STAR WARS SPOILER: GEORGE LUCAS CAUSED THE WAR ON TERROR. AND EVERYTHING ELSE.

In retrospect, George Lucas was John the Baptist to Ronald Reagan's Jeebus. Whatever its provenance, the retroactively but perfectly named "A New Hope" could not have been calculated as a more effective salve to stop its audience scratching at the memories of the pictures of the people on fire, the people shot point-blank in the head, entire families and entire villages burned and murdered—by Americans. By white hat-wearing Gary Coopers with fucking napalm. For having the audacity to live in a place whose leaders went communist.

HOORAY! shouted the collective American subconscious on 19770525: Real good guys fighting real bad guys! Poof! the moral ambiguities of the Vietnam War evaporated like a dream on waking. Thanks to the perfect good-and-evil simplicity of the Star Wars-fronted political zeitgeist, by the time Mr. Reagan was caught covertly rewarding Iran for getting him elected, America's rash was not only healed but immune to relapse. What fuddled the American war machine anaphylactic in the 1960s and early '70s would never again give us pause. Episode III contains a telling—and appalling—moment early on in which Obi-Wan and Anakin share a smart-ass Hollywood zinger and a hearty chuckle just as their high-flying action sequence causes collateral civilian damage. Fuck 'em: they didn't even get name billing. Just like those two million dead gooks.

And I'll say this again: That moral absolutism, that fundamentalist Amurka is right by definition mentality, is propped up by the Force. Back in the day, savants noted that Lucas was cashing in on the defection in record numbers of Americans from their organized dogma-saddled churches into the squishy realm of "personal spirituality". The Force deftly avoided all the objectionable aspects of "God" (largely his schizoid personality); and it sidestepped the unsolvable question of how a benevolent god could countenance such a sustained fortissimo of evil in the world. No consciousness, no remorse or glee, just an undiscovered law of physics that happens to favor... I dunno, pretty people? People who wear earth-tones? No, I know, I'm kidding; we all know precisely what the Force favors: Amurka! Freedom! Human rights! (well uh some of them anyway). This! The Force loves my Ford truck!

Egoless and unaccountable but still absolute—basically "karma" in chivalry drag—the Force is the perfect modern religion. It still allows for—indeed, it insists on—immediate cranial access to omniscience. A scant hour into the filmic literature we are shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the Force exists: Luke effectively defends himself against a floating remote droid without the aid of his vision—a trick that sets up his climactic Death Star-destroying shot an hour later. That's it, Luke! Trust your feelings!

Whatever in the highwire fuck. Trust your feelings? Trust your fucking feelings?! Could there by a more irresponsible sentiment to aphorize? Trust your feelings means "[Insert your cause here] is right. Its army is right. I am right. I am doing the right thing. I am killing the right people." Granted, Ep. VII opens with someone thinking outside that constraint and defecting from stormtroopery, but c'mon: he WAS on the wrong side and he was only trusting his feelings which he got from the Force! Just as organized forms of religion have always done, the Force makes morality and moral behavior tautological: "The higher intelligence to which I have immediate brainwave access says x is right and y is wrong; and in ambiguous situations, the higher intelligence will guide me and I will do right because righty-right-rightness is right right right!" Right?

I cannot speak to any possible alternate present-day. Absent the Star Wars behemoth some other fundamentalism-abetting formulation would doubtless have presented in some other blockbusta. And I cannot say what goes through the head of somebody who, say, bombs an abortion clinic. I think it's safe to say nobody who does such a thing does so because they believe the fucking Force is strong with them. But it's much the same thing. What I am saying is that "God" and "the Force" are first cousins. Their activity in human brains works in precisely the same way. And if we live in a world (and we do) where even secularism is drenched in magical thinking and fantasies of moral certitude (courtesy of our popular entertainments) they ain't no way the genocidal, prepuce-collecting god of Abraham is waiting behind any velvet ropes. Or police tape.

Late in the narrative...

... we have a scene that tries to swing the sort of molto stretto feeling achieved by Goodfellas right about the time "Memo from Turner" starts to play, all black-'copter paranoia and cokesweat—but on a much tamer and more legal scale: Chick and Ellen have a new recreational vehicle to which they've just applied to coat of some kind of protectant—not quite paint, not quite plastic, but water-resistant and somehow aggressively beige. Bright beige, if there is such a thing. Krazy Khaki. Day-Glo mlin. And the clock is ticking because for ill-disclosed reasons they need to get the vehicle to Richmond by a certain time, and that time is just under an hour from now and we're a good 30 minutes away and it's raining.

Ah, never mind: that ticking clock scenario is old and tired and there are other narrative threads to explore. Besides, if you can't come up with a tangible reason for going to Richmond...

