A Variation on Stephen King's Carrie

     Has Maine ever excelled at developing great sports teams on the high school and college levels?

     Why have I never heard of Maine in association with sports?

     Maine, known only for Stephen King, Bangor resident, so popular with readers they'll buy millions of copies of his worst novels, millions of his best.  His books cover millions of square yards of space on bookshelves worldwide.  The Bangor Public Library has an entire room, maybe, dedicated to his work.  One of his childhood bikes, behind glass, signed by the rider, can be viewed there.  Life-sized photographs of King from infancy to the near present line the round chamber used originally by Free and Accepted Masons and Revolutionary War plotters.  

     Everything he writes takes place in his backyard, Maine or New Hampshire.  Dolores Claiborne even has a map of a 1963 total eclipse across parts of Maine.

     Maine.

     Is King under a spell?  Must he keep to Maine and environs in his work?  One can counter that Misery and The Shining take place in Colorado.  It's not an absolute rule, people.  He can go outside his fictionalized Maine, yet he, or some daemon, chooses to ground him in his beloved state of trembling and fears realized by his more unfortunate characters.

     Awkward tormented Carrie, in the 1974 novel, is a sixteen year old big-boned girl with bad acne (unlike 26 year old slender corn stalk Sissy Spacek in the 1976 movie).  Carrietta White, cursed to be brought up by a woman with crazily prudish hyper-Christian ideas, has her menarche in the girls' shower.  Classmates guffaw, as the cruel bitch component of any given high school population will do.  Carrie doesn't understand what's happening, her mother never clued her in.  Blood flows from Carrie's sin hole penalty for Man's Fall.

     Naked girls surround her, jeering and cackling, girls in the know about periods.  Carrie absorbs absolute adolescent humiliation, converts it naturally, or supernaturally, to telekinetic rage.

     

     What a Prom to remember!

     Go Carrie!  

     Her mind has no OFF button.  Standing on stage, covered in the blood of their practical joke, led to believe she really had finally aced the popularity contest that is high school--well, no more!   

     Boys hurled, sprains and breaks, girls smashed into each other, some twisting ankles in high heels.  

     Julie McClintock and Terri Ho, bang heads!  

     Bobbie Duncan and Gina Van Styles, rip each other's faces off with your nails!

     Richie I'm So Handsome Hayes, jab your face with a fork! 

     Holly Simms, gluttonize yourself on finger sandwiches and chips!  Gorge!  Gorge, you darn bicuspid!

     One boy, not just any boy, has electric cable wrapped around his constricting throat; Carrie jerks her

head, mouth tight, eyes showing where the metaphorical arrow will go.  At the rafters, he chokes, breath cut, legs wagging about, kicking, then Carrietta White drops Mr. Popular, Todd Murker, to the gleaming wooden floor.  

     Unraveling the cord, she shouts, "Now do you know who I am, Todd!?"

     She launches the cord after one of her shower tormentors, Chris Hargensen.  

     Chris goes down hard, screaming, cord tightening at her ankles, pulled towards Carrie whose hand rises in a squeezing gesture.  Chris's ribs break, now her ankles.  

     Carrie doesn't like this girl!  

     Carrie levitates the punchbowl across the room.  Pink multiple fruit juices plus lemonade plus vodka and gin from students' flasks dump onto Chris's pink dress.  In severest pain, Chris croaks a pleading wail at her tormentor.

     "You want to be my friend?" Carrie asks.

     "Yes! Carrie please?"

     "Get real, bicuspid!"

     Carrie stomps her combat boot on Chris's face.  Nose broken, looks marred, whimpers.  Carrie enjoys her power.  Carrie snaps her fingers, breaks Chris Hargensen's neck.  

      Versatile Carrietta.  The Defense Department could've used you against Southeast Asia.

      Who or what can contain this powerful weapon?  This Maine teenager who's had it up to here, plus she can't control her desire to use telekinesis.  How would you handle it?  Consider, though, if Samantha Stevens from Bewitched, with either Darren, had spent her childhood annihilating civilizations?  Why?  Because it was fun, what's the harm?  Similarly, Carrie is having the best time of her life.  Somebody with no power has power.

      Bravo Stephen King.  You attempted to depict menstruation and shame and a biblical upbringing that fails, tried with some success to embody the reality of women's lives, the cycle they have but we men do not.

     Carrie crashes a spotlight onto feathered hair, a glancing blow, but hard enough for a bad headache for "The First Down Maker, Number 44," fullback Andy Pesch.  

     

     He asked Carrie out the second week of the school year, changing her life's focus.  She peered at her face in a small compact mirror she found in the girls' locker room.  She managed to convince herself after a few days, close to her date, that Andy must've found something appealing in her appearance.  

     Andy knows best.

     Andy knows beauty when he sees it.

     Andy dated Wanda Peters--she's beautiful so... 

     The night of, she applied zit cream and a little powder shaken out from her mother's toiletries table.  

     Pleaded to her mother the necessity of a study session at the public library, French test on Monday, home by ten, promise.

     In a blue sweater and long black skirt down to her ankles, Carrie waited with her math book and notebook, a number two sharpened pencil jammed through the metal spiral.  

     Andy Pesch, suave, short, but confident like the top kid in camp.  

     A dreamboat, just my size, Carrie thought, pacing, trying not to stomp in her combat boots, remembering THE DAY when Andy Pesch

    

     shoulder-leaned against a locker two away from hers.

     "How's it goin, doll?"

     "Um, okay."

     "Want to cruise with me Friday night?"

     "Okay."

     Terrified and thrilled, Carrie reminded herself often in the next three days to conceal her happiness and expectations of romance with a gorgeous boy with muscles, from her mother.  This most momentous of events in her recent life, the first date, would be played out, she believed, without parental, or paternal God of punishments, spying on and interfering with her love life.  She felt independence for the first time.

     My love life!  How nice that sounds!  Come on, Andy!  I love you, Andy!  From afar, but now up close, soon, come on!  Andy, come on!  Where are you?  You said you have a fast car.

     She waited, her mind conjured every scenario she could think of.  

     Why was Andy late?  

     Did he have a breakdown, the car, I mean?  Is he nervous about our date?  Maybe he's not experienced, maybe the stories are just stories?  Andy, so innocent.  I hope he's not dead.  Andy, I'll die if you're dead!

     Carrie's thoughts became so saturated with Andy she decided to let him touch her breasts, and tonight.  

     Tonight, oh, it's going to be great!  No one's ever felt like this!

     Her watch showed 9:34.  Two and a half hours on nine or ten squares of pavement except when she walked in the gutter.

     Cars passed throughout with breaks in traffic.  A Buick station wagon filled with girls, some of them from the shower incident, yelled and shouted.

     "Hey Red!"

     "Been to the drugstore lately?"

     Carrie's pencil zwipped itself from the spiral, rocketing after the station wagon, to clatter on the street fifty feet ahead.  

     It was the fifth time something weird like this had happened.  She went home, cursing herself for not just going to the library to study.  More cursing when she saw the B written in red felt tip on her test.

     

     Andy Pesch, woozy from the spotlight's impact, tries to sit up.  Carrie's having none of that.  

     More for you, Andy!

     Carrie breaks his left femur.  Andy screams, no more haze in the brain.  Carrie flutters her fingers, Andy Pesch's gut splits open in a gruesome smile with spilling intestines.  Larry Dringle, celebrated halfback, Number 39, stealer of thirty-seven cherries, slips on his friend Andy's guts, landing on his broken leg, right side submerged in a fallen athlete's guts, a pratfall amusing Carrie no end.

     What a time to not have a camera!

     Carrie spins blubbering Larry Dringle, pulls him towards her on the floor, makes him rise like Nosferatu from his coffin, turns him fast until he falls, dizzy, grunting and groaning, then yelping as Carrie heats his brain and shoots tingling painful jabs at his groin.  His screams for the moment rise above all others.

     Across the gymnasium, a group of students set things, and each other, on fire with their lighters.  Deb Giles, one of the shower bicuspids, runs in high heels, screaming, long lustrous red hair flaming.

     Carrie yanks open Larry's mouth, fires a microphone into it, jammed far enough back it's stuck, but the gymnasium's sound system projects a resonant ambiance of rumbling breathy grunts.  

     Carrie hurls Larry.

     Son of a rich bicuspid who never once suffered in this school, until tonight!  

     She lifts Larry six feet and down into prone, dead Andy.  Squirming in Andy's guts, Larry's screams from speakers drench all other sounds in the big bloody room.  He rises with difficulty from slippery smelly entrails and trots toward the red EXIT, his last act of free will. 

     With her eyeballs, Carrie pulls him, walking backwards, to the free throw line.  She drops him to lie on his back, then floats from the stage, hovering above him, the microphone projecting from his face a sight gag gone on too long, especially from Larry's point of view.

     Carrie lowers herself onto him, grinds it out to discover for herself if Mother's right that's it a bad thing.

     Losing her virginity (so she considers it), coming to orgasm, Carrie multi-tasks throughout, maintaining a high level of carnage among the decimated students.  Cops outside whoosh into the air and land a mile or two away, people are killed by their silverware, throughout the country people lift into the air, hundreds and even thousands of feet, are dropped, broken to bits; all of this during the last two minutes of Carrie's first dry hump.

     In the gym she sees everyone dead.  

     Except Norma Watson, one of the shower girls.  

     "Hey Norma! What's red and squatting behind a table hoping I won't see her?"

     "What Carrie?  Will you please let me--"

     "You!"  

     Norma pops into red mist and liquefied guts, skeleton thudding to a polished wooden floor needing a serious cleaning.

     Carrie, the most powerful being in a nation with only 150 people left, the rest telekinetically eliminated  in numerous ways bewildering to victims who know nothing of the planet wide reach of an abused girl's anger, casually mind-poofing four billion people on a ruined Prom Night.

     Her mother, however, survives.

Vic Neptune

A Great Book About Iwo Jima

      In case you're wondering what America can do if it actually seeks to win a war you might want to read Iwo by Richard Wheeler, a U.S. Marine veteran of the grueling battle (February and March 1945) to seize from the Japanese Army and Navy the island of Iwo Jima, 800 miles from Japan, 800 miles from Guam; thus, a strategically located airstrip for distressed B-29 heavy bombers returning from bombing Tokyo and other cities in the war's final year.

     Except for a page where Wheeler (a member of U.S. Marines, 5th Division, 28th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, E "Easy" Company) relates how he received the wounds preventing him from joining his fellows in climbing Mount Suribachi to raise the American flag (as shown in Joe Rosenthal's famous photograph), the author keeps himself out of the book, though he does emphasize the actions of his Company throughout the battle.  He knew these men.  Three of the six in Rosenthal's photograph were killed during subsequent days and weeks.  The flag went up only on February 23, 1945, just four days after D-Day, the commencement of the invasion on February 19.  Not a sign of victory as such, but a morale booster, for the flag could be seen from all over the tiny island.  

     Like flags planted on the Moon, the Mount Suribachi flag overlooked a blasted dead landscape.  Iwo Jima had, by February 1945, developed into a formidable defensive fortress with tunnels, bunkers, artillery emplacements, tanks buried with their gun turrets exposed, hiding spots, natural caves in volcanic rock.

     The U.S. Navy bombarded the island regularly during the battle, airplanes from carriers strafed, bombed, and rocketed dug-in Japanese Navy and Army defenders.  From the summer of 1944 onward some 15,000 men had labored to create a castle of death and resistance on the open sea, guarding the way to their homeland.  Japanese troop movements during the battle happened simultaneously beneath aboveground American troop movements, a fantastic circumstance never known before or repeated in the history of warfare.  Marines thus had the enemy on all sides, beneath them and above them, too.  At night Japanese patrols would use their extensive tunnels to slip outside and attack Marines in their foxholes.  These assaults, an ever present danger, caused significant disquiet among the Americans, leading to sleeplessness on top of their other difficulties.  

     "Battle fatigue," PTSD in today's lingo, afflicted 2,648 U.S. troops at Iwo Jima.

     Five weeks passed before the island was considered to be in the control of American forces.  The Marines left, replaced by an Army regiment that spent the next two months killing a further 1,600 Japanese who wouldn't surrender and taking prisoner 867.  The Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, committed hara-kiri.

     It was Kuribayashi who directed the building of the fortress Iwo Jima became.  

     Kuribayashi in the 1920s had spent time in the U.S. and Canada, a deputy attaché in Washington, D.C.  He liked America, predicting that its people would demonstrate a strong fighting spirit if pushed to that.  In a letter, he wrote, "The United States is the last country in the world that Japan should fight."

     Head of the Imperial Guards when war between the two nations started, he accepted the command at Iwo Jima apparently knowing he wasn't going to survive it.

     The reader, in the early chapters, gets a good glimpse of the views of a few Japanese officers, especially the commander.  He wrote letters home to his wife and children, poignant words from a father and husband, sounding like a regular person, not some demonic enemy.  He clearly loved his wife Yoshii dearly, as well as his kids.  He wrote a letter to his daughter admonishing her about writing more grammatically.  This little criticism of his child seems strange considering he was facing the might of the U.S. Navy and Marines, living in a bunker, but I think it also shows his will to keep the darkness away from his young daughter's thoughts, showing himself, even in the midst of eventual ruin, steady and patient, a firm father figure for her to look up to.

     I would've liked to have read more accounts of the regular Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima but so many of them didn't survive it's understandable why there's probably less material along those lines for the author to work with.

     The book, however, deals effectively with the Marines' hardihood, their fears and pain, their determination, their cohesiveness as a fighting unit derived from extensive and brutal training.  6,821 Americans died, 19,217 were wounded.  Approximately 20,000 Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen died, with only 1,083 captured.

     Since Wheeler was there, his account, even when writing about the many parts of the battle he didn't participate in, are vivid and told with a full understanding of the combat Marine's experience.  The book's most astonishing story involves Colonel Chandler Johnson, an ill-tempered but much respected officer in the habit of standing in the midst of enemy fire, like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, heedless of bullets and mortar explosions.  Walking inland a ways to meet with "Easy" Company he paused to look at two dead Japanese soldiers in a crater.  A Marine calling to him was one of several who witnessed the Colonel receiving a direct hit from a mortar shell, blowing him to pieces.  The Marine who'd called out spit out a piece of Chandler Johnson's flesh.  The men found his rib cage and part of his forearm with attached hand.  The Colonel's wristwatch was still ticking.

     Any account of war will have such stories, only the technology changes.  In a modern day war like in 

Afghanistan, the weaponry is much the same as in the 1940s (bombs, bullets, missiles) but America's experience of World War Two was wrapped up in three years, eight months, ending in victory.  Compared to our current obscenity of the War on Terror (in its twentieth year), the key difference is that back then, in the time of Iwo Jima, America tried to win, with clear objectives, rather than to serve a military industrial congressional complex existing mainly to perpetuate itself.

     Wheeler's book, published in 1980, a concise work of 225 pages with black and white photo sections, remains an excellent account for the general reader of a horrifying, seemingly endless battle, written soberly by an objective military historian who also feels deep compassion for every man (on both sides)

who participated.

     Wheeler and his fellow Marines' iron determination finally won out, the B-29s got their emergency landing base, Japan lost, and then in 1968 the U.S. handed the island to Japan's Defense Forces, prompting one Marine, an Iwo Jima veteran, to joke, "By hell, I'll run off to Canada before I help take it again!"

Vic Neptune

The Jitters

     Today while mowing a lawn I got called a "fuckin idiot" by a young man on a bicycle.  He wore a baseball cap backwards, sunglasses, his book bag strapped to his back marking him as a college student.

     I had moved the mower over a crushed Pepsi can, the blades separating the aluminum into two pieces. I'd seen the can in the grass earlier but felt distracted after finding a dollar bill nearby.  Pleased with my luck, I switched focus momentarily to the mutilated can now in two pieces on either side of the mower.

     Lawnmowers are loud.  My attention for about five seconds was directed at the ground before I heard, "HELLO!"

     A sarcastic utterance from the bicyclist.  As I pulled the mower back, he passed, adding his judgment of my intelligence.  I can't know for sure if he's writing a blog, or making movies as I am, or if he's knowledgeable about the origins of the First Crusade, or if he knows anything about the strange career of Lee Harvey Oswald, or if he's read Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, but I know I'm not an idiot, as in dummy, moron, or one who would have difficulty understanding how to order a chicken sandwich from a drive-through menu at Burger King.  

     In addition, I knew some real fucking idiots at university, including an English major who picked up a woman in a bar and vomited on her breasts while they had sex.

     Earlier, backing out of my driveway to go mow that lawn, my car halted as I momentarily shifted from Reverse to Drive.  When I entered the street backwards I saw no cars using the road ahead of me or behind me.  A bulky white pickup truck, like a moving tower, must have speeded to my position with suddenness.  A long push on his horn seemed unnecessary, although maybe he couldn't wait two or three seconds until I got going.  

     Coming home, ahead of me, a Chrysler van's driver honked at a slow-moving man in rumpled disheveled clothes crossing the street.  By the time the driver honked, the man was already mostly across the street, an unnecessary blast of displeasure helping no one. 

     I said out loud but to myself, "Doesn't he already have enough problems, fuckface?"

     The van's driver moved up to a grand speed of 22 miles per hour in a 25 zone.  I drove behind this slow-moving person who had gotten irritated by a slow-moving man, feeling irritated until the Chrysler turned.

     Dwelling on these three incidents involving impatience, I've wondered about my own tendency to get pissed at people over the committing of minor acts.  It also makes me wonder if I am a fuckin idiot.  Maybe I am slow, oblivious to my surroundings?  One thing I don't do is honk my horn unless it's necessary--a rarity in ordinary driving in a city with just 70,000 people.  Sit for an extra three seconds when the light turns green, it's likely the person behind will honk, alerting one's attention, but that also sends into one's nervous system the hostility of another.

     The bicyclist's own idiotic contempt for me failed to take into account the lawnmower's noise and that street's busy traffic roar.  He knows lawnmowers are loud.  Does he know my hearing isn't what it was when I was his age?  Does he know he's a pussy for riding his bike on the sidewalk instead of on the street, like my friends and I did when we were under the age of ten?

     All three cases were minor road rage, one road being a sidewalk.  If such insignificant inconveniences provoked such displeasure from three citizens of my town in less than an hour, I wonder how we don't think more often and more deeply about boiling energies causing some to lash out, even if just by honking a horn or insulting a stranger.

     A friend told me he would never, while driving, give someone the middle finger, meaning "Fuck you!"

     Not only is it rude and pointless, "flipping the bird" could be done at someone with a gun in his car.  Pressures build in fragmented societies abused and warped by bad leadership.  Divide and conquer is those leaders' guiding philosophy.  A populace striving against itself constitutes a quiet civil war.  We each participate in society, even as loners.  Aggravate people with monetary frustrations, no health care, college   and medical debt, a war that never ends, political disagreements ruling out friendly dialogue, a species on a collision course with increasingly severe climate change, wealth disparity not seen since the time of Egypt's pharaohs, and the possibility ripens that a society will clash with itself while the ruling class laughs, murders people, and gets richer.

     I was in the bicyclist's way?  Maybe he was in mine?  

     The man in the white pickup truck, for a few seconds, didn't get to drive 35 in a 25 zone?  Maybe I have the intelligence to not suddenly shift my car into Drive while it's still rolling backwards?

     The van's driver was delayed for five seconds while a man I've seen in the Mental Health Services Building ambled at his own speed across the street?  Maybe his day's pace is also important?

     My mild enmity toward these three aggravated people today reflects my own occasional misanthropy, although I keep it contained as much as my nerves will allow.  Timon of Athens, mentioned above, deals with a rich man who gives a lot of money to his ungrateful friends.  Disgusted, Timon renounces  civilization to live by himself in a cave.  

     No traffic in a cave, no noisy machines, no slow-moving pedestrians, just dirt and echoes.

     Even with today's triad of hot-blooded incidents, I can't give up on society, nor can I help wondering if Timon of Athens lives inside the caverns of our minds, shouting occasionally, pointlessly, his cry from the heart an upraised middle finger at a world not always cooperating with our timetables and our hopes, inspiring instead spent, empty echoes.

Vic Neptune 

     

       

     

        

FDR Biden and Nancy Junior

     Joe Biden, malign inversion of a New Deal Democrat, puts portrait of FDR in the Oval Office, identifies with rich Roosevelt, the President who saved capitalism by helping out the American people until abandoning the idea in 1937.  Still, Hoover Dam; the courthouse in my hometown; the dormitories of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute (no computer classes offered pre-World War Two); Carnahan Memorial Gardens in Jefferson City, Missouri; the City Hall of Omro, Wisconsin.

     PUT AMERICA TO WORK, PRESIDENT BIDEN!  No jobs program, and you've been in the highest political office for eight months?  Have you been napping for four of those months?  Were you asleep when your order to drone kill a suspected ISIS-K fighter actually resulted in the deaths by sudden physical obliteration of the family of the translator who was not with ISIS, somebody's mistake is actually murder?  Are you asleep now?  Is Kamala Harris, dressed in a blue pants suit purchased from the same outlet patronized by Hillary Clinton, placing your hand in warm water while a Mossad cameraman makes video of the old senile President pissing his pants while he naps?  What fun!  Put it on every channel in Europe, in Australia, beam it to the International Space Station along with the latest sex toys.  

     I watched a video on YouTube about politics.  AOC in particular.  She's supposed to represent New York as the Congresswoman for the 14th District.  To achieve her seat in Congress she defeated a veteran politician, Joe Crowley, groomed as a likely successor to Nancy Pelosi, if the sorcerer's spell ever wears off, cast in 1481 in a castle in Transylvania to make her young forever, but it's been wearing off for the last fifty years and the sorcerer was burned to death in 1482.

     Speaking of dark arts, Joe Aleister Crowley lost to the fresh-faced adorable AOC, twenty-nine years old, social media savvy, more Twitter followers than Donald Trump when he was on Twitter.  

     Alexandria O. took over America's hearts.  Even Morning Joe had her on.  The Congresswoman who ran on progressive issues didn't sound too interested in pursuing the implementation of Medicare For All.  In the interview with Joe and Mika, AOC sounded like a Centrist trying not to offend a table of Right Wingers.

     Still, AOC, in harmony with Aunt Nancy, supports policies that continue unjust illegal wars across the globe, spreading pain and fear.  AOC boosts the Capitol Police, those who failed in their main job: protect the U.S. Capitol.  What do you do when the field goal kicker misses the kick that would have won the game?  You give him more money?  If you're fucking crazy that's what you do.  The Capitol Police received a billion dollars.  They seek to open offices in each state.  They want to form an intelligence agency.  

     THE U.S. CAPITOL IS IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, NOT IN BEREA, KENTUCKY! (Home of the Berea Police and Municipal Center, a New Deal project).

     Watching AOC talk, explaining her positions on foreign policy, for instance, it's clear she's bullshitting, trying to remember talking points at times, resorting to giggling, knowing that little girl act will make some people sympathize with her, but really it's just nauseating.

     Some believe AOC was corrupted by Washington.  I disagree.  She was already corrupt, a power-seeker, wanting a lot of money comprising her net worth, to be on the rise, to have followers like Gwyneth Paltrow, to take no step towards getting legislation accomplished on what she campaigned on.  A fraud from the very beginning of her desire to run for office.  She was a Congressional intern.  Did she get sexually harassed by any of the many sexual harassing politicians running this doomed country?

     What convinces me now of AOC's long experience of corruption, her "before she was famous" corruption, is that she's really good at it.  She's taken to corruption like an apprentice vampire learning from the fangs of the master, Nancy Pelosi.

     As Pelosi is the Democratic Party's champion fundraiser, so will AOC run with that ball after the spell on Nancy cast in late 15th century Romania wears off, maybe on C-SPAN.  Words choked off in mid-sentence during remarks about banning alcohol to anyone who makes less than 50,000 a year, skeleton Nancy's bone dust from her jaw and the rest of her yellowish-brown skull collapse onto her designer black white and red mask, an anti-Covid-19 mask invented by one of Elon Musk's scientists, who never received the credit Elon Musk took, winning the Nobel Prize for Masking.

     AOC's purpose in the Party is to shepherd Progressives and convert Republicans to the Democratic cause.  I've come to find that not even the Republican Party is as repellent to human decency as the Democratic Party.  The Republicans' greed, viciousness, callousness, stupidity, make them revolting.  Even more disgusting, the Democrats act like they're good.  

     To see steaming devils pretending to be generous humanitarians as they sacrifice children to their weapons for profit, for influence, for no good reason, makes me sick; I wish every American to be sickened by these scoundrels and to not vote for them, or for Republicans.

     But the Democrats' cupidity, their magnificent egos, their precious committee assignments, their drama, their excuses, their inability to find any compassion in their hearts, naturally making them help people in need, and while they run the House, the Senate, and the Executive Branch, all point to their uselessness as an organization capable of aiding the American people.

Vic Neptune

Letters From Hollywood by Michael Moorcock

      In the late 1970s and early 1980s, English fantasy author Michael Moorcock (born 1939) dealt with a fractious breakup of his second marriage.  Faced with money problems, he accepted a lucrative job writing the screenplay for a Hollywood film about King Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot.  He relocated to Greater Los Angeles, stayed with friends (including science fiction author Harlan Ellison) until finding his own place in North Hollywood, and then a tiny place in West Hollywood, both shared with Linda Steele (an associate of Ellison's) who eventually became Moorcock's third wife.

     While in California, Moorcock wrote long letters to his good friend, the author J.G. Ballard (Empire of the Sun, The Crystal World, The Atrocity Exhibition).  Ballard at that time was fiction editor of Ambit magazine.  Some of these letters, originally published therein, eventually made it into book form, Letters From Hollywood (1986), an entertaining and honest account of Moorcock's observations of Los Angeles and other cities he visited; San Francisco and the Bay Area, San Luis Obispo, but concentrating mostly on L.A., a place the author enjoyed for its associations with the cinematic obsessions of his childhood.  Driving with Linda on the Pacific Coast Highway in a borrowed red Mercedes Benz 450SL convertible, Moorcock remarks about the numerous memories elicited by sights along the way, hillsides to the ocean he's seen involved in classic Hollywood car crashes, for instance, or beach locations he remembers from old pirate movies.

     Having been to Southern California three times, I can attest to this memory/movie location phenomenon.  In La Jolla in 1983 I saw and recognized the Coronado Hotel, location for the Billy Wilder comedy of 1959, Some Like It Hot, with Marilyn Monroe.  It's a startling thing to feel such a memory sparked unbidden, unexpected, conjuring moments from favorite films of one's past.

     Moorcock's appreciation for Hollywood's products, its films, is not much felt in the present day of circa 1979 to 1984 when he lived periodically in Los Angeles except when he was in England dealing with difficult personal matters.  The director of the King Arthur movie (name changed--I'm uncertain who the actual director is, but by the end of the book it's clear the movie never got made) is a great character even though he's based on an uncomfortably real man who drives Moorcock nearly nuts with his unsteady ideas about the movie.

     Ike (the alias given by Moorcock) is in his late fifties, drinks milk instead of booze, has no appreciation for historical accuracy, doesn't understand plot or narrative or logical character motivations, has made it in Hollywood by directing lots of sequels.  Moorcock, on his expense account provided by the unnamed studio, has to spend a thousand dollars per week, is given "anything" he needs--except for an escape out of an increasingly difficult situation--but has to endure Ike's crazy vacillating ideas about the movie.

     Ike has Moorcock over to his house a lot, throwing ideas at him, each one more batshit crazy than the previous one.  Pointing out two books on his coffee table, Moorcock is told to read the chapter in an Ingmar Bergman book about the Swedish director's film, Cries and Whispers, an intense interpersonal drama about sisters going through a difficult, painful time in their lives.  The book has Bergman's "letter" that he wrote to his crew and cast about the film, giving the participants guidance on how to proceed.  Ike loves this idea, wants Moorcock to write the script as a letter, borrowing psychological themes from Bergman's film.  The other book on the coffee table is about the films of Akira Kurosawa.  Ike wants Moorcock to emulate the bold action scenes of that director's Samurai films.  

     Samurai, Bergman, King Arthur, right.

     Moorcock needs to get a rough script finished, then a rewrite, to be followed by a second installment of his pay, which will go a long way towards addressing his debts.  Trapped in a kind of Hell, he serves a Master (modern Hollywood) that ultimately lacks any interest in producing the kind of good work Moorcock believes he must do to maintain his integrity as a literary artist.

     Michael Moorcock wrote some of the best Sword and Sorcery fantasy I've read.  His series of Elric stories and novels I've read and reread ever since high school.  His books following the exploits of his anti-hero Jerry Cornelius combine experimentalism with spy novel tropes.  He puts most of his fiction in a "Multiverse," a conglomeration of parallel universes so that his protagonists, like Elric, have counterparts in other universes with their own novel cycles: Hawkmoon, Corum, Jerry Cornelius, Erekosë, and others.  Numerous other books deal with different concepts and settings.  He's one of the most prolific writers in the field, already a literary giant by his early forties, when he was in Hollywood maintaining epic patience with some really stupid fucking people in the film industry.

     In spite of such literary accomplishments he wasn't rich at this time, his second marriage had flopped, he was in debt, he had to latch himself to the unpleasant job of satisfying the ever-changing decisions of a flibbertigibbet seeking to combine the quiet intimacy of a Bergman movie with the spectacular dynamics of a Kurosawa film; someone, too, disdainful of Moorcock's efforts at writing a script true to the film's time and place, 5th century Britain.  

     Much of the book, though, demonstrates Moorcock's eye for detail, this time not writing about a made-up fantasy world as in the Elric books, but a made-up real world place called Hollywood.  He lets his correspondent, Ballard, know about tattoo parlors, roller skaters in Venice Beach, Chicano gangs in his neighborhood, gunshots at night, sirens, neighbors yelling, radios blaring at two in the morning, the heat, but also his morning walks during which L.A. is cool and quiet, the smell of oleander in the air.  His descriptions of L.A., for anyone who's visited, ring true.  It's a fascinating place, a kind of decentralized mega-community founded in the early 20th century because of its light, movie film of those days requiring plenty of illumination, "interiors" for scenes open to the sky.

     In the end, Ike's unreliability, and whatever else is going on behind the scenes at the studio beyond Moorcock's knowledge, put the kibosh on the King Arthur movie.  He earns his two payments, but has spent a long time tethered to an insane business process.  His own fiction projects must wait while he labors on the idiotic take on the story demanded by Ike.  He drinks more and more, runs into fans who constantly offer him cocaine, marijuana, and whatever else.  His reserved "Englishness" leads to many disadvantageous encounters with movie business Americans who, in their direct way, assume he agrees with everything they say.  The drinking increases.

     In the end, though, it's the sunny smoggy magic of Los Angeles, the visuals, the smells, the sounds, that attach their enchantment to his spirit, as he considers, finally, living in L.A. half the year and in England the other half.  Moorcock eventually worked out such an arrangement, but with different locations.  He now lives in Texas and Paris, eighty-one years old, still writing, not as prolific as in the past, but a major author whose contribution to speculative fiction, if not to screenwriting, remains and will remain a major influence on the imaginations of millions of readers.

Vic Neptune

     

        

     

Chance Encounter of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella on an Operating Table

     From The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs:

     So the One God, backed by secular power, is forced on the masses in the name of Islam, Christianity, the State, for all secular leaders want to be the One.  To be intelligent or observant under such a blanket of oppression is to be "subversive."

     I first read Burroughs in 1986, The Adding Machine, a short book of essays.  Then I read Naked Lunch but wasn't prepared for it.  Still, trusting bewilderment would lead to understanding, I read The Soft Machine and Nova Express.  The cut-ups in those novels, whereby fragments of different texts mix

randomly like the outcome of a literary Big Bang, baffled me but served as preparation for The Ticket That Exploded, a novel I read after my second manic episode in 1994.  My brain's neural network, recovering after the inescapable disturbance of normal order from mania, helped me understand Burroughs' prose.    

     From The Ticket That Exploded:

     The sound track conjures up the image track--Word came before image--Shut off the sound track on your TV set and put in your own sound track words music what you will--Now play back your sound track and you will see the images sharp and clear...

     I haven't tried this, but plan to.

     Images gain new context as they associate with previously unrelated sound, original sound silenced as I experimented with American Capitalism's Super Bowl in 2019, listening with headphones to Atari Teenage Riot's Reset, a stunning mind-blasting album.  Images of the players, action, cheerleaders, the crowd, ads, blended with intense and compelling music, a new unique movie giving life to memories, individual images still with me.  

     L.A. Rams in blue and yellow, Tom Brady looking for people to catch his balls, the crowd's faces, celebrities watching just like ordinary people, Coach Belichick, head resembling a bag of expired flour.

     13-3 Patriots.    

     August 2, 1997, Burroughs died.  I found out the next day, saw a headline on a library copy of USA Today, a more mundane publication it's not possible to read, but William S. Burroughs cut many newspapers to form random patterns, so it's appropriate I saw the news of his death that way.

     I told my coworker Nicole about his death.

     "He's one of my favorite authors."  

     We talked a bit, then she went to her tasks, saying, "I'm sorry about your friend."

Vic Neptune

The Synod of Whitby A.D. 664

     Easter.  What does that mean to you?  As a non-Christian, for me it just meant candy.  It meant a big meal with extended family.  Some of them Christians, one's a Muslim.  Agnostics, too, plus a very scientifically minded one with no discernible religion but possessing beatific personality traits, like Dennis Wilson, drummer of The Beach Boys, actor in the masterpiece, Two Lane Blacktop.

     My mind wanders, I know, but know that there was a time, the seventh century A.D., when there were different competing dates for Easter.  The Celtic Church in northern England, Ireland, and parts of Scotland used a dating system based on an eighty-four year cycle.  In Rome this had been accepted until a different system based on a nineteen year cycle was introduced.  The differing Roman and Celtic Easters also meant differing Roman and Celtic Lents.  Within the royal household of Oswiu, King of Bernicia and Northumberland, both Celtic and Roman Easter and Lent observances meshed awkwardly, with one group eating Easter dinner with the King, while his Queen Eanflæd, a Roman Catholic, fasted with her fellow believers.  I imagine some of the Queen's gossipy courtiers and fellow Roman Catholics, hungry, mouths watering from the smell of roast mountain hare, woodcock, wild boar, and red deer.

     "Oh, those gluttonous Celtic Rite sinners!"

     Northumberland then was divided between two kingdoms, Bernicia ruled by Oswiu, and Deira ruled by his son, Prince Alchfrith.  Alchfrith sponsored a Roman Rite priest, Wilfrid, who'd been to Rome, giving him a monastery to run, evicting the place's Celtic monks.  This increased Wilfrid's power and influence to the extent that he argued the Easter case from the Roman side at the Synod of Whitby in 664.  

     King Oswiu, who had murdered a rival monarch, Oswine of Deira, and was feeling a need to atone before Hellfire could claim his soul, ordered the Synod, taking place probably in the first months of 664 in a monastery in Yorkshire called, get ready for Old English--Streanæshalch.   

     Colmán, Bishop of Northumbria, argued the Celtic Rite case for the eighty-four year cycle.  Wilfrid (Alchfrith's man) argued for the nineteen year cycle.  King Oswiu presided and would decide the issue.

     Colmán relied on tradition, going back to the authority of John the Evangelist, who, I guess, happened to endorse the Easter dating method preferred by later Celtic Christians.  Since the eighty-four year cycle had been practiced for so long, why change something with the background authority of Christ's Beloved Disciple?  What's more, Colmán argued, many countries in Europe used the eighty-four year cycle.

     Wilfrid talked about five times longer than Colmán.  He said that Saint Columba of the Celtic Rite was by no means as important as St. Peter, whom Our Lord made his rock upon which to build His Church.  Mention of Peter, keeper of the keys to Heaven, Heaven's Doorman, swayed King Oswiu in favor of the Roman Rite, even though he had supported the Celtic Rite.

     A political decision as well as a religious one?  The result of this Synod was the expulsion of the Irish (thus Celtic Rite) monks and Colmán from their stronghold at Lindisfarne.  Their return to Iona, to Ireland, left the Celtic Church weakened in Northumbria, the Roman Church strengthened.

     Easter represents rebirth.  It could be a moment in your life when you feel different, your perspective has changed.  A seventh century king you've never heard of has decided on the dating method of a Sunday in early Spring when you get to look for jelly beans hidden the night before by your mother, along with an Easter basket filled with goodies and fake grass,

     664, year of the Synod of Whitby, was a time of plague.  A solar eclipse on May 1 of that year preceded the plague and was regarded as an omen.  The plague devastated the peoples of southern Britain and wiped out many Northumbrians, including a few prominent churchmen.  In the southeast of Britain, the plague claimed the life of King Eorcenberht of Kent.

     Oswiu's motives in choosing against his Celtic Rite bias may have been due to his guilt over ordering the execution of King Oswine of Deira in 651.  Oswiu in the Synod was persuaded by the Petrine argument, that St. Peter, as Christ's Rock and the Keeper of the Keys to Heaven has authority over who gets in and who stays out.  Oswiu sought forgiveness from God for his heinous act, or so the idea goes.  His son Alchfrith wanted to assert the Roman Rite and his own man, Wilfrid, over the Celtic, which may have had the position of the old-fashioned religion, and definitely the minority faith.  Most of England followed the Roman Rite by then.  Eanflæd, Oswiu's Queen, backed the Roman side.  She, Wilfrid, and Colmán were all beatified, Alchfrith "vanished from history," and the Celtic Church lost some of its power in the north, while Mediterranean Christianity grew in influence and strength.

     When is Easter?  The fact that some obscure (to us) personages in seventh century Northumbria cared about that means they impact to this day our calendars with the roving date commemorating a day regarded by Jesus as two days after he was executed, but for me, Easter was sugar.

Vic Neptune

    

     

     

       

Chris Kolodny, Second String Forward, Game of Games, Valentine's Day, 1981

      Before that fateful night in the winter of 1981, Christopher S. Kolodny of Cotillion, Pennsylvania, a garment industry community fifty miles north of Harrisburg, was unknown to his classmates at Arlen Specter High School, home of the Specter Ghost Bullets, red and white uniforms, the football helmet sporting an illustration of an Old West handgun firing, held by a spectral hand.

     On the Basketball side of things, the teams over the past four years of the school's history had failed to place even in the playoffs of state championships.  Due to Kolodny, that was about to change.  

     Christopher, or usually Chris, Kolodny came from a quiet street with families all around, none of them loud.  Chris's father was a slow burn alcoholic and an insurance man who enjoyed relaxing for the five or so minutes he could obtain after another boring day of work before his wife, Cherry, would interrupt him with inane comments about her day, about their neighbors, about the new postman's leaving others' mail in their mail basket, a piece Cherry wove herself.  She took many classes, was always seeking to improve her mind.  She spent an afternoon studying the topic of the medieval Cather heretics of southern France and then never thought about the subject again.

     "Chatty Cherry" talked with her only child often.  She heard him out about his concerns, frustrations, his feeling of invisibility in a school run by overpowering jocks.  The culture of the school disgusted Cherry.  It elevated sport and spectacle above the arts and learning for the sake of learning.

     Chris excelled in English class, Calculus was tough, but he was managing well under the guidance of his Math teacher, Mr. Walton, a white-haired man who could add in his head really fast.

     Chris's abilities during the basketball unit of Junior year physical education were noted by his teacher, Mr. Quilmer. 

     In their shared office, Quilmer remarked to Mr. Haskins, a teacher who coached the basketball team, "Mind young Kolodny.  He's a good dribbler and has some good moves.  I believe he would make the team."

     Haskins, a pragmatic man who resembled Lee Iacocca but with a softer and less psychotic look, spoke one on one with Kolodny, at that time a junior.  

     "So, your first name?"

     "Chris."

     "Chris, I'm Coach Haskins.  I want to see you do a lay up.  Right now."

     Chris Kolodny knew this to be an audition.  He didn't care if he got the part, though.

     Not graceful, but an effective lay up.

     "Do another!"

     Muffed the second.  Hit the third, good net sound.

     "Do five more!"

     All of them successes.  Haskins offered Kolodny Second String Forward.  The team was in the dumps since four of their top players graduated.  Bummer.

     Kolodny's joining the team meant that fifteen adolescent boys had someone new to fool around with.  They teased him, tested his gullibility, shoved him on the court and pretended it was accidental, threw basketballs at him and yelled at him to dance--he refused.

     Kolodny, in his home life, preferred time alone in his bedroom.  He had a Star Wars poster, a copy of the Star Wars novel, a model of an X Wing Fighter he made, he read Breakfast of Champions by Vonnegut.  He wrote in a journal later self-published, Christopher Kolodny's Journal, 1977 to 1997.

     On November 12, 1979, the day Haskins recruited him, Kolodny wrote,

          Jerry Haskins, the coach of the b-ball team, invited me to join.  I accepted.  I felt pressured by his gruff enthusiasm.  He's a backslapper type, like Dad's friend Bobby.  Bobby hurt me once with that come up behind you back slap.  It made me tense my muscles, I felt it for two days.  You bastard Bobby!

          As part of the team I will be allowed to date a cheerleader, maybe three at a time.  Robin or Cheryl I would prefer, not that I expect it.

          My height, six-two, enables me to play on a basketball team, Backup Forward.  The two Forwards are Mike Hopper and Gerry Wohler.  Hopper has never acknowledged my presence, in junior high either.

          Gerry Wohler is a psychopath, he's injured two people I know of.  Rough conditions at home, it's said.  Gerry Wohler turned his life around last year with the aid of Coach Haskins acting as basketball teacher and mentor.  He adopted Gerry, he brought Gerry to live with him in Fortinbras, a rather working poor area.  In a year Gerry was not only a good basketball player, he was a "fine young man."

          No, he's a terror to others.  He scarred people.  Now I'm backing him and Mike Hopper.  They're hateful but I will work with them.

     Kolodny worked.  Hopper shoved him often, was penalized and admonished not sternly in practice games, Kolodny missed half his free throws, better than ten members of the team, but he was ridiculed by Hopper and Wohler, Steyer and Prince, with the little Guard Lester Retz chiming in to fit in with the First Stringers, who, all except for Prince, were vicious jock morons who required constant tutoring.

     Wohler confronted Kolodny in the locker room after a strenuous practice.  "You better shape up.  You're dropping the ball, literally.  You're missing baskets, today you TRAVELED!  You don't run with the ball in your hands, dummy!"

     "I was trying to get away from Mike.  He scratched me, see?" Kolodny showed a red welt on his right cheekbone.  

     "You did that to yourself!  You're clumsy!  You're stupid!  You're worthless!  Clumsy Kolodny!"

     Wohler's punch deliberately missed Kolodny's head, but he heard hurtfully and felt jarringly the vibration of the indignant boy's fist denting a locker, Mike Hopper's.

     "Shape up, Cuh-riss!"

     The exit door got punched, too.

     Kolodny's father sat with his drink, nodding, saying nothing about his son's getting nailed on the cheek and menaced by a handsome blonde goblin.  Mrs. Kolodny, though, listened raptly, pursing her lips and shaking her head at the more intense parts.  

     "Honey," she said to her husband, "don't you think it's time Chris be taken off that team?"

     "Why?"

     "Haven't you heard what Chris has said?"

     "Every word."

     "Well?"

     "Chris, do you want to play basketball with these creeps?  It's okay if you do, it's okay if you don't, how's that for reasonable?"

     "Chris honey--"

     "Mom, it's okay, I never intended to leave the team.  I just wanted to tell you my story."

     "You can manage with these savage players?"

     "Sure, I think so."

     

     The Kolodny Kool from that point on was in play.  He spoke little, studied much, practiced basketball, played for thirty seconds in the season opener, got knocked down.  In the second game, played in Harrisburg, Kolodny scored one basket in the fourth quarter when the team was ahead by 21, then, per Kolodny, 23.  

     Chris wanted to be a Finisher.  Someone who comes in during the last minutes, fresh, ready to play, uninjured, full of vim.  Only in games, usually, where the outcome was certain did Kolodny bounce the Wilson.

     He scored 14 points in Game Six, all baskets coming in the last 90 seconds.  Final score, Ghost Bullets 60, Johnsonville Strikebreakers 85.

     Still, such scenarios gave him game practice.  He got steadily better, less clumsy, more just-given-the-silent-treatment by the First Stringers rather than the previous doses of brutality and verbal abuse.

     By season's end, Kolodny had definitely earned the respect of Coach Haskins.  Even Gerry Wohler said "Good game" to him after their last one, a disappointing loss at home that kept them from the playoffs.  Kolodny scored 20 points in that one, Wohler 18, Hopper a mere 5.  Mike Hopper also missed 9 out of 10 free throws.  Kolodny didn't make fun of him in the locker room for that, but his teammates did.  

     Nobody could glower better than Michael A. Hopper, some found it fun to accentuate the glower through relentless verbal damage.  The First Stringers were sometimes shitty to each other. 

     

     Kolodny practiced every day, layups in his parents' driveway, driver's education for summer school, his driver's test successful, license by the end of August, able to drive his Mother's Pacer to school on Mondays and Wednesdays.

     Until b-ball started again in November, Kolodny worked on differential calculus, he read Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, he read the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back.  

     Entry from Monday, October 13, 1980, of the Kolodny Journal:

     I'm looking forward to playing basketball again.  I'm not looking forward to often seeing Mike Hopper.  I ran into Gerry today in the Commons.  He looked the same, anxious head bob at times, like he's trying to figure out what he needs to do.  He said Haskins is getting difficult to live with.  He drinks, he yells at the television after Gerry has gone to bed.  The Coach had a woman over, like a lady of the evening, she looked Chinese, Gerry said.  They were very loud watching television, especially the Coach, and then very loud doing something else.  It was weird for Gerry, and I can understand why.  I wondered if Gerry is trying to be friends with me?  I've heard Mike isn't spending much time with him.  Mike has a new girlfriend.  Guess what she does.  Football cheerleader, yup.  Teresa Baginski.  Two years ago, before a class started, she was sitting on my desk, her feet on her chair.  I had a perfect view of her bottom.  She was in her Junior Varsity Wrestling red and white cheerleader uniform.  James Kline, next to me, gestured with his eyes at her backside, as if I hadn't noticed Teresa's butt on my desk.  Cheerleader butt at that.

     Mike and Teresa.  Every time I see him in the hallways he's got the same Mike Hopper glower.  The guy needs some sunshine in his life.  Maybe Teresa will lighten him up?  A happy Mike Hopper would make being his teammate an agreeable thing.

     November 10, 1980, a Monday, first day of practice, 3:45 PM to 5:45, rusty players getting back in the groove.  Verbal abuse at new players.  Mike and Gerry prolific with sarcasm and shoving.  

     Has Teresa Baginski's tender influence not improved Mike Hopper's biliousness and aggressiveness?

     Gerry, for all of his transformative experiences since coming under the influence of Coach Haskins, remained a sadistic physically strong boy effective at convincing those others not his victims that he was harmless. 

     No one complained about Gerry.  He scored so many points, he ran in track and field events, earning himself trophies and ribbons as well as female attentions.

     Gerry made the school, his and Kolodny's twelfth grade year of 1980-1981, proud of its basketball team, State Championship bound.  College scouts interviewed Gerry.  Some university in Indiana really wanted him.  A small Illinois college recruited hard, lost out to Penn State.

     GERRY!!!!!

     Two red Number 10s on his jersey, Wohler an arc of future glories on the sweaty garment's back. 

     Mike Hopper, Number 16, the Lovebird with the constant look on his face of desiring to murder someone.

     The little guard, Lester Retz, Number 13, a Three Point Man who never got girls due to his greasy face and awkwardness around the school's female half.

     Leo Steyer, the other guard, Number 24, not as good as Retz, but one of the handsome ones; arrogant and cruel, father a sheet metal man.

     Gabriel Prince, the six foot five center, Number 5, boyfriend of Homecoming Queen Linda Scholer, lived in the town's most expensive house with his gadfly parents.  Gabriel did whatever he wanted in his own wing of the house.  Kolodny was never invited there to any of Gabriel's parties.  Orgy rumors circulated, probably weren't true, or were exaggerated.  

     Chris Kolodny now played in less games than the previous year's first half of the season.  The five starters played excellently, the team accumulated five wins before losing a close one at home.  In Game Seven Kolodny played quite a bit for an injured Mike Hopper.  A very tall weighty boy slammed down on his foot, probably on purpose.  Taken to the bench, Mike had tears in his eyes.  Kalodny felt bad for him, felt bad for Teresa who would feel bad.

     Kolodny scored just three points, did not impress the Coach, by now a bottle of scotch per night man.  Kolodny's poor performance, at any rate, was shared by the team.  Gerry Wohler scored only five points.

     What could be happening with this splendid bunch?

     Five more regular season games to go.  Kolodny played in three of them, including the final one at home on Valentine's Day, 1981, a win needed to get into the State Championships.

     Coach Haskins pushed Gerry in this game, yelled compliments and imprecations at him.  

     "Be great!  Be grand!  What the hell was that?  Be overpowering, Gerry!  What are you doing?  Knock that little fucker over the next time he tries that!  Be a missile!  Be a gruesome foe to your court opponents!"

     Gerry played well for a while and then, defending against a dodgy Carmen Wildcats guard, he stepped hard on the paint, made a sudden move right when his foot was pointing slightly left and went down, eyelids wide.

     Kolodny, Number 14, replacing Wohler, in a whirlwind scored 16 points, narrowing the margin to 3 with 1 minute remaining.

     "How do you feel, Gerry," Doctor Bauman asked.

     "I feel fine," Gerry said hoarsely, voice tight.

     Doctor Bauman touched his knee, pronounced him fit.  He and Coach Haskins were old friends.

     Gerry went back in, not fast anymore.  He missed two baskets, missed two free throws.  Mike Hopper at least held up his end of the game, scoring by that time 13 points including 3 free throws.  

     Wildcats 62, Ghost Bullets 59.

     Haskins told Gerry to rest.  Kolodny, with 3 seconds on the clock, scored a three-pointer to tie it.  The crowd deafened anyone who thought about how loud it was. 

     OVERTIME.  

     To the crowd's surprise, Kolodny sat on the bench.  Gerry was back.

     The Penn State Man is in the bleachers, Haskins reasoned.  The Penn State Man has to see Gerry shine.

     Shine, Gerry!

     Gerry scored no points.  Gerry dropped the ball on an easy pass, picked up by a Wildcat guard to make it 67 to 63, Wildcats.  Gerry fell down though no one had bumped into him.  Gerry lay on the court for five minutes, attended by Doctor Bauman.  Lifted by rookie teammates, Gerry was taken with Doctor Bauman to the locker room.  Doctor Bauman had drugs in his suitcase.

     The crowd, relieved, cheered Kolodny's return.  Anybody with the slightest reasoning ability could see that Kolodny was the best Forward this game so keep him in.

     Kolodny appreciated the crowd's approval, but he had a big job to do.  A two point stuff by Gabriel Prince made it 67-65.  Kolodny got fouled, scored a free throw, 67-66.  The Wildcats rallied, their best Forward put the ball through the hoop, 69-66.  

     With only 5 seconds on the clock Kolodny burst past two opponents, made his way to just outside the three-point line and launched a successful trey.

     69-69.

     Crowd even louder than before.  Unbelievable, who is this guy, sunk two three-pointers at the absolutely needed time!  Kolodny, never heard of him.  Oh, he's that guy in my English class who never says anything.  Kolodny, yeah, I used to think he was a fag, but no way is that guy a fag, the way he plays.

     

     No question now in Haskins' mind: Kolodny is the one. 

     The second overtime period began with Kolodny threading through his opponents for a layup.  71-69.  Ghost Bullets in the lead!

     Cheers, they love him!  Next possession, Chris Kolodny scores a three-pointer from the side.  74-69!  

     Wildcats rally, score six unanswered points, 75-74, time running out!  

     Kalodny bursts, a layup makes it 76-75, such a narrow edge, such a minute margin!

     The Wildcats' best guard scores a three-pointer, 78-76 Wildcats!  

     Fourteen seconds frozen on the clock, last time out.

     "Get the ball to Kolodny!" Coach Haskins yells at his men, barely heard in the din.

     Gabriel Prince has the ball, shoots it to Steyer on the side, Steyer shoots it back to Prince, Prince finds a brief opening as Kolodny breaks away from two opponents, zooms back from the paint, catches Prince's throw, turns, looks down, steps quickly outside the three-point line, aims and launches.

     79-78, 2 seconds...1...Horn!

     Nobody thinks about Gerry.  Everyone celebrates Chris Kolodny!  

     

     Gerry Wohler joined the Marines and was killed in Lebanon in 1983. 

     Gabriel Prince became a Pennsylvania Republican Congressman and then a lobbyist for Big Coal.

     Teresa Baginski married someone named Mike, though not Mike Hopper.

     Mike Hopper became a cop in Allentown, a bouncer in Philadelphia, and finally, a mercenary.  Missing in Afghanistan since 2004.

     Mr. Kolodny died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 2019.

     Mrs. Kolodny died of liver cancer in 2015.

     Lester Retz became a landscape business owner and married a nice woman.

     Leo Steyer became a licensed therapist.

     Chris Kolodny went back to being a normal person.  Fame and glitter last briefly, people once enthusiastic forget and think of other excitements.  For part of one evening, Valentine's Day, 1981, Kolodny was a dribbling god.  He scored 26 of the team's 79 points, nearly a third.  He rallied them to make up for the loss of Wohler.  They played better that night because of Kolodny, the school newspaper said so.

     Coach Haskins approached Kolodny in the locker room afterwards, asked him to meet with the Penn State Man who'd come to watch Gerry.  The Penn State Man wasn't interested in Gerry anymore.  Even before the injury, Gerry had scored just six points and missed four free throws.  Gerry hadn't been practicing much lately.  Riding high on the team's first half of the season victories and the sexual experiences following from those, Gerry Wohler made the mistake of assuming superiority on the court.  On the positive side, he also felt proud of his teammates, no longer bothering to torment any of them during this winning season.  

     Gerry was on his way.  Gerry was going to college.  Gerry was about to fall from the tower he constructed in his mind.

     Chris, lacking troublesome ego, knew it didn't matter if the team won or not.  

          It's how you play the game.  I played well tonight, my teammates played well, most of them.  I'll hand it to Mike.  He and I cooperated well, allowed each other the basket when we saw that was the right move.  He's still a sourpuss, but at least he wasn't a problem.  Gerry glared at me when I went in at overtime.  I hope he's better for the next game, State Championship playoffs in Harrisburg!  We're up against the Sloane High School Tomahawks of Osweguish.  Said to be a good team.  Said by somebody.  Well, we'll maybe beat them!

     They didn't.  Eliminated in the first round.  The Tomahawks destroyed them, 67-27.  Kolodny scored 2 points, Mike Hopper 7, Lester Retz 12.  Gerry watched from the bench, knee taped. 

     Coach Haskins now regretted having the Penn State Man talk with Kolodny.  The Penn State Man had gone home, missing this horrible performance, but he would read about it in the newspaper.

     The Penn State Man didn't call Kolodny as he said he would.  The Penn State Man was looking at Henry Nightbird of the Sloane Tomahawks.  Nightbird was darting.  Nightbird was fast.  Nightbird's free throw record was number one in the state.  

     Coach Haskins kicked Gerry out of his house.  "Why don't you do something with your life?  Join the Marines or something!"

     After graduation on Saturday, June 13, 1981, Chris Kolodny drove his mother's Pacer to the grocery store to buy a four pack of Stewart's Key Lime Soda, the ambrosia of soft drinks.  Driving home under the sunlit waving leaves of his quiet neighborhood, Kolodny spent the rest of the day drinking Key Lime, eating popcorn, and reading Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock, heroic fantasy at its best.

     His mother made him a beautiful steak dinner, his father told him he was proud of him and then went to drink and watch television.  

Vic Neptune   

        

     

     

     

     

Governor Cuomo's Farewell Address

      "My fellow New Yorkers, and, indeed, my fellow Americans.  The time has come for me to say goodbye.  I've walked backwards into a scandal.  It seems I touched women without their consent.

     "It goes with the job.  As a male with lots of money, a legacy of power and control over others, over budgets, deciding what to cut and what not to cut, I have, according to the law, overstepped my bounds.  My hands can't keep away from women's bodies.

     "I've been told by my lawyer that it's not a good thing to touch a woman without her consent.  I always regarded this as friendly play.  What woman wouldn't want to play in my sandbox? I reasoned.

     "It's hard for a man of my generation to adapt to new mores.  Who knows?  In forty years it might be inappropriate to not grope.  We don't know.  What's right and proper one decade is no longer a thing in another.  It was okay for the British Empire to run concentration camps in South Africa, but forty years later it wasn't okay for the Third Reich to do that.  Who can keep up?

     "I have not run my administration like a concentration camp, I assure you.  I condemn all practices depriving free peoples of their rights, including the right to be left alone.  This great country that provided this Governor with the opportunity to serve the great state of New York will always represent a beacon of liberty and hope, of the pursuit of happiness.  Here in America you can be anything; a plumber, a carpet salesman, a grocery store clerk, a NASA scientist, a women's rights advocate, a mail order Halloween costume distributor, a chef, a policeman or policewoman.

     "I now know it would be inappropriate to grope that hypothetical policewoman.  Lesson learned.

     "The alleged severity of my behavior, wherein I must resign because eleven women have credibly accused me of sexual harassment, a term I thought I understood the definition of but was incorrect, was unknown to me while I harassed.  I touch a butt, she leaves my office, she seems fine, I'm happy, I like women's butts, what breach of trust could come from this innocent play?

     "I've learned, though, to view this scandal and my behavior through the eyes of my three daughters, all of them in their twenties, a decade of a woman's age I particularly enjoy.  Believe you me, had one or all of my daughters worked for me in my administration I would not have groped them.  To even suggest such a thing reveals more about the one suggesting that than it does about myself.

     "I cannot stress enough that I had no idea it's wrong to touch a woman without her consent.  Why didn't anyone inform me of this?  I don't know.  They say with great power comes great responsibility.  With great power, too, comes the assumption, I know this first hand, that one can do whatever one wants if one is powerful enough.  

     "I killed 15,000 elderly people when I ordered Covid-19 cases into nursing homes.  I refused nearly seven billion in Medicaid in the middle of a pandemic.  I'm a killer.  A sociopathic, egotistical, arrogant, selfish f-word, and what did Attorney General James of the great state of New York get me on?  Sexual harassment.  I'll take that judgment.  The jail time, if any, will be less than it would be for killing 15,000 people.

     "President Clinton was impeached, if you recall, for lying about acts of consensual sex between an intern and himself.  Had he groped her, would he have had to resign?  It's difficult to be a powerful man.  The pressures.  The decisions.  The wondering about whether or not to make sadistic budget cuts in health care on behalf of wealthy donors.  Killing all those old people was easy, like driving a truck over a baby.  What would not be easy would be saying no to the likes of Democratic Party donors and wealthy supporters.  We all have bosses, except for the Big Boss, I mean God.

     "God has guided me throughout this ordeal.  My faith, my well-thumbed copy of the Bible, my belief in Providence, have shown me that all is not for naught.  A phoenix rises from its ashes.  Jesus came back from the dead.  I still have my Emmy Award.  It sits on my desk.  I admire its beauty.  It does not object when I finger its metal behind.

     "I want to thank all of the so-called 'Cuomosexuals' in Hollywood.  Ellen Degeneres, Chelsea Handler, and so many others who piled on the praise during my FDR-like Covid briefings.  Bob De Niro and Spike Lee, among others, made a wonderful tribute video to thank me.  The Hollywood elite, at least, prove by example that rich people are not all selfish a-holes with an inability to recognize an evil person when they see one.

     "Finally, I want to thank the American flag.  Throughout this embarrassing brouhaha I have found comfort gazing at the Stars and Stripes.  The colors reflect my moods of late.  I've felt blue, downbeat, depressed, tired, strained, worn out from trying to think up eloquent excuses for my behavior with women.  I've wanted to wrap the flag around my neck to hang myself.  

     "Red symbolizes the strong circulatory system of the vigorous Italian-American man, and the red sauce I flung with a big spoon at my little brother Chris, one time giving him second degree burns.

     "The white of the flag represents the purity of my belief that everything I did with those accusing women was not meant to cause harm or create discomfort.  I did not know that asking an administration aide to play strip poker was the wrong request to make.  I sometimes gamble when I open my mouth.

Nothing holds back my will.  Power surges through me.  I make phone calls, people die.

     "I'm a touchy-feely person.  I see a cat I want to pet it.  I see a dog I want to pat its head.  I see a woman I want to put my hands on her body, kiss her on the mouth, see her naked, bend her over my desk if she doesn't have any place to be in the next twenty minutes.

     "I reiterate what I've said about my accusers, all of them female: If they were offended by my touching and kissing, then it was wrong.  Was it wrong?  I don't know, you tell me.  Again, the shifting of mores.  It used to be legal to own slaves.  What happened to that?

     "In conclusion: everything I've done these past ten years as Governor of the great state of New York has been a banner I show with pride--yes, including the nursing home deaths and unconscionable Medicaid cuts in the middle of a pandemic I exploited to show up the incompetence of President Trump, my fellow accused sexual harasser.

     "If you've suffered because of my actions, with the pandemic, with the sexual harassment, I'm sorry you feel that way.  

     "Overall, it's been a good run.  This Decade of Andrew will end shortly, but it's not the end of me.  Once I'm in the White House I will kill even more people.  My sexual harassment will continue but I'll prey exclusively on the weak, not on women who might go to lawyers someday and complain about their ill treatment by a great Emmy Award-winning man who's the son of a great man, and brother of a CNN host.   

     "May God bless America, may the Jets get back to the Super Bowl, and may all the women I sexually harassed get a sense of humor.  May they learn to have innocent fun.  My sandbox is a fun sandbox.  If I attempt to wrestle with my female playmate who happens to be my employee just remember: my sandbox, my rules.

     "Thank you, and God bless some of you."

Vic Neptune

          

The Buffalo: The Biggest Genocide of All

      My technique these past few posts allows me to write about whatever I want to write about.  Kafka's aphorisms show a man thinking, jotting down ideas, short short stories, cultural legends.  Camus did the same in his journals.  My mind these days jumps around, interrupted by news, the need to take my iPhone out of my pocket, look at the weather forecast, play chess, look at a YouTube video.  

     Saw Foster Brooks in a Dean Martin Show sketch.  Foster Brooks, who didn't drink, specialized in playing drunkards.  I laughed at maximum volume, my gut hurt.  As a kid in the seventies I watched Foster Brooks, seeing him usually on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  If the TV Guide listed Foster Brooks as a guest on Johnny Carson's program, my parents allowed me to stay up past bedtime.  My father watched Foster Brooks with me.  We laughed, our ribs hurt.  I reacted to his funny faces and drunk voice, Dad reacted with cackles to the full range of Brooks's politically incorrect innuendo-filled subversive humor.  The scene I saw on Dean Martin's program is as funny as any top moment of any comedian I've ever heard. 

     An uglier topic about a comedian who sold out.  Bill Maher, it turns out, is a disgrace to humanity.  In favor of the destruction of Palestinians, the stealing of their land, their remaining open air prison pounded to rubble in the 11 Day War, he debated Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times writer and TV pundit, defender of Israel and Zionism and American Empire, critical of Trump, therefore good in willfully ignorant liberals' minds.

     Wreckage of concrete, dead bodies, naked rebar, obstacles everywhere, a new Stalingrad for Israeli Defense Forces if they invade with ground troops.  They probably won't.  Palestinians backed into their ultimate corner, on stronger ground because they can ambush from wreckage the IDF military produced in its U.S.-supported bombing campaign.  Down went apartment buildings, down went a building housing apartments and the offices of the Associated Press and Al Jazeera; Israel a Death Star blowing up planets in the 30th century, America still feeding money to it,  making possible its murders and planet grabs for resources.

     Reconstruction money from the U.S. supposedly going to help rebuild Gaza, so they can knock it down again?

     Really, so that construction firms and big businesses get to rehabilitate Gaza, making many smackers doing so.  

     Iraq: moneymaker for KBR and Halliburton, two construction firms formerly CEO'd by Dick Cheney, American Gangster, War Criminal, Torturer, Liar, Friend of Joe Biden.

     Libya: Nicolas Sarkozy bombed oil rich Libya, with its huge fresh water aquifer much coveted as a bottle water industry moneymaker.  Sark the Shark wanted to test the fighter-bombers in "combat," a misnomer in Libya since Gaddafi's Air Force had nothing comparable.  The jets' performance ratings in an actual NATO bombing campaign led mainly by France and the U.S., would attract other nations' interests in purchasing some for their own weapons collections.  That Sarkozy behaves like the sleazy war profiteer and criminal he is should surprise no one who has broken free of the news media perpetuated myth that our leaders aren't adversarial to children, women, men, in war zones manufactured by imperial powers. 

     Gang warfare.  The Godfather trilogy is popular because it rings true.  Duvall, Pacino, and Brando in that dimly lit office, making plans, talking business, discussing murder, is what it must be like when other violent criminals (politicians) plot their shit.  Maybe Netanyahu's lighting and camera angles are different than Coppola showed to us.  Bill Maher vocalizing euphemisms to omit the reality of burying sleeping Palestinian families in their apartments' wreckage makes him feel righteous, but it's dumb righteous, has-too-much-money righteous: net worth 140 million dollars.

     Bill Maher could purchase fifty JDAM bombs, what Biden promised to Netanyahu while the latter was murdering Palestinians, and still have 139,100,000 dollars.  Should rich people just shut the fuck up? 

     For less than a million dollars, militaries of every nation except maybe North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, and the Palestine Authority can buy fifty dumb bombs equipped with guidance systems, like when Spock gets his brain removed by a female alien.  Dr. McCoy attaches a radio control device to Spock's nervous system, making him useful as a strong Vulcan body at one life-saving point as he seizes a frequency pain inducer device from the female leader's wrist, stopping McCoy's, Kirk's, and Scotty's on-the-floor-writhing punishment session.

     The thing about Spock?  He really has emotions, but suppressed ones.

     Leonard is Dead.  From his interviews Nimoy came across as a decent person with a curious mind.  His hosting In Search Of demonstrated his interest in relating information about unexplained events, the paranormal, ufology, ancient mysteries and structures, Bigfoot.

     Star Trek Meets Bigfoot.  A forest planet, Tau Centauri 3T, seems devoid of sentient life, but the forest is alive, where Bigfoot, a nine foot tall green and brown bipedal cyclops with big feet menaces the landing party, fatally knocking the heads together of two red-shirted security men.  Scotty too, dead, go to commercial.  The forest heals Scotty.  The promo all week advertising the episode on 1960s TV emphasizes the "Scotty's dead" plot point.  A few hundred thousand faithful viewers assume Mr. Scott will be killed.  No online chat rooms to discuss this as a worldwide council.  Who will replace Scotty? they wonder.  Causes a lot of talk at school.  Scotty's going to die.  How does he die?  Something gets him in a forest on some planet.  What's he doing on the planet?  Yeah, why do they need an engineer in a forest?

     My Spock doesn't want to see Palestinians annihilated.  His logic on the inefficiency of murdering people and then wasting time justifying Bill M.'s hostile-to-life arguments would earn Spock just one appearance on the Maher show.  Thus, do aliens infiltrate our media, sometimes interviewed or acting as pundits or presidents, sometimes as the camera crew, sometimes as Rand Paul.

     

     Une histoire de 1981.  Because I write "This really happened," some of you will believe it really happened, but it did happen.

     Junior year, second hour Chemistry I class taught by Arnold Bavaria; acerbic sweater-wearer with gray hair combed right to left, good head of hair for a man in his fifties.  Lined face, weird way of talking, European accent of some kind unheard by my ears before or since.  I fantasized he was a German officer in World War Two, an SS man with death's head badge on silver-lined black cap with polished black brim. He also seemed like he may have known people who died in the Holocaust, including family members.  I'm guessing, but there were two students at my high school whose family, some of them, had been killed in a systematic extermination program to get rid of excess disposable units in the forms of human beings, copies of the deserving real people--this shit's supposed to be illegal.  

     Sorry for the digression.  One day in class, I sat up front on the far right.  Bavaria was talking, pacing back and forth.  He asked me a question, and I said, "I don't know."

     "You don't know what two plus two equals?"

     I had nothing.

     "You all know, I'm sure, that John knows what two plus two equals."

     At the board, Mr. Bavaria lifted his chalk:

    2

+  2

                                                                             _______

                                                                                   = 4

     "John," he announced to the class, "though he was physically present, was daydreaming, weren't you, John?"

     "Yes."

     "What's two plus two?"

     "Four."

     "Good.  Getting back to--"

     My friend Brian and I have long had an idea for a book of high school memories with names changed called The Girls in August.  A new semester would begin, back in 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, when we were in that school together.  New sense of maybe hooking up with a girl you've never met before, hasn't heard anything about you, doesn't know you wrote an embarrassing love note to Susan Hicks, got humiliated in class by Susan's gabby friend Nina.  Anyway, I'm making the project seem more ridiculous than it's supposed to be, but projects in my experience rarely succeed at following every blueprinted move.

     It's a memory book, with embellishments.  I don't remember exactly what Arnold Bavaria said to me, but that captures it.  The feeling of being stared at, smiled at, laughed at, other students relieved something interesting finally happened: the guy who didn't know the answer to the two plus two question.  Maybe I was heroic suddenly.  Or a stupid shit.

     I felt my nervous system tingling my limbs, I wanted the son of a bitch to stop talking about me.  Boys' and girls' laughter.  Not everyone laughed, but it was a show, an impromptu entertainment to watch at that moment because nothing else was on.

     At my graduation, Bavaria approached me, shook my hand and wished me luck.

     Brian's approach to the book will be more meticulously detailed, that's his style.  I feel like shifting gears.

     Kamala Harris in trouble for tweeting a picture of herself grinning along with the message: "Have a great holiday weekend!"

     Any theories propounding that this woman is a deep thinker I challenge with this story that blew up Google today, May 30, 2021, anniversary of Jeanne d'Arc's death, 591 years ago.  Harris's tweet is "disrespectful," she doesn't seem to understand the meaning of American troops' sacrifices.  

     No, really, Kamala Harris is shallow as fuck, that's the answer, like four is from two plus two.  It didn't occur to Kamala Harris, who could be president within a few years, that not saying something about fallen American sailors, soldiers, Marines, Coast Guard, National Guard, CIA agents, DIA agents, weapons industry lobbyists, heavily armed contractors, military personnel who rape other military personnel, military personnel who kill civilians, would be regarded as an oversight by the American people and right wing news media sheets and websites.  Fox News did a story on it.  It's presented like it's the most important infraction of justice ever committed by a woman who held back the releases of prisoners who had served their time so she could use them to fight California's wildfires.  These same prisoners, many of whom learned to be good firefighters, were refused by Attorney General of California Harris in getting firefighter jobs.  Thus, did she fuck them twice.  Look at her psychopathic, laughing face in the picture on that Memorial Day Weekend tweet, like Hillary Clinton unable to contain her glee at denying American citizens Medicare for All, forever.

     Kamala Harris is a dimwit mostly, but as a riser, she's good at greasing palms, overlooking big time crimes, like the housing market-related obscenities committed by One West Bank president Steve Mnuchin, later Trump's treasury secretary, the guy who writes his name on your money.

     Harris could've prosecuted Mnuchin, put him behind bars, make him wear the same shitty outfit day in day out, and repeat.

     Picture Trump pacing a cell in jail.  Melania comes to see him with her attorney, they have papers for him to sign.  No, he can't see Barron.  Don Junior is now a Democrat, gets interviewed by Rachel Maddow.  Don plans on primarying President Kamala Harris, tells Maddow he's for Medicare for All, elimination of student and medical debt, raising taxes severely on billionaires, raiding their offshore money supplies and redistributing it--Operation Robin Hood.  On Fox and Friends, Don Junior wears the Errol Flynn green and brown Robin Hood costume, the very one from 1937.  Bow, arrows, a dagger and sword.  Thin Zorro mustache, much enjoyed by the no doubt blonde hostess.

 

     Gabriel the Winged Messenger, the Trumpeter, one with a job to do on Judgment Day, will be the Clock Starter of Next Age Humanity, whatever that's gonna be.  Gabriel comes to Mary with a message about her upcoming pregnancy.  The Annunciation.  March 25 that's celebrated, same day Sauron lost his home, his physical form, his Ring forever.  All of his ability to wield power gone, never to return.  As Gandalf the Grey puts it, "a mere spirit of malice that gnaws itself in the shadows..."

     Gnawing oneself in the shadows, though it can be applied to unsavory characters like Gollum, or Hillary Clinton after her 2016 election loss, is something we all do.  Worry about a loved one's health, or money problems (most Americans currently afflicted with that, BIG TIME), can make one stay in thinking mode, negative whirl of thoughts and anxieties, so much fun, and Mitt Romney and others of his type never get to experience it.

     I'm sick from politics, from watching faces of cruel incompetent weirdos destroying lives and rearranging the contentment of those millions in the majority who generate the elites' wealth.

     They don't give us health care even as they ruin our health with worries caused by their selfish actions.

     But they mean well, or they're ethnically diverse, or gay, or making money from business while in office, or incinerating the flesh of children.

     

Vic Neptune