Trump's general declarations matter?  Political candidates make promises when they run, and never fulfill many of them once they've ascended to office.  Guantanamo Bay horror prison will close, Obama promised, and then it didn't.  He did promise to withdraw the U.S. troop presence (occupation, to use another term) from Iraq, and did so, mostly, but later began adding troops ("advisors") in response to ISIS aggression.
     Trump, acting from a safe position of blaring nonsense in the presence of reporters, doesn't have to, at this early date, think about what being president might actually mean, if he gets elected.  Now, as he puts it, he can "just be Trump."  Asked by CNN reporter Dana Bash if he's preparing for the nearing Fox News Channel Republican debate in Cleveland, he responded with the I'll just be Trump attitude.  He's not doing homework, he's not practicing with his campaign staff acting as other candidates.  He's in Scotland swinging golf clubs.  A video image of Trump, wearing a red baseball cap stitched with his campaign logo, showed him on CNN stepping down from his helicopter (easy to tell it's his because his surname is painted on it).  Walking with an entourage, watched by reporters and camerapersons, Trump put his shoe bottoms on Scottish soil and then told news media fools
about a key part of his upcoming campaign:
     "The Hispanics will vote for me."
     "I'll win the Hispanic vote."
     Even a perceptive child, who can't even vote, might ask, "How will you do that, considering the degree to which you alienated them with your anti-Latino comments?"
     I heard no such question from the assembled reporters.  Someone, maybe, asked it, but CNN didn't air the question or the response, if such exchanges of carbon dioxide occurred.
     Trump will win over the Hispanics.  They enjoy being called criminals, rapists.  He told Bash of CNN that he will deport all illegal aliens in America before allowing them to apply for citizenship.  He avoided her follow-up question on how he would remove 11 million (he claims 34 million) people from this country, and then bring them back as if they've been laundered.  No reporters, as far as I know, ever tell Trump to his face that most or all of his ideas about using the power of his hypothetical presidency are fucking crazy.
     He will bomb ISIS far more than Obama's been doing.  He will bomb ISIS oil facilities, as if that mobile organization can't conquer additional territory where there's oil.  He chimes in with every other Republican grandstander (plus Netanyahu) who claims the Kerry-negotiated deal on controlling a nuclear-ambitious Iran is "a bad deal."
     "I'll be Trump" really means a media savvy con artist skilled at improvisation and willing to say anything to grab attention.  He's better at this than his Republican challengers (who barely challenge him).  Mike Huckabee's "leading Israel to the door of the oven" comment reveals that candidate's clumsy desperation to participate in Fox's stupid debate.  Only stiff-necked hyper-Zionists would embrace such an inaccurate and mean-spirited statement.
     Trump's elegance, if he has any, consists of a well-honed ability to make outrageous statements, backed by the force of his Olympian ego.  He said John McCain isn't a hero because he got captured in Vietnam.  Some claimed that Trump wouldn't recover from attacking a renowned war hero, that his comment did a disservice to all American military personnel.  His poll numbers rose, instead.  Trump had the hypocrisy of the Republican Party on his side.  John Kerry, also a Vietnam war veteran, and, arguably, since he put his life on the line many times, a hero, was viciously attacked in 2004 for being a coward by some of the same right-wing assholes expressing indignation over Trump's anti-McCain remark.
     Trump's insertion of himself into the 2015-2016 electoral contest illustrates, with his popular success thus far, how American political processes have become a joke.  In the 1960s TV series Batman, a pair of episodes deals with a Gotham City mayoral race.  Supervillain Penguin runs for mayor, gains so much traction with the people that Batman decides to run against him.  Batman's campaign, compared to Penguin's, is straitlaced, square, platitudinous.  Penguin offers a light-hearted say-what-people-want-to-hear approach.  Batman refuses to kiss a baby because it would be "unsanitary."  Penguin kisses the baby and puts one of his campaign stickers on the stroller.  Penguin has ulterior motives, of course--he is a politician, or rather, he's playing at being one.
     President Trump will fix things.  Problems will be solved.  Bombs will be dropped.  No civilians will die.  An impenetrable fence, paid for by the Mexican government, will be built along the Mexico-U.S. border.  Tunnels under the fence?  How could that happen?  Hispanics in their millions will vote for Trump.  They don't care that he implied they're the scum of the earth.
     He will, for sure, be the star of the upcoming Fox debate.  He can hold his own against any of the hopefuls he'll face.  He'll be placed in the center of the stage.  The men on the edges will have to make their zingers count, showing some voters that the candidate with the best zinging skills should run the United States.  Trump, of course, is best at that among his opponents.  Self-confident contempt for others is not something he needs to fix about himself.  He and Penguin share that character trait.

                                                                               Vic Neptune 
          

     Great Expectations by Charles Dickens has a character named Miss Havisham.  Jilted by the groom at her wedding, she sits in her decaying wedding gown at the feast table--still covered with the meal--with a cake tunneled by mice.  I haven't read the novel, but I saw this dramatized in David Lean's 1946 adaptation.  Martita Hunt plays Miss Havisham perfectly: demented, but in control of her faculties, although her mind's entirely devoted to preserving a lost, never fulfilled ideal.  Surrounded by mold, the shit of vermin, cobwebs, and dead food remnants, Miss Havisham represents holding on, to an extreme extent, to the past.  She preserves a moment that almost was, instead of forgetting about the louse who backed out of marrying her.
     I've had Miss Havisham nights and days of thinking too much about what I wanted, but never came to pass.  Love, of course, is a terrible ache when it doesn't find fulfillment, or gets punched hard by some unforeseen circumstance.  I've been dumped, I've dumped.  I feel a psychic sympathy for both sides of that process.  I've gotten involved with women and then found the relationships lacking in intellectual interest.  When I was much younger, I couldn't handle emotional turmoil in a woman partner very well.  I wanted to back away from drama.  Years later, I tended to embrace the whole experience, putting up with situations and emotions in significant others that sometimes bewildered me, but didn't make me fly away, like Miss Havisham's fiancé.
     Getting dumped, of course, feels horrible.  The pain of separation, of not being able to touch that person again, or feel them close by, can be felt in the body like an illness.  Growing used to someone, to their nourishing aspects, when inverted in loss, causes agony when it's no longer there.  It's death.  It's a jilted woman in Dickens' novel holding on to something slowly disintegrating into atoms no longer held together into energy fields comprising a wedding feast.
     The beautiful things that never happen in your life hold on, with varying degrees of strength, paradoxically consisting of nothing, nowhere to be found, yet alive in memory of what could have been.