So Ellen, Chick, and I prep the vehicle—which, it becomes clear, is sometimes a boat—for a more dalliant sally, or perhaps salient dally. Prep happens in the manner of a camping "pop-up": the roof, shaped a bit like an ice cream truck roof, though larger and, did I mention, aggressively beige, is raised on high, and we get inside. It's bigger on the inside. There's a queen-sized bed in the main compartment, and we need to set it up as bunk beds, which is actually fairly easy since the headboard includes an electric forklift contraption that raises a platform for the second box spring and mattress. The upper berth is mine. There's a strange glass plate in the stack of bedding, rectangular and lipped, like a bed-sized microwave plate, from days before build-in carousels. I say, We should stow this; and Mom (oh, yeah, Mom is there now) asks Why? and I say Because I don't see any reason it should be part of the bedding. And we put the glass plate in the back of the closet—which is now Nanny and Poppop's bedroom closet in their trailer—and I put the box spring and mattress up on the fork and my bed is magically already made.

Once we get the RV on the road, there's this guy hanging around who is at least attempting to socialize with Chick but is also possibly attempting to interview him for more structured journalistic purposes. Chick is having none of that. He's terse and brusque and retiring. The journalist makes the most of it, speaking aloud, framing his documentary story elsewhere so Chick seems never to have been his focus but just a random encounter. While he speaks he paints various parts of the boat. Chick is having none of that, nor, and paints them over a different color. It seems to me this is vaguely about Ireland in a green-and-orange way, but neither of the colors they apply is green or orange. I think it's black and red. At least the whole damn thing isn't so fucking beige anymore.

In what must be a flashback I am hurrying through the refrigerated section of a supermarket—and it is not my first time through this supermarket on the same errand, to lade in supplies for the RV trip. I pass a very sparse display with a few boxes of Cap'n Crunch, all askew from customer handling. It is the only breakfast cereal in the whole store—I am reminded there is a cereal shortage and I wonder whether I can afford the time to drive to a different grocery—or maybe a pyramid, offers Ben Carson—where my luck might be better.

And then I realize I have a lit cigarette in my hand. How the hell do I have a lit cigarette in my hand? Did I just forget I had one lit upon entering? That's very, very strange: it is not 1970. But of course I wish to dispose of it quickly and as unobtrusively as possible. For some reason it never occurs to me to throw it on the floor right where I am and stamp it out; I guess I'm looking, with increasing panic, for an ashtray or -bin. Maybealso I don't want anyone to actually see that I have a lit cigarette, and if I stamped it out they would see and I would be arrested. It doesn't help that the store is very crowded, so as I head to the front left corner of the store, where the customer service counter is, I'm maneuvering through closer and closer batches of humans, all the while bobbling a still-lit cigarette in my hands like a particularly hot potato.

And somehow I end up putting it on the floor anyway, and the spot I pick is disastrous: it is one foot away from an infant whose mother is on the floor as well, keeping her baby entertained while the line she's waiting in goes nowhere. And while I smoosh the burning cigarette with my shoe I cannot seem to extinguish it: indeed, new embers keep cropping up, five, ten seconds later, and inches closer to the baby! The mother keeps her child (who's maybe a year old) safely away from the residual fire, saying, "Let's stay away from those golden pearls!" but the baby is clearly interested. Don't start smoking, baby!

And I'm on the floor, extremely close to these people, feeling like the biggest asshole in the world. It was all accidental; I had no intention of; I'm usually a very courteous smoker! Nope: biggest asshole.

Somehow, though, I get a mulligan. The entire supermarket scene replays, and at the end of it I manage not only to get the cigarette out more efficiently, I somehow charm and quip my way through the villainy of having tried to light a baby human on fire—I watch myself ingratiate myself to the young mother with smiles and self-deprecation and wordplay. (I am at least part Noah Wyle here, in a fetching blue shirt.) I ask about the little girl, but mom says it's a little boy. At the end of the scene mom kisses her son's cheek, and I lean over and kiss him, too. We're still all on the supermarket floor.

Several years later and this same child is now mine, or at least in my care. It is bedtime and we are having supermarket stories. "Did you really used to shoplift?" he asks me.

—All the time, I tell him. Back when I lived in Delaware I stole packs of cigarettes from the Pathmark. (I omit to tell him about the more elaborate bouts of boosting and the occasional fraud.)
—Really, all the time?
—Well, I don't know. Maybe it was just a few times. I think every time I went, I was more and more afraid that this was the time I'd get fingered for the heist.
—Fingered. (Ah, we're playing the thesaurus game! This is a reliable precursor to sleep. He'll tell me when I've reached an acceptable word; if he doesn't, he's sailed off.)
—Picked up by the police. Caught. Arrested. Nabbed. Pinched.
—Nabbed.

I thought sure he'd go for "pinched"; and my mind does a tailspin on the workings of his mind: Is his brain doing a sort of routine statistical normalization, trying to adjust for the possibility that its positive response to "pinched" was artificially heightened by its coming right after "nabbed" which brain also liked?

—Ok. Nabbed for the heist.
—Heist.
—Theft. Lift job. Caper. (I flash on "I got pinched mid-caper" and then I really want to amuse him with "I shall pinch your caper and tickle your olives" but this is possibly too Dada for him. And then, brain stalls, moves on to verbs.) Steal. Boost. Promote. Nick.
—Nick.
—Perfect. I was afraid it was my turn to be nabbed in the nick. Or nabbed mid-nick.

And my brilliant sleepy boy says: I wanna be Nabs McNick for Halloween. Make me a costume.

The New Shkrelism

This screed was occasioned by a friend's FB status, but the further rhetoric it responds to cannot be attributed to that friend; I'm engaging an imagined (though very real in innumerable Amurkin iterations) combatant. Anyway, the prompt read thus:

"I looked at the Pharma hyper-prices as a Medicaid/insurance scam that backfired. / If everybody is insured and nobody can be dropped for a condition then after the deductible is met the sky is the limit on what to charge, a company or the gov't will pay it (thats the strategy anyway)... / Not agreeing with this strategy at all, would be fine seeing the execs shot but I expect a lot more (though not as obvious/expensive) such business models to come!"

Yes. Unfortunately Capital (and its thronging legion of carefully under-educated, underpaid stooges—see also Maleficent's minions) is perfectly happy with any scenario that provides even easier access to your tax dollars. Pharma and the rest of Health Care have been eyeballing their share greedily for the last half-century as Armaments and Warmaking proved themselves infallibly spill-free (well, except for all that blood) siphons of the American wallet.

But as much as Pharma loves its new easier access to our tax dollars, they would much rather take a step back—after all, Medicaid/Medicare and other federal assistance programs are just that same half-century old themselves—than a step forward to a single-payer system. So here's the part where Capital screams itself hoarse about how this and similar "failures of Obamacare" prove socialist solutions don't work—yes, you heard that right: uber-Capitalist creosote stain Martin Fucking Shkreli proves that socialism doesn't work—and so we need to go back to the Great American Bootstrap where Ronald Reagan lent you a chicken to pay your doctor.

The problem isn't government assistance. The problem is insurance. We grew up being taught to accept the whole concept of insurance as benign if not outright beneficent. "It takes care of you when you need it" and suchlike. Actually, it's one of seven REAL deadly sins—the most evil things humankind has ever done to itself—the other six being religion, slavery, war, advertising, modern country music, and Neti pots). Maybe "healthcare insurance" was initially created to be helpful, but it quickly metastasized into a universal malignancy. And it did so with the full connivance of Capital and Capital's neocon buddies.

Boehner and Obama rehearse the mirror scene from Duck Soup

The example here of Pharma price-gouging is a single, simple, common-sense lesson in economics: NEVER set up a fucking system whereby a group of sellers and a group of buyers are operating in a de facto capitalist market but without any practical economic contact with each other—without any real reference to market value of products and services. Universal insuredness ENSURES [ahem: with an 'e'] artificiality of market value. Obamacare doesn't do anything for the health care of Americans except patch the holes where everybody's tax dollars might have leaked out. It hones and perfects exactly the sort of vacuum Martin Shkreli so jauntily moved to exploit. Shkreli's sin was not his actions per se but rather how far he stretched the system and his LOLling insouciance about it. Capital was all, like: "Dude, knock it off. You're drawing attention. People are noticing."

But what people were noticing and screaming about is exactly the corporate behavior which Big Healthcare had been practicing for decades—just done cartoonishly big—and which they continue to refine and perfect under the Affordable Care Act.

Read up on Mr. Nixon's Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 if you're interested in the precise moment Big Healthcare first jizzed in their pants. Mr. Obama, like all good corporate capitalists, duly painted his new installment with a bright blue HOPE logo and sold it to what passes, embarrassingly, for liberals in this country. The flashing red lights and angry hollering was all side-show—well, mostly side-show; scaremongering about socialism remains itself a lucrative racket—but everybody that counted knew it was (a) an inevitability and (b) a blank check for industry printed up to look like a big Band-aid.

"And here we have a textbook example of obligatory payment..."

So with an entire nation trained to ignore Insurance itself as an immutable feature of the landscape, and struggling to make do with their shriveling paychecks, is it any surprise that the most common response to the New Shkrelism is "See? That's what we get for handing out government assistance instead of MAKING AMURKINS TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEMSELVES like our parents and grandparents did!"

We are an evil people. I don't know why that is; I don't know how we came to this pass; but America is a fucking wasting disease.

Late last night and earleye this morning

I am playing hearts with four other people, two men and two women—don't ask me how five people play hearts; it's not real hearts anyway, as the deck we're dealing from contains at least three regular poker decks, maybe four, and shuffling is a shared ordeal each time. It is obviously impossible to shoot the moon when you don't even know how many hearts exist in a hand. Nobody seems bothered by this.

The two men are almost certainly Tonys DiNozzo Junior and Senior;

the women are NPCs—I knew them slightly last night but don't know them now. Everyone is dressed up fancily for nightlife and while we're at our card table we appear to be in a jazz club. Between hands, however, I have to make a toilet run. I push the table slightly forward and it rolls or skids fractiously into Robert Wagner's ribcage, threatening to spill all our drinks. He is only slightly huffy about this; still, I do not like making Robert Wagner huffy. I make a note to be careful of the overly touchy table when I return, then head across the club to the Men's room...

...which is on the other side of the garden center, or perhaps public banquet facility, with "outdoor" garden areas for wedding rentals and such—though "outdoor" and "indoor" are hardly meaningful since the change from one to the other happens much more gently and organically than the usual business of traversing doors.  While I am on a broad wooden deck strewn with autumn leaves and dappled with late sunlight, horses idling in my brain if not elsewhere, I remember that Renée asked me to pick a song to sing with her, just one, for the upcoming occasion we're both invited to. In real life this would almost certainly be "Babes in the Wood"...

...which Renée and I have known since 1987 or '88; here, however, the song we've decided upon appears to be something different. Moreover it is represented as a physical object—a tote bag, folded and stowed among many tote bags, presumably all representing songs. I pull out the not-quite-Babes in the Wood bag, unfold it, and examine it. Yes, this will do.

Returning from the bathroom to the card game is a longer affair as I must circumnavigate the enormous amphitheater, which is simultaneously a dramatic stage and a water park show tank, the sort of place humans line up to get splashed by a fellow mammalian predator almost as deadly as they. The seating area is correspondingly a mélange of staid, plush theater seats and outsize resin half-shell thingies, looking like nothing so much as rows of upturned contact lenses and painted a garish aquamarine.

I fear I have dawdled, with my song-bag reverie, and so now I sprint back toward the card table, spameloping deftly up and down sets of steps and around discrete sections of contact lenses; I take this auditorium like a known and practiced obstacle course—though my brain registers a warning: "You sha'n't be doing THIS sort of thing for long, Methuselah!"—all the way over to the back corner, where my company has hiked their card table up enormously high on a hydraulic rig. I'm not even certain it is my table; I need to get up that high to make sure it's my party; so I start to climb... and what do you know, we have a Fear of Heights Dream™—like inane stories about "chosen ones," they just never stop making these. I eventually persuade my company to come back down to a reasonable altitude, but it is no matter. The card game is over.

Much later, after many forgotten adventures, I have gotten extensively tattooed, across my entire (ventral) thorax and both arms—not exactly sleeves, but pretty crowded. I have buyer's remorse. It was apparently Marya who convinced me to decorate myself so—it is not clear to what extent the ink is her design, but it's certainly not all her original drawing—and while looking around the bedroom for lost garments—an Herculean labor given that the bedroom is strewn knee-deep with discarded garments—I contemplate making a public statement. It was of course my decision to have myself tattooed but I blame Marya anyway, loftily, in public, before all our friends. To her credit, she is having none of that bullshit; yet it's clear she is personally upset that I do not like the results of her art direction.

James approaches me shortly thereafter with helpful information about the shipping lines of tattoo ink and how—though the tattoos I already have a permanent—how I might prevent further tattooing by disrupting the ink shipments. He has a box of spent ink canisters, like oversize fountain pen cartridges; there is perhaps a scheme to substitute these for new cartridges, a great train robbery sort of caper. It seems sensible; James is always a font of useful information and good ideas.

And then we have wakeys.

God is the real terrorist.

This is troubling me, because I feel the entire conversation is missing an essential point or perspective and I've been trying to figure out what that is.

Since that asshole with the creepy Beatrix Potter name shot up Planned Parenthood, liberal ideologues have been singing, solo and /ripieno/, the orthodox line about "homegrown Christian terrorism". And the conservatives... well, frankly, I have not consulted the rightist ideologues, but the leftist ones *assure* me the rightist ones are doing their usual softshoe grin hey look over there about how the "shooter" was a crazy person acting alone and ain't it just turrble what he done did I mention hey look over there?

Furthermore, everyone everywhere is referring to the incident as being "politically motivated"; fed and state LE both have been quoted as saying so. But but but. Two things: 1. Absent an already vast national-level conspiracy, Robert Lewis Dear WAS a crazy person acting alone; and 2. That politicians and the political process have been engaged for half a century in the fight over safe and legal abortion does not make this a political action. Yes, I absolutely mean that. This murtherer may have a coherent politics—as far as his likely pathological brain will allow—and it's a *fair* assumption he's not a big Obamahite; but this is not about his politics and has nothing to do with any politician who takes up either the attack or the defense of the legal practice of abortion. This is about... Well, remember (ye codgerscienti) those Hebrew National hot dog commercials? Here, have a look and then we'll continue.

