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