                                                                            Vic Neptune     

     When the phone rings and a pollster asks if I'd be willing to answer some questions, I refuse.  I've got other things to do.  Even clipping my toenails is preferable to listening to a pollster asking about how I regard issues and politicians.  I wonder about people, their days interrupted by pollsters, finding it worthwhile to respond to strangers about whether or not Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton are human beings acceptable enough to run the country and command its military forces.
     Is Rand Paul acceptable to you?
     Does Ted Cruz strike you as a stable individual?
     Would you like Jeb Bush to make decisions impacting the natural environment?
     If God is just, does He really want Scott Walker to be president?
     Hillary Clinton, dropping in the polls, is handicapped by the nature of this premature presidential election cycle.  She must compete for news media attention with Donald Trump, the clear gossip-favorite among those who sit behind clear plastic desks and offer opinions on camera.
     Trump, we're assured by MSNBC mouths, will not secure the Republican nomination, nor will Bernie Sanders secure the Democratic one.  Fifteen months before the election, they pretend to know what will happen.  The roiling changeability of social media-driven information exchange being what it is, it's amazing that anyone could believe in accurate predictions regarding next summer's political conventions.
     When Ted Cruz announced his candidacy for president, the first prominent person to do so, he received a great deal of news coverage.  Now, he receives coverage for calling Mitch McConnell a liar, an act unprecedented, it's claimed, by a senator speaking on the Senate floor--but do most people give a shit about this?  Cruz, more importantly, needs to get attention in the Trump-dominated news media world, so he called McConnell a liar.
     The Fox News Channel Republican debate this August stipulates that "only" the top ten candidates, in popularity according to latest polls, may participate.  This may explain why one of the polls' bottom feeders, Mike Huckabee (former Arkansas governor, Fox News Channel star, man of God, con artist), said of the Iran nuclear deal that "it will lead Israel to the door of the oven."
     Holocaust rhetoric is tricky.  A cynical person, like Vic Neptune, might think Huckabee has used the murders of approximately six million people to advance his place in polls, earning him a spot on a debate stage with another bomb-first-ask-questions-later type like Donald Trump.
     Huckabee strikes me as a vicious political opportunist lacking the humane Christian ethics spoken of by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.  He combines the surface personality of a wise and sober minister offering common sense, but tainted by nasty statements and hyperbole designed to shiver the backs of those vulnerable to fear-talk.
     The Fox News debate will act as a funnel for those low-numbers candidates desperate to stand on that stage, as if it's one of the most portentous events of their lives.  It will be, rather, a mindfuck-fest run by pollsters and a propaganda-driven cable news channel, elevating Donald Trump further as he self-promotes circles around his competitors.
     We live in a dystopian science fiction novel.

                                                                                Vic Neptune
    
        

     Samuel Mudd, who treated the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth in 1865, after the latter shot Abraham Lincoln in the head and then jumped down to the stage of the Ford Theater and shouted, "Sic semper tyrannis!", had children whose descendants try still to clear their ancestor's name.  Mudd was arrested as a conspirator in the assassination plot and spent years at a prison on the Dry Tortugas, an island chain near the Florida Keys.  The lack of fresh water made those islands "dry."  Mudd's
skills as a physician came in handy during his stay there.  In the early 1930s, a very good Hollywood film called The Prisoner of Shark Island was made, depicting Mudd's selfless efforts at healing his fellow man.
     On Saturday, July 25, 2015, Fox News Channel aired a story about Mudd's descendants, showing them gathering for what looked like a family reunion on a touring boat, with a visit to old buildings at some tropical location.
     The Fox newsman speaking over the footage said, "I don't know where they're supposed to be..."
     I thought, Have you considered doing research before you air the story?  Could you call the Mudd descendants and ask them about the footage, among other interesting facts about the ancestor they're trying to convert from infamous to famous?
     Cable news programs often show imagery the anchors and pundits probably wouldn't be able to identify, at least as to the images' origins.  How many times have we seen training footage of al-Qaeda junior terrorists in ski masks working with monkey bars and other playground equipment?  War on Terror footage shown on the three U.S. cable news networks is remarkably sparse.  The Defense Department provides footage filtered by their censors to the public here, avoiding anything bloody.  No civilian corpses.  No combat footage depicting its real nastiness.  An image shown thousands of times in recent years on cable news depicts a soldier throwing a grenade over a wall, a truly long hurl, like a centerfielder arcing a ball to the catcher.  War as baseball.
     How much do newscasters in our freedom of information country know about what's going on in the war zones?  Like the repeating shot of terrorists on monkey bars, did anyone watching that or broadcasting it know where that footage was shot?  It was used here to make us feel uneasy, like all footage provided by the Defense Department of enemies of the U.S., most of whom wear black masks, supplying their own villainous headgear.
     Samuel Mudd's story is of a man quite possibly falsely accused.  He provided aid to a man who had recently assassinated the President of the United States.  Did he know about Booth beforehand?  Could he break the Hippocratic Oath and not treat a man in great pain?  His exemplary and heroic conduct on Shark Island should be noted by any newsman or -woman talking about Mudd and his descendants' efforts to clear his name.  The Fox News ignoramus didn't make the connection between an image of Mudd's descendants and an old-looking building interior plus tropical waters, meaning he's probably looking at Samuel Mudd's prison location.
     A likely innocent person held prisoner by the U.S. government in a Caribbean location.  Imagine that.

                                                                               Vic Neptune
    

     Late at night a few years ago I walked home from a friend's downtown apartment.  We had discussed a variety of subjects, drunk enough beers to feel buzzed, listened to The Doors on compact disc--not quite as good as listening to them the vinyl way, but adequate to add weirdness to the living room's ambiance.
     A little tweaked emotionally by the content of our conversation (one involving aliens, government surveillance, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, and disappointments in our dealings with women), I walked faster and faster on Main Street, wanting badly to be in my own space.  It was around three in the morning.  The only activity consisted of traffic lights flashing yellow before and behind me.  Empty cars parked here and there.  Muted light from streetlamps brightening the sidewalk at intervals, and a breeze rattling an empty soda bottle.
     As spooky as the main drag setting was, I stayed with it until the quiet perpendicular avenue that would lead me to my street.  One car, driven by a civilian, passed by--no cops.  Every upstairs window on Main Street was dark.  Some of these are parts of apartments, but I guess everyone was asleep, or awake in the dark.
     I approached the last intersection with traffic lights before my turnoff.  I started across and stopped, seeing something across the intersection, near the opposite corner: a white cat, sitting placidly, front legs straight, looking at me.  I kept moving, but slowed down quite a bit as I crossed to the other side.  Wind blew a piece of paper between me and the cat.  I walked on and before I reached my turnoff I looked back.  The cat was still there, sitting on the street just off the curb.
     I thought about the cat the rest of the walk home.  I tried to assign some meaning to the encounter, but came up with nothing.  I couldn't make it into an omen.  The image of that night's cat sits in my memory, doing nothing, meaning nothing, a moment shared; forgotten, probably, by the cat.

                                                                          Vic Neptune    

     Donald Trump, America's current favorite political celebrity, finally went too far, offending his fellow Republican presidential candidates enough to speak against him.  He called Mexican illegal immigrants criminals and rapists, and four years ago he headed the so-called Birthers, questioning President Obama's American citizenship.  Those two indications of Trump's sleazy political opportunism were not sufficient to generate strong objections in the minds of Republican high office seekers.  Ted Cruz, himself of Cuban ancestry, spoke admiringly of Trump after the real estate developer impugned Latin Americans.  Jeb Bush, married to a Latina, sounded reluctant to raise his voice against Trump, even after the latter suggested Bush defends Mexicans because he must, being married to a woman of that origin.
     Republican presidential candidates have gone easy or silent on Trump, although Rick Perry and Lindsay Graham took early stabs at him, and now criticize him without hesitation.  Still, the others were quiet about Trump, until yesterday, when he said that Senator John McCain is not a hero because he was captured in Vietnam.  The statement's logic makes no sense, but Trump's way is the monkey's way of painting a wall with handfuls of shit.  He gets attention, while relative non-entities like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, also running for president (did you know that?), feel the need in a Fox interview yesterday to speak forcefully of "killing" America's enemies; that Obama is not up to the task of doing what he must in our war on terrorism, against the enemies of freedom.  Bobby Jindal wants to kill.  Trump wants to build a fence at the U.S.-Mexico border and make the Mexicans pay for it.  Neither will be president, both are delusional, but Trump shows his willingness to attack every sacred cow, or bull, in the American political scene; thus, he gets airtime. 
     John McCain's war record has been off limits, even when he's demonstrated his inability to make wise decisions (choosing to run with Sarah Palin).  Granted, his war record is his war record.  He was a POW, he was tortured.  Trump, though, attacked a man regarded as a hero, and the Republican candidates just had to respond, outraged.  McCain's reputation, after all, matters so much more to them than the characters of millions of Mexicans.

                                                                                  Vic Neptune 
        

     A guest--I didn't catch his name--on Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor told guest host Eric Bolling (a man even more right wing than O'Reilly) that the month of Ramadan encourages Muslims to believe they'll be more blessed if they practice jihad during that time.  In other words, watch out for fanatical Muslims infused with the desire to please their deity by killing non-believers, as we saw yesterday in the shooting in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
     Ramadan isn't about killing people, as much as Fox News pundits, encouraged by bigots like Eric Bolling, would like us to believe.  Some fundamentalist Muslims are a pain in the world's ass.  Some fundamentalist Jews and Christians are also pains in the world's ass.  Take religious viewpoints out of war and half of the armed conflicts going on now might cease.  George W. Bush, hardcore Christian, believed he was doing right when he attacked Iraq, and it wasn't just for oil or to overthrow Saddam Hussein.  His first public comments about invading Iraq included the word "crusade" to characterize the operation, but he was advised not to use that word again.  It has unpleasant associations in the Middle East, where European aristocrats and knights intruded themselves, called upon and blessed by Popes, conquering and killing Muslims, Jews, and local Christians.  Two days ago was the 916th anniversary of the climax of the Siege of Jerusalem, when European crusaders breached the walls and killed nearly everyone in the city.  The leaders prayed in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, thanking God for delivering the Holy City to them, a city literally covered in blood.  I suspect the word jihad unsettles the stomachs of Eric Bolling and other professional paranoids the same way the word crusade unnerves some in the Middle East.
     Bolling's guest also said that "we" must track down pro-Isis-related tweets, while Bolling suggested more bombing.  Yes, war for control of the twitterverse, plus intensification of bombing, will win the war.
     Neither one of these doofuses seems to realize the impossibility of eliminating everybody who fights American interests and hates U.S. foreign policy.  Malicious and unwise actions in the Middle East have doomed U.S. efforts there.  U.S. policies (and bombs, and torture practices) create a vigorous flow of enemies the Pentagon will never run out of.  Instead of focusing on the execrable domineering practices of U.S. foreign policy in action, Bolling and a host of group-think politicians and news media people in America concentrate on recruitment by terrorists, primarily ISIS, trying to solve the problem backwards, cart before the horse style.
     ISIS and other anti-American groups thrive on the shit the U.S. has been throwing at the Middle East for decades.  The first step in getting people to like you is to stop being an asshole.  Hellfire missiles shot at civilians in Yemen don't make Americans safe, but that does create hatred.  The twenty-four year old Muslim who killed four Marines at a recruiting center in Tennessee before he was shot to death by cops, probably carried out his self-appointed (ISIS encouraged, perhaps) mission because he despised U.S. military actions in the Middle East.  Bush and Cheney's legacy, really, is a mountain of corpses rising from a sea of oil.  Sometimes, the dead pile grows with Americans who had nothing to do with decisions made by the killer crusaders who caused the problem in the first place.

                                                                               Vic Neptune      

     I talked to a scammer on the phone.  I looked up his premise on Google after he hung up on me.  I didn't cooperate.  I asked him questions, became emphatic that he identify where he was calling from.  He sounded Indian or Pakistani.  I could hear a call center in the background.  His thick accent didn't cross the communications web without losing the clarity his voice would've possessed had he been in the same room with me, trying to convince me, eyes to eyes, to turn on my computer and follow his instructions.
     He explained that I needed to check Windows, that "11,000" computers have crashed due to something or other.  My immediate reaction, kept to myself, was, I was just about to sit down and read for a while, and you want me to sit in front of the computer and listen to your hard to comprehend voice coaching me through a series of questionable actions?
     It sounded like a drag.
     He explained himself again, and again.  I thought, Even if you're actually trying to be helpful, your approach sucks.  You're not being clear.  I don't know who the fuck you are.
     When I repeated, forcefully, emphasizing each word, "Where are you calling from?" he disconnected.
     In the Google search box I typed, People calling about Windows.  As I figured, it's a scam.  Marks snagged by it turn on their computers as instructed and receive "help" from friendly, "concerned" strangers.
     Curiosity, my best defense, made me ask, "Why?"  Why do you want me to do this?  Why do you want me to do that?
     He said, "You NEED to go to your computer now!"
     Picture a health expert making cold calls, insisting, "You MUST drink at least eight ounces of V8 per day!"
     "You say 11,000 computers have crashed," I said.  "Are you and your colleagues calling everybody in the world as part of some do-good operation?"
     He denied participating in such an enormous endeavor, but insisted my computer had to be checked.  He, I assume he was trying to say, was the man for the job, volunteering his time for Windows users in another hemisphere--an unasked-for favor unintentionally stinking of shadiness, ignore the smell.
     The background chatter of others doing the same thing reminded me of my time working for a call center contracted to raise money for police charities.  Along with nine others, I spent forty-six hours a week calling out of state residents, reading a "script" from a computer screen, learning to make it sound natural enough to get good at it before quitting the job.  I learned to modulate my voice, earning strangers' trust, convincing them to donate from twenty-five to a hundred dollars.  Extracting a donation felt good.  The room's compactness meant that the boss had his desk well within hearing range of everyone's voices saying the same things all day.  If an entire morning passed without making a successful call, my frustration and exasperation would be noticed by the boss.  I could occasionally feel his eyes on me.  Sometimes, glancing at him, I'd see him glaring at one of my coworkers.
     People in jobs making cold calls are like many others in the working world, doing the latest shitty job in possibly a long adulthood of shitty jobs.  I sympathize, for I was one of them.  My own headset-wearing job didn't consist of scamming people and fucking up their computers, but it did involve convincing some probably quite poor people that it was a good idea to give twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred of their dollars to police charities instead of using it to buy groceries and gasoline.  Even at the time I viewed the job as preying on the good natures and beliefs of people minding their own business.  If telephone cold calls meant to separate people from their money were abolished, humanity, I'm convinced, would be better off.
     Scammer, if you ever read this, please realize I understand you're doing a job you need in order to get by, but also understand when I say, as I didn't say when we talked, "Fuck you."

                                                                             Vic Neptune         

     I had to squeeze through a narrowing gap of patience to reach this spot, to put these letters together into a sentence.  I turned on the computer to write another post.  I followed the same procedure I've always followed to get to my Blogger Dashboard.  A guard in the form of a Google Blogger checkpoint Tron cop asked me to write my password.  I couldn't remember it.  I have it written down on a piece of paper underneath a mound of other papers.  I didn't feel like looking for it.  I followed the advice offered, to create a new password.  I wrote down some new gobbledygook, rewrote it in the space below, wrote the new gobbledygook on a post-it note.  I was then presented with several screens of security recommendations--add additional phone number, another e-mail, calculate pi to the 937th digit using just a compass, pencil, and slide rule.  After a few more screens of multi-layered security suggestions I began to notice I seemed to be going in circles.  Pi, indeed.
     Throughout this thirty minute aggravation, I yelled at the computer.  There is no inanimate object I feel more revulsion for when it doesn't work for me than a computer.  My minimal knowledge of how to work the things contributes mostly to my frustration.  I yell at it like I would never yell at a person or an animal.  It's plastic and circuits.  I assume it can handle the abuse.  Its brain is primitive artificial intelligence, part of a hive mind when linked to the Internet.  It has no feelings.  In me, though, when I don't understand what I'm supposed to do with it, it inspires anger and hatred.
     Some think it's foolish to yell at inanimate objects, but for me it's an expression of hot anger I'm getting out of my system right away, rather than storing it for later.  Some people drop dead eventually because they don't express their emotions enough.  One of the characters in Mike Judge's masterpiece about the mid-level technical working world, Office Space, hates the copy machine they have to use.  It jams every time he uses it, he talks to it almost like a hurt lover on the verge of violence.  Later, after he and his two colleagues pull off their embezzlement scheme, they steal the copier and take it to a field, going to town on it mob-style, with baseball bats.
     My frustration, when computers confuse me, stems from my avoidance of them when I was young and could've learned at a fresh age.  In my high school there were two computer courses taught, using what would now be considered funny-looking machines.  Still, the students who, around 1980, took those classes, saw the utility of that machine and what was coming.  Two computer students I knew continued in that field, quite successfully.  Why didn't I take those classes?  I wasn't interested.  This lack of interest led eventually to my occasional one-sided curse-ridden berating of plastic and circuits.  If I understood more about this fucking thing I'm using to write this, I'd save myself some irritation.
     But Vic, some might suggest, you can still learn more about computers.
     Yes, but I'm not interested.

                                                                                 Vic Neptune
        

     India first impressed itself on my mind when I was a boy perusing a pair of Rudyard Kipling books my father gave me.  A two volume illustrated anthology, the books attracted my attention because of the story, "The Man Who Would Be King."  My parents took me to John Huston's film adaptation of that tale, and I was knocked silly by it.  Starring two of my favorite actors, Michael Caine and Sean Connery, the movie seethed with an adventurous spirit, with mystery of a foreign fictional land somewhat based on Afghanistan, set in the late nineteenth century, but dealing with a culture lost in time.  These two ex-soldiers of the British Empire carve out a kingdom, Connery's character ruling as a god, due to a coincidence when an archer shoots an arrow at him and apparently hits him in the heart.  Not only doesn't Connery's character die, but he doesn't even bleed.  The arrow had penetrated an unseen leather sash beneath his clothing containing pouches of cartridges.  The quick-thinking Caine perceives what this could mean in taking advantage of the natives' awe.  The small mountain kingdom is theirs, for a time.
     When I was eleven years old, encountering this movie and story, I knew nothing of the real histories of that part of the world, of imperial rule and exploitation, of the sense of superiority felt by the British over their subjects, as so brilliantly written about in George Orwell's novel, Burmese Days and in his essay, "Shooting an Elephant."  In that essay, Orwell recounts a difficult day during his civil service in Burma when a bull elephant in rut, on the loose, went rampaging about the town, knocking down walls, messing up the marketplace.  As the prime British authority figure in the immediate area it was his job to take care of the problem.  He took a big gun off the shelf and went to the elephant, followed by most of the townspeople who watched him set up for a shot.  All the while, Orwell didn't want to kill the elephant, but the pressure of all the eyes on his back waiting for him to do it, to uphold his position as Man of the British Empire, made him squeeze the trigger.
     Between Kipling's jolly embrace of British rule of India and other vast lands of the world, and Orwell's jaded vision lies only about thirty to fifty years of a shifting viewpoint influenced, no doubt, by the carnage of the Great War and a growing sense worldwide of the yearning for self-government among those governed by Big Daddy empires.  What Kipling embraced, Orwell rejected.  In Burmese Days he writes a mesmerizing page about the native culture, its habits, its ahistorical way of being: it hasn't changed, essentially, in thousands of years, making absurd the attempt to alter it through some Westernizing effort.  Attempts to change cultures from without are doomed to fail, because the results and consequences of such invasions, peaceful and otherwise, produce the unexpected, peaceful and otherwise.
     "The Man Who Would Be King," a great romantic adventure story about two men with superior technical knowhow taking advantage of modern age people frozen culturally in the ancient world, demonstrates the superior-minded imperial attitude of its author.  Orwell's work shows the reality of that same imperial mindset, decaying like the Burmese jungle's undergrowth.
     My impression of India as a child was just that: an idea bearing no relation to the real place.  It's important to realize there's no getting around the fact of how our illusions can romanticize and even destroy, if we use the power to act that way.

                                                                               Vic Neptune  

     In Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began with the self-immolation of a man fed up with his corrupt government, massive garbage hills grow, dumps maintained by a French firm, Pizzorno Environnement, that collects approximately $45,000 a day dumping a daily average of 3,000 tons of waste.  Landfills must have a termination date, when no more garbage is added, or they become open wounds polluting surrounding land, making life for nearby residents intolerable, distributing stench and windblown detritus.
     From The Guardian, May 13, 2014: "In el-Attar, the stench of rubbish chokes the air; it sticks in your throat and permeates your clothing...Respiratory illness is rife."
     At one mega-dump in Jbel Borj Chakir, waste of all types are deposited together.  "Residents and those who make their living scavenging the dump have reported finding blood bags and fetuses..."
     The various kinds of waste produce leachate, the liquid beneath compressed garbage.
     Kamel Marouani, "a former refuse worker...was diagnosed with lung cancer in August 2012."  He "worked at Jbel Borj Chakir for ten years, the past five for...Pizzorno...One of his tasks was to work in the ten leachate basins that surround Jbel Borj Chakir.  He was required to wade through the often chest-high, reeking, black leachate--building dams or clearing away the thick foam that forms on the surface of the basin."
     There's money to be made in maintaining a never-closing dump.  Pizzorno, gathering in $45,000 a day while also billing the Tunisian government for "the costs of trucks and labor," is rewarded as it makes thousands of lives unlivable, according to what is normally considered a livable existence.  Those who have to raise children amid mountains of sickness and death-producing unmanaged garbage and leachate lakes must inspire no one making money from Pizzorno's garbage dumping business to consider the vile criminality they're engaged in.
     We live, though, in an age of corporations as people.  When a corporation's rectum shits out an endless flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning coastlines and marshes, killing wildlife, giving disease and long-term health problems to human residents, and then has the gall to make sunny public relations advertisements informing us that "the Gulf is back!" we should have the right to kick the corporation's testicles into its throat.
     Trains carrying oil and natural gas derail in America as often as trains tend to derail--once is too many times, and on average it's more than once a year.  When a train flops over by or near your town and burns for days and nights, do the CEO and corporate officials of the organization responsible feel the real effects of that accident?  Do they breathe the fumes; do they get cancer from it twenty-five years down the line?  My opinion of them, along with the garbage brokers at Pizzorno, is contemptuous and judgmental, ignoring the likelihood that such rich "folks" are nice to their pets, spouses, children and grandchildren, put on a good dinner spread, and give great parties.  They also profit from the long slow way irresponsible corporations and governments kill people.
     "Corporations are people, my friend!" the campaigning Mitt Romney shouted at a heckler in 2012.
     Legally, he was correct.  Corporate lawyers and corporate-influenced judges made this fantasy the law, but didn't ask the logical next question: If a corporation is a person, and people die and become ill because of the actions of that corporation, shouldn't the corporation be prosecuted as a murderer, and proscribed, or eliminated, as a deadly threat to society?
     When a human being commits murder, he or she, when caught, is punished, usually.  When a corporation commits murder that's money in the bank.

                                                                             Vic Neptune
              

     One pleasure of the modern age is the opening up of movie viewing via YouTube.  I've been able to see films I heard of in the past, but were remote from me except during the international film series presented at the local university in the 1980s.  Then, I took every opportunity to see movies that just weren't playing on television.  I remember getting into an argument with my brother, realizing it was Wednesday, and leaving the house in an emotional broil, walking to the student union to see Kenji Mizoguchi's masterpiece Ugetsu Monogatari projected onto a small screen in a big lunch room with no slope to the floor.  The sometimes less than ideal circumstances of these viewings were
counterbalanced by the enlightenment gained by seeing the films themselves.
     I saw Alphaville, my first Jean-Luc Godard movie, in that room.  My father found it tedious, I was mesmerized.  The screening of Fellini's La Dolce Vita was packed, but as that long film unfolded, people left in twos and threes until finally, during the movie's astounding powerful final moments, I was the only audience member left in the room.
     I'm a real dedicated nut when it comes to watching deceptively difficult movies.  Rainer Werner Fassbinder's fascinating psychodrama The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant held me in one position in my chair for its entire length.  I like watching movies others complain about.  So-called "slow" movies strike me more as cinematic works that reflect what life is really like.  As the director Samuel Fuller, playing himself in a cameo in Godard's Pierrot le fou, puts it, movies are above all about emotion.  Explosions, fast edits throughout, no depth in character development, allow for little expression of emotion in films.
     As a young man recently out of high school I began purposely studying movies and directors.  I read book after book about filmmakers and histories of moviemaking in countries all over the world.  Not having seen any movies by Yasujiro Ozu, I nevertheless read a book about him, but many years passed before I saw any of his films, Tokyo Story being one of the greatest I've ever seen.  Alain Resnais was another director I read up on cold without  seeing his work until much later.  I managed to see several films of the West German postwar directors: Volker Schlondorff, Werner Herzog, Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders.  Other movies I read about with fascination eluded me for decades, until YouTube, which has allowed me to see Pier Paolo Pasolini's masterpiece Medea,
Antonioni's Red Desert, and many others.
     I'm haunted, though, by some still images I saw in books I studied in the 1980s, including a shot from a Bulgarian film, Iconostasis.  I can't remember what was written about it, but that image from the film imprinted itself in my mind: a long line of people stretched serpentine-like to the horizon, in snow, trudging towards the camera.  Boosted by the enigmatic title, Iconostasis, a yearning to see it grew inside me so that when I later saw Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Part One, I was gripped by the image of a long winding line of people in a snowscape, coming to demonstrate their fealty to the exiled monarch.  That image, fraught with the emotion Samuel Fuller speaks of in the Godard film, shows what movies can do when a filmmaker uses the world as a studio, harmonizing acting,
real natural and urban settings, and the relatable veracity of lived-in spaces.

                                                                           Vic Neptune 
              

     Yesterday, July 8, 2015, MSNBC aired a half hour interview with Donald Trump.  Conducted in the public space of New York's Trump Tower, the setting resembled a shopping mall.  The reporter, Katy Tur, somehow managed to sit across from a human barrage of self-inflating words that made me, sitting at a remove before the TV set, wince occasionally from the effect of hearing this man blare his ego non-stop.  While Trump did listen to her questions--the only times his mouth wasn't open--he otherwise kept up a relentless flow of self-aggrandizement fit to come out of the mouths of some psychiatric ward patients. 
     He is, according to himself, Mr. Success.  He will "win the Latino vote."  Hillary Clinton was "the worst Secretary of State in this country's history."  With that statement, Trump implies he's read about and is thoroughly familiar with the biographies of the other sixty-seven people who've served as Secretary of State.  I don't believe--and I know I'm making a subjective judgment against him--that Trump knows even jackshit about the accomplishments of any of the Secretaries of State, including Clinton.
     His ignorance-based knowledge doesn't matter to him or those who support him as a political candidate: he speaks, it's true.  Trump, like Chris Christie and other egomaniacs, "tells it like it is."  He's omniscient, like a philosopher king.  He claims he knows best about what to do with the U.S. military.  He would destroy the oil fields run by ISIS.  He dismissed with contempt Katy Tur's follow-up question about civilian casualties resulting from such bombing.  Civilian casualties have nothing to do with oil drilling, apparently.  The very idea of civilians killed by mass bombing doesn't register in his mind as a real thing, even if those opposed to U.S. war policies point to collateral damage as a key factor in the opposition to American actions in the Middle East and elsewhere.
     As he pointed out in his campaign announcement speech, the one he paid actors to attend, he doesn't give a shit about the environment, and blowing up oil producing areas with the resulting pollution means nothing to him: he lives, let's realize, a life characterized by helicopter travel from tower to tower.  While his fellow competitors for the Republican nomination, Jeb Bush for instance, travel and speak at events--campaigning--Trump hasn't gotten out there, yet.  He sits in his tower with the interior like a shopping mall, allowing journalists to come to him.  He responds to his detractors through the tweet medium, or calls Fox News and rants to pliable Murdoch employees like Tucker Carlson and Steve Doocy.  Thus far, he's been willingly stuck inside his golden bubble, his primary power the celebrity he's fashioned for himself with the help of sensationalistic news media. 
     Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC insists Trump's candidacy is a joke, that "the Donald" knows it's a joke, a publicity-generating maneuver he's gotten used to doing every few years.  Trump himself in his interview with Katy Tur dismissed the negative reactions and boycotts resulting from his, to use a kind word, erroneous, or to use harsher words, fucking crazy, statements about Mexicans being "sent" by the Mexican government to America.
     "They're criminals, they're rapists, some of them, I'm sure, are good people."
     Univision, the Spanish language TV network that broadcasts in the U.S. and shows the Miss Universe contest, a Trump-owned production, has refused to show that beauty pageant.  Macy's, Nascar, ESPN, among many others, have disassociated themselves from Trump World.  NBC Universal, which broadcasts his reality show The Apprentice, also dumped him.  Trump, who's lost money from the boycotts, insists he didn't want to do that show anymore so NBC got upset with him.
     Imagine Trump not wanting to continue with a show dominated by his most-handsome-primate-in-the-universe face, casually dismissing that prominent TV source of his publicity.  I don't buy it, anymore than I think Trump's strategy in getting elected President includes stupidly losing millions of dollars offending Latinos, and anyone else with a heart.
     Not talked about enough in the news media is the early stage these candidates are in.  The election doesn't happen for another sixteen months!  I reserve judgment on who the Democratic and Republican nominees will be.  Who among the current candidates will burn out by the end of this year?  By the end of the summer?  The Citizens United decision makes possible elastic long-term campaigns funded by enormous amounts of secret money.  That it's secret means it comes from wealthy people, but who among the candidates can last another year?  How much do people get turned off when they see what the Clinton campaign did in New Hampshire last weekend?  With a mobile rope cordon, they separated the press from the candidate as she strode majestically, wearing one of her usual United Federation of Planets ambassador's costumes, oblivious to the impotent reporters' questions.  Is this behavior not an indication of what she'll be like if she's president?  Trump, too, gives us every needed clue to help us understand what kind of president he'd be: a blowhard lacking the ability to be diplomatic, convinced always of his own greatness, filled with violent power fantasies of deportation and mass bombing, of coercion, and above all, supremely confident in his own abilities, especially those he's never developed.  This personality description
could also fit Caligula.
     Trump's interview with Katy Tur was described by Tur's MSNBC colleagues as "very entertaining," smile smile.
     Is this what we want in a leader?  Robin Williams was a far greater and more admirable entertainer than Trump, but I would never have voted for him to hold an elected office.  Being entertaining (said often of Chris Christie, too) is a useless criterion for becoming president.  The state of the news, though, in these years, requires entertainment, for that gathers attention, increases profits, and weaves harmoniously, as was discovered in Rome's gladiatorial games, with real carnage.  Today's presidential candidates, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, provide the pre-game show before one of them will become the winning gladiator.

                                                                                Vic Neptune         

     Last night I watched Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, who's better known for her work in Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris.  In Antonioni's 1975 film, she plays a "tourist studying architecture" who helps Nicholson (David Locke, a renowned journalist) carry on with his plan to continue pretending to be someone else, a man he met in Saharan Africa named Robertson.  They resemble each other enough that once Robertson has died of a heart attack, Locke switches passport photos and passports with him, takes his things, and assumes the responsibilities of the dead man's life.  Robertson, it turns out, was an arms dealer.  Locke impersonates him, as if seeking meaning in another man's skin.  He makes good money off of carrying out Robertson's next deal in Munich, and proceeds to Barcelona to meet again with Robertson's customers, representatives of rebels fighting a civil war in North Africa that Locke had been trying to locate for his documentary.
     As complicated as this might sound, the film unfolds slowly enough to allow the viewer access to its many mysteries.  I've seen The Passenger maybe six or seven times.  Since Antonioni is my favorite filmmaker I watch each of his movies over and over again.  He was a master of space and the subtle revelation.  His movies don't addle the viewer's nerves.  They're quiet, poetic, haunting, beautiful, filled with cinematographic compositions that should be blown up and framed for presentation on museum walls.
     The Passenger pulls on my imagination because of its existential theme of a man who can no longer be himself--his identity has failed him, his profession, reporter, become meaningless since he can no longer make sense of what he's reporting on: a civil war he can't find.  His encounter with Robertson in the hotel they're staying in is ultimately just a coincidence Locke acts upon.  His
difficulties with this escape from who he is constitute most of the film's action, with Maria Schneider's character behaving from the viewpoint of someone who knows only the man running away from himself, and treats him as he is in the present, knowing nothing of his past.
     In this sense, The Passenger is like a Hollywood crime film with a pair of lovers on the run, engaged in illicit activities (gunrunning in this case).  In such Hollywood films (Gun Crazy, They Live By Night, Bonnie and Clyde) the criminal lovers on the run live in a stretched-out present doomed to end once the law catches up.  The Passenger, though it has this theme, doesn't explode in the end with the accentuated sound bursts of Hollywood gunfire.  Rather, it's like Locke, the man who chooses not to exist, but continues existing until he runs out of gas, becomes a ghost, real only to the last person (Maria Schneider's character) who knows him and accepts him regardless of his identity.
     Watching the film last night it became obvious to me at the end why I keep going back to it.  The Passenger is the only film I've ever seen that so memorably focuses on a character so fed up with his life that he changes into another person.  In doing so he attracts back onto himself the turbulence of the very same civil war he couldn't find in his profession as reporter.

                                                                              Vic Neptune

     In my twenties I wondered about the meanings of things.  Combining imagination and intelligence with curiosity, people that age tend to find a wealth of newness in discovering previously unknown information.  It can feel to them like no one ever had such thoughts before.  In those years, I wondered how the brain works, how its perceptions color our views of reality.
     Differences in viewpoints, worldviews, may lead a young adult to realize "everything's relative."  We live in a post-Aristotelian, post-Newtonian, quantum physical complex of intersecting realities, each mind perceiving uniquely.  I first read about these ideas in Robert Anton Wilson's non-fiction and Philip K. Dick's science fiction.  Percolating in my brain during my twenties, they influence me still.  I changed the way I talked, saying, "I think that's an ugly painting," rather than "That's an ugly painting."  Is suggests absolute judgment, something no one can possibly have.
     In those years I spoke of tendencies: "She tends to lose her cool whenever I mention that."  Saying it this way means I'm aware she doesn't always lose her cool when I mention whatever it is.  This way of talking sometimes goes around listeners' ears.  They'll hear is when I actually said that tends to be the case.  I got irritable with a friend once who didn't hear my tends to be.  I then said, "It can be a problem in communication when people don't listen to the words being spoken."
     My speaking precisely, relating as much of the truth as I'm capable of putting across, stems, I think, from the heady intellectual decade of my twenties, influenced, too, by my adolescence.  Back then I wanted badly to be understood, to be true to whatever information I was trying to convey.  I grew up with a shy personality.  Social situations shut me up but good.  I've always identified with wallflower types.  I still am one, but my personality has grown to still include the introvert, but mingled with an extroverted exterior that doesn't mind talking with almost anyone.  Inside, I'm still carrying on an inner dialogue with myself.  Much of my creativity branches from this original self.  As a writer I am certainly extroverted.  The two psychological conditions, introversion and extroversion, are really one thing: the human personality flowing outward and inward, manifesting itself so that society sometimes notices--the extrovert--and sometimes doesn't--the introvert. 
     Categorizing people as extrovert or introvert, normal or psychotic, attention deficit disordered or possessing the concentration of a spider, can be useful in making generalizations, but to stop at that point, never pondering the subject to gain more information, makes it seem as if people are one-dimensional.  Get to know someone labelled by the medical community, by the government, by a friend, and you'll probably find the label applies only to a condition the person sometimes has no control over.  Or, the person made choices, got labelled, but there are still many layers to his or her personality.
     I try to use language in a non-absolute way because I acknowledge complexities in other humans.  I also judge harshly, as can be read in some of this blog--I do think the man in my July 5 entry, who wrecked his head with the firecracker, was a moron.  I also recognize that he was young and drunk, that he probably had some good qualities, that his friends and family are upset and grieving.
     When I was in my twenties, I had far less experience of the world and life than I do now.  The ideas mentioned above swam freely in my head, an intellectual stew not yet spiced by the suffering I've experienced since then.  My precise way of talking when in my twenties, still used to the point where I'm usually not conscious of it, has nonetheless been tempered by a more free-flowing style, mixing relativity with the spice of direct language.  I don't talk like Donald Trump, whose face explodes verbal diarrhea not backed up by facts, but I have fun with English, and it no longer irritates the fuck out of me when people speak imprecisely, except journalists.

                                                                             Vic Neptune     
           
    

     A drunk twenty-two year old man in a Maine town near the border with New Brunswick managed to kill himself yesterday by placing a mortar tube on the top of his head, attempting to launch the firework, with himself as Cape Canaveral.  His instantaneous death caused his drunk friends, perhaps,
to transition suddenly from laughter to "Whoah, dude!"
     The article, from The Guardian, adds that this death is the first "since the state legalized fireworks on 1 January 2012..."  Maine had banned fireworks in 1949, but in 2011 lawmakers repealed the law, "reasoning that the industry would create jobs and generate additional revenue."
     And lessen the state's moron population. 
     I don't like fireworks.  For several days before and after July 4, it's typical wherever I've lived to hear those things pop at all hours of the day and night.  Some of them boom, some crackle, all have in common the unnerving property of noises interrupting peace with no regular pattern.  Steady rhythms, even noisy ones, can be tolerated because the brain gets used to them, but goblins with gunpowder "celebrating freedom" by supposedly honoring the signing of the Declaration of Independence, make their chaotic sounds with no sense of how annoying their actions are to those who're trying to sleep or concentrate.
     Firecracker Head in Maine died of dumbassitis, a fatal condition I identified a few years ago when I began thinking about how some people die in ridiculous ways, as with yesterday's incident.  Apart from the potentially serious or mortal damage caused by lighting a firecracker on one's head, this person "celebrating" freedom, afflicted with dumbassitis, was too stupid not to put a firecracker on his head and light it.  Hence, the real cause of his death.

                                                                             Vic Neptune 
    

     The first thing I saw and heard this morning when I pressed the TV's ON button was an image of a shark and the words "shark attacks."  There have been "upticks" in  the number of such attacks this summer.  The Atlantic Ocean off the coasts of North and South Carolina allegedly seethe with vicious carnivores attracted to increased amounts of other fish to feed on, and above average seawater temperatures.  Rising ocean temperatures, related directly to climate change, should tell anyone who can add two and two that shark attacks closer to beaches are, and will be, increasingly more frequent in years to come.
     Sharks, of course, are in more danger from humanity than humans are from sharks.  Pollution, rising sea temperatures, more and more humans, will ultimately doom sharks as surely as coral reefs are doomed.  Sharks, unlike humans, possess no malice.  They see glittering bracelets on the wrists of swimmers and move to investigate.  It, the swimming vacationer, may not look like a fish, but it looks like food.
     A simple way of never being attacked by a shark is to never go out beyond the surf, keeping sand under your feet.  A woman, interviewed briefly on MSNBC, said she's staying on the beach because of all the shark stories in the news media.  The news corporations' ratings-elevating scare tactic works--be afraid of sharks.
     On this July 4, another recurring news story is law enforcement's readiness to deal with terror attacks on symbolic holidays.  The Department of Homeland Security assures us there are no specific threats, but they're operating on the better-safe-than-sorry side, something we've heard many times this century, accompanied by video showing patrolling cops with robot faces.  I saw a low angle image of black-clad helmeted men in some large American city, carrying automatic rifles and appearing vigilant, or maybe too warm inside their excessive gear.
     Fourteen years ago, shark attacks rose in frequency, like now.  The news media made the phenomenon into a big story, and then on September 11 something happened involving airplanes and symbolic buildings.  Today's cable news features discuss Independence Day celebrations, nuclear talks with Iran, sharks, and terrorists.  Climate change and endless war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa, two essential conditions underlying shark and terror attacks respectively, are ignored mostly by news corporations that thrive financially on the fear they help inspire.

                                                                        Vic Neptune    

     The word problem spelled backwards is melborp.  An antonym for problem is solution.  Since I coined the word, I suggest that a melborp is a solution that doesn't work.
     In 1993, after I'd undergone a prolonged period of personal chaos, my father suggested, after careful consideration, that I should attend a local technical college; that learning skills with computers might get me a decent job.  I began attending in January 1994, sat through classes I didn't comprehend, struggled with homework I often couldn't finish without help from my computer-savvy older brother.  One day, driving home from class, I spun out on an icy four lane street, crossed the median, and rammed my Ford Fairmont Futura (the Car of the Future) into a tall snowbank.  My arc drew its lines between jumbles of traffic far out ahead of me and behind me.  Embedded deep, I had to gun the engine in reverse to withdraw from the snow wall.  My next thought, a non-sequitur, as I drove home with rattled nerves, suggested I wasn't cut out for professional computer work. 
     I took refuge in my bedroom after these classes, taking time to unwind from the unpleasantness of sitting in plastic chairs, with every student around me able to understand what was going on.  One young woman who sat behind me, Tracy (her actual first name), was beautiful, had long dark brown hair and wore round glasses.  I can still picture the gray soft sweater and form-fitting blue jeans she wore one day.  Apart from her, I remember only a few details about my time as a technical college student. 
     In April 1994 an old friend stopped by for a visit after being out of town for a long while.  I was still a student.  I told him about my desire to quit school.  We bought two six packs at a nearby liquor store and sat on the porch discussing at length the recent suicide of Kurt Cobain, a rather freaky thing for people of our generation to contemplate, at the time.  Within a day of my friend's visit, I decided not to go to school, not because of anything he said.  I simply slipped into a well-greased slacker role, my mind committing itself to the quick and temporary pleasure of no commitment.  I had a job all through my technical college experience, but I got an additional one a few weeks after I ended my student days, continuing with my usual role in society as intellectual with non-intellectual occupations.
     My father's suggested solution to my personal chaos of 1993 was the discipline of learning a trade at the technical college.  It seemed like a sensible idea for a while, especially before I started classes, but the experience turned into a melborp.

                                                                            Vic Neptune
    
    
      

     I read today about Konstantin Chernenko, the man who led the Soviet Union in 1984 and 1985, dying in office, an expiration that gave way to Gorbachev, who, in my opinion, had more to do with ending the Cold War than did Ronald Reagan.  The Cold War's freeze required someone to open things up after decades of mistrust and pointing nuclear missiles.  Reagan had old-fashioned ideas about the East-West divide.  His method when president was to adrenalize America's defense programs, making so many nuclear weapons the Soviet Union couldn't keep up.  U.S. foreign policy on this issue ignored the fear in the American citizenry caused by contemplation of the bleakest possible outcome to such irresponsible spending and chicken-playing with the Soviet leadership.
     In 1983 a made for TV movie aired, called The Day After.  Fresh from directing the exciting and popular Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Nicholas Meyer made this grim downer that was hyped for weeks before airing.  The propaganda preceding the film was so effective that millions of Americans tuned in, expecting some more or less accurate depiction of what was likely on the way: nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. 
     It's telling in my own case, having watched The Day After in 1983 and having felt, like many Americans, trepidation before doing so, that all I can remember about the film is Jason Robards watching the imaginary conflict beginning in a news report from divided Berlin.  The spark in Berlin spreads worldwide, and I assume human civilization steps down to the rat-eating level.  This dreary, horrible film had the reverse-polarizing effect of causing me to no longer worry about nuclear war.  Since then I've paid far more attention to the damage caused by the use of conventional weapons. 
     In 1983, Yuri Andropov, former KGB head, and Reagan sat on their thrones surveying the world landscape manipulated by the two superpowers.  Proxy wars were fought, the two superpowers acting as fight managers, reds versus red, white, and blues.  Nicaragua's Sandinistas were Marxists, therefore Reagan supported and illegally armed their opponents, the Contras.  The government of the Caribbean island of Grenada turned Marxist, so Reagan sent an invasion force--Operation Urgent Fury--to "liberate" some American medical students, banging away at a virtually defenseless country and awarding an absurdly large number of medals to U.S. military participants .  This ridiculous "war" against Grenada followed, by just two days, the bombing in Beirut of U.S. Marine barracks.  241 Marines died and Reagan, apparently, felt it necessary to balance accounts, so he expressed his anger against people who had nothing to do with the Mideast crisis. 
     After Andropov's death, the Soviet government ignored the late leader's choice of successor, Gorbachev, and picked Konstantin Chernenko, an old man in ill health, suffering from emphysema and other long-term ailments.  A heavy smoker most of his life--he started when he was nine--Chernenko was gravely ill when he assumed top position.  He'd been a high-ranking government official since the early 1960s, Brezhnev's Chief of Staff, a Politburo member, and long-term propagandist as well as communications director, in charge of spying on his fellows in government, and directing access from lower to higher levels, making him in that regard a Martin Bormann type.  One of his main activities was signing documents.  I imagine this man, described at the time of his brief leadership of America's archenemy, as "zombie-like," sitting at his desk in a smoky office writing his name with one hand and moving paper with the other.  Day after day, month after month.  A processor. 
     Finally, in his last years, he couldn't even write his name, so a machine affixed his signature to the endless document stream, just as Chernenko had used a machine to affix Andropov's signature when he could no longer function at his job. 
     Still, Chernenko lived.  His wife, whom he married during World War Two, had the emergency "red line" by her side of the bed so her husband needn't move if it rang.  This is the caliber of bogeyman we Americans were supposed to fear when we dutifully watched The Day After.
     In February 1985, Chernenko was dragged from bed by a government official to go vote for himself.  He won, but dropped dead a month later.  When Reagan was awakened with that news, he said, "How am I supposed to get anywhere with these Russian leaders if they keep dying on me?"  In his diplomatically gauche way he had a point: in just a few years three Soviet leaders died.  At that point, someone with the vitality and vision of Gorbachev was hard to imagine. 
     Chernenko isn't thought about much anymore, or so I assume.  Even Gorbachev's reputation in the United States, where Reagan is regarded much like a saint, has become fuzzy in even fairly young memories giving way to the encroaching oblivion of the constant new.  Chernenko, a gray man of the Soviet Union's history of many faceless power brokers, had a series of bureaucratic jobs that led him, without any effort on his part, to the driver's seat for one year.  He was probably picked to succeed Andropov because he was safe, a Party man since the 1930s, a loyal servant to the state.  Signing his name all those unnumbered times gave him some power coming from established authority, even if it was authority on a stratum distant from real power, which came to him at last when he was too decrepit to use it. 

                                                                            Vic Neptune        

     I owned a paperback copy of And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.  I never read it.  I gave it to a girlfriend in the 1990s, wrote something in there for her, but she returned it two days later when we broke up.  I doubt she read it, because it's a thick book and she barely had time, given the turmoil going on between us late in the game of our relationship. 
     I don't know what I did with that book.  It was tainted somehow by the failed relationship's bad ending.  I tried to read it twice in later years, couldn't get past the first two pages.  The book weighed like a grim memory.  I gave it to a library book sale, perhaps, or to the Salvation Army, inscription to my ex-girlfriend scribbled over. 
     Some items accumulate malign associations, but isn't that just a way of saying our minds attribute a possibly non-existent thing called luck to inanimate objects?  After being with her, I could barely touch the Nick Cave book because its history involved in part a terrible breakup.  I gave her the book because she liked Nick Cave, but she, too, must have felt the malignity attached to its weight and pages.  The book was from me, a newly resented person in her life, where before I had, for a time, seemed fine to her, indeed. 
     Because I'm a writer, setting ideas in motion in my head much of the time, I must wonder about the true actual ability of people to curse objects, whether wilfully or, as in the case of the Cave book, unknowingly.  Did our electrical storm-like fury at the end of that relationship light up, on some unseen level, the book given one day as a warmly accepted gift, and two days later returned as if smelling like a slime-covered brick? 
     If that kind of thing happens, are inanimate objects affected by our hurt thoughts and dark emotions?  If so, can they fight back by making us feel uneasy or sick inside when our eyes pass over them or when we touch them? 
     I don't suggest this fanciful idea is true.  I do, however, like most people, know the bite of unpleasant associations with some past events.  Somehow, perhaps, the pain would've eased--I wouldn't have needed finally to rid myself of the Nick Cave book--if I could've looked at that paperback and seen a curse clinging to it; something to be lifted by a magical spell.  Outside fiction, though, we don't live in that kind of world, and yet, the objects in our lives with bad associations work their sorcery regardless of the non-truth or truth of the fantasy elevating them to an intelligence interacting with human minds so capable of believing in angels.

                                                                            Vic Neptune      

     Rhonda Fleming in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound plays a violent nymphomaniac with light/dark sides to her personality.  It's a small role near the film's beginning; she's escorted by a male orderly to the psychiatrist's office.  On the way she flirts with him.  They walk through alternating shadow and light.  In response to her suggestions, the man smiles, looking forward almost at the camera.  He thinks something will occur between them later, maybe late at night, but she switches moods like an appliance flying off a kitchen shelf during an earthquake.  She rips her fingernails across the back of his hand.  Their against-regulations date will not happen. 
     Her psychiatrist is played by Ingrid Bergman, wearing glasses, speaking in an accent we associate with old world European shrinkdom.  Rationality emanates from her like heat waves seen in sunlight.  Her calmness presses against the unstable battiness of Fleming's character.  The psychiatrist will later work with a man (played by Gregory Peck) troubled by death-haunted dreams.  Bergman's character will go on an emotional ride before the movie's end, as Hitchcock puts even his most stable character, the psychiatrist, through hell, making her opening encounter with the nymphomaniac a warning of turmoil to come.  The scratches on the orderly's hand tie in to Peck's character's recurring dream images of parallel lines.  Thus, does Hitchcock take a dramatic moment (the hand-scratching by the nymphomaniac) and use it as a symbol of the psychological eruption characterizing the film's mystery of a man whose waking self knows nothing while his unconscious perceives the truth of his problem. 
     Not bad for a filmmaker regarded by many as primarily an entertainer. 
     Spellbound is for me a good example of a Hitchcock movie I don't like as an overall watching experience.  Once everything gets explained in the latter parts I've lost interest.  The psychiatrist's explanations of her handsome patient's dreams, aided by visuals designed by Salvador Dali and theremin music, seem too easy to me.  Dreams aren't that clear cut.  In my life, anyway, they tend to make sense mostly in thematic terms rather than as specific answers. 
     The film's early scenes and the developing mystery of Peck's character's dreams, however, are alive and also strange.  A mental hospital, head doctors, an orderly wanting to fuck a patient, violence committed by a mentally ill woman, the soothing words of professionals trying to make things seem normal, putting glasses on beautiful Ingrid Bergman to give her a Ph.D. look, and a weird music score, make Spellbound worth at least one viewing, if you haven't seen it.

                                                                              Vic Neptune