Now I'm not trying to conflate what Jews think their deity wants with that Christians think theirs wants. Oh, no, wait, yes I am. It's the same fucking deity, doncha know: and the divisions between Jew and Christian and between Jew and Muslim and between Christian and Muslim—those divisions are only the widest and most visible of the chasms between WHAT DIFFERENT HUMANS BRAINS INSIST THE DEITY WANTS. It's as simple as that. The problem isn't political. It's theological.

Obama and many other liberal voices have taken up their ritual call-and-response:

MASS MURDERER: Bang bang bang!
SCHOLA: Gun control gun control gun control.

I'm not saying we *don't* need more sensible gun control (I frankly believe the state should take as many guns off the street as they can and make them extremely difficult to acquire). I'm saying that isn't the only problem in cases like this; it isn't even the most salient problem. This Dear asshole (heh) wasn't part of any sort of criminal conspiracy. (To call his act "terrorism" so dilates the definition of the word as to negate similar claims against people who, oh, I dunno, shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the street; it insults the latter's cause and integrity to suggest their shooters are of the same class of felons as Robert Lewis Dear.)

It wasn't terrorism. It wasn't even primarily about violent defense of extremist political ideas; it was about violent defense of extremist theistic ideas.

Mass murder was and is the inevitable endpoint of a societal model that does nothing to police indoctrination into the belief in a deity that wants mass murder.

The argument needs no elaboration—this is the simplest and most elegant formulation: if "God" speaks truth to you, why does He lie to so many other people? Why wouldn't an omniscient and omnibenevolent god tell everybody the same truth in their brains?

We are a species strongly inclined to believe that ego—that the raw feed from brain into consciousness—includes a separate voice called "deity" whereby an external omniscient intelligence speaks its wishes. If that right there isn't the biggest recipe for disaster you've ever heard, you better start writing some fucking books about what you've heard.

Fight the real enemy.

Back in Newark for a little shopping

The layout of the Deer Park Tavern

 has changed

since my 1996 move from Newark to Washington.

Rather, it changed once and has stayed basically the same since. It currently has a sort of hemi-triskelion design at its heart, with three tavern rooms describing a 180-degree arc in front and, I suppose, the kitchen and storage and office space in the back. (Don't look at the above. That's reality. That's irrelevant.) Somehow the layout and architectural detail allow the revised Deer Park to be simultaneously authentic as the 19th-century public house and inn that it actually is, and hip—which is convenient inasmuch as it is sometimes a storefront in a mall. Second floor, by the Bamberger's.

The Park is an early stop on a combination carouse-and-retail therapy trip down and around Main Street in Newark, the course of which trip does not take us to Sam's Steakhouse, but Sam's is certainly there, over on Academy, gettin' the kiddies drunq. We pass but do not visit the mini-mall where Days of Knights used to be; and just east of there we browse through an incarnation of Barry Solan's Vidéo Américain. Even with everything hauled out of the highly suspect evidence locker of my memory, right now—wide awake, wracking my brain—I honestly cannot determine whether the layout, organization, staff, and my history of visiting this outlet are real or dreamspun. It is certainly not Barry's store in the Granary, nor the incarnation in the strip mall at Elkton and Apple Roads, now seemingly a ballet school. Is is possible Barry briefly had a storefront on Main Street where I'm "remembering" it? Possibly in the very spot in the mini-mall that DoKs vacated?

Details of our actual stops are lost (as are details of who "we" are apart from the ego) but well after the spree has come to a rest one other person—who may be John McDonald but may also be Itzhak Perlman—and I realize we forgot to buy a book. So we head back up Main Street, hoping any of the three bookstores there will be open. The first is not. While we're passing through the tire store we see the Kindly Old Asian Man (yes he's fucking Asian because I don't fucking know where he's fucking from except Asia so fuck you) who manages the second bookstore, and he tells us the third bookstore is open as well.

We head to the third shop; in the vast parking lot out front I put set my cigar down by the fountain, hoping it will still be there and lit when I retrieve it later. Inside, some college women are browsing the "new arrivals" or "popular" Barnes-and Noblish display nearest the entrance, talking about a wonderful new book that purports (purrports?) to be written by a cat imitating a human "voice" and advising "other" humans to be unduly solicitous of and generous toward their cats. "Science has foud that your cats need LOTS of treats" and so forth. This is so amusing I forget what I am looking at, or looking for.

Later, back "home" (someone else's) there's an impromptu singing session; and though I'm currently involved with a not-very-formal Wednesday night group, the only person I recognize around the dining table is Jason McCool—whose judgment I fear in completing a particular phrase that I manage to get through with breath to spare, but a little wobblingly. We are singing Gary Winans's ...les cèdres et chaque petite fleur... and I discover that someone, perhaps the composer, has devised a mold or latex form for freezing ice into a gizmo shaped vaguely like a set of dentures but with only a slight curve—like a violin bridge—so that when bowed from the first ice-tooth to the last it plays the tenor's cantabile two-measure/seven-note-long phrase on the word par-ti-cu-li-èr-e-ment (0:31 to 0:35 here). The tooth for "par", like a molar, is the widest, since it plays the longest note in the phrase; then a bicuspid, two incisors, and three more bicuspids. (Yeah, ok, it's not like real teeth.) I pick up somebody else's bow to try it out and knock over their fiddle in the process—but it falls silently onto plush carpet, no harm no foul. I bow the ice and manage to get the phrase out; but I am annoyed at how difficult it is to control the bow properly. I guess 1 year of violin lessons at age 12 or so hasn't lasted another 38.  Go figure.

And then it's today.

On vien de faire

Grandmom's backyard, sort of: Lorie and I are discussing gardening, trying to figure out what it's called when someone asks you to take care of their plants for them. "Plantsitting" doesn't occur to either of us as we start moving potted plants around the backyard, looking for where they go. There is the added complication of mistaking plants for birds and vice versa, seeing as how leaves and feathers are interchangeable, modular, like Tinkertoys. "Petsitting for plants!" I offer, but I know it's silly. We ask the person in the visitor center, but that person is either confused or bored by the inquiry.

Shortly thereafter, Roze continues the gardening theme by planting two rose bushes by the fence to the north of the house. She has definitely placed them where they go. We are then in her van with more gardening supplies in the back, and as we approach the house we drive past the landlady, who has a reputation as a sort of evil Disney matron: superior, suspicious, miserable. We hear her instructing a minion (her son?) to keep an eye on us, and as we turn into the drive, we hear incredulity: "What do they think they're doing?" Apparently we are now minions, too, and with gardening errands in hand we are perfectly authorized to drive the van into the property—but the landlady never recognizes the van, even though she sees it every day. So as we come to a stop, she's all up in the backseat, snapping at Roze. She doesn't seem to know me from the back of my head, and I refuse to turn when I say "Hi," attitudinously. She manages a formal, "How are you?" during which utterance I decide to effuse. I turn around and tell her "SPLENDID!" and keep a big, warm smile on my face while we get out of the van. I can't tell if she recognizes me, though we have met before.

Irrespective of the garden, I am alone in a darkened classroom, writing on the chalkboard, of which there are two, extending the lengths of the front and back walls. They are simultaneously chalkboards and corkboards. I am at the back of the room, scribbling, and occasionally moving push-pins around, apparently prepping a lesson for the instructor, whom I admire. But he doesn't show up tonight, and instead I encounter some folks in various contexts just outside the classroom door: there is, for instance, a bridegroom standing there at one point—he is perhaps Ryan Raz—surrounded by his groomspersons, and I ask him if there's anything I can do for him. To my chagrin there is not. Later—in the same space, except it's now a veranda overlooking various gorgeous natural landscapes—some interested parties in a documentary film project are discussing the upcoming work; I am obviously involved in this project primarily because two of the documentary's subjects present at this discussion are hot men in their mid to late 30s; and they are naked and they give every indication of intending to remain so forever.

In the school cafeteria, a friend called Sherry or some such asks me whom I'll be rooting for next season—at least I thought she said next season and I consider my response to an obvious baseball question. But then she starts naming football teams, so I explain I have zero interest in le zutball américain. Indeed, I explain, I've only ever been to one football game in my life, and that was an Eagles game where the Hammonton High School "Blue Devils" marching band—then regional champions or serious contenders every year—played at halftime.

So we have a flashback, which is narrated by an unspecified high school bandmate: she complains that, at said Eagles game certain band members were off, hitting their percussion cues horribly late and so forth. I wander off midstory to find a place to pee, though I can still hear her narration the whole time. I think to pee against the back of an industrial cooler, but the space between the base and the lid has some scary oozy horror movie things going on. So I go away.

I'm in a house considering animal conservation; so of course Lorie is here again—or perhaps I'm just standing in for her, approximating her reactions to certain news reports, which are either on a widescreen TV or a handheld tablet computer (or both). There's the usual talk of the lions, but I'm worried about the hippos, who are drying out in the recent drought. So I go find one, in the back bedroom, in a ditch of dried mud, and I pee on him. I know—it's not even in question—that this action is salubrious, not mean-spirited in any way. The urine soaks into his skin as quickly as it hits, and I realize he must have been near death with desiccation. I can see the symbiotic insects crawling around under his skin as he, revitalized, begins to stretch. His name is Shawn.

I go directly to the next room and do precisely the same for two other creatures sleeping next to each other in the bed. They are, I think, water buffalo.

Then I wake up. And goddamn, do I have to pee.

What just happened.

Prelude

When I was young, girls had penes. In my dreams they often still do. How this jibes with the fact that I consistently find chicks with dicks mildly alarming when they turn up in porn, I don't quite understand.

Fugue

I am weary of living in Squalor. I tell Paul, on the lawn just outside the open front door: I can't live like this. Like what? says he, and I indicate with a sweeping arm the avalanche of dirty laundry our housemates have left in looming piles everywhere. I tell him: I know you were upset about it before we went on vacation, but I'm upset about it now. That's it, I say. I'm putting everyone on notice. Claim it and stow it by next Saturday or it's trash. I go poking around some of the clutter. There are books on shelves along the staircase, some of which I know belong to Bob. These are piled with laundry, too.

At the top of the stairs I am in the long house, and these central second story rooms are my favorite rooms. In some sense they are mine, though I am not a regular occupant. I set about straightening and am faced with the choice: Make the beds or no? I recall recent Internet advice that making the bed every day helps dust mites propagate. I contemplate a system whereby thinnish top mattresses are daily removed and hung on the walls, so as to kill or discomfit the mites. The side room, in a place where there's no room for a side room, has beds under eaves; it both the playroom in the house in Folsom where I grew up and the guest room in the Paynes' house in Vermont.

Yes, this is my favorite room of the house—and I tell JoJo as much—even though it's now on the ground floor and on the end of the house, with a single window in the middle of the back wall. There is a train going by; except maybe we're on it. And there must have been a door there in the wall, because now we're out on the lawn, on the corner, near the school bus stop, and I'm chatting with Sharon, in a very pleasant and quiet dusk, about the film festival we're about to go to. The festival is in Brooklyn, which reminds me, Aren't we in Brooklyn now? Yes, Sharon says. It may no longer be the long house, but this house is certainly in Brooklyn.

The bus comes. Neither Sharon nor I has ridden this line before, and Sharon asks the driver questions, holding up transit. A young hipster woman offers aloud the advice that we "Figure it out, people." Sharon figures it out and we board, only now we're in a taxi, four across the back seat: Sharon, I, Hipster Woman, Hipster Woman's companion, who happens to be Hipster Man. She is short, cute, ruddy, hair in a bob, Henry Blake fishing cap. Peppermint Patty, I think, but nobody asked me. (In retrospect, she might have been a long-lost acquaintance from the Fruity Pebbles gang in Newark.)

I am in that mindspace where I could be truly annoyed at her "Figure it out, people" or just pretend annoyed. I say, I hope that wait wasn't too long for you. She responds with what I perceive as elaborately fake singsong niceness: No, it wasn't. I respond, I'm so sorry!—matching her intonation exactly, mockingly. She laughs and says, I said it wasn't. I know that's what she said, but I was just being a bitch. I say to her, Oh, I thought you were just being a bitch. She laughs. We're keeping it light. We're sitting smoosh next to each other but we're a million miles apart but we're keeping it light. Like you do.

We talk about the film fest. Are you a fan of the films of Jim Jarmusch? I ask her. Are you kidding? she says: In the last three hours I've become one! She mentions that she and her companion saw a film at the fest the other day featuring a woman in a tiny bikini; apparently its tininess was something to behold. I recall having heard a radio announcer mentioning something very similar, and offer that this must be The Tiny Bikini Film Festival. But of course it was probably just one film that they both saw. Or maybe she heard the same radio broadcast and never saw the film at all. And maybe the radio man was making shit up as well.

Although the taxibus never dropped us off, we're in a diner now in the bustling city, and the counter guy, who is possibly Chris Pratt, is speaking into a contraption that he intends as a microphone, but it's really a funky old camera. Or maybe a pizzelle iron. In either case, he amuses as intended. There are funky contraptions hung about the walls of the diner; it's hipster heaven. There are also a couple floor-model Victrolas (Victrolae?). I wonder that the Victrolas aren't just useless things to be in the way, since there are no records about, but apparently some of the staff enjoy putting round things that are not records on the turntable and playing them. This, I am assured, allows them to here short-wave radio from under the sea.

The hipster chick, still by my side at the counter of the diner, tells me that the server, Doug, "...is smarter than you. Doug is smarter than me. Doug is smarter than everyone we know." Everyone knows that Chris Pratt is a goofus, but I believe her. Hell, I've never known what "smart" means.

At this point I have to pee. So I pee. And then, Don't Ask Me Why, the big silhouette grasshopper vomits Maalox instead of tobacco juice. It sets up like cement within seconds. Shortly thereafter, my friend, who is part Queen Latifah as Big Mama and part LaWanda Page as Aunt Esther—they intersect at the hat—chases some bullies away. She's always been good to me.

And on that Frostian note...

I've always felt the whole "personal/civic responsibility" bugbear is something of a straw man. Sure, the case for increased activism makes itself; but when we're talking about the elected, it's more to the point to accuse both parties of acting openly and vigorously against the interests of the American people than to accuse them of failing to take responsibility for those actions; the latter is an afterthought. Besides, the alternative shown here, blaming the other party, is exactly the kind of drama our televisions have trained us to expect. How are we surprised?

This kind of commentary further lets our gubmint off the hook by acting as if they are blind followers of trend or fashion themselves. They are not. The decision to side with Capital and corporatism is not an idle "Oh well, might as well back the stinking rich horse" choice you make over lemonade; it's a decades-long program to dupe the overwhelming majority of citizens (i.e., the stupid ones). And it's been swimmingly successful.

I'm never one to shirk the decrying of humans as fucking idiots; but you gotta admit, the evil scheme was choice: Take all the neocon goals and themes—trickle-down fairydust; demonization of the most vulnerable populations (bootstraps, baby!); deregulation; corporate welfare; civil rights as anti-American values (no, seriously! up is down!); and the inevitably pernicious influence of a liberal education—and inextricably link all these in the propaganda machine to the two things about which the peasantry will feel most violently protective: GOD and GUNS.

(1) God says this and god says that and god sees you in the voting booth and god will bring you coal this Christmas—er, I meant send you to hell to suffer unspeakable torment for all eternity, my bad—if you so much as utter the phrase "women's reproductive rights".

(2) In the Great American Dream, "Get off your land or I will shoot you" has evolved slightly to "Get off my land or I will shoot you"—but not an inch ferre.

I saw it coming at age 15, observing my grandmother's pavlovian response to the suddenly political messaging of her fuckstick televangelists. Even my parents—half-hearted "let's sleep in on Sunday" evangelicals at that point—bought the hype to some extent. Years later, my formerly anti-establishment dad embraced W.'s "regular guy" anti-intellectual, pro-gun bullshit loudly and proudly.

And what do you know? The terrorists have won.

Robert Frost in Interzone #418

"My little horse must think me queer
Because of what I do with steer."

Tractor Porn #418

Quinn Christopher Jaxon

Matthew Don't Rush on My Account

Here is one of the most recognizable men in the gay porn industry.

Gregory Grove (nom de porn Matthew Rush) retired from porn in late 2011, announcing he had found a partner with whom he was madly in love; and then unretired in early 2012—presumably following an unannounced breakup. 

Mr. Grove began his career in 2001 and was quickly snatched and sewn up by Falcon Studios as a "lifetime exclusive performer"—which of course ended in 2009. ("Lifetime" means something totally different in porn, and on that particular clock Mr. Grove is looking decidedly feline.)

This is how the newbie Matthew Rush looked: his first movie (yes, he went straight to coverboy) and an early Falcon photo shoot. The airbrushing from Falcon at times tends to the surreal, but this is a general idea of his physique. Mr. Grove picked up both the GayVN and the Grabby Award for Best Newcomer in 2002, plus a Grabby for Best Solo.

Note how they tended to give him (or he tended to give himself) a whiteboy haircut; and one way or another (THIS COW IS COVERED IN BAKING FLOUR!) his skin tone was universally at its lightest in those early Falcon features. Falcon shot and released high-end porno after high-end porno without a single African American (the occasional Latino was permitted), and it really seemed to me (and still seems) that Falcon did their best to make this astonishingly built and beautiful young man into a superstar without ever letting his audience know he was of mixed race.

Which of course would not matter in the slightest if the major studios, at least at in the early aughties, had promoted racial diversity: all the men of the rainbow, fucking. 

This is about midway through his career, I think: the late aughties, small tattoos and quite a bit thicker than his debut size. Still with Falcon, but he ditched the whiteboy hair and—while that skin tone may still be manufactured in post, at least there is starting to be—and he is starting to look—a skosh "of color".

Ah, there's no two ways about it: I like enormous muscled guys. Throughout his career, Mr. Grove has reaped silos full of shit over his supposed steroid use, but his body hasn't much changed in more than a decade—and if he's been juicing this long, it certainly doesn't seem to affect his personality and mood, which seem universally pleasant.

And, after all, who's to say this young man didn't hit the mixed-race jackpot re body type and metabolism?

Anyway, back to my point, pointless though it may be: I think Gregory Grove looks better today, at age 42, then he's ever looked before, including those early, airbrushed Falcon salad days. See this here street photo in which he appears vaguely dopey (in various ways other than dwarfism)? With the smile-crinklies?

I can't think when he's looked more crazy-adorable.  Well, ok, maybe here:

He's looking damn near Wahlbergian there. Then there's...

I could go on. In fact, I think I shall. Here are some more recent images (some middling NSFW) for your delectation